Book Reviews Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. 283pp. d 29.95 (hbk) Ethnicity without Groups is an important, original and acutely needed book. It marks, simultaneously, both a continuation and a significant departure from Brubaker’s influential earlier studies such as Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Harvard University Press, 1992) and Nationalism Reframed (Cambridge University Press, 1996). The continuity is mostly detectable in his theoretical approach, as Brubaker expands his meticulous analysis and criticism of key concepts in this field while also elaborating on his preferred cognitivist perspective. The departure is for the most part visible in Brubaker’s move from the historical and macro-sociological level of analysis to the micro-sociology of group interaction. Thus there is little or no emphasis on the state and political institutions, wars, geo-politics or historical transformations of empires into nation-states. Instead the focus shifts to micro-level group formation, social categorisation, stereotyping and individual and collective perceptions of reality. Although the book is essentially compiled from already published papers written for different occasions (some of which are co-authored), there is a common unifying theme running through all the chapters. This is explicitly formulated as an uncom- promising attack on what Brubaker diagnoses as a propensity to groupism which is defined as a ‘tendency to take bounded groups as fundamental units of analysis (and basic constituents of the social world)’ (p. 2). He argues that despite decades of prevailing social constructivist thinking, the overwhelming majority of studies pub- lished in the field of ethnicity and nationalism continues to suffer from this groupist syndrome. Even when they nominally distance themselves from essentialism and reification many authors are, according to Brubaker, prone to intellectual complacency and ‘cliched constructivism’ where ‘one often finds constructivist and groupist language casually conjoined’ (p. 3). In this sense academic writing becomes barely distinguishable from that of journalists or politicians as they all make reference to conflicts between ‘nations’, ‘ethnic groups’, ‘cultures’ or ‘communities’ as if these are homogeneous singular actors with clearly defined wills. Hence in place of concrete individual or social actors such as political entrepreneurs, religious authorities or specific social movements as well as other organisations that make specific political claims or pursue various ideological projects in the name of a particular group, one regularly encounters references to ‘the Serbs’ who kill ‘the Croats’ or ‘the whites’ who subjugate ‘the blacks’ and so on. Instead of this groupist language Brubaker insists, following Bourdieu, that researchers should operate with much more dynamic concepts of group formation. Since group membership is a variable rather than a fixed state of existence, one should not assume that collective action necessarily stems from one’s collective designation. In place of static groups Brubaker suggests different and much more relational appara- tuses of analysis: cognitive schemes, practical categories, cultural idioms, political projects or discursive frames. Most chapters of the book develop this argument in greater detail, first by challenging key concepts in the field (Chapters 2, 4, 5 and 6), second, by making a plea for greater engagement with developments in cognitive Nations and Nationalism 12 (4), 2006, 699–715. r The author 2006. Journal compilation r ASEN 2006