Reviews 439 between fact and fiction, but also between observation, objectification, and abstraction? According to the authors their use of the factional genre is also ‘a response to postmodern criticism that argues that anthropological accounts grossly distort ethnographic reality – or in extreme versions they are fictions’ (p. vi). Without any particular references it remains uncertain to whom such a belief is attributable. Arguably, ‘postmodernism’ is concerned less with polarities than with the boundaries required to maintain them. As such, the ‘postmodernist’ challenge is not that ethnography is ultimately fiction, but that ethnography is ultimately faction. The question thus raised is, once again, whether the avowedly factional ethnography differs substantially from any other kind of ethnography. Mei-Li Roberts Perth College Zanca, Russell. Life in a Muslim Uzbek village: cotton farming after communism. xxviii, 212 pp., maps, tables, illus., bibliogr. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Cengage, 2010. $23.00 (paper) Life in a Muslim Uzbek village is a new title in Wadsworth Cengage Learning’s Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology series. The series is aimed at students of anthropology at introductory and more advanced levels. This is not a textbook, though. Instead, it tries to give a general insight into a particular world region through a personal and self-reflective style in order to bring the specific target group in contact with the complexities of the ethnographic practice and the particularities of the ethnographic writing. Russell Zanca’s long involvement in the former Soviet Union and in Uzbekistan since 1992 contributes to a rich account of cotton farming in the small village of Boburkent (Fergana Valley) during the communist and post-communist years, focusing on the villagers’ lives, interpretations, and memories recorded in numerous direct excerpts throughout the text. The research was based mainly on extensive participant observation and interviews. In the introduction, which depicts the historical and geographical framework within which Uzbekistan was formed as nation-state, the author underlines that ‘Nowhere I feel a greater challenge than in the job of representing the Uzbek peasants’ (p. xxiii). In the following six chapters this mission is loyally pursued. The first chapter examines the concept of connection through the ethnographer’s own relations to the field and those of Boburkent to other regional and national centres. The second chapter embarks on a historical account of the category ‘peasant’ in Uzbekistan through land organization and management in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. The third chapter turns our attention to the history of cotton farming not only as a source of income, but also as a dominant factor of social organization and relation-building in Boburkent. The gender aspect of these relations is considered in chapter 4 through a discussion about cuisine and social etiquette, such as sharing bread, weddings, and hospitality. The last two chapters treat the issue of tradition and change in Boburkent and more widely in Uzbek society. Chapter 5 describes how the introduction of a market economy forces the villagers to reconsider their options, choices, and attitudes regarding their course of life, such as education, career choice, and citizens’ expectations. This discussion is followed in chapter 6, which considers the villagers’ personal assessment of independence and how it affected their lives, but also the position of Uzbekistan as a cotton economy within the world community. In the conclusion, the author has the opportunity to follow the issue of how globalization has affected Uzbekistan by opening his discussion to more politically controversial issues, such as religious violence, illegal migration, trafficking, and depopulation. However, there is no consideration of how villagers interpret, or even refuse to interpret, these more politically acute problems. Life in a Muslim Uzbek village is a rich ethnographic account that gives valuable insights highlighted with personal and even humorous descriptions of life in rural Uzbekistan. The account is further strengthened with numerous photographs. The discussion is not trapped within a Soviet and post-Soviet discussion that could depict rural life nostalgically. Instead, the villagers of Boburkent critically assess their life, past and present, adopting new strategies of survival through daily choices made, as the author underlines, ‘in collapse and flux’. Diversification in terms of the potential paths their economic and social life could take emerges as a key issue for the inhabitants of Boburkent so that they cope with the gradual neglect of the central authorities and the challenges of market capitalism. Although the book targets a student readership, it does not overlook larger issues of social anthropology such as the meaning of Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) , - © Royal Anthropological Institute  440 Reviews peasantry in globalization, multiple reinventions of national identity within political change, and gender issues. Nevertheless, these issues often remain in the background of the ethnographic description, avoiding theoretical overload. However, the discussion of the ‘Muslim’ identity of the village indicated in the title is rather overshadowed by the Uzbek one. This ‘neglect’ might hint at the tensions between the political and the religious in post-independent Uzbekistan, but it does not replace the more in-depth engagement with these issues. Furthermore, some autobiographical details of the people whose voices are recorded in the excerpts used in the book would add to the representation of diversification in the social mosaic of the village. Eleni Sideri University of Thessaly Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) , - © Royal Anthropological Institute 