El Guindi Research Articles

The Talented Ones by Yussef El Guindi

The Talented Ones by Yussef El Guindi

Oppression in the Homeland: Yussef El Guindi's Karima's City

Oppression is one of the major destructive problems across all cultures, particularly for women of Arab origin. The aim of this research paper is to depict both the gender and sociopolitical oppression of the Egyptian women in Egypt in the Arab American playwright Yussef El Guindi's play Karima's City (2005). The idea of this play is an adaptation from Salwa Bakr's novel Thirty-One Beautiful Green Trees (1992) in her collection of stories The Wiles of Men and Other Stories (1992). Yussef El Guindi was influenced by Bakr's effort in resisting the oppression that is exercised on the Egyptian women. In spite of the fact that Yussef El Guindi is an Arab-American playwright, his Egyptian spirit inspires him; therefore, he laments the oppression that faces the Egyptian woman, especially if she has a voice that she seeks to be heard. If Salwa Bakr's novel was a scream in the past time which was not heard, that is why El Guindi recalls the scream in the modern period for share the same goal of emancipating the Egyptian women. The paper illustrates the dilemma facing Egyptian women when gender oppression is interlocked with the disintegrated political conditions in the Egyptian society in the modern era. Since women are treated as inferior to men in most Arab communities, it would be critical and problematic for them to voice their disapproval against the prejudiced patriarchal ideology as well as the despotic regime. Arab women strive to emancipate themselves from all sorts of oppression, and seek freedom away from intolerances of any shape or form. In their quest for these hopes, they resist, cry, and write in an attempt to have higher levels of self-worth, and self-determination. Unfortunately, this is not an easy journey as they face more suffering by being rejected, outcast and condemned of madness. The guiding impetus for this paper is to examine how patriarchal practices as well as repressive political and economic conditions serve in oppressing Egyptian women. Resisting these oppressive structures is the running theme in Yussef El Guindi's play Karima's City. The play explores postcolonial feminists' resistance against their oppression in national discourses that imprison women in traditional stereotypes. Drawing attention to the dynamic factors surrounding these oppressive practices is the effort dedicated by the playwright Yussef El Guindi through his portrayal of the protagonist of Karima's City, Karima. Karima strives with her local Egyptian representations that work on repressing her personality. This study exhibits multi-faceted traumatic and psychological illness as the damaging responses to these oppressive structures on Egyptian women. Postcolonial feminism theory will be examined and applied to Yussef El Guindi's Karima's City, depending on postcolonial feminist concepts of marginalization, silencing and misrepresentation by postcolonial feminism theorists including Rosemary George (1961-2013) , Chandra Mohanty (1955- ), Gayatri Spivak (1942- ), Robert Young (1950- ), Uma Narayan (1958- ), and Judith Butler (1956- ).

Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab British LiteratureContemporary Arab-American Literature: Transnational Reconfigurations of Citizenship and Belonging

Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab British LiteratureContemporary Arab-American Literature: Transnational Reconfigurations of Citizenship and Belonging

Threesome by Yussef El Guindi (review)

Threesome by Yussef El Guindi (review)

Wakako Yamauchi’s "12-1-A" and Yussef El Guindi’s "Back of the Throat": Ethnicity, Politics, and the Question of American Multiculturalism

Wakako Yamauchi’s "12-1-A" and Yussef El Guindi’s "Back of the Throat": Ethnicity, Politics, and the Question of American Multiculturalism

The Mysteries Conceived and directed by Ed Sylvanus Iskandar (review)

Reviewed by: The MysteriesConceived and directed by Ed Sylvanus Iskandar Jill Stevenson THE MYSTERIES. Conceived and directed by Ed Sylvanus Iskandar. The Flea Theater, New York City. 24May 2014. Among the many revivals and adaptations of medieval drama that I have seen, the Flea Theater’s production of The Mysterieswas arguably the best at capturing the communal spirit and anachronistic humor that I have always believed energized the original medieval performances. The project involved forty-eight playwrights, among them Amy Freed, Madeleine George, David Henry Hwang, Craig Lucas, and Dael Orlandersmith, who (very loosely) adapted pageants from the medieval York cycle. The play was structured as fifty-two episodes divided into three acts—each separated by a thirty-minute intermission during which dinner and dessert were served—and was performed by fifty-four actors, most of whom were members of The Bats, the Flea’s resident company. Consequently, although presented in a small, intimate theatre rather than on wagons proceeding through city streets, as was the case in York, The Mysteriesoperated on a large scale that evoked the original medieval tradition. The play featured a wide range of dramatic approaches, with a number of playwrights employing parody. For example, Yussef El Guindi adapted “The Conspiracy” into a Hollywood Western, with Pilate played as a sheriff/cowboy and Caiaphas as a stereotypical American Indian. In another case, Nick Jones reinvented Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac into a reality television–type family drama, complete with exaggerated Southern accents. In doing so, Jones also transformed the biblical event from a sincere test of Abraham by God into a vindictive trick by Hagar, the mother of Abraham’s first son Ishmael. It is clear the playwrights were given a great deal of freedom in how they modified the original material, especially with respect to theology, and many offered postcolonial and feminist perspectives on the biblical stories. In most cases, I found this very effective. One of the more captivating choices was in “The Prophecy,” adapted by the New York–based ensemble playwriting company CollaborationTown. Here, Jesus’s conception was staged as a rape by the angel Gabriel. Although the act was somewhat tempered by the fact that Gabriel was played by a woman (Alice Allemano), the rhythmic clapping and stomping of the Angel Chorus that ringed the space gave the aggressive assault on Mary (Allison Buck) a threatening and sinister quality. This interpretation was reinforced in the following play, “The Annunciation” by Jordan Harrison, which was staged as a conversation between Mary and a physician. In response to Mary’s repeated claims of virginity, despite being five-months pregnant, the Doctor asserted: “I already told you that I deal with the Observable world. . . . For instance, that the abrasions and lacerations to her external genitalia were consistent with forced entry. For instance, that her psychological profile was consistent with survivors of incest. For instance, that her hymen appeared to be . . . intact.” Therefore, despite the diversity of interpretations, it appeared that the director, Ed Sylvanus Iskandar, and dramaturg, Jill Rafson, may have worked with the playwrights to build connections among certain plays. The result was a five-and-one-half-hour production that felt remarkably cohesive. This was due, in part, to the same actors playing key roles across the pageants, something that was not the case in medieval York. The first episode, “Song of Triumph (Lucifer’s Lament),” introduced the play’s central characters—Gabriel and Lucifer (Asia Kate Dillon). Although Jesus (Colin Waitt) was a significant character in act 2 and during the first half of act 3, it was Gabriel’s and Lucifer’s differing responses to God’s authority that propelled the story forward. This difference was established in the second episode, written by Liz Duffy Adams, in which Lucifer accuses Gabriel of “groveling” before God rather than truly loving him as she does. When God (Matthew Jeffers, in a track suit and gold chains) banished Lucifer, she said: “I wonder if someday you’ll learn what [End Page 591]love really is. I wonder if someday it will break your heart. I wonder what will happen when the Heart of God breaks.” Click for larger view View...

A scoring system for biliary atresia: Is this the right one?

Objective: Early diagnosis of biliary atresia (BA) is mandatory and challenging at once. A few scoring systems had been proposed over the last decades but none of them was routinely applied. Recently a new one was proposed by El Guindi et al. on the basis of some well known clinical, biochemical, ultrasonographic and histological features (1) of BA. The aim of our study is to evaluate the ability of this scoring system to differentiate AVB from other conditions of neonatal cholestasis.

Michael Malek Najjar, ed., Four Arab American Plays: Works by Leila Buck, Jamil Khoury, Yussef El Guindi, and Lameece Issaq & Jacob Kader (Jefferson, North Carolina : McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2014)

Michael Malek Najjar, ed., Four Arab American Plays: Works by Leila Buck, Jamil Khoury, Yussef El Guindi, and Lameece Issaq & Jacob Kader (Jefferson, North Carolina : McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2014)

Can There be Cognitive Science Without Anthropology?

Topics in Cognitive Science 6 (2014) 144–145 Copyright © 2013 Cognitive Science Society, Inc. All rights reserved. ISSN:1756-8757 print / 1756-8765 online DOI: 10.1111/tops.12051 Can There be Cognitive Science Without Anthropology? Fadwa El Guindi, a Dwight W. Read b a b Department of Social Sciences, Qatar University Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles We are contributing to the debate on the role of anthropology in and for cognitive sci- ence (see Topics in Cognitive Science, 4(3), 2012). Although the conceptual distancing by some anthropologists from linguistics, psychology, and cognition diminished the holism of anthropology, the recent trend that reduces culture, a very complex phenome- non, to biological fitness and/or phenotypic transmission has deformed and derailed the anthropological project (El Guindi & Read, 2012; Read 2012). Culture is a coherent web of shared knowledge about all aspects of life and death—sacred, secular, spatial, temporal, political, social, and religious—integrated as a whole. Anthropological cognitive research never ceased. At times it is not visible to cognitive scientists due to labeling or publishing venues. In the 1960s, cognitive anthropology was known as Ethnoscience and has been part of the historical development of anthropologi- cal knowledge. The structural approach has taken anthropology beyond method, elicita- tion, and segmented cultural domains to holistic structures that reveal underlying cognitive dimensions. Knowledge about how human minds work has increased dramatically, utilizing differ- ent modes of inquiry. Anthropology has contributed much to this enterprise, both with respect to cognitive science (Wexler, 2006) and even physics (Capra, 1996). We see this in the shared culture that is part of humanness and whose expression has cognitive under- pinnings determined by the size of working memory, thereby precluding the non-human primates from having anything but a superficial analogue of human culture (Read 2012). In our research we are not merely interested in how “people construe their world by the way they talk about it,” but in how human knowledge is expressed through complex, universal cognitive processes of categorizing and re-categorizing, as revealed concretely (explicitly) in various human domains such as kinship activity (El Guindi 2006, 2010, 2011, 2012) and terminology (Read 2001, 2007), myth, ritual, space, time, etc. (El Guindi 1973, 1977a,b, 1982; El Guindi & Read 1979). These creative processes of structuring Correspondence should be sent to Fadwa El Guindi, E-mail: fg77@anthro.ucla.edu

Misconstruals Miss the Mark

El Guindi and Read criticize our (Kushnick and Fessler 2011) exploration of Westermarckian phenomena on the grounds that (1) evidence in support of the Westermarck hypothesis (WH) is weak and (2) our characterization of Karo marriage preferences is misguided. Their critique, however, suffers from a selective use of the literature, a misconstrual of the hypothesis at issue, and factual errors. El Guindi and Read’s first position presumes that human psychology lacks evolved inbreeding-avoidance mechanisms—in their words, “Why should there be a natural aversion among siblings?” While this was a plausible question when Westermarck’s contemporaries challenged him over a century ago, it is an astounding position to adopt today. Voluminous evidence documents such mechanisms in other species (e.g., Pusey 2004), findings paralleled by psychological research in humans independent of the natural experiments that El Guindi and Read problematize (Lieberman et al. 2003, 2007; Fessler and Navarette 2004). Moreover, the evidence regarding natural experiments is far less equivocal than El Guindi and Read suggest. Humans’ detection of biological relatedness relies on a hierarchy of cues (Lieberman et al. 2007). When natural experiments are revisited in light of this (Lieberman 2009; Lieberman and Lobel 2012), the evidence in favor of the WH is substantially strengthened—indeed, contrary to the impression created by El Guindi and Read’s out-of-context quotation, Rantala and Marcinkowska (2011) made exactly this point in their review. El Guindi and Read discuss the prevalence of cousin marriage in Qatar, and point to Henrich and Henrich’s (2007) work among Chaldeans, as evidence of “the desirability of marriage among close kin.” However, the authors are (1) conflating a cultural preference for cousin marriage with the subjective experience of sexual attraction and (2) failing to grasp the role of cosocialization in the WH. There is nothing new in the observation that norms for cousin marriage are common—indeed, it was precisely this that motivated Westermarck’s original work, as the conflict he observed was between a prescription for cousin marriage and a subjective aversion resulting from cosocialization. Correspondingly, al-

Westermarck Hypothesis Reconsidered

Previous articleNext article No AccessWestermarck Hypothesis Reconsidered A Comment on Kushnick and FesslerFadwa El Guindi and Dwight ReadFadwa El GuindiQatar University, P.O. Box 2713 Doha, Qatar ([email protected]) Search for more articles by this author and Dwight ReadDepartment of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095, U.S.A. 2 VIII 11 Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 1February 2012 Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/663576 Views: 57Total views on this site Citations: 5Citations are reported from Crossref HistorySubmitted July 23, 2011Accepted August 02, 2011 © 2012 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Dwight Read, Claes Andersson Cultural complexity and complexity evolution, Adaptive Behavior 28, no.55 (Jan 2019): 329–358.https://doi.org/10.1177/1059712318822298Jeffrey Winking Exploring the Great Schism in the Social Sciences: Confirmation Bias and the Interpretation of Results Relating to Biological Influences on Human Behavior and Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology 16, no.11 (Jan 2018): 147470491775269.https://doi.org/10.1177/1474704917752691Eran Shor The Westermarck Hypothesis and the Israeli Kibbutzim: Reconciling Contrasting Evidence, Archives of Sexual Behavior 44, no.88 (May 2015): 2139–2150.https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-015-0558-5Dwight W. Read Incest Taboos and Kinship: A Biological or a Cultural Story?, Reviews in Anthropology 43, no.22 (Jun 2014): 150–175.https://doi.org/10.1080/00938157.2014.903151Fadwa El Guindi, Dwight W. Read Can There be Cognitive Science Without Anthropology?, Topics in Cognitive Science 6, no.11 (Nov 2013): 144–145.https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12051

Gateway to NSF, Award and Grant Recipients, Kudos

Abstract:GATEWAY TO NSF:“Methods Training for Undergraduates, GraduateStudents and Experienced Researchers” by Laura M AhearnDeborah Winslow is contributing editor of Gateway to NSF, the AN column from the National Science Foundation.“Award Recipients”“Grant Recipients”“Kudos”“Job Placement”Keywords:Jeanette L Blomberg, Beverly Davenport, Fadwa El Guindi, Thad Gulbrandsen, Elaine Julie Waldman, Carlos Vélez‐Ibáñez

Amazing Acrobatics of Language: The Theatre of Yussef El Guindi

Amazing Acrobatics of Language: The Theatre of Yussef El Guindi

Silk Road Theatre Project and Yussef El Guindi's Our Enemies: Lively Scenes of Love and Combat

Silk Road Theatre Project and Yussef El Guindi's <i>Our Enemies: Lively Scenes of Love and Combat</i>

Female circumcision: multicultural perspectives

Female Circumcision: Multicultural Perspectives. Edited by Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Pp. vi + 290, introduction, notes, bibliography, contributors, index, acknowledgments. $39.95 cloth, $19.95 paper) In 1973, while serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Cote d'Ivoire, I received an invitation from the chief of a nearby village to visit a group of girls who were preparing for their initiation into womanhood. Accepting the chief's kind invitation, I traveled to a small house in the forest where the girls were learning traditional songs and dances while eating as much chicken and rice as they could hold. Several days later, I attended the girls' celebration of their initiation's successful conclusion. Of course, as an outsider and guest, I did not see the girls undergo the celebration's prerequisite: excision. Having kept in touch with scholarship on excision since my departure from West Africa, I am pleased to have the chance to review this exceptionally well-balanced and important book. The editor, Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf, wisely chooses the general term Each form of female circumcision involves a different level of physical change; clitoridectomy removes the clitoris and excision removes both the clitoris and the labia minora, while infibulation involves removing the labia majora and suturing the genital area. Much of the scholarship on this subject since the early 1980s has been based on feminist and interventionist ideology. Studies such as Asma El Dareer's Woman, Why Do You Weep'? (1982) and Esther K. Hicks 's Infibulation ([1993] 1996) have motivated readers to seek social change. While editor Abusharaf carefully represents the views of both activists for women's rights and believers in cultural accommodation, she closely examines community efforts to transform long-established rituals and their happiness after successful transformation. One of the book's main purposes is to address glaring gaps in current conceptualizations of the problem by providing details about activists' efforts in local and transnational contexts (16). The authors, most of whom have participated actively in NGOs, have had many years of experience in communities where female circumcision has been practiced. Some of them are lawyers; others are physicians or other health professionals; still others are professors of sociology or anthropology. Their expertise and thoroughness in bringing complex situations to life for the reader result in admirably thorough and thoughtprovoking coverage of areas that need to be examined in greater depth. One issue that scholars have not always considered is comparability between female circumcision and other body modifications. In her essay Had This Been Your Face, Would You Leave It As Is?, Fadwa El Guindi compares female circumcision to nose jobs, facelifts, and breast enlargement in Western culture. Like female circumcision, El Guindi suggests these procedures mutilate the body and strive to achieve beautification for the sake of sexual pleasure. Sami A. Aldeeb Abu-Sahlieh takes a different approach in his essay Male and Female Circumcision: The Myth of the Difference, finding infant male circumcision to be as questionable as pubescent female circumcision. Both essays encourage readers to consider, in assessing female circumcision, the impact of their own cultural and religious backgrounds. …

Islam in Urban America: Sunni Muslims in Chicago

Book Review| July 01 2005 Islam in Urban America: Sunni Muslims in Chicago Islam in Urban America: Sunni Muslims in Chicago, Garbi Schmidt. Fadwa El Guindi Fadwa El Guindi Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2005) 24 (4): 123–124. https://doi.org/10.2307/27501650 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Fadwa El Guindi; Islam in Urban America: Sunni Muslims in Chicago. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2005; 24 (4): 123–124. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/27501650 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2004 Immigration and Ethnic History Society2004 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Hepatitis B vaccined children at five years of age in need of a booster dose: Mohamed A El Guindi, Liver Institute, Cairo Egypt; Aleef A Alam, Ahmed A Raouf, Liver Institute, Shebin El Kom Egypt

Hepatitis B vaccined children at five years of age in need of a booster dose: Mohamed A El Guindi, Liver Institute, Cairo Egypt; Aleef A Alam, Ahmed A Raouf, Liver Institute, Shebin El Kom Egypt

FADWAEL GUINDI, Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance, Dress, Body, Culture Series (New York: Berg, 1999). Pp. 262. $19.50 paper.

In the Preface, Fadwa El Guindi states that her book is a study “born out of fieldwork on the contemporary Islamic movement” and represents “an original synthesis of ethnography, history, Qur[ham]anic text, Hadith, and Tafsir.” But the book is also exhortatory. In a preliminary sentence that takes the place of a dedication, El Guindi expresses the hope her book will reach those who have made the decision to veil, those who have refused, those who have always veiled, and those who have never veiled. It is clear that El Guindi's main audience is Muslim women and men, whom she invites to understand the religious, political, and sociological origins of their current stances for or against veiling. Yet the non-Muslim reader, who feels graciously invited into the audience to observe and learn, easily understands her arguments.

Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance: Fadwa El Guindi

Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance: Fadwa El Guindi

Book Reviews

Books reviewed:Anthropology of ReligionJohn R. Hinnells, and Roy Porter (eds), Religion, health and sufferingFelicia Hughes‐Freeland, and Mary M. Crain (eds, Recasting ritual: performance, media, identityBirgit Meyer, Translating the devil: religion and modernity among the Ewe in GhanaCecilia Pennacini,Kubandwa: la possessione spiritice nell’Africa dei Grandi LaghiRowena Robinson, Conversion, continuity and change: lived Christianity in southern GoaMalcolm Ruel, Belief, ritual and the securing of life: reflexive essays on a Bantu religionMartin D. Stringer, On the perception of worship: the ethnography of worship in four Christian congregations in ManchesterBeatrice Vogt, Skill and trust: the Tovil healing ritual of Sri Lanka as culture‐specific psychotherapyArchaeology / Material CultureChris Gosden, and Jon Hather (eds), The prehistory of food: appetites for changeDavid J. Wilson, Indigenous South Americans of the past and present: an ecological perspectiveBrian R. Billman, and Gary M. Feinman (eds), Settlement pattern studies in the Americas: fifty years since Virú.Stephen D. Houston (ed.), Function and meaning in Classic Maya architectureJudith Perani, and Norma H. Wolff, Cloth, dress and art patronage in AfricaLidia D. Sciama, and Joanne B. Eicher (eds), Beads and bead makers: gender, material culture and meaningBiological AnthropologyRobin Dunbar, Chris Knight and Camilla Power, The evolution of culture: an interdisciplinary view.Michael A. Little, and Paul W. Leslie (eds), Turkana herders of the dry savanna: ecology and biobehavioural respeonse of nomads to an uncertain environmentDavid Magnusson (ed.), The lifespan development of individuals: behavioral, neurobiological and psychosocial perspectives – a synthesis.Tessa M. Pollard, and Susan Brin Hyatt, Sex, gender and healthCarig B. Stanford, The hunting apes: meat eating and the origins of human behavior.GenderFadwa El Guindi, Veil: modesty, privacy and resistanceL.L. Langness, Men and ‘woman’ in New Guinea.Rafael L. Ramirez, What it means to be a man: reflections on Puerto Rican masculi‐ nityIna Rösing, Geschletchliche Zeit, geschlechtlicher RaumGeneralSusan Bayly, Caste, society and politics in India from the eighteenth century to the modern ageGeri‐Ann Galanti, Caring for patients from different cultures: case studies from American hospitalsJames Paul Gee, An introduction to discourse analysis: theory and methodRamachandra Guha, Savaging the civilized: Verrier Elwin, his tribals, and IndiaDavid Macdougall, Transcultural cinemaJames M. Wilce, Eloquence in trouble: the poetics and politics of complaint in rural BangladeshModernity / postcolonialityBruce M. Knauft, From primitive to postcolooniial in Melanesian anthropologyTariq Modood, and Pnina Werbner (eds), The politics of multiculturalism in the New Europe: racism, identity and communityNiklas Luhmann, Observations on modernityJames Ferguson, Expectations of modernity: myths and meanings of urban life on the Zambian copperbeltPeter Pels, A politics of presence: contacts between missionaries and Waluguru in late colonial TanganykaSamuel M. Wilson, The emperor’s giraffe, and other stories of cultures in contactHans Siebers, We are children of the mountain’: creolization and modernization among the Q’eqchi’esLisa Rofel, Other modernities: gendered yearnings in China after socialismPolitical AnthropologyAnthony P. Cohen (ed.), Signifying identities: anthropological perspectives on boundaries and contested valuesElizabeth Keating, Power sharing: language, rank, gender, and social space in Pohnpe, MicronesiaVincent C. Peloso, Peasants on plantations: subaltern strategies of labor and resistance in the Pisco Valley, PeruGloria Rudolf, Panama’s poor: victims, agents, and historymakersKatherine Verdery, The political lives of dead bodies: reburial and postsocialist changeKosaku Yoshino (ed.), Consuming ethnicity and nationalism: Asian experiencesLouise Young, Japan’s total empire: Manchuria and the culture of wartime imperialismSocial anthropologyDonna Birdwell‐Pheasant, and Denise Lawence‐Zúñiga (eds). House life: space, place and family in Europe.James A. Boon, Verging on extra‐vagance: anthropology, history, religion, literature, arts … showbiz.Mary Douglas, Leviticus as literature.Elliot Fratkin, Ariaal pastoralists of Kenya: surviving drought and development in Africa’s arid landsMaurice Godelier, Thomas R. Trautmann and Franklin E. Tjon Sie Fat (eds). Transformations of kinshipCharles W. Nuckolls, Culture: a problem that cannot be solvedJohn Carlos Rowe (ed.), ‘Culture’ and the problem of the disciplines