This collection of twenty-one essays is a festschrift for I. M. Lewis, the British anthropologist whose publications about Somalia span five decades. As is typical for a book of this nature, these essays vary widely in nature, scope, depth, focus, and quality. They include personal reflections dating back to the colonial era (Drysdale); ethnographic case-studies of spirit possession (A. Adam and Tiilikainen) and the Gibil Cad lineages of the south (Luling); rather technical essays on Somali grammar and poetic metre (Puglielli and Orwin and ‘Gaarriye’); brief essays on political Islam (H. Adam) and the Af Maay dialect/language (Mukhtar) – both restatements of earlier work; a carefully researched analysis of the rise of Islamism and the Family Law of 1975 (‘Baadiyow’), updated from a 2007 McGill University working paper; two excellent essays on the politics of poetry in Somali society (Johnson and S. Samatar), and four essays on Somali clanship and genealogy (Ciabarri, Cassanelli, Djama, and Menkhaus).

The most significant and innovative connections to Lewis's own work are drawn by the latter three authors. Cassanelli attributes the historical development of the ‘total Somali genealogy’, the concept of a near-comprehensive Somali family tree whose highest branches reach into the Prophet's Arabian Quraysh family, to the intellectual efforts of Somali religious scholars. He regards this particular project of fashioning a common Somali religious identity that was more inclusive than other communal identities such as those based on clan as an important historical achievement that is especially visible in the historical record of the nineteenth century. This insight is in line with the conclusions drawn by Mohamed Kassim in his 2006 dissertation on the transmission of knowledge on the nineteenth century Benadir Coast. There religious scholars and poets responded to the existential threat of European colonial rule, Kassim argues, in the form of an expansion of devotional literature in the vernacular, which was more accessible to the common people than that in Arabic. Lewis had been the first to articulate and analyze this ‘total Somali genealogy’ and Cassanelli draws on the latter's rich ethnographical data and insights. However, by considering ‘the incorporation of a universalist Islamic dimension into Somali genealogical consciousness’ as a ‘historical phenomenon’ (p. 62), Cassanelli also moves beyond Lewis and introduces a new and innovative approach to Somali conceptions of group (including clan) identities.

Djama engages Lewis's anthropological paradigm and concept of clanship more head-on. In his critical analysis of arguments Lewis articulated in A Pastoral Democracy (1961), Djama argues that the driving forces behind Somali politics have historically not been ‘ecology and pastoral production relations’ (and thus clanship), as Lewis has argued, but ‘a combination of forces outside the Somali world’ such as international trade, colonial rule, the Cold War, and so forth (p. 113). Menkhaus adds to the debate on clanship in his ‘The Question of Ethnicity in Somali Studies’. He first examines the emergence, during the last fifteen years, of a Somali Bantu ethnic identity, paying attention to the historical circumstances of this emergence, as well as the range of political actors who helped bring it about. He then brings these insights to bear on the question of Somali clanship. Thus, as Daniel Compagnon does in his insightful work on clan as a political resource used by what he calls ‘political entrepreneurs’, Menkhaus asks what kinds of political actors engage clan solidarities and mindsets in what kinds of circumstances and for what purposes. Thus he gently moves the debate about clanship beyond Lewis's own a-historical, non-contextual and increasingly reductive paradigm.

It is Geshekter who, in the closing essay ‘The Social Anthropologist as Historian’, comes to the defense of Lewis's clan paradigm and praises the historical nature his work. Unfortunately, he fails to take into consideration Lewis's own view of history as he has explicitly asserted it in several publications at different times of his career. Lewis's view of history, such statements suggest, is very particular, as it is rooted in the structuralist-functionalist paradigm of his British social anthropological predecessors. As I have written elsewhere in an article published in the Northeast African Studies (2011, p. 15):

Moreover, Geshekter does not grasp or do justice to the arguments of those who critique or move beyond Lewis's clan paradigm. Such critics (in this volume Cassanelli, Djama, and Menkhaus) do not deny the power of clanship as a political force but insist, on the one hand, that the uses of clan as a political resource have histories and must therefore be explained in their ever changing contexts and, on the other hand, that there are many determinants of Somali political dynamics in past and present beyond clan.

Two further essays are disappointing. First, Sally Healy's essay on the historical trajectory of the state in Somalia is so superficial that it appears out of place in this volume. Second, the introduction to the volume by the editors neither analyzes Lewis's intellectual trajectory as it has evolved over the last half-century nor reflects on how the contributions to the volume build upon and push back against Lewis's many accomplishments. Lewis's view of structure, function, and history (as theorized in his introduction to History and Anthropology of 1968), or his disdain for ‘meta-twaddle’ and the ‘Anything Goes School of Cultural Studies’ (as discussed in his Arguments with Ethnography of 1999, p. 140), together with other aspects of his epistemology and methodology, are important diagnostic tools for understanding both Lewis's own work and the field of study in which that work has played such an important role.

To the mind of this reviewer, the failure to measure changes in Somali studies by the oeuvre of its first formally trained and most productive anthropologist represents a missed opportunity. Moreover, by side-stepping (and thus protecting Lewis from) harsher and more comprehensive critiques of his epistemology in- and outside of Somali studies, the editors, perhaps ironically, fail to do full justice to the enormous influence Lewis has had on outsiders' views of the Somalis and Somali self-understandings alike.