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This article argues that historical anthropology provides approaches for the exploration of previously neglected problems of the history of Southeastern Europe. Historical anthropology is not seen as a fixed set of methodologies and theories but rather as a perspective which directs attention to the questions of how societies have worked in the past and "ordinary" people made sense of their lives. Furthermore, historical anthropology tends to be comparative. In the past, Southeastern European historians concentrated on political history and ethnographers on the "traditional" culture of their nation, with little interaction between the two disciplines. After the fall of the communist system in 1989/1991, however, historians and ethnologists borrowed approaches from each other. The potential of historical anthropology is shown in particular with respect to the study of the social fabric of socialism—a topic until now shunned by historians while anthropologists have provided exemplary studies on this issue. The article ends with a discussion of the limits oPf historical anthropology and warns not to leave the state and economic structures out of historical analysis.

▪ Abstract  Ethnographies and anthropological analyses of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union published in the last decade have been shaped by two major circumstances. First, they reflect the discursive possibilities opened up by the political upheavals of November 1989 in Eastern Europe and of August 1991 in the Soviet Union; second, they express and represent the theoretical heterogeneity of contemporary American anthropology. We can characterize anthropological work in the former Soviet Union as attempts to use and explore the concept of culture in various sites of social, economic, and political transformation. By contrast, anthropologists studying postsocialist societies in Eastern Europe have turned from analyses of the cultural practices of groups on the margins of modernizing state projects to accounts of how communities are shaped by systemic changes in the political economy of states.

Frontmatter -- Dedicated to the "Bronco" network, in the spirit of worldwide independence, friendship, and freedom -- Contents -- Preface -- Contributors -- 1. Discovering Cultural Perspective: The Intellectual History of Anthropological Thought in the Age of Enlightenment -- 2. Barbarians and the Redefinition of Europe: A Study of Gibbon's Third Volume -- 3. The Immobility of China: Orientalism and Occidentalism in the Enlightenment -- 4. Doux Commerce, Douce Colonisation: Diderot and the Two Indies of the French Enlightenment -- 5. Adam Smith and the Anthropology of the Enlightenment: The "Ethnographic" Sources of Economic Progress -- 6. Beyond the Savage Character: Mexicans, Peruvians, and the "Imperfectly Civilized" in William Robertson's History of America -- 7. Herder's India: The "Morgenland" in Mythology and Anthropology -- 8. The German Enlightenment and the Pacific -- 9. Persian Letters from Real People: Northern Perspectives on Europe -- 10. Russia and Its "Orient": Ethnographic Exploration of the Russian Empire in the Age of Enlightenment -- 11. Love in the Time of Hierarchy: Ethnographic Voices in Eighteenth-Century Haiti -- 12. The Dreaming Body: Cartesian Psychology, Enlightenment Anthropology, and the Jesuits in Nouvelle France -- 13. The Anthropology of Natural Law: Debates About Pufendorf in the Age of Enlightenment -- 14. "Animal Economy": Anthropology and the Rise of Psychiatry from the Encyclopedic to the Alienists -- 15. Metamorphosis and Settlement: The Enlightened Anthropology of Colonial Societies -- 16. The Old Wor(l)d and the New Wor(l)ds: A Discursive Survey from Discovery to Early Anthropology -- Notes -- Index

▪ Abstract  After 1989, the interpretation of a complex set of disputes and exigencies settled into a conventional narrative of paradigm shift, in which the intellectual past became essentialized as "traditional area studies" and "classic anthropology." This approach obscures the processes of engagement (including dispute) by which disciplinary change occurred. The Area Studies1engagement with interdisciplinary colleagues and voices from the "area" has been critically important over several decades. Necessarily, the intellectual terms for addressing other interlocutors about regional conditions and events have differed according to the experience of the area in changing universalist politics and analysis. The area/anthropology intersection is examined for Africa (where race is basic to disputes), Latin America (where the place of culture and race in political economic arguments is central), and Europe (where culture and nation are at issue). During the 1990s a collective approach to areas emerged. Anthropologists, and particularly scholars of Asia, played a major role. The varied angles from different areas are linked by a broadly shared concern with the formation of emergent political communities and with themes of governmentality. Although the wider circulation of these ideas is promising, does it risk losing the grounding and accountability that Area Studies imposed (like it or not)? The events of September 11, 2001 and those that followed have made starkly clear the poverty and the dangers of essentialism, and the importance of focusing on the loci from which terms of argumentation in relation to power arise. Middle Eastern Studies is briefly discussed as "epicenter" for defining such an approach.

In this powerful, but accessible new study, John Bowen draws on a full range of work in social anthropology to present Islam in ways that emphasise its constitutive practices, from praying and learning to judging and political organising. Starting at the heart of Islam - revelation and learning in Arabic lands - Bowen shows how Muslims have adapted Islamic texts and traditions to ideas and conditions in the societies in which they live. Returning to key case studies in Asia, Africa and Western Europe, to explore each major domain of Islamic religious and social life, Bowen also considers the theoretical advances in social anthropology that have come out of the study of Islam. A New Anthropology of Islam is essential reading for all those interested in the study of Islam and for those following new developments in the discipline of anthropology