The Practice of War: Production, Reproduction and Communication of Armed Violence

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Aparna Rao, Michael Bollig, Monika Böck
Berghahn Books, 2007 - Social Science - 346 pages

The fact is that war comes in many guises and its effects continue to be felt long after peace is proclaimed. This challenges the anthropologists who write of war as participant observers. Participant observation inevitably deals with the here and now, with the highly specific. It is only over the long view that one can begin to see the commonalities that emerge from the different forms of conflict and can begin to generalize. [From the Introduction]

More needs to be understood about the ways of war and its effects. What implications does war have for people, their lived-in communities and larger political systems; how do they cope and adjust in war situations and how do they deal with the changed world that they inhabit once peace is declared? Through a series of essays that move from looking at the nature of violence to the peace processes that follow it, this important book provides some answers to these questions. It also analyzes those new dimensions of social interaction, such as the internet, which now provide a bridge between local concerns and global networks and are fundamentally altering the practices of war.

 

Contents

The Practice of War
1
Violence Social Tension and Personal
53
Terror and Healing in Tooro Western
73
The Herero of Namibia 19041940
89
Psychology and War
111
Martyrs of the Lashkare Taiba Army of the Pure
133
Is War Gendered? Issues in Representing Women and the Second
161
Due Care in the Management
175
The Case of the Lashkare Taiba
215
In the Combat Zone
241
Virtual Discourse and the Creation and Disruption of Social
253
Internet Representations
285
Chiapas on the WWW
305
Peace Building at the Crossroads Appropriations of War
323
Index
341
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About the author (2007)

Aparna Rao (1950-2005) spent many years doing ethnographic fieldwork among numerous rural and semi-rural communities in Afghanistan, Kashmir and in western India, and published several books and papers based on her research. Michael Bollig is a Professor in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne. He has conducted fieldwork in northern Kenya and northern Namibia with pastoral communities. He recently published Risk Management in a Hazardous Environment. A Comparative Study of Two Pastoral Societies (Springer/New York 2005). Michael Bollig is the speaker of the interdisciplinary research group Resilience, Collapse and Reorganisation in Social-Ecological Systems of Eastern and Southern African Savannahs.

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