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As we are commemorating the centenary of Durkheim's death in this issue, it seems appropriate to reflect on what we know about it. We know, of course, that he died on 15 November 1917 at the age of 59 – not a young age at which to die a hundred years ago, but not an old one, either. Also, we know that he died during World War I, but in his bed, unlike many of his younger colleagues, who died on the battlefield, including his own son.

The article takes the form of a critical comment on Warren Shapiro's recent defence of approaches to kinship from evolutionary psychology against Susan McKinnon's attact on them from a position of cultural constructivism, but it also takes issue with some of McKinnon's own arguments, as well as reflecting critically on the assumptions of evolutionary psychology itself. Although far apart theoretically, Shapiro and McKinnon share a flawed understanding of the significance of kin term equations, while McKinnon and evolutionary psychology both rely in their arguments on notions of agency that are fundamentally ethnocentric and neglect the significance of social obligation. Nonetheless, Shapiro and McKinnon both represent established tendencies within social anthropology, though not exhaustively so. The article ends with a plea for a degree of reconciliation between these tendencies (echoing Janet Carsten), if only to defend them from often ill‐informed interventions in this area from other disciplines.

While it can claim some historical depth, essentially Lubuskie is a new province in western Poland that emerged from the local government reforms of 1999. It is thus located in a part of the country taken over by Poland from Germany in 1945, which as a consequence experienced a complete replacement of populations (Polish for German) at that time. This makes the province a useful case in which to study the emergence of a new identity over time. At present its identity is not as strong as in the case of its neighbours like Silesia and Wielkopolska, though it is being cultivated where possible by some local bureaucrats and politicians. It is argued that it is nonetheless justified to study such cases in order to determine and account for differences in the strength of regional identities in the same nationstate. The wider framework is regional identities within Europe as part of the process of European integration and its articulation with nation-states in the EU.

Alexander Riley, W. S. F. Pickering and William Watts Miller (eds.). Durkheim, the Durkheimians and the Arts. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2013, 320 pp.

Robert Hertz. Sociologie religieuse et anthropologie: deux enquêtes de terrain (1912–1915), presented and edited by Stephane Baciocchi and Nicolas Mariot, with a postface by Marcel Mauss. Paris: Presse Universitaires Françaises, 2015, xiv +398 pp.

Philippe Besnard. Études durkheimiennes, Genève: Librairie Droz. 2003. pp.382.

Massimo Rosati. Solidarietà e sacro. Secolarizzazione e persistenza della religione nel discorso sociologico della modernità, Rome: Laterza. 2002. pp.190.

Camille Tarot. Sociologie et anthropologie de Marcel Mauss, Paris: La Découverte. 2003. pp. 117.

Alexander Riley and Philippe Besnard (eds.), Un ethnologue dans les tranchées, août 1914–avril 1915: Lettres de Robert Hertz à sa femme Alice, Paris: CNRS Editions. 2002. pp. 265.

Robert Hertz. OEuvres publiées: édition critique, ed. Cyril Isnart, Paris: Classiques Garniers, 2014, 466 pp. Review by Robert Parkin

Matthieu Béra. Emile Durkheim à Bordeaux (1887–1902), Bordeaux: Éditions Confluences, 2014, 135 pp. Review by W. S. F. Pickering

Alexander Riley, The Social Thought of Émile Durkheim, Los Angeles and London: Sage, 2015, xi + 263 pp. Review by W. S. F. Pickering

Sondra Hausner (ed.), Durkheim in Dialogue: A Centenary Celebration of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2013, 267 pp. Review by Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi