Appadurai's Fear of Small Numbers is an important contribution to the study of one of the most harmful aspects of modernity, violence against minorities. Although anthropology—a discipline prolific on the topics of ethnicity, nationalism, and religious identity, as well as modernity—is well situated to offer insight into this problem, few anthropologists have addressed it in general terms. We can thus view Appadurai's monograph as the beginning of an important conversation, and like many seminal works, his contains both monumental insights and notable missteps.

Appadurai's most significant contribution to the understanding of violence against ethnic and religious groups may be the centrality that he attributes to “uncertainty.” Like Douglas' “matter out of place,” the presence of minorities “blur[s] the boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’” (44), rendering majorities' own identities less distinct. Are Indian Muslims, German Jews, Turkish Kurds, or Israeli Palestinians “really” fellow citizens, or foreigners? And if people who seem like “them” are actually “us,” what does that say about us? The inability of some majority members to answer these questions to their own satisfaction goes far toward explaining their hatred of such groups. Minorities threaten the ability of majorities to define their own identities as they would wish.

The production of minorities as different, Appadurai writes, helps to “set boundaries and mark off the dynamics of the we” (50). A majority needs an “other” against which to define its own identity, even as the presence of such an other within a nation-state renders this very identity indistinct. Appadurai argues that majorities cast minorities as an “impure” element in the national body, the destruction of which provides an opportunity for self-definition.

By providing an other against which majorities can define themselves, minorities also allow majorities to cast their own nation as mainstream in relation to others. “Minorities are the major site for displacing the anxieties of many states about their own minority or marginality (real or imagined) in a world of a few mega states, of unruly economic flows and compromised sovereignties” (43). Majorities align themselves with identities that have global prestige and power by displacing potentially negative characterizations of themselves onto minorities.

The relationship Appadurai identifies between majority identity and the persecution of minorities is compelling and useful. His account of global forms of social organization is more problematic. He traces the plight of minorities to the alleged decline of the “vertebrate” mode of organization, represented by the nation-state. He asserts that this form is currently challenged by a less centralized mode, encompassing such diverse phenomena as global capitalism and Al-Qaeda, which he calls “cellular.” Appadurai argues that capitalist corporations, grassroots associations of progressive activists, and terrorist groups share the key organizational features of being “mobile, recombinant, opportunistic, and de-nationalized” (27).

The structural similarities that Appadurai observes among these disparate phenomena are theoretically interesting, but their differences are more relevant than he allows, and compromise the usefulness of his model. Global capitalism and terrorism threaten the nation-state in completely different ways. Capitalism challenges the nation-state's hegemony, but it could easily replace that form with its own “vertebrate” integration of the world's power structures. Terrorist groups, on the other hand, do not appear poised to topple the world's power structures, but instead could be described as parasitic on vertebrate systems. It is not clear how the similarity of their structures elucidates these processes.

Unfortunately, Appadurai does not flesh out the mechanisms through which “cellular” capitalism acts upon the nation-state; such an expansion might have rendered the analogy more useful. An analysis of the long-term effects of global corporations on the world's structures of power is, likewise, beyond the scope of this review. It will suffice here to point out one way in which capitalism's effects could be read as vertebrate.

Appadurai correctly notes that economic globalization has made regional coalitions such as the European Union increasingly important. He points out that such coalitions are often accompanied by “new panic about foreign goods or about foreign languages, foreign migrants, or foreign investments” (22). He understands this racism as evidence of the nation-state's disintegration; fear the foreign is a desperate attempt to retain nationalism in the face of globalization. Economic integration “leaves the cultural field as the main one in which fantasies of purity, authenticity, borders, and security can be enacted” (23).

It is not immediately obvious, however, that the presence of jingoistic sentiment affirms the impending doom of the nation-state or the vertebrate mode; as the literature on nationalism has shown, constructions of identity bolstered by varying degrees of ethnocentrism have accompanied the form from its inception. A careful examination of the example of the European Union suggests a more compelling alternative. The racism in contemporary Europe displays a crucial difference from that of earlier eras: it is regional in scope. While as recently as World War II, Europeans focused much enmity on “others” whose identity as European was not in question, today despised groups are cast as originating outside the region. For example, today's French racists distrust “Algerians” (Algerian immigrants and their descendants), not Germans. The current European bigotry, then, appeals to regional rather than national identities. It is logical to interpret this new fear of the foreign as a means of constructing identities based on, and reinforcing loyalty to, regional coalitions, rather than as a reaction against their threat to the economic hegemony of the nation-state. The European Union, a large-scale vertebrate form born of global capitalism, can be seen as imagining its “European” identity through the exclusion of those perceived to “belong” outside its borders. This reading of the situation is well in keeping with Appadurai's arguments about matter out of place. When citizens of Denmark, population under six million, rally around cartoons designed to offend Muslim residents, they posit themselves as European in opposition to a Muslim other. In this way, they allay fears that their small nation could be considered marginal.

While global capitalism does appear capable of restructuring world power, if not of rendering it cellular, terrorism does not hold such threat or promise. Instead, terrorism can be understood as a strategy for gaining control within the current world system. Appadurai himself notes in the context of terrorism, “cellular organizations are sometimes a product of and are dependent on the nation-state” (130); he underestimates the significance of this observation. For example, as Gerges (Reference Gerges2005) demonstrates, Jihadist movements originally arose as a form of religious nationalism. They aimed to gain control of specific Arab nations and to instill Islamic law there. Their offensive against Western governments was also motivated, at least in part, by nationalist aims. Jihadists hoped to expel the American military from Saudi Arabia and to inspire support of their movement at home. Thus, it is difficult to accept Appadurai's claim that Al-Qaeda is propagating “a war against the idea that states are the only game in town” (17). Al Qaeda does not oppose the United States because it wishes to destroy the nation-state system, but rather because it wishes to promote its own aims within that system.

A final weakness in Appadurai's text arises in his explication of the experience of minorities. Because Appadurai identifies so many advantages for majorities in defining and then discriminating against minorities, it is not surprising that he sees minorities as the product of this process. Minorities are constructed “through specific choices and strategies, often of state elites or political leaders” (45). However, Appadurai fails to account for the agency of minorities in their own self-definition, a factor that becomes unavoidably important in sites such as contemporary Turkey or the former Yugoslavia, where state rhetoric suppresses the expression of minority identities. His account appears to deny that minority identities are often useful and meaningful to those who claim them, as is well demonstrated by the extensive philosophical literature on “recognition” (cf. Taylor Reference Taylor1994).

The brilliance of Fear of Small Numbers, while sporadic, nevertheless renders it groundbreaking both for social theory and for political action. Even its questionable assertions inspire reflection on important issues. I highly recommend this book to all people interested in the fate of the contemporary world.