There is much to praise in Anthropology and Political Science. Above all, the authors do in fact demonstrate potential convergences, as the subtitle promises, between the study of politics in the two disparate fields. However, scholars who have served on national or international interdisciplinary committees and selection panels, as I have over the last two decades, have also often experienced a growing divergence over approaches. To demonstrate convergence, Myron J. Aronoff and Jan Kubik do not make it easy on themselves. They do not narrow anthropology to social science–oriented approaches within the discipline, but instead take up the investment of sociocultural anthropology in the investigation of processes of meaning making through a fieldwork-based method. This puts the emphasis on the hermeneutic, humanities-oriented studies that indeed dominate the study of politics in anthropology.

Thus, several asymmetries appear in the dialogue that they construct. For one, political scientists have more to learn from anthropology than vice versa. For another, to find common ground with similar-minded political scientists, the authors write about a minority in that discipline, focusing on scholars concerned in some way with “culture” in the fields of comparative politics, political theory, and international relations. The large and perhaps dominant field of national (i.e., American, Israeli, Polish) politics, being a weak candidate for convergence due to the strong positivist turn to statistics, rational choice theory, and behavioral economics, is rarely a partner in dialogue with anthropologists. And so scholars working in this vein are not likely candidates for convergence.

That said, the book nonetheless surveys a broad range of scholars and issues since, approximately, the 1940s. It demonstrates a strong case for convergence in method (e.g., extended case study approach) and in objects of inquiry (e.g., symbolism, ritual, democratization, collective identity, dispute, and sociopolitical change). This demonstration is accomplished through sustained comparison: by explicating specific (and very useful) empirical cases from both authors’ long histories of working with these methods and issues in Israel and Eastern Europe, and then comparing them to other studies or to similar issues in other geographic regions. In short, the range of topics and studies––temporally, geographically, and disciplinarily––has impressive scope.

The book begins with a discussion of major debates about political phenomena and the key concepts employed to grasp them. These debates include disagreements over universalism and explanation versus particularism and interpretation; epistemological doubt and reflexivity; ontology, science, and constructivism; mono- and multidimentionality; substantive versus formalist economic frames; and the history of political science versus political anthropology. The authors then proceed by enumerating types of ethnography and the importance of the (extended) case study and social dramas for method. This is followed by a critique of political culture, as not only constituted within political science but also advanced by semiotics (Roland Barthes), social theory (Max Weber), myth analysis (Ernst Cassirer), ritual, and rhetoric. They also show what political culture reveals about, for example, collective memory, tradition, ideology and utopia, and hegemony.

Chapter 4 explores the “symbolic dimensions of politics” (p. 86) and proposes a number of diagrams to reveal the social transformations provoked by political ritual and ceremony, illustrating them with an analysis of political party rebellion and a state funeral in Israel, and with the pope’s visit to Poland in 1979. Chapter 5 considers collective identity, specifically contested Israeli nationalism. Chapters 6 explores “democratization in deeply divided societies” (p. 132), comparing the Israeli Jewish–Palestinian Arab conflict with forms of incorporation in the Netherlands and India. Chapter 7 returns to Israel and the politics of the Israel/Palestine peace process. Chapters 8 and 9 move out of research on Poland and Eastern Europe to demonstrate the utility of anthropological understandings of “civil society” and vernacular knowledge for political scientists. Culture is factored in to explain Soviet attempts at socialization, and a social constructionist approach is employed to explain changing claims to ethnicity and nationalism.

Given this incredible range of topics, the promise of convergence between the two disciplines is both commendable and something of a wonder. It is commendable in that there is a remarkable fairness in the summaries and juxtaposition of diverse viewpoints that from many other perspectives might be seen as radially opposed. It is a wonder in that sectarian fights over power within disciplines and between paradigms tend to be omitted, as are studies that do not converge but nonetheless may in fact have redirected the understanding of politics or change in the political field generally.

Three examples will suffice. First, although the study of collective identities and nationalism is discussed throughout the book, Benedict Anderson appears only in a footnote. If any scholar in the last several decades has redirected research quite radically in both disciplines, it is Anderson, a political scientist deeply informed by anthropology. When I taught with him at Cornell University (he in politics, I in anthropology), people continually misidentified him as an anthropologist. His premise that nationalism is more like kinship and religion than ideology took that object from political science and placed it squarely in an old anthropological tradition. That tradition, which developed out of the study of premodern groups, insisted that kinship was social organization, and that politics in these societies was kinship organization. One can conclude that the separation of politics as a domain of activities, and nationalism as a specific form of group cohesion, are modern developments with uneven and particular histories. These premises are fruitful and promising avenues of study for large-scale plural societies as well, and they inform much work in anthropology, such as Michael Herzfeld’s (The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village, 1985) and my own (Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State, Nation, 1993), among others.

Second, a very important frame that does not appear in the book, even in a footnote, is the work of Michel Foucault. Political anthropology (to a lesser extent political science) has found his questions incredibly generative, especially regarding the role of discursive formations in constituting power and subject formation. More specifically, exploration of the politics of sexuality and disciplinary regimes has opened up a wide range of political activities for investigation that political science had ignored, reshaping not only “politics” as object but the very idea of disciplinary knowledge.

Third, although the authors do alert us to the hidden, the informal, and the symbolic, they give scant attention to repression and the unconscious or to the process whereby something is or can be brought into language, that is, symbolized. Here, the analyses of non-anthropologists, such as Theodor Adorno of authoritarianism or Herbert Marcuse of fascism, are highly relevant for the potential convergence of fields. To see a “symbolic dimension” of politics was surely an advance over a purely instrumental, material-interest view. But symbolism, like language, is not a dimension of anything. Symbolism is constitutive of all politics. A more productive approach than looking at symbols as the end point of politics and culture would be to ask what kinds of activities resist symbolization such that they are altogether foreclosed from speech or from the formal political arena, or how individuals and groups come to symbolize or misrecognize their struggles. Policy and policy studies, then, begin to look more like magic than science—an attempt to manipulate the public through words, images, metaphors, and public relations that has real effects and ritual efficacy. Political scientists interested in these kinds of questions might turn to the work of anthropologists such as Stanley Tambiah (Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia, 1997) or Michael Taussig (The Magic of the State, 1997). But this might require a more radical reflexivity than most political scientists (or perhaps even anthropologists) would find comfortable.

These omissions aside, Anthropology and Political Science does the important work of demonstrating fruitful openings in two fields of study. Political scientists have the most to gain by becoming aware of the historical specificity of their models, perhaps developing less American and ethnocentric perspectives that can index alternative futures. But anthropologists might also gain from political science approaches by being more precise and rigorous in their formulation of problems and use of concepts. Aronoff and Kubik do a real service by underscoring the importance of such dialogue.