David Scott and Charles Hirschkind, eds., Palo Alto, California: Stanford University Press, 2006. 355 pages.

At the heart of this book is an invaluable exercise of productive engagement and dialogue arranged by the editors. The clever manner in which Asad’s most complex and often misunderstood interventions on power, the West, and the study of the non-western world is put into action in a unique way. By bringing together nine quite different scholars who invest considerable energy in their papers, we are treated to an honest exploration of Asad’s contribution to a wide range of disciplines. Well-known sociologist of religion Jose Casanova; anthropologists Steve Caton, Veena Das, and Partha Chatterjee; and renowned political scientists William E. Connolly and Hent de Vries all clearly took their task seriously. Perhaps the most fruitful outcome of this exercise is the intimacy of the engagement. In many ways, this book reads as if the readers are listening to a round-table session that proves crucial to understanding Asad’s influence on how all of these scholars of religion have reframed their work over the years.

The most noteworthy contribution is the book’s format, for it allows Asad to respond directly at the end of the collection. This novel and all-too often neglected forum of public exchange invigorates the importance of his contribution to how we study religion today and intensifies the value of each contributor’s essay. Asad’s responses, at times energetic, hint at far more than mere theoretical nitpicking. There is a real debate going on that will prove enriching for a wide range of readers.

Illustrative of this volume’s utility is how the essays gravitate around Asad’s major theoretical and methodological/polemical contributions to the study of religion. Casanova and Caton, for example, are clearly at odds with his interventions on how western notions of secularism and symbolism play out in the study of spirituality in the modern world. Instructively, Asad’s response to these challenges (pp. 206-16) further elaborate the otherwise complex and often obscure nuances of his underlying arguments made in Genealogies of Religion (The Johns Hopkins University Press: 1993) and Formation of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford University Press: 2003).

Such introspection goes beyond the confinements of discipline as well. Asad’s contribution obviously transcends anthropology in some illuminating ways. Historian Jon Wilson offers a challenging revisionist reading of the interconnections of Bengali peasants and their landlords through Asad’s exploration of how we can productively rethink the actions and passions of individuals vis-à-vis their relationship to other humans, a god, a spirit, and their unconscious (pp. 180-205). Furthermore, as Scott’s challenge to Asad on his apparent contradictory reliance on Alasdair MacIntyre’s engagement with tradition and Michel Foucault’s genealogy reveals, this exercise also provides new insight for Asad himself as he goes about responding to much welcome criticism.