Customer Reviews

Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland

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This is an absorbing account well worth reading. The oral history segments are fascinating and informative. The scholarly analysis, though insightful, is not meant for the casual reader. Students of Irish politics will like this book, but they may need a political theorist specializing in the body to help them understand the more involved analytical segments. Worth reading.

Feldman explores narratives of political violence in Northern Ireland based on testimonies of paramilitaries. The anthropological project goes far beyond an ethnography of the conflict: unveiling the unconscious symbolical meaning of practices of fighting and suppression, Feldman delineates the theoretical foundations of an anthropology of violence.
This is a difficult book for the rich theoretical material discussed (especially drawing on Lacan). But there are also a lot of ethnographic materials, which makes it a fundamental document for the history of the conflict in Northern Ireland: street guerilla, politics of arrest, protest in prison.

To read this book took more time and capacity than I had expected. Most of the students in my group choosed not to read this book, because of its reputation which was rather ambivalent. I decided not to give it up before I had given it a try, and I do not regret a moment... I have to admit that my frustration (but indeed my admiration too) grew during the reading. The theme is a complexe one, but the author has taken his therorethical fundation seriously. As a book most theoretically influenced by Michel Foucault and Friedrich Nietzsche, takes theese two philosophers out of the abstract theroretical discourse and add to it the empirically based reality of Northern Ireland. The manner in which this has been done is elequant; the mixing between the oral histories told by the informants together with the analytical parts in between. The book is absolute worth reading, and the insight one (hopefully) gets through Feldmans narration can be used on several arenas and in different academic diciplins, for my part in social science.

I read this book for a course in social anthropology and while it is a detailed ethnographic monograph it is difficult to understand the language and it would help to know more about the history of the conflict in Northern Ireland before reading it.