Terror and Violence: Imagination and the Unimaginable (Anthropology, Culture and Society) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745323987 ISBN 13: 9780745323985

Publisher: Pluto Press, 2005

Synopsis

What is terror? What are its roots and its results -- and what part does it play in human experience and history? This volume offers a number of timely and original anthropological insights into the ways in which acts of terror -- and reactions to those acts -- impact on the lives of virtually everyone in the world today, as perpetrators, victims or witnesses. As the contributors to this volume demonstrate, what we have come to regard as acts of terror -- whether politically motivated, or state-sanctioned -- have assumed many different forms and provoked widely differing responses throughout the world. At a deeper level, the contributors explore the work of the imagination in extreme contexts of danger, such as those of terror and terrorism. By stressing the role of the imagination, and its role in amplifying the effects of experience, this collection brings together a coherent set of analyses that offer innovative and unexpected ways of understanding a major global problem of contemporary life.

About this title

About the Author:

Dr Andrew Strathern is Mellon Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. Dr Pamela J. Stewart is Research Associate in Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburg, USA. Dr Neil Whitehead is Professor of Anthropology and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA.

Review:

The editors, Andrew Strathern and Pamela Stewart, set out the aim of this collection of essays. They go on to define 'terror', 'terrorism', and 'terrorist'. There is a certain world wide sameness to police terrorism 'abduction; detention without trial; no records kept of arrest or detention; torture and extrajudicial execution, the latter covering both deaths in custody and killings in false encounters... These cases show that terror was essentially about having no redress either through the courts or through persons occupying positions of influence. -- Rene Wadlow, Transnational Perspectives timely, sophisticated and original -- Hastings Donnan, Queen's Belfast

About this edition

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0745323987
• ISBN 13: 9780745323985
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 264
• Editor: Strathern Andrew