prior knowledge of the background history so the book would work less well for first-year courses).The Press would do well to produce an affordable edition of the book.

The Headless State, Aristocratic Orders, Kinship Society and Misrepresentations of Nomadic Inner Asia.By David Sneath. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Pp. 273, 3 maps.ISBN 10: 0231140541; 13: 9780231140546.Reviewed by David Durand-Guédy, Halle, Orientalisches Institut/SFB 586E-mail david_durandguedy@yahoo.comdoi:10.1017/S1479591410000392

This book is an invitation to reconsider the whole history of “nomadic Inner Asia”. The question is:how can we understand the emergence of these famous “empires of the steppes” which appear toplunge into the void so suddenly when they fell? Sneath’s answer can be put that way: ratherthan assuming an opposition between two political forms (i.e. state vs. tribe), it is more productiveto think of a continuum of “ruling houses” (also called “nobility” or “aristocratic orders”) developingmore or less centralized forms of political organization. The best example of a strongly centralizedform is the state established by Genghis Khan on the eve of the thirteenth century in Mongolia.The other extreme (a non-centralized form of state power) could be found in seventeenth to earlytwentieth-century Mongolia – a period of which the author, who is Director of the InnerMongolia and Asia Studies Unit at Cambridge University, is a specialist. In 1640, Sneath explains,the Mongol and Oirat nobility put up a State (törö), with its laws and judges, serving a social systeminherently unequal, but without capital and sovereign – in other words, a “headless state”. In Sneath’sview, the engine of Central Asian history is no longer the environment (ecological constraints wouldprevent social stratification inside nomadic society and/or explain their moving) or the external influ-ences (the political organization of the nomadic society would be closely linked to that of their seden-tary neighbours), but instead the political strategy of these basic units that were the noble houses. Inthe end, Sneath highlights an bottom-up process: the (nomadic) society is produced by the centralizedor “headless” states (for example through the creation of genealogies), and not the reverse.

To conduct this demonstration, Sneath analyzes in great details the links between history andanthropology. Indeed, since the nomadic societies have left almost no written trace, historianshave been inclined to fill in with the help of anthropological studies. The problem, says Sneath, isthat most of the anthropological scholarship was wrong and/or outdated. The enemy, becausethere is one, is the “colonialist” misconception that has obscured the aristocratic reality of InnerAsia, namely the notion of an egalitarian society, according to which the “chiefs” would havebeen primus inter pares, and the group members would have been united by a solidarity based ona common origin. Armed with Weber, Foucault and Lévi-Strauss, Sneath conducts a critical reviewof a large body of literature: anthropology (criticism of the kinship society theory), sociology (criti-cism of the structural functionalism and political evolutionism) and history (criticism of the essenti-alist view of the nomads). Drawing on numerous examples, from the Scythians to the Bakhtiaris, fromthe Türkmens to the Mongols, Sneath reassesses most of the studies which have been produced onthe nomadic societies of Asia and proposes his own understanding.

This is a stimulating essay, whose ambitious project will be of great interest to scholars fromdiverse backgrounds. The Headless State is an invitation to think about the epistemological linksbetween history and the other branches of social sciences, and the way they feed each other.While historians are invited to be careful not to use such outdated “anthropological” concepts (for

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example the concept of tribe), anthropologists are encouraged on their side to re-historicize the facts.Sneath sets an example by rereading Irons’s field work and conclusion on the Yomut Türkmens froma perspective of what we know of the history of the Oghuz (pp. 142–56). He concludes that Yomutwere not “a nation”, but a “ruling elite”. It is an interesting application of the constructivist theoriesdeveloped by Hobsbawm and Gellner for European history to Central Asia. Beyond the questions ofmethod, this book captures the attention by its thesis (the preeminence of the noble houses) and theeffort, praiseworthy in these days of over-specialization, to propose a new model of analysis for anarea which played such a pivotal role in world history. For the author of this review, a specialistof a sedentary country – Iran – when it was ruled by Turks of nomadic origin – the Saljuqs, thistype of questioning is naturally welcome.

The question is to know whether the demonstration holds. The book poses a number of problems,which will prove prohibitive to many readers. The first reservation is about the manner in whichSneath presents his material. There is a Da Vinci Code side to this book: the signs (of the aristocraticreality) were everywhere, but they were masked by more or less dishonest scholars at the service ofthe “dominant view” (p. 59, or “dominant vision” p. 71, “received wisdom” p. 53, “typical justification”p. 49). Even “the Scythians were not allowed to challenge the notion of the essential nomad” (p. 124)!This demonstration is done at all costs, and sometimes with amazing shortcuts. To reassess the con-cept of nation (and hence of solidarity among the nomadic society), Sneath convenes in the samepassage the French reactionary historian Montlosier and the Marxist Hobsbawm (p. 159). Besides,Sneath has a definitive way to contrast the elected scholars (those who go in the direction of his argu-ment) from the misguided. Throughout the book he awards good and the bad points in an extremebinary way. Hurrah for Vladimirstov, who highlighted the “Mongolian nomadic feudalism” as earlyas 1934; down with Tolybekov, who thereafter tried to apply the model of “kinship society” to CentralAsian societies, and who later brought in his wake other scholars (like Geiss).1 Hurrah for the trave-lers and explorers of the nineteenth century, whose perception was not veiled by the (false) kinshiptheory; down with the functionalist anthropologists of the twentieth century. Hurrah for Digard whoinsisted on class divisions among Bakhtiaris of Zagros; down with Garthwaite who stressed the impor-tance of lineage divisions.2 Hurrah for Dresch who has shown that segmental genealogy is the pro-duct of a political project and down with the (numerous) others who took for granted thesegenealogies.3 Not surprisingly the palm of “infamy” in this binary presentation belongs to the scho-lars who share with Sneath his field of specialization: Mongolia. Krader4 and Barfield5 hold here therole of arch-villains, and there is no worse criticism than to say, for example, that “Barfield offers adescription . . . that could have been written by Krader and Sahlins” (p. 60). Sneath seems to havea vital need to attack others, and when no researcher can serve as a victim, the journalists will do,as at the beginning of Chapter 4 (pp. 93–94). In many places the tone of some comments, the constantimprecations (speaking of Krader, he regrets “another of his entirely misleading flights of fancy”,p. 70) seems to me not only out of place, but detrimental to the project itself.

1 B. Y. Vladimirstov, Social Order of the Mongols: Nomadic Mongol Feudalism (Leningrad: Academy of Science,1934); S. Tolybekov, Kochevoe obshcheestvo kazakhov v XVII-nachale XX veka, Politiko-ekonomicheskii analiz(Alma-Alta: Nauka, 1971); P. Geiss, Pre-Tsarist and Tsarist Central Asia: Communal Commitment and PoliticalOrder in Change (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003).

2 J.-P. Digard, “On the Bakhtiari: Comments on ‘Tribes, Confederation and the State’,” and G. Garthwaite,“Tribes, Confederation and the State: An Historical Overview of the Bakhtiari and Iran,” both in R. Tappered., The Conflict of Tribe and State in Iran and Afghanistan (London: Croom Helm, 1983).

3 P. Dresch, “Segmentation: Its Roots in Arabia and Its Flowering Elsewhere,” Cultural Anthropology 3:1 (1988),pp. 50–67.

4 L. Krader, Social Organisation of the Mongol-Turkic Pastoral Nomads (The Hague: Mouton and Co., 1963).

5 T. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).

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A second reservation is about the content. The detailed description of the anthropological basiswhich had allegedly “corrupted” the understanding of Inner Asia (esp. in Chap. 2, 3 and 5) goesback as far as Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877). This is interesting but not really new. The same istrue of the criticisms of the segmentary model (its limitations have been highlighted for a longtime), and his use of the “house society”. Theorized in 1979 by Lévi-Strauss from the study of aNative-American tribe, a “house society” (société à maison) combines apparently contradictory prin-ciples (agnatic/uterine, kinship/alliance, etc.), and as such it enables the anthropologist to analyse “afield of power relations expressed in the idiom of descent” (p. 112). The concept provides Sneath’s“headless state” with the theoretical basis he needed, and he uses it as a magical formula to under-stand the history of the Xiongnu, the Liao and the Mongols (pp. 112–19). However, in a major articlepublished as early as 1987 in L’Homme, Digard had already referred to Lévi-Strauss’s “société à mai-son” to explain the apparent contradiction he had noted within the society of the nomads ofBakhtyari.6 The fact that Sneath does not even mention this article on a topic so close to his ownconcern, but instead refers to a collected volume in English on Lévi-Strauss is symptomatic of eitherthe lack of visibility of the French scholarship or, worse, Sneath’s limitations in the issue he dealswith (as far as the anthropological approach is concerned, readers would be well advised to readthe production of the research group Production Pastorale et Société which was active in France between1976 and 1987).

From the point of the view of the historian, Sneath’s stance presents many weaknesses also. His“aristocratic” interpretation of the terms noyan or obogs in the Secret History of the Mongol is interesting,as is his dismissing of a “tribal” interpretation. But given the state of our documentation, it seemsthat it can be at best only an hypothesis and not a certitude. Interestingly Peter Golden, whosework on pre-Chinggisid Inner Asia is often cited by Sneath in reinforcement of his theory, hasbeen particularly critical of the way he uses historical sources on Mongol history (see Golden’s reviewin the Journal of Asian Studies, 68:1, pp. 293–96, and the subsequent rejoinders in ibid. 69:2, pp. 658–63).The same is true of other texts mobilized to support the thesis of “aristocratic orders”. For example,while dealing with Türkmen society, Sneath refers extensively to the nineteenth-century French ver-sion of Levshin’s account (first published in Russian in 1832) of de Levchine’s account, but withoutaddressing the two major issues of any historical reading: the issues of sincerity (the possibility ofdeliberate lies) and of accuracy (the possibility of error). Such casualness is problematic when oneis attempting to engage in a re-historicization of the whole history of Inner Asia. Beyond these pro-blems of interpretation, many factual errors are equally irksome. The Saljuq “established a power basein Persia” a century later than Sneath thinks (p. 25). Mistaking the identity of Ira Lapidus (p. 51), whomight be legitimately considered as the greatest scholar of medieval Muslim societies, is not reassur-ing as to Sneath’s level of historical knowledge. This is the kind of mistake that undermines the con-fidence of the reader in the rest of the author’s case. And his wish not to use what he probablyconsiders as suspect historical works results in surprising holes in the references (for example onthe Aq-qoyunlu, Sneath quotes Minorsky but not Woods7).

Another defect is, I believe, the very structure of the book. Sneath starts with the general (a reread-ing of all the literature on nomadic societies) and finishes with the particular (seventeenth- tonineteenth-century Mongolia). It is a risky approach since he rejects at the end of the volumewhat he knows best and where he is least attackable. Before getting to that period, the reader isinvited to consider elements of proof, on the solidity of which the author takes care not to be tooassertive (for example about the main protagonists of the national epic of the Kyrgyzs, Sneath

6 J.-P. Digard, “Jeux de structures. Segmentarité et pouvoir chez les nomades Baxtyâri d’Iran,” L’homme, vol. 27,no. 102 (1987), pp. 12–53.

7 J. E. Woods, The Aqqoyunlu: Clan, Confederation, Empire (Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1976).

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describes them as nobles who led groups of retainers “who do not seem to be their kin”, p. 89, emphasisadded). No doubt he would have made his point more convincing by analysing first the case ofMongolia during the Qing period, and offering only subsequently a rereading of the history ofInner Asia in the light of his starting hypothesis.

Lastly, we can deplore the constant and tiring cross-references (for example p. 71) and equallyincessant repetitions (the inje, or ‘human dowry’, is presented in the introduction, described onpage 110 and again on p. 175; same for the refutation of geographical determinism, p. 16, p. 53and pp. 135–36). Many references are not included in the references section (for exampleKhazanov 1984 quoted on p. 73 and p. 176; Khazanov 1990 quoted on p. 176; Hobsbawm 1990 quotedon p. 159; Fried 1967 quoted on p. 7; Irons 1975 quoted on p. 142). And there are also an unusualnumber of misprints (for example “Qara-Kdhitan” on p. 31, “Syr Dariya” on p. 85, “significan” onp. 109, “qahgans” on p. 169, “D. Senor”, on p. 255). All of this reflects precipitation and a lack of care.

In conclusion, this is a book that I have found deeply challenging (because of its argument and itsaudacity), but also deeply irritating (because of the way he has made a mess of it). The best thing isprobably to take this book for what it is: a polemical pamphlet. It has all the features: an interestingthesis but few hard facts and much over-simplification. As for the hard words and the attacks, they arepart of the project. With regard to Deleuze and Guattari’s “nomadologie”, Sneath writes: “If the studyof mobile pastoral society is to usefully inform wider social theory, it must do so on a firmer basis”(p. 202). Indeed.

Modern Egypt through Japanese Eyes: A Study on Intellectual and Socio-economic Aspectsof Egyptian Nationalism.By Eiji Nagasawa. Cairo: Merit Publishing House, 2009. Pp. 410.ISBN 10: 9773514811; 13: 9789773514817.Reviewed by Massoud Daher, Lebanese UniversityE-mail daherm@inco.com.lbdoi:10.1017/S1479591410000409

The author of the book under review, Eiji Nagaswa, is a well-known Arabist in Japan. Since gradu-ating from the Faculty of Economics at the University of Tokyo in 1976, he has published manystudies on different aspects of the modem and contemporary society of Egypt as well as other studiesdealing with the Middle East at large.

After nineteen years at the Institute of Developing Economies (IDE), Tokyo, he moved in 1995 tothe Institute of Oriental Culture at the University of Tokyo as an Associate Professor. From 1998 to1999 he served as the director of JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) Research Center inCairo. In 1998, he was promoted to Full Professor at the University of Tokyo, which position he hasheld until now.

Nagasawa has published many articles in the socio-economic history of modern and contemporaryEgypt. He has focused on Egyptian society in the belief that the country could serve, to differentdegrees, as a model case for the Arab world at large. Notably, he has paid special attention to ques-tions of rural migrant workers, the cotton economy, the relation between Egyptian capitalism andcommunist movements, the transformation of the irrigation system in modern times, and the effectsof labor migration on employment conditions in rural Egypt in the late 1970s.

At the same time, his interest in the socio-economic aspect of Egypt developed into further relatedareas of interest. For one thing, he came to take an interest in the sociological analysis of Egyptian

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