Author: Veena Dass
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 379
ISBN/UPC (if available): 019568191
Description
The essays in this collection written by a distinguished international roster of contributors consider the ways in which violence shapes subjectivity and acts upon people's capacity to engage with everyday life.
Like its predecessor volume, Social Suffering, which explored the different ways social force inflicts harm on individuals and groups, this collection ventures into many area of ongoing violence, asking how people live with themselves and others when perpetrators, victims, and witness all come from the same social space.
From civil warms and ethnic riots to governmental and medical interventions at a more bureaucratic level, the authors address not only those extreme situations guaranteed to occupy precious media minutes but also the more subtle violences of science and state. However particular and circumscribed the site of any fieldwork may be, today's ethnographer finds local identities and circumstances molded by state and transnational forces, including the media themselves. These authors contest a new political geography that divides the world into 'violence-prone areas' and 'peaceful areas' and suggest that such descriptions might themselves contribute to violence in the present global context.
With explorations of violence and authority in a variety of situations, including the partition of India and Pakistan, the Sri Lankan conflict, and Pakistan, the Sri Lanka conflict, and the 1975-6 Emergency in India, this book is essential reading for specialists in sociology, anthropology, politics, history, gender and the interested general reader.
EDITORS OF THIS VOLUME
Veena Das is Professor of Sociology at the University of Delhi and Professor of Anthropology at the New School University in New York.
Arthur Kleinman is Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and social Medicine, Harvard University. Mamphela Ramphela is Vice Chancellor of the University of Cape Town.
Pamela Reynolds is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Cape Town.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Violence-Prone Area of International Transition? Adding the Role of Outsiders in Balkan Violence
Violence and Vision : The Prosthetics and Aesthetics of Terror
Circumcision, Body, Masculinity : The ritual wound and Collective violence
Teach me how to be a man : An exploration of the definition of Masculinity
On not becoming a "Terrorist" : Problems of Memory. Agency, and community in the Sri Lanka conflict
The Ground of All Making : State Violence, the Family, and Political Activists
Violence, Suffering, Amman : The work of Oracles in Sri Lanka's Eastern War Zone
The Act of Witnessing : Violence, Poisonous Knowledge, and Subjectivity
The Violence of Everyday Life : The Multiple Forms and Dynamics of Social Violence
Body and space in a Time of Crisis : Sterilization and Resettlement during the Emergency of Zeal
Mayan Multiculturalism and the violence of Memories
Reconciliation and Memory in Postwar Nigeria
Mood, Moment, and Mind
List of Contributors
Index