The book begins with a discussion of the several fundamental definitions of tribe that anthropologists have adopted, how these definitions hold up when applied to the Middle East, and why they are unsatisfying. He then draws some distinctions between cultural and political classifications of tribes and between tribes of varying sizes. Although Tapper does not spare anthropologists, his most pointed criticism is of the historian Patricia Crone, who views tribes as a purely pastoral phenomenon despite abundant evidence that tribes were both settled and pastoral. Tapper's introduction is helpful, but there is also a certain insularity that comes with his kind of parsing of concepts and definitions that is most reminiscent of analytic philosophy. 2 Tapper makes it clear that historical sources on the tribes of Iran are often non-indigenous and thus have limitations.
None is particularly useful in sorting the rich variety of tribal formations in Iran.
Extrapolation, by which scholars reconstruct tribal society in the past from contemporary ethnographic work, is also flawed. 3 Tapper devotes the first two parts of his book to clarifying how the Shahsevan were formed. He argues that, by our own times, the Shahsevan had acquired three versions of their origins. The Shahsevan themselves contributed to the construction of these differing versions, as did various outside observers of their political behavior, particularly Russian observers. The most common version is that the sixteenth-century Safavid ruler, Shah 'Abbas, created the Shahsevan in order to widen the base of his personal support.