ila Abu-Lughod's Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt joins a steadily growing body of ethnographies on the effects of mass media. In this case the focus is mainly on how two communities of women— maids employed by wealthy, mostly foreign, patrons in Cairo, and rural vil- lagers—respond to narrative genres. The book also seeks to draw the perspec- tives of television producers into the analysis. Dramas of Nationhood is an excellent ethnography, and should find a wide audience in several fields. Though the book is not without flaws, and perhaps some missed opportuni- ties, it is undoubtedly a strong contribution to Middle East studies and anthro- pology, as well as gender and media studies. Media ethnographies—of the television medium in this case—must find ways to bring starkly disparate scales of social action into coherent focus. The political, economic, and social agendas that shape the social fields of televi- sion are equally difficult to reconcile in an ethnographic focus. To make an ethnography conform to the conventions of the genre it must give a convinc- ing sense of "placing television more seamlessly within the sort of rich social and cultural context that the sustained anthropological fieldwork that has been our ideal since Bronislaw Malinowski is uniquely able to provide" (32).