Mara A. Leichtman, Shi’i Cosmopolitanisms in Africa: Lebanese Migration and Religious Conversion in Senegal (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2015).

Ethnography worthy of the name is now a long way from social and cultural description tout court and probably always has been. Issue-oriented description is what postcolonial ethnography calls for, and it is wellrepresented by Mara Leichtman's book. She delineates a dynamic that encompasses Shi'i immigrant Lebanese in Senegal and Senegalese converts to Shi'i Islam from Lebanon. Her stories are a choreography of people and ideas on the move: Lebanese migrants in Senegal and Shi'i Islam recasting Senegalese self-understandings and promoting a developing religiosity. This multi-layered complexity bids us to rethink how we use thematizing abstractions such as migration, autochthony, transnationality and cosmopolitanism and if they can work as descriptors in our interpretations.