Miriam cooke is a veteran and respected scholar of the Middle East. In her newest book, she turns her attention to the Arab Gulf States. Once framed as an exceptional footnote to the greater Middle East, the Gulf States have more recently emerged as central to our understandings of the region. The outstanding contribution of cooke's book is her nuanced articulation of the evolving role that tribes and tribalism play in the social matrix of these modern societies. Amid a veritable blizzard of new attention to the region, the centrality of tribe to her understanding of these societies is welcome, and the entirely accessible style with which the book is written only enhances its usefulness.

The book comprises eight chapters framed by an introduction and conclusion. The first chapter, “Uneasy Cosmopolitanism,” points to some of the sociocultural frictions resulting from the Gulf States’ recent decades of rapid modernization, with some attention to the vast population of foreign workers throughout the region. In the two chapters that follow, cooke explores how the conceptualization of tribe has been shoehorned into the geography of the nation-state, and how that conceptualization connects with ethnicity and class in the national container. In the fourth chapter, “The Brand,” she begins to explore how this sense of tribal belonging interacts with the cosmopolitan pluralism of the region. To do so, she uses barzakh as a model of how ideas of tribal authenticity are maintained amidst the diversities of the Gulf present. The three concluding chapters explore how the social and infrastructural development of these modern Gulf States coordinates with the tribal modernity she identifies, and how customary dress and poetry, the queer community, and women relate to her idea of “tribal modern.”

The book is not without its faults. Overall, it relies on a fairly selective survey of existing scholarship concerning the region. Although her reference to a handful of anthropologists (Sulayman Khalaf, Anh Longva, Paul Dresch) is insightful, we missed the incorporation of some newer work into her thesis (e.g., Ahmed Kanna, Neha Vora, Nelida Fuccaro, Farah Al Nakib). And although her roots in the study of Arabic literature are sometimes illuminating, she frequently uses novelists’ fictionalized characters to articulate her ideas. Moving back and forth from ethnographers’ work to (fictionalized) characters and experiences becomes confusing at times.

More broadly, while the post-disciplinary tenor of the book is energizing, the absence of a systematic research agenda is a principle fissure in the book. Instead of an insider's perspective on women's experiences with contemporary Arab tribalism, for example, we get a gloss of novelists’ characters, anecdotes from cooke's time in the classrooms of Qatar, and descriptions of a few of her experiences in the Gulf States. It is unclear how many individuals were interviewed, how much time was spent in the region, and what the objectives of the research underlying the work might have been. At times, cooke relies on observations and descriptions that sound more like anecdotes than the threads and patterns she discerned in a broader empirical or ethnographic project.

At several points, this unsystematic approach leads to misunderstandings, oversights, and misinterpretations. For example, while her Qatari students at an American university's satellite campus in Doha might have confirmed her ideas about the importance of this new tribalism, what about the generational, class, and other differences, that other scholars have noted? Or how can we call the tents lining the roads of Doha on National Day “bedouin tents” when they are, in reality, filled not only with bedouin tribesmen but also with hadar families and clans, as well as the ‘ajam, huwala, beluchi, and other sorts of Qatari social subdivisions, that she glosses as “city slickers”? Moreover, with so many observations and analyses derived from her time in Doha, can readers extrapolate to the Gulf as a whole, as she seemingly encourages us to do?

While these faults might be problematic to some advanced scholars and students of the Arabian Peninsula, the book is nonetheless a valuable introduction to the region for those unfamiliar with these peoples and societies. Her capacity to summarize and intervene in numerous scholarly conversations is welcome. Certainly, the book's principal strengths lie with the scope of her interest and experience in the greater Middle East, her skillful writing, and the deep literary perspective she brings to this amalgamation of peoples and societies.