The essays in Violence and Subjectivity, written by a distinguished international roster of contributors, consider the ways in which violence shapes subjectivity and acts upon people's capacity to engage 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 areas of ongoing violence, asking how people live with themselves and others when perpetrators, victims, and witnesses all come from the same social space.
From civil wars 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.
Violence and Subjectivity
About the Book
Reviews
“Important and timely contribution to the burgeoning literature . . . An ambitious and wide-ranging paper. The book will be of interest not only to social scientists.”—Paul Collinson Anthropology In Action
Table of Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Introduction
Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman
Violence-Prone Area or International Transition?
Adding the Role of Outsiders in Balkan Violence
Susan L. Woodward
Violence and Vision:
The Prosthetics and Aesthetics of Terror
Allen Feldman
Circumcision, Body, Masculinity:
The Ritual Wound and Collective Violence
Deepak Mehta
Teach Me How to Be a Man:
An Exploration of the Definition of Masculinity
Mamphela Ramphele
On Not Becoming a "Terrorist": Problems of Memory,
Agency, and Community in the Sri Lankan Conflict
Jonathan Spencer
The Ground of All Making:
State Violence, the Family, and Political Activists
Pamela Reynolds
Violence, Suffering, Amman:
The Work of Oracles in Sri Lanka's Eastern War Zone
Patricia Lawrence
The Act of Witnessing:
Violence, Poisonous Knowledge, and Subjectivity
Veena Das
The Violences of Everyday Life:
The Multiple Forms and Dynamics of Social Violence
Arthur Kleinman
Body and Space in a Time of Crisis:
Sterilization and Resettlement during the Emergency in Delhi
Emma Tarlo
The Quest for Human Organs and the Violence of Zeal
Margaret Lock
Mayan Multiculturalism and the Violence of Memories
Kay B. Warren
Reconciliation and Memory in Postwar Nigeria
Murray Last
Mood, Moment, and Mind
E. Valentine Daniel
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX