Genocide, Collective Violence, and Popular Memory


Book Description

The twentieth century has been scarred by political violence and genocide, reaching its extreme in the Holocaust. Yet, at the same time, the century has been marked by a growing commitment to human rights. This volume highlights the importance of history-of socially processed memory-in resolving the wounds left by massive state-sponsored political violence and in preventing future episodes of violence. In Genocide, Collective Violence, and Popular Memory: The Politics of Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, the editors present and discuss the many different social responses to the challenge of coming to terms with past reigns of terror and collective violence. Designed for undergraduate courses in political violence and revolution, this volume treats a wide variety of incidents of collective violence-from decades-long genocide to short-lived massacres. The selection of essays provides a broad range of thought-provoking case studies from Latin America, Africa, Europe, and Asia. This provocative collection of readings from around the world will spur debate and discussion of this timely and important topic in the classroom and beyond.




Genocide, Collective Violence, and Popular Memory


Book Description

The twentieth century has been scarred by political violence and genocide, reaching its extreme in the Holocaust. Yet, at the same time, the century has been marked by a growing commitment to human rights. This volume highlights the importance of history-




Genocide


Book Description

What happens to people and the societies in which they live after genocide? How are the devastating events remembered on the individual and collective levels, and how do these memories intersect and diverge as the rulers of postgenocidal states attempt to produce a monolithic “truth” about the past? In this important volume, leading anthropologists consider such questions about the relationship of genocide, truth, memory, and representation in the Balkans, East Timor, Germany, Guatemala, Indonesia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sudan, and other locales. Specialists on the societies about which they write, these anthropologists draw on ethnographic research to provide on-the-ground analyses of communities in the wake of mass brutality. They investigate how mass violence is described or remembered, and how those representations are altered by the attempts of others, from NGOs to governments, to assert “the truth” about outbreaks of violence. One contributor questions the neutrality of an international group monitoring violence in Sudan and the assumption that such groups are, at worst, benign. Another examines the consequences of how events, victims, and perpetrators are portrayed by the Rwandan government during the annual commemoration of that country’s genocide in 1994. Still another explores the silence around the deaths of between eighty and one hundred thousand people on Bali during Indonesia’s state-sponsored anticommunist violence of 1965–1966, a genocidal period that until recently was rarely referenced in tourist guidebooks, anthropological studies on Bali, or even among the Balinese themselves. Other contributors consider issues of political identity and legitimacy, coping, the media, and “ethnic cleansing.” Genocide: Truth, Memory, and Representation reveals the major contribution that cultural anthropologists can make to the study of genocide. Contributors. Pamela Ballinger, Jennie E. Burnet, Conerly Casey, Elizabeth Drexler, Leslie Dwyer, Alexander Laban Hinton, Sharon E. Hutchinson, Uli Linke, Kevin Lewis O’Neill, Antonius C. G. M. Robben, Debra Rodman, Victoria Sanford




Forgotten Genocides


Book Description

Unlike the Holocaust, Rwanda, Cambodia, or Armenia, scant attention has been paid to the human tragedies analyzed in this book. From German Southwest Africa (now Namibia), Burundi, and eastern Congo to Tasmania, Tibet, and Kurdistan, from the mass killings of the Roms by the Nazis to the extermination of the Assyrians in Ottoman Turkey, the mind reels when confronted with the inhuman acts that have been consigned to oblivion. Forgotten Genocides: Oblivion, Denial, and Memory gathers eight essays about genocidal conflicts that are unremembered and, as a consequence, understudied. The contributors, scholars in political science, anthropology, history, and other fields, seek to restore these mass killings to the place they deserve in the public consciousness. Remembrance of long forgotten crimes is not the volume's only purpose—equally significant are the rich quarry of empirical data offered in each chapter, the theoretical insights provided, and the comparative perspectives suggested for the analysis of genocidal phenomena. While each genocide is unique in its circumstances and motives, the essays in this volume explain that deliberate concealment and manipulation of the facts by the perpetrators are more often the rule than the exception, and that memory often tends to distort the past and blame the victims while exonerating the killers. Although the cases discussed here are but a sample of a litany going back to biblical times, Forgotten Genocides offers an important examination of the diversity of contexts out of which repeatedly emerge the same hideous realities.




Genocide and Mass Violence


Book Description

Genocide and Mass Violence brings together a unique mix of anthropologists, psychiatrists, psychologists and historians to examine the effects of mass trauma.




Memory and Genocide


Book Description

This book focuses on the ethical, aesthetic, and scholarly dimensions of how genocide-related works of art, documentary films, poetry and performance, museums and monuments, music, dance, image, law, memory narratives, spiritual bonds, and ruins are translated and take place as translations of acts of genocide. It shows how genocide-related modes of representation are acts of translation which displace and produce memory and acts of remembrance of genocidal violence as inheritance of the past in a future present. Thus, the possibility of representation is examined in light of what remains in the aftermath where the past and the future are inseparable companions and we find the idea of the untranslatability in acts of genocide. By opening up both the past and lived experiences of genocidal violence as and through multiple acts of translation, this volume marks a heterogeneous turn towards the future, and one which will be of interest to all scholars and students of memory and genocide studies, transitional justice, sociology, psychology, and social anthropology.




Violence as a Generative Force


Book Description

During two terrifying days and nights in early September 1941, the lives of nearly two thousand men, women, and children were taken savagely by their neighbors in Kulen Vakuf, a small rural community straddling today’s border between northwest Bosnia and Croatia. This frenzy—in which victims were butchered with farm tools, drowned in rivers, and thrown into deep vertical caves—was the culmination of a chain of local massacres that began earlier in the summer. In Violence as a Generative Force, Max Bergholz tells the story of the sudden and perplexing descent of this once peaceful multiethnic community into extreme violence. This deeply researched microhistory provides provocative insights to questions of global significance: What causes intercommunal violence? How does such violence between neighbors affect their identities and relations? Contrary to a widely held view that sees nationalism leading to violence, Bergholz reveals how the upheavals wrought by local killing actually created dramatically new perceptions of ethnicity—of oneself, supposed "brothers," and those perceived as "others." As a consequence, the violence forged new communities, new forms and configurations of power, and new practices of nationalism. The history of this community was marked by an unexpected explosion of locally executed violence by the few, which functioned as a generative force in transforming the identities, relations, and lives of the many. The story of this largely unknown Balkan community in 1941 provides a powerful means through which to rethink fundamental assumptions about the interrelationships among ethnicity, nationalism, and violence, both during World War II and more broadly throughout the world.




Collective and State Violence in Turkey


Book Description

Turkey has gone through significant transformations over the last century—from the Ottoman Empire and Young Turk era to the Republic of today—but throughout it has demonstrated troubling continuities in its encouragement and deployment of mass violence. In particular, the construction of a Muslim-Turkish identity has been achieved in part by designating “internal enemies” at whom public hatred can be directed. This volume provides a wide range of case studies and historiographical reflections on the alarming recurrence of such violence in Turkish history, as atrocities against varied ethnic-religious groups from the nineteenth century to today have propelled the nation’s very sense of itself.




The Path to Genocide in Rwanda


Book Description

Uses unique field data to offer a rigorous explanation of how Rwanda's genocide occurred and why Rwandans participated in it.




Public Criminology?


Book Description

What is the role and value of criminology in a democratic society? How do, and how should, its practitioners engage with politics and public policy? How can criminology find a voice in an agitated, insecure and intensely mediated world in which crime and punishment loom large in government agendas and public discourse? What collective good do we want criminological enquiry to promote? In addressing these questions, Ian Loader and Richard Sparks offer a sociological account of how criminologists understand their craft and position themselves in relation to social and political controversies about crime, whether as scientific experts, policy advisors, governmental players, social movement theorists, or lonely prophets. They examine the conditions under which these diverse commitments and affiliations arose, and gained or lost credibility and influence. This forms the basis for a timely articulation of the idea that criminology’s overarching public purpose is to contribute to a better politics of crime and its regulation. Public Criminology? offers an original and provocative account of the condition of, and prospects for, criminology which will be of interest not only to those who work in the fields of crime, security and punishment, but to anyone interested in the vexed relationship between social science, public policy and politics.