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Peter Alford Andrews, ed., Ethnic Groups in the Republic of Turkey (Wiesbaden: Ludwig Reichert, 1989). 659 p., maps, graphs, statistical tables, bibliography. This is the companion book to the Tubingen Atlas of the Near East" s maps: TAVO NR. A VIII 14, Republik Türkei: Ethnische Minderheiten im länlichen Raum, "The Republic of Turkey: Rural Ethnic Minorities," in two sheets, east and west, by the same authors (Wiesbaden: Ludwig Reichert, November 1987). The text is mainly in English, but there is also one article in French, and six in German, including a very important and substantial article on the Kurds by Nestmann.
It is always a delight to see the production of statistical works of this detail and scope on ethnic groups in the Middle East. It is even more so when the work concentrates on ethnic groups in Turkey, where the government and many of the citizenry remain averse to any such undertakings. To their credit Peter A. Andrews and thirteen other contributors to this book have succeeded in the enormous task of compiling data, all the way to the village level.
The work is divided into four sections: (1) a catalogue of ethnic groups, wherein each and every ethnic group is dealt with separately and statistical data is provided for population, language, religion, geographical distribution, etc. A selected and valuable bibliography is attached to each these entries; (2) an extensive survey of the villages in eastern Anatolia by language and reUgion, based on the work done over the course of the 1960s in Turkey, before such activities were banned by the state; (3) ethnic groups listed by villages and administrative districts, and (4) essays on selected etiinic groups by fourteen authors. There is also a hefty 13,000-word introduction, and the work carries six black-and-white maps of its own, in addition to the two large full-color ethnic maps of the TAVO series.
The amount of raw statistical data provided in this work is phenomenal. Despite this wealth the work is entirely lacking in correlation and analysis of the data it provides; therefore, theoretically there is nothing in this book that cannot be found elsewhere, even though it would require years of research to locate it. Essays are the sole exception, but except for one,...