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Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology, (Nancy Scheper-Hughes & Philippe Bourgois, eds., Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004). 496 pages with index.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois have edited an important book of readings dealing with the nature of violence in the contemporary world. This book should be of interest to all those who are concerned with a deeper understanding of the historical, political and cultural contexts in which violence occurs and has significant implications for our understanding of the social forces that give rise to human rights abuses.
The book's thesis is that violence occurs along a generative continuum, from individual action and responsibility to collective action (read communal) and state sponsorship. Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois' argument is that violence begets violence, as they write in their introduction:
Violence is a slippery concept-nonlinear, productive, destructive, and reproductive. It is mimetic, like imitative magic or homeopathy. "Like produces like," that much we know. Violence gives birth to itself. So we might rightly speak of chains, spirals, and mirrors of violence-or, as we prefer-a continuum of violence.1
For Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, violence is more than the infliction of pain and the physical assault on the body, though it often includes both. Violence, for these two cultural anthropologists, is an attack on the very essence of personhood. To that extent, violence can strip individuals of their dignity and self worth, thereby undermining their sense of personhood and connection to others. However, Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois do not want to concentrate on the physical aspects of violence alone, as expressed in such acts as cruelty and torture, for that would in their view transform their project into a "clinical, literary, or artistic exercise" which would run the risk of turning into a form of theater or "pornography of violence" in which the voyeuristic impulse subverts the goal of understanding and action. Instead, their aim is to write "against violence, injustice and suffering" through a process of witnessing and critiquing.2 Their hope is to present a series of carefully selected and edited texts that will cause the reader to rethink violence in times of war and peace.
I will say at the outset that as editors Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois have more than succeeded in re-framing the issues of violence in such a...