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Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret Lock, Mamphela Ramphele, Pamela Reynolds (eds.), Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Reviewer: Sima Aprahamian
Concordia University
Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery edited by Veena Das et al. is the third (and last) volume on social suffering, violence and recovery compiled by the members of the Committee on Culture, Health, and Human Development of the Social Science Research Council (New York). Whereas the first two volumes Social Suffering and Violence and Subjectivity examined the effects of problems related to force, political, economic, institutional power on individuals and communities, this last volume explores how people build their lives after collective trauma or after being marginalized through structured violence.
As described in the insightful introduction by Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman, Remaking a World brings together six ethnographic papers interwoven through "the thread of narration." The six essays in Remaking a World focus on the remaking of everday life after social trauma. The overlapping fibers of the ethnographic cases as Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman point out, deal with the following: "(a) relation between collective and individual memory; (b) creation of alternative public spheres for articulating and recounting experience silenced by officially...