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Rating: 
Summary: Missing anthropology
Review: While I did not expect the contributors to this collection of essays necessarily to be Europhiles, I found little emphathy that anthropologists usually show towards their object of study, in this case the European Union, as a result of their long-term and in-depth research. One author, Marc Abélès, still speaks of a virtual Europe for what in fact is already very much reality, whether one likes it or not (and I speak here as the citizen of a European country that is not a member of the European Union). At times, the editors and several authors even strike me as Europhobic, rehashing old arguments about the problems of a unifying Europe rather than focusing on its achievements and opportunities. I thus find disappointingly little about either experiencing or imagining and building Europe in this book, and the question arises: Where is the anthropology here? Sadly, this collection of essays also lacks historical depth at either the micro or macro level. Yet a truly anthropological discussion of unifying Europe could benefit much from examining for contrast the very developments of earlier multilingual-multicultural federations such as Switzerland in 1848. Anthropologists furthermore have much to contribute by providing a broader historical context for understanding modern Europe, i.e. the development of complex societies into international conglomerates of states from an evolutionary perspective. Ultimately, this collection of essays fails in this respect as well, and does not offer any new insights into what other social scientists (economists, political scientists, sociologists, etc.) have already described and analyzed for some fifty years. Emanuel J. Drechsel, Professor, Liberal Studies, University of Hawai'i
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