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Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East edited by Philip S. Khoury and Joseph Kosner. London: I.B. Tauris, 1991. Pp. xv+351, index. L45.00.
The book began life as a conference on 'Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East' sponsored by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987. It was to bring together anthropologists, historians and political scientists in a concerted effort to understand the transformation of tribes into states and the existence of tribes within states or alongside states. In the wake of the conference the editors asked some of the participants to revise their contributions: they also commissioned several new essays and wrote an introduction to the volume. The result is a book of conference proceedings that is better integrated than most of its ilk. While it does not offer a totally new approach to the problem of tribe, it presents a series of thoughtful essays about relations between the tribe and the state, as well as several historical and anthropological case studies dealing with the relations between state and tribe in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Libya. When the volume was published in 1991, it provoked a review essay by Patricia Crone (Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol.3 1993, pp. 353-76), which can now be treated as part of the ongoing discussion.
Only two or three decades ago such a dialogue would have...