The Middle East and Central Asia: An Anthropological Approach (4th Edition)

Rating:
Summary: Dense and complete
Review: This book is quite dense. It makes for slow and contemplative reading. As a review of the anthropological literature of the Middle East, it should be a required text for any graduate or upper level undergraduate social sciences course focussing on the Middle East or Central Asia. Original source material is summarized and analyzed in comparison to other viewpoints, particularly across time. Anyone with further interest in particular areas of culture could skim the footnotes to find the complete citations for the original material. Each chapter also concludes with an annotated list of further readings, which would also be quite useful for the interested reader. My favorite sections were the second chapter, Intellectual Predecessors: East and West, and the last part of the last chapter, Writing Middle Eastern Anthropology.

Rating:
Summary: Dense and complete
Review: This book is quite dense. It makes for slow and contemplative reading. As a review of the anthropological literature of the Middle East, it should be a required text for any graduate or upper level undergraduate social sciences course focussing on the Middle East or Central Asia. Original source material is summarized and analyzed in comparison to other viewpoints, particularly across time. Anyone with further interest in particular areas of culture could skim the footnotes to find the complete citations for the original material. Each chapter also concludes with an annotated list of further readings, which would also be quite useful for the interested reader. My favorite sections were the second chapter, Intellectual Predecessors: East and West, and the last part of the last chapter, Writing Middle Eastern Anthropology.