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In two landmark essays published in 1973, the eminent anthropologist Clifford Geertz offered an early assessment of what he termed "The Fate of Nationalism in the New States," referring to the newly independent nation-states of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Ranging with characteristic ease and flair across Burma, India, Indonesia, Lebanon, Malaysia, Morocco, and Nigeria, Geertz argued that an "Integrative Revolution" was under way, but one complicated and compromised by the inherent tension between "essentialism" and "epochalism," between "Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States." Geertz argued:The peoples of the new states are simultaneously animated by two powerful, thoroughly interdependent, yet distinct and often actually opposed motives—the desire to be recognized as responsible agents whose wishes, acts, hopes, and opinions "matter," and the desire to build an efficient, dynamic modern state. The one aim is to be noticed: it is a search for identity, and a demand that the identity be publicly acknowledged as having import, a social assertion of the self as "being somebody in the world." The other aim is practical: it is a demand for progress, for a rising standard of living, more effective political order, greater social justice, and beyond that of "playing a part in the larger arena of world politics," of "exercising influence among the nations."

Amid the steady stream of quantitative and game-theoretical studies of conflict published in recent years, Marc Howard Ross's Cultural Contestation in Ethnic Conflict comes as a welcome reminder of the ineffably human dimensions of conflict and violence around the world. His panoramic account of ethnic conflict goes beyond the establishment of statistical correlations and the modeling of "iterated games" to trace the complex processes by which conflicts emerge, escalate, and unravel, as well as the role of culture and identity in these processes. Making sense of ethnic conflict, Ross shows, requires an understanding of meaning—of how symbols, rituals, places, and events evoke emotions, inspire narratives, and inform identities in diverse settings around the world. The research agenda he pursues and promotes is thus in no small measure ethnographic and interpretivist, focusing on the (inter)subjective (self-)understandings of participants in ethnic conflicts, rather than the ostensibly objective conditions under which conflicts unfold.

The argument that religious identities are haunted by anxieties is firmly grounded in anthropology, psychology, and social theory. The evidence for such anxieties in Indonesia comes from close reading of Islamic publications in Indonesia and of ethnographic accounts of localities that subsequently experienced episodes of religious violence. There is abundant descriptive evidence of these anxieties in ethnographic accounts and discourse analysis, much more than what readers will find in my book.