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Jeffrey Sluka (ed.), Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 272 pp., US$39.95, ISBN 0 8122 3523 1 (hbk); US$18.50, ISBN 0 8122 1711 X (pbk).
Across Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s and at various times since the Second World War in Asia, Africa and Europe, states have used terror, and often death squads, to pursue political ends. In response to this escalation of terror, Death Squad provides what Sluka states is the first edited collection of ethnographic studies on the anthropology of state terror. This in itself makes the collection a valuable contribution to a topic which has received limited academic attention outside treatment-focused work in psychology and broader theoretical approaches in political science.
Death Squad explores the `state of play' in the anthropology of state terror with, for example, discussions of the theory of state terror in the introduction and case studies on the significance of language and symbolism in terror. The first chapter on Spain focuses on the language of the state and the construction of Basque fighters as 'other'. Unfortunately, several parts of...