Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology

by Nancy Scheper-Hughes (Editor), Philippe Bourgois (Editor)

Overview

From Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" to Joseph Conrad's "fascination of the abomination," humankind has struggled to make sense of human-upon-human violence.

Edited by two of anthropology's most passionate voices on this subject, Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology is the only book of its kind available: a single volume exploration of social, literary, and philosophical theories of violence.

• Brings together a sweeping collection of readings, drawn from a remarkable range of sources, that look at various conceptions and modes of violence.
• Juxtaposes the routine violence of everyday life against the sudden outcropping of extraordinary violence such as the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the state violence of Argentina's Dirty War, and organized criminal violence.
• Edited by two of the most prominent researchers in the field.
• Offers a thought-provoking tool for students and thinkers from all walks of life: an exploration of violence at the broadest levels: personal, social, and political.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780631223498
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication date:	11/07/2003
Series:	Wiley Blackwell Readers in Anthropology
Pages:	512
Product dimensions:	6.70(w) x 9.70(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Nancy Scheper-Hughes is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Philippe Bourgois is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments.

Introduction: Making Sense of Violence (Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois).

Part I: Conquest and Colonialism.

1. From Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad).

2. Culture of Terror-Space of Death: Roger Casement's Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture (Michael Taussig).

3. From Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America (Theodora Kroeber).

4. Ishi's Brain, Ishi's Ashes: Anthropology and Genocide (Nancy Scheper-Hughes).

5. Tribal Warfare (R. Brian Ferguson).

6. From The Bushman Myth: The Making of a Namibian Underclass (Robert J.Gordon).

Part II: The Holocaust.

7. Right of Death and Power Over Life (Michel Foucault).

8. The Gray Zone (Primo Levi).

9. From Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Hannah Arendt).

10. Initiation to Mass Murder: The Józefów Massacre (Christopher R. Browning).

11. From This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (Tadeusz Borowski).

12. From Maus: A Survivor's Tale, II: And Here My Troubles Began (Art Spiegelman).

Part III: The Politics of Communal Violence.

13. From "Hellhounds" (Leon F. Litwack).

14. From Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Liisa Malkki).

15. From We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (Philip Gourevitch).

Part IV: Why do People Kill?.

16. Behavioral Study of Obedience (Stanley Milgram).

17. Grief and a Headhunter's Rage (Renato Rosaldo).

18. Why did You Kill?: The Cambodian Genocide and the Dark Side of Face and Honor (Alexander Laban Hinton).

Part V: The State Amok: State Violence and Dirty Wars.

19. Talking Terror (Michael Taussig).

20. Bodies, Death and Silence (Nancy Scheper-Hughes).

21. Living in a State of Fear (Linda Green).

22. Killing Priests, Nuns, Women, Children (Jean Franco).

23. The Fear of Indifference: Combatants' Anxieties about the Political Identity of Civilians during Argentina's Dirty War (Antonius Robben).

24. On Cultural Anesthesia: From Desert Storm to Rodney King (Allen Feldman).

25. The New War Against Terror: Responding to 9/11 (Noam Chomsky).

26. Violence Foretold: Reflections on 9/1l (Nancy Scheper-Hughes).

Part VI: Violence and Political Resistance.

27. Preface to Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth (Jean-Paul Sartre).

28. From On Violence (Hannah Arendt).

29. Dirty Protest: Symbolic Overdetermination and Gender in Northern Ireland Ethnic Violence (Begoña Aretxaga).

30. Who's the Killer? Popular Justice and Human Rights in a South African Squatter Camp (Nancy Scheper-Hughes).

Part VII: Peace Time Crimes: Everyday Violence.

31. Terror as Usual: Walter Benjamin's Theory of History as State of Siege (Michael Taussig).

32. Symbolic Violence (Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant).

33. Two Feet Under and a Cardboard Coffin: The Social Production of Indifference to Child Death (Nancy Scheper-Hughes).

34. On Suffering and Structural Violence: A View from Below (Paul Farme).

35. Suffering Child: An Embodiment of War and Its Aftermath in Post-Sandinista Nicaragua (James Quesada).

36. "The Lower Classes Smell," from The Road to Wigan Pier (George Orwell).

37. U.S. Inner City Apartheid: The Contours of Structural and Interpersonal Violence (Philippe Bourgois).

38. Denaturalizing Disaster: A Social Autopsy of the 1995 Chicago Heat Wave (Eric Klinenberg).

39. The New "Peculiar Institution": On the Prison as Surrogate Ghetto (Loic Wacquant).

Part VIII: Gendered Violence.

40. Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain (Veena Das).

41. From The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War (Mark Danner).

42. Gender and Symbolic Violence (Pierre Bourdieu).

43. The Everyday Violence of Gang Rape (Philippe Bourgois).

44. Hooking Up: Protective Pairing for Punks (Stephen Donaldson).

45. Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals (Carol Cohn).

Part IX: Torture.

46. From The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Elaine Scarry).

47. From Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (Judith Herman).

48. The Wet Bag and Other Phantoms (Antjie Krog).

49. The Treatment of Children in the 'Dirty War': Ideology, State Terrorism, and the Abuse of Children in Argentina (Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco).

Part X: Witnessing/Writing Violence.

50. From Maus: A Survivor's Tale, II: And Here My Troubles Began (Art Spiegelman).

51. Missing the Revolution: Anthropologists and the War in Peru (Orin Starn).

52. From War Stories: The Culture of Foreign Correspondents (Mark Pedelty).

53. With Genet in the Palestinian Field (Ted Swedenburg).

54. The Anthropologist as Terrorist (Joseba Zulaika).

55. An Alternative Anthropology: Exercising the Preferential Option for the Poor (Leigh Binford).

56. The Continuum of Violence in War and Peace: Post-Cold War Lessons from El Salvador (Philippe Bourgois).

Part XI: Aftermaths.

57. The Witness (Giorgio Agamben).

58. Colonial War and Mental Disorders (Frantz Fanon).

59. From The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter (Albie Sachs).

60. Undoing: Social Suffering and the Politics of Remorse in the New South Africa (Nancy Scheper-Hughes).

61. From When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Mahmood Mamdani).

62. From The Burden of Memory: The Muse of Forgiveness (Wole Soyinka).

Index.

Editorial Reviews

This comprehensive anthology is a must read. Recognizing and understanding the continuum of violence is a critical step in meaningfully addressing the fact that violence is not specific, for example, to war, but intimately woven throughout the fabric of society.”

Jody Williams, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate (1997)

“This remarkable work explores the sources and surfaces of violence — public, private, political, symbolic, psychic. Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois transform our most fundamental understanding of what it means to be a victim, an agent, or a witness. In these times of war and violence, this book has a resonance that echoes from the classroom to the state house and the street.” Homi K. Bhabha, Rothenberg Professor of Literature, Harvard University

“Violence in War and Peace brings together among the most profound empirical and philosophical texts on modern violence. Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois have created a volume that challenges fundamental issues concerning the crisis of humanity that violence exposes. This critical and politically responsible book should be read by students and researchers alike.”Bruce Kapferer, University of Bergen and James Cook University

"It showcases the great relevance of ethnographic research and writing—compared to other approaches—for thinking about violence and suffering. This collection will be an invaluable resource for teachers and learners, a comprehensive anthology for introductory classes, or a companion volume for more in-depth seminars ... the reader will find some of the best attempts of the best of the last century to translate pain, uncertainty, and absurdity of violence into an at least somewhat understandable format."

Anthropological Quarterly

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