An overwhelming majority of the people of Pakistan belong to the Sunni Hanafi sect of Islam. However, non-Muslims and people belonging to several minority sects of Islam also inhabit the country. The book under review, ‘Islam and Society in Pakistan,’ describes the origins of some of these minority sects and their role in the current socio-political situation in Pakistan. The book is a collection of seventeen different articles each describing a religious sect or activity related to religion in Pakistan and connecting it with the socio-political developments in the country.

According to the Editor of the anthology, the objective was to bring together ‘as diverse an array of literature on Islam and Muslim life in Pakistan as possible.’ He feels that the book serves as a valuable resource on learning ‘the complex ways in which Pakistan’s cultural heterogeneity is played out and contested in the realm of religious life.’

Anthropology is the study of humanity. The term “anthropology” itself is derived from the Greek words “anthropos” and “logia” and was first used in 1501 by German philosopher Magnus Hundt.

Its further divisions include cognitive/cultural and economic anthropology. Cognitive anthropology lies within cultural anthropology, in which scholars seek to explain patterns of shared knowledge, cultural innovation and transmission over time and space using the methods and theories of the cognitive sciences (especially experimental psychology and evolutionary biology). This is often conducted through close collaboration with historians, ethnographers, archaeologists, linguists, musicologists and other specialists engaged in the description and interpretation of cultural forms. Cognitive anthropology is concerned with what people from different groups know and how that implicit knowledge changes the way people perceive and relate to the world around them.

Economic anthropology is a scholarly field that attempts to explain human economic behaviour using the tools of both economics and anthropology. There are three major paradigms within the field of economic anthropology: formalism, substantivism and culturalism.