Violence in War and Peace : An Anthology

by Scheper-Hughes, Nancy; Bourgois, Philippe

• ISBN13: 9780631223498
• ISBN10: 0631223495
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-11-07
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

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. 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. Edited by two of anthropology's most passionate voices on this subject, Violence in War and Peace is a sweeping collection that looks at various concepts and modes of violence. Drawing from a remarkable range of sources, the editors juxtapose the routine violence of everyday life---what scholars Taussig and Benjamin have termed "terror as usual"---against the sudden outcropping of unexpected, extraordinary violence such as the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the state violence of Argentina's Dirty War, revolution, vigilante "justice," and organized criminal violence. Despite the impulse to distance ourselves from such acts, Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois take care to remind us that concepts of violence and aggression have often failed to acknowledge symbolic and structural forms. Yet, the most violent acts often involve conduct that is socially permitted---even encouraged---rather than condemned as deviant. In Violence in War and Peace, the editors offer 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.

Author Biography

Nancy Scheper-Hughes is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley where she also directs doctoral studies in "Medicine, Science and the Body". As a critical anthropologist and outspoken public intellectual, Scheper-Hughes's lifework concerns the violence of everyday life from analyses of madness among "leftover" bachelors farmers in rural Ireland; the madness of hunger and the experience of mothering in Northeast Brazil; AIDS and sexual citizenship in Cuba, Brazil and the United States; violence, 'truth' and justice in the New South Africa; death squads, democracy, and the execution of Brazilian street children, to the global traffic in human organs. She is best known for her ethnographies, Death Without Weeping (l992) and Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics (l979, new, updated edition 2000). She has been the recipient of many awards and prizes including a Guggenheim, the Staley Prize, the Margaret Mead Award, the Wellcome Medal, the Bryce Wood Book Award, the Harry Chapin Media Award, and the Pietre Prize.Philippe Bourgois is Professor and Chair of the Medical Anthropology Program at the University of California, San Francisco. His most recent book, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (1995) was awarded the C. Wright Mills Prize and the Margaret Mead Prize. He has conducted fieldwork in Central America on political violence, ethnic conflict, immigration and labor relations, and street children and has published several dozen academic and popular media articles on political and intimate violence as well as on substance abuse, inner-city poverty and ethnic conflict.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Making Sense of Violence

Conquest and Colonialism

From Heart of Darkness

Culture of Terror-Space of Death: Roger Casement's Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture

From Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America

Ishi's Brain, Ishi's Ashes: Anthropology and Genocide

Tribal Warfare

From The Bushman Myth: The Making of a Namibian Underclass

The Holocaust

Right of Death and Power Over Life

The Gray Zone

From Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Initiation to Mass Murder: The Jozefow Massacre

From This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

From Maus: A Survivor's Tale, II: And Here My Troubles Began

The Politics of Communal Violence

From "Hellhounds"

From Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania

From We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda

Why do People Kill?

Behavioral Study of Obedience

Grief and a Headhunter's Rage

Why did You Kill?: The Cambodian Genocide and the Dark Side of Face and Honor

The State Amok: State Violence and Dirty Wars

Talking Terror

Bodies, Death and Silence

Living in a State of Fear

Killing Priests, Nuns, Women, Children

The Fear of Indifference: Combatants' Anxieties about the Political Identity of Civilians during Argentina's Dirty War

On Cultural Anesthesia: From Desert Storm to Rodney King

The New War Against Terror: Responding to 9/11

Violence Foretold: Reflections on 9/1l

Violence and Political Resistance

Preface to Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth

From On Violence

Dirty Protest: Symbolic Overdetermination and Gender in Northern Ireland Ethnic Violence

Who's the Killer? Popular Justice and Human Rights in a South African Squatter Camp

Peace Time Crimes: Everyday Violence

Terror as Usual: Walter Benjamin's Theory of History as State of Siege

Symbolic Violence

Two Feet Under and a Cardboard Coffin: The Social Production of Indifference to Child Death

On Suffering and Structural Violence: A View from Below

Suffering Child: An Embodiment of War and Its Aftermath in Post-Sandinista Nicaragua

"The Lower Classes Smell," from The Road to Wigan Pier

U.S. Inner City Apartheid: The Contours of Structural and Interpersonal Violence

Denaturalizing Disaster: A Social Autopsy of the 1995 Chicago Heat Wave

The New "Peculiar Institution": On the Prison as Surrogate Ghetto

Gendered Violence

Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain

From The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War

Gender and Symbolic Violence

The Everyday Violence of Gang Rape

Hooking Up: Protective Pairing for Punks

Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals

Torture

From The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World

From Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

The Wet Bag and Other Phantoms

The Treatment of Children in the 'Dirty War'

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