Culture in Chaos

by Lubkemann, Stephen C.

• ISBN13: 9780226496429
• ISBN10: 0226496422
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-01-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Fought in the wake of a decade of armed struggle against colonialism, the Mozambican civil war lasted from 1977 to 1992, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives while displacing millions more. As conflicts across the globe span decades and generations, Stephen C. Lubkemann suggests that we need a fresh perspective on war when it becomes the context for normal life rather than an exceptional event that disrupts it.Culture in Chaoscalls for a new point of departure in the ethnography of war that investigates how the inhabitants of war zones live under trying new conditions and how culture and social relations are transformed as a result. Lubkemann focuses on how Ndau social networks were fragmented by wartime displacement and the profound effect this had on gender relations. Demonstrating how wartime migration and post-conflict return were shaped by social struggles and interests that had little to do with the larger political reasons for the war, Lubkemann contests the assumption that wartime migration is always involuntary. His critical reexamination of displacement and his engagement with broader theories of agency and social change will be of interest to anthropologists, political scientists, historians, and demographers, and to anyone who works in a war zone or with refugees and migrants.

Author Biography

Stephen C. Lubkemann is assistant professor of anthropology and international affairs at the George Washington University and associate editor of Anthropological Quarterly.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Notes on the Text	p. xi
Introduction. The "Ordering of Violent Things": War and Displacement	p. 1
Migration and Social Transformation before the War	p. 45
Contending with Colonialism: Migration and Resistance	p. 47
Other Struggles: Migration and the Transformation of Social Relations	p. 66
The Social Conditioning of War	p. 103
Imposing the New Mozambique: Sowing the Seeds of Postcolonial Disillusion	p. 111
Society and the State: Mutual Misrecognition at the Gathering of War	p. 137
Prosecuting Life by Other Means: The Social Logic of Violence in a Fragmented War	p. 161
The Social Condition in War	p. 187
Terrains of Displacement: War-time Mobility and Immobility	p. 191
Tambem Aqui Fazemos Amor: Living in War	p. 216
War as a Socially Transformative Condition	p. 251
Postconflict Displacements: The Social Problematics of Refugee Return	p. 259
Transnational Contentions: The Moral Economy of Postconflict Migration	p. 281
Where to Be an Ancestor? The Struggle for the Postconflict Social Imagination	p. 304
Notes	p. 331
References	p. 361
Index	p. 393
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.