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By centering attention on how students feel after casual sex, studies of the college social scene miss an extremely important phenomenon—namely, how hookups get started. This article argues that it is in the negotiation of contact during hookups that college students creatively navigate their sexual identity. Using a mixed methodology, this research reveals that the cell phone, as both an object of communication and consumption, is essential to the formation of self, and, as such, it provides the means by which men and women can play with gender boundaries. And yet, the male dominated fraternity system at college restricts the ability of women to realize full agency within the hookup scene.

In this article, Sascha L. Goluboff investigates the development of ethnographic knowledge about Mountain Jews in Azerbaijan to provide new ways of understanding who Mountain Jews are and to provoke scholars to reflect critically on empire, ethnicity, and religion in the Caucasus. Following Nicholas B. Dirks's recent call for anthropologists to pay attention to the "textual field that is the pretext to fieldwork," Goluboff analyzes how the work of the first ethnographers of Mountain Jews—Yehuda Chernyi (1835-1880) and Il'ia Anisimov (1862-1928)—created an image of Mountain Jews as both "savage Asians" and "primordial Jews" and how subsequent scholarship has reinforced this dichotomy as modern "fact." Goluboff believes that by paying more attention to the intersections among ethnic groups and refraining from making moral judgments, it is possible to open up new ground for creatively researching the relations between Islam and Judaism in the Caucasus.

In this article I investigate ritual life at the Moscow Choral Synagogue, the largest and longest running Orthodox synagogue in the Russian capital. Unlike many Eastern European synagogues, this synagogue is a thriving prayer community due to its unique congregation of Russian, Georgian, Bukharan, Mountain, and visiting Western Jews. I focus on a fistfight that took place between an Israeli and a Georgian Jew during prayer. I detail how Russian and Georgian Jews interpreted the incident to be a result of their different ethnicities, Russian and Georgian respectively. The fight elucidates how ritual in post-Soviet society provides the means for the production of ethnicity and Jewish identity. Arguing for localism within Judaism's transnational ideology, I suggest that Jewish identity, like ritual, is performative and contextual. I also show how the shifting power relations in post-Soviet society have reshaped ethnicity, making state-endorsed market reform a reference point of ethnic differentiation.