The Anthropology and Ethnography of Political Violence

Two recent books have shown the fruitfulness of approaching the analysis of political violence and terror based on a set of general anthropological ideas about meaning formation, cosmology and ritual. One of these works in particular reveals links between what may be described as the cultural construction of political violence in modern industrialized contexts and the shaping of particular spatial and bodily symbolism among social actors. The other book has contributed to the field of cross-cultural studies of political violence by examining connections between the making of particular concepts of the past - or history - among groups of actors, and the suffering and perpetration of political violence. This study sheds general light on the relationship between collective remembering of violence and spirals of ethnic violence. This review essay also briefly assesses a third book, i.e. a collection of essays which discuss different aspects of what it means in theoretical, methodological, and ethical terms to carry out research based on fieldwork when political violence in the field is, or has until recently been, commonplace. Together the three volumes can be said to reveal central features of recent trends among anthropologists who investigate political violence.