It has become something of a cliché to say that social media is making us tribal. But what do self-styled tribespeople themselves think about social media, and how might they help us better understand the role of the internet in our current political moment? Drawing on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork among Bedouin in Jordan, Social Media Tribes: Jordan's Bedouin and the Margins of the State (U Texas Press, 2026) underscores the varied but broadly intelligible ways in which distinctive groups domesticate social media to suit their needs.

Organized around key concepts in Bedouin life (including tribalism, envy, and mercy), Social Media Tribes moves between Facebook-mediated tribal truces, upstart online media platforms, palatial urban villas where self-appointed sheikhs dispense justice, and street clashes organized over WhatsApp in rural communities ignored by state development projects. A meticulous researcher and insightful participant-observer, Geoffrey Hughes reframes social media as part of a global renegotiation of the state-society divide that both preceded the emergence of social media platforms and, in turn, feeds off of them. In this telling, the internet represents a new frontier that, like older frontiers, heralds both novel freedoms and novel forms of social control.

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From their foundational era in 1097 to Saladin's conquest of Jerusalem almost a century later, the Crusader States transformed the Middle Eastern world. In an era shaped by many conflicts, this was not simply a war between Christianity and Islam, but an epic contest among multiple rival empires, dynasties, and cultures. Nicholas Morton's The Crusader Storm: A Global History of the Wars for the Middle East (Pegasus, 2026) unfolds through a kaleidoscope of perspectives: a Byzantine renegade, a crusader princess, a Turkish matriarch, a young Arab nobleman, a Syriac archbishop, Saladin's leading commander, and the vizier of Egypt. Between them, information, technologies, and ideas—as well as weapons—crossed borders at astonishing speed as their societies fought, allied, and traded. Their entangled fates reshaped not only the Middle East, but the medieval world itself. Drawing on sources from Arabic, Greek, Syriac, Armenian, Latin, and Hebrew traditions, Nicholas Morton's enthralling panorama transforms our understanding of the Crusades, revealing these wars not as a single clash of faiths, but as a dynamic era of war, commerce, innovation, and exchange that defined the course of history.

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Examining how memory, intergenerational transmission, and kinship work together, Relative Strangers (U Toronto Press, 2024) sheds light on Romani life in Palestine. Arpan Roy presents an ethnographic portrait of Dom Romani communities living between Palestine and Jordan, zooming in on everyday life in working-class neighborhoods, and under conditions of perpetual war and instability. The book focuses on how Doms are able to sustain ethnic difference through kinship, even when public performances of difference are no longer emphasized – a kind of alterity that is neither visible by obvious markers like race or religious difference, nor detected by the antennas of the state. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Amman, Roy makes a case for such alterity for Romani people and other groups in the region. Analysing intimate ethnographic scenes through anthropological theories of kinship, psychoanalysis, social theory from the Global South, and more, the book reveals how alterity in the Middle East does not adhere to rigid identitarian categories.

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