Customer Reviews

Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology (Blackwell Readers in Anthropology)

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I scare easily so I didn't really want to get into this book, but for professional reasons I wanted quickly to access and understand a diverse lot of anthropological theory about violence as a phenomenon, and wound up with this book on my shelf and then, I took it everywhere I went for about a month. A heavy book physically, VIOLENCE IN WAR AND PEACE benefits from Blackwell Publishing's wide page strategy and the extreme thinness of each page allows the two co-editors to pack an unbelievable number of beautifully chosen articles into one volume.

We learn about violence in war, and just about every war-front over the last 100 years. Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois concentrate not only on individual suffering but they are absolutely fixated on the disappearance (or "die off") or whole peoples and tribes, and this material is especially searing. We see violence working in the service of colonialism, and also as a tool of resistance movements here and around the world. I like the excerpting from the classic ISHI IN TWO WORLDS, together with Scheper-Hughes' own more dispassionate account of what the devil old Kroeber was doing with Ishi's body both before and after his death. Everywhere there is a welcome contextualization. The articles about the "dirty protests" of the IRA prisoners in Northern Ireland put the problem of violence in a new light, asking us to consider what happens when we try to disrupt the system from within at the risk of damaging our own psyches.

Maybe the excerpts from Pierre Bourdieu on so-called "symbolic violence" failed really to convince, but they drove us to acquire the entire volume where they make much more ssnse -- once again, a question of context. All in all a grim and devastating subject receives its own peculiar grace under the light of clear thinking.

A few highlights and marks but i don't mind it at all, the book was in great condition. The inside and outside. I am very happy with it