Cultures of Border Control: Schengen and the Evolution of European Frontiers. By Ruben Zaiotti. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 263 pp., $30.00 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-226-97787-4). For many years, I worked in a British university in an academic unit with a planned and distinct interdisciplinary environment, with scholars who, while subject specialists, sought to test the limits of their disciplines, to design curricula and research that approached the European Union in novel ways. This Institute of European Studies was in the main staffed by scholars of politics, international relations, international political economy, law, and anthropology. I was in fact the sole anthropologist, and I was both impressed and heartened by the many ways in which my colleagues used the ideas, theories, methodologies, and literatures of diverse scholarly approaches to ask and answer questions that could not be satisfactorily crafted through the use of one subject's toolkit. In our collective view, the European Union (EU) and its predecessor intergovernmental and supranational manifestations were so dynamic, so novel, and so much a product of the contemporary that they constituted a political-economic-social-cultural system without precedent and blueprint. As the eminent French political anthropologist Marc Abeles has labeled it, the EU is an unidentified political object, and as such, it tests the limits of the possible in terms of new political and economic forms. We mixed bag of social scientists, whether consciously or unconsciously, sought the tools to identify as much as we might of that object, and to understand the myriad ways it seemed to transform itself from year to year. Ruben …