Fascinating in its combination of personal stories and analytical insights, Some Trouble with Cows will help students of conflict understand how a seemingly irrational and archaic riot becomes a means for renegotiating the distribution of power and rights in a small community. Using first-person accounts of Hindus and Muslims in a remote Bangladeshi village, Beth Roy evocatively describes and analyzes a large-scale riot that profoundly altered life in the area in the 1950s. She provides a rare glimpse into the hearts and minds of the participants and their families, while touching on a range of broader issues that are vital to the sociology of communities in conflict: the changing meaning of community; the impact of the state on local society; the nature of memory; and the force of neighborly enmity in reshaping power relationships during periods of change. Roy's findings illustrate important theoretical issues in psychology and sociology, and her conclusions will greatly interest students of ethnic/race relations, conflict resolution, the sociology of violence, agrarian society, and South Asia.
"This is an extremely important piece of work. In an unpretentious fashion, Roy challenges the traditional wisdom on communal riots and raises bold new questions about how they might be understood. A lucid piece of writing, Some Trouble with Cows is a pleasure to read."--Amrita Basu, author of The Two Faces of Protest
"A brilliant contribution to the study of group conflict, written with immediacy and clarity."--Bob Blauner, author of Black Lives, White Lives
From the Back Cover
"This is an extremely important piece of work. In an unpretentious fashion, Roy challenges the traditional wisdom on communal riots and raises bold new questions about how they might be understood. A lucid piece of writing, Some Trouble with Cows is a pleasure to read." (Amrita Basu, author of The Two Faces of Protest)
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Reared in Texas where I entered segregated high school in the year the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, I was inclined by history to build a life with a quest for justice at its center. My parents stood up for principles of racial equality at cost to themselves, and so my life as an activist was launched early on.
In 1961 I graduated from Brandeis University with a BA in mathematics. My one desire was to leave the U.S., to make my way to a culture as different from the one I knew as I could find, for I knew that what I knew was a tiny portion of what the world had to offer. I made my way, through marriage and intention, to India, where I lived in extended family for seven years, writing two books, Bullock Carts and Motor Bikes: Ancient India on a New Road (Atheneum, New York, 1972) and On a Tree of Trouble: Tribes of India in Crisis (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1974).
In 1972, I returned to the US, with a small son, a passionate set of principles about child-rearing, few ideas about earning a living, and good friends in the San Francisco Bay Area. With the latter, I began a lay practice in an alternative approach to psychotherapy called Radical Therapy, work grounded in a social theory of alienation and a practice focused on community-building, including group therapy and conflict resolution. We taught workshops in mediation and trained therapists and mediators through long-term apprenticeships.
After some fourteen years, as my son considered where he wanted to go to college, I began enviously to long for a contemplative space in which to explore more deeply and theoretically the ideas on which my practice was based. I applied to the sociology department at the University of California, Berkeley, and was accepted.
The program afforded me precisely the forum I wanted, to talk, to read, to write about the questions that occupied me, both in my therapist persona and as an activist. I saw academia as a way to bring together my attachments in South Asia to my more recent wanderings in the intersection of psyche and society. With the support of my advisors, Bob Blauner, Sandy Freitag, and others, I returned to the subcontinent to study Hindu-Muslim conflict. In 1992 UC Press published the resulting book, Some Trouble with Cows: Making Sense of Social Conflict, an analysis based only on oral accounts by local people of a riot in a Bangladeshi village. I was awarded a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Research Abroad Grant (1989) and a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (1990), as well as a fellowship from the Fund for Research in Dispute Resolution (1990-91).
While continuing my therapy practice and an extensive practice in mediation, I've gone on since then talking with people about moments of intense social conflict they've lived, and drawing out from those oral histories sociological theory with a social justice bent. Two books resulting from that process are Bitters in the Honey: Tales of Hope and Disappointment Across Divides of Race and Time and 41 Shots...and Counting: What Amadou Diallo's Story Teaches Us about Policing, Race, and Justice.
Bitters in the Honey, published in 1999 by University of Arkansas Press, tracks the lives of people involved in the 1957 desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. It tells a cumulative story of the construction of whiteness over the decades, in the context of class mobility and the erosion of community.
For 41 Shots (Syracuse University Press, 2009), I interviewed members of the New York community most directly affected when Diallo, a young immigrant from Africa, was shot and killed by NYPD officers. I also talked with defense lawyers, prosecutors, police officers, criminologists, and others, examining the tragedy and so many others like it from many different perspectives. The book moves toward an analysis of police-race relations in the context of deeply imbedded systemic racism, and concludes with suggestions of actions that might lead to substantive change. A paper derived from my research, "Stick Figure Against a Background of Color" (The Journal of Intergroup Relations, vol. XXVIII, no. 3, Fall, 2001), was awarded the National Association of Human Rights Workers Award in 2002.
My work is committed to joining theory and activism. For many years, I have engaged in the field of conflict resolution on local, national, and international levels. I served as the chair of the National Conference on Peacemaking and Conflict Resolution in 1995 and was honored with the Peggy Hermann Award for outstanding contributions to the field of conflict resolution in 2001.
In 1999 I joined with beloved colleagues to challenge dynamics of exclusion in the newly-professionalizing field. Together, we founded the Practitioners Research and Scholarship Institute, a dynamically diverse group promoting writing and relationships among oft-marginalized people. Our collaborative work was supported by three grants from the Flora and William Hewlett Foundation (in 2000, 2003, and 2004) as well as a grant from the JAMS Foundation in 2004. After placing for publication many papers and collaborating with journals to produce volumes devoted to issues of multiculturalism, in 2008 the project published its first anthology, Re-Centering Culture and Knowledge in Conflict Resolution Practice. I served as co-editor with four other colleagues.
In my local practice of conflict resolution, I work with families, communities, and non-profit organizations. In 2007, that work gave rise to an advice book for parents: Parents Lives, Children's Needs (Personhood Press, Fawnskin, CA). The book represents wisdom drawn from the many families with whom I've been privileged to work over almost four decades. It's publication has afforded me the enormous pleasure of traveling across the U.S. conducting parenting workshops, with a focus on transforming those so-frequent family conflicts into constructive change.
My current project is to explore those social and personal dynamics that allow good people to consent to live in unjust societies. Provisionally called "Bending Toward Justice", the project is supported by a Yosek Wosk Grant. I also teach at University of California, Berkeley, in the Peace and Conflict Studies program and from time to time in sociology departments within the UC system.
This review is from: Some Trouble with Cows: Making Sense of Social Conflict (Paperback)
This is an academic study of social conflict. The author investigated a previously unreported riot in what is today the country of Bangladesh, though at the time of the riot was East Pakistan. Her methodology was to talk in detail to persons involved to understand what happened, and perhaps more importantly, their interpretation of what happened. Initially, the book is easy and engaging reading as she describes how she learned of the riot, and how the riot reportedly occurred. She then proceeds to explain the conflict in terms of the broader scholarship of social conflict. Roy's analysis of the power relationships in the village, the precipitation of the riot, and the meaning of the riot to Hindus and Muslims provide is a refreshing balance of the perception of common villagers, and academic social conflict theory. For persons interested in the social relationships in South Asia, and social conflict broadly, this is a terrific book.
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This review is from: Some Trouble with Cows: Making Sense of Social Conflict (Paperback)
Beth Roy's account of how a dispute between two neighboring farmers - cow grazes neighbor's crop - turns into a family conflict, then a village conflict, then a religious-ethnic conflict, then embroils the surrounding villages and finally an entire region. She went there, she spoke with the people most directly involved, and she uncovered the underlying national and international issues here being played out on a village level. It takes great insight and empathy to accomplish what Beth Roy has done. This is such a good book.
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