The Practice of War

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.

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.

Monika Böck is a Social Anthropologist, affiliated with the University of Cologne. She has conducted fieldwork among a matrilineal community in North-Eastern India. She is interested in kinship & gender studies, cognitive anthropology, and the medialization of war and violence. Together with Aparna Rao she published Culture, Creation and Procreation: Concepts of Kinship in South Asian Practice (Berghahn Books 2000).