This is a superb book. Lisa Wedeen brings a complex theory of interpretation to the study of nation building in Yemen. She explores the power of performances that penetrate cultural life as they work upon bodily dispositions and valences. Peripheral Visions has several high points, including a critique of secular theories that separate national imaginaries from Islamic practices of piety; a wonderful exploration of “qat chews”—a custom through which democratic dispositions and a national imaginary are promoted through semipublic discourses; an account of how the weakness of the state can enlarge the imagination of the nation; and an engagement with the effects of global neoliberalism on discursive practices in Yemen. Each level and mode is interwoven with the others. So we gain a complex understanding of politics that is irreducible to the kind of study organized around fixed categories of analysis and “variables” that do not interpenetrate.

Every turn of the page teaches me something about the history of Yemen, its internal struggles, its relations to neighbors, and its participation in regional and global politics. My sense is that this book will stand as a powerful account of Yemeni politics. But I am more qualified to think about the theoretical resources that Wedeen brings to bear than to assess the details of her account of Yemen. Let us turn, then, to some of those issues.

The qat chews are illuminating. They show the insufficiency of conceptions of democracy confined to electoral competition and, to a lesser extent, the Habermasian history of deliberative democracy in Europe. The chews pursue and express a national imaginary, as they help to promote a democratic ethos among citizens in a regime that is both authoritarian in some ways and weak as a state. The participants imagine the nation as they debate, commune, and struggle in local settings. Wedeen convinces this reader, at least, when she says that these chews “can serve both ruler and ruled, providing an authoritarian regime with crucial information, while giving ordinary individuals and an organized opposition more freedom than they would enjoy in other authoritarian circumstances' (p 142).

Another high point is when she complicates the claim, made elsewhere in the literature, that global neoliberalism has intensified practices of Islamic piety in Yemen. An intensification has occurred, she argues, but it expresses numerous elements, including Israel/American policies on Palestine, regional religious conflicts, nationalizing strategies, and others besides. Piety and nationhood play upon each other at multiple levels, as the specific timing of the growth of piety in Yemen suggests.

There are other riches in this book, but I will use the space left to pose a couple of questions.

First, Wedeen suggests that Michel Foucault and Foucaultians emphasize the overweening power of discipline, surveillance, and governmentality in European life, while the case of Yemen shows more porosity and uncertain modes of control. I am convinced by the conclusion about Yemen but not by the reading of Foucault. To me, he emphasizes the fragility and uncertainty of the very processes he uncovers, showing how they encounter unexpected obstacles and modes of resistance even in Europe. He seems to be with her account, not against it. It would be fascinating to see Wedeen (sometime) mine that side of Foucault, as she places modes of resistance and creative intervention in Euro-American states into dialogue with different expressions of such ambiguity in Yemen.

Second, her account of the connections among discourse, performance, and politics is superb. But I wonder if it is possible to focus more on the nondiscursive dimension of performance, consolidation, and critique. Foucault and Talal Asad (another figure she invokes) emphasize the extent to which styles of eye contact and avoidance, modes of dress, stride, facial hair, ritual, and gesture play a role in the generation of constituency intensities and interconstituency relations. Wedeen touches this dimension but does not pursue it very far. Do linguistic theories of performativity, while utterly indispensable, underplay these elements when they stretch “language” until it formally includes all such behavior? Thus, the leafy stimulant, qat, may encourage intensities of expression and modes of absorption that alter the quality and effects of the chews. These effects can be studied.

On a related front, the work of the neuroscientist Giacomi Ritzolatti, who studies “mirror neurons” through which we mimic and internalize role performances below language, might contribute something to a theory of discursive practices without sacrificing the subtlety already extant. It is pertinent to note that Ritzolatti immediately turned to a study of Maurice Merleau-Ponty upon making this discovery, using the latter's work to help him refine laboratory experiments. Merleau-Ponty was interested in both linguistic and nonlinguistic modes of acculturation. Such an issue is not confined to practices ordinarily described as “pious.” The diets, corporeal punishments, drugs, dress, rituals, and bodily demeanor of secularists help to constitute distinctive modes of absorption, hubris, and piety, too. (I am sipping coffee as I write this review.) We are talking about a distribution of emphasis here, rather than a difference of kind, the type of thing Foucault does when he attends to “intersections” between corporeal disciplines and (a phrase that might be improved) “symbolic practices.” If Ritzolatti, Merleau-Ponty, and Foucault together suggest ways to augment the performative practices explored by Wedeen, her attention to these insights would not pull her too far from Ludwig Wittgenstein, a figure to whom she is indebted. He, too, introduces limit terms such as “training,” “life,” and “nature” that might be drawn in this direction.

Third, Wedeen's discussion of relations between changes in piety and political shifts is absorbing, even if one is not chewing gat while reading it. The word “piety” may include both a creedal and a spiritual dimension. Does Wedeen think that formal agreements of creed are compatible with differences in existential disposition, including, say, care for this world on one end of the spectrum and resentment of the most fundamental terms of existence as you understand them on the other? I detect such a complexity in her text. Addressing the complex relationships between creed and spirituality might aid one's thinking about how to fashion productive political assemblages across differences in creed. God knows we need all the help we can get in this domain.

Finally, a question to Wedeen and Connolly alike. Wedeen attends carefully to the impact of neoliberalism on Yemen. I would also broaden the question a bit. It may be that the acceleration and expansion of capital today, in conjunction with other forces, foments pressure to insert minorities of multiple types on more territories more rapidly than heretofore. (The claim made by some that global capital only “homogenizes” culture may thus be exaggerated.) Territorial regimes respond to those pressures in different ways, sometimes by accepting a more expansive pluralism, sometimes through militant drives to protect boundaries to secure the compensatory comforts of nationhood, and sometimes through a tense struggle between these options. Do such pressures affect the pursuit of nationhood in Yemen? Does the desire for nationhood intensify while its realization also becomes more difficult? Is it possible to imagine a non-national standard of territorial integrity that speaks to those pressures in a rather new way?

The first three questions are minor, and the responses I endorse are debatable. The last may exceed the reach of both Wedeen's book and mine, though it could be pertinent to both. Be that as it may, the basic point is that Wedeen has produced a creative, multidimensional study that deepens our grasp of Yemen, comparative politics, and political theory.