Violence and Society - Toward a New Sociology

"What is violence and how can we understand it sociologically? And is society becoming increasingly inured to acts of violent behaviour? Pushing beyond widely accepted sociological theories of the complexity of violence, Violence and Society: Toward a New Sociology gathers leading national and international experts to set a new agenda for our understanding of interpersonal and state violence in contemporary society. Through an in-depth analysis of issues that include the nature of contemporary war; gender-based violence and street fights; and of the role of biography, the body, culture, emotion, and time in the exercise and experience of violence, chapters reveal how modern sociological thinking is at odds with a proper understanding of the nature and root causes of violence. Timely and important, Violence and Society: Toward a New Sociology sheds important new light on our understanding of the world we live in"--

List of contents

About the Editors x
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction: Making Sense of Violence 1
Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois
Part I: Conquest and Colonialism 33
1 From Heart of Darkness 35
Joseph Conrad
2 Culture of Terror - Space of Death: Roger Casement's Puyumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture 39
Michael Taussig
3 From Ishi in Two worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America 54
Theodora Kroeber
4 Ishi's Brain, Ishi's Ashes: Anthropology and Genocide 61
Nancy Scheper-Hughes
5 Tribal Warfare 69
R. Brian Ferguson
6 From The Bushman Myth: The Making of a Namibian Underclass 74
Robert J. Gordon
Part II: The Holocaust 77
7 Right of Death and Power Over Life 79
Michel Foucault
8 The Gray Zone 83
Primo Levi
9 From Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil 91
Hannah Arendt
10 Initiation to Mass Murder: The Józefów Massacre 101
Christopher R. Browning
11 From This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen 109
Tadeusz Borowski
12 From Maus: A Survivor's Tale, II: And Here My Troubles Began 118
Art Spiegelman
Part III: The Politics of Communal Violence 121
13 From "Hellhounds" 123
Leon F. Litwack
14 From Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania 129
Liisa H. Malkki
15 From We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda 136
Philip Gourevitch
Part IV: Why do People Kill? 143
16 Behavioral Study of Obedience 145
Stanley Milgram
17 Grief and a Headhunter's Rage 150
Renato Rosaldo
18 Why Did You Kill?: The Cambodian Genocide and the Dark Side of Face and Honor 157
Alexander Laban Hinton
Part V: The State Amok: State Violence and Dirty Wars 169
19 Talking Terror 171
Michael Taussig
20 Bodies, Death, and Silence 175
Nancy Scheper-Hughes
21 Living in a State of Fear 186
Linda Green
22 Killing Priests, Nuns, Women, Children 196
Jean Franco
23 The Fear of Indifference: Combatants' Anxieties about the Political Identity of Civilians during Argentina's Dirty War 200
Antonius Robben
24 On Cultural Anesthesia: From Desert Storm to Rodney King 207
Allen Feldman
25 The New War Against Terror: Responding to 9/11 217
Noam Chomsky
26 Violence Foretold: Reflections on 9/11 224
Nancy Scheper-Hughes
Part VI: Violence and Political Resistance 227
27 Preface to Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth 229
Jean-Paul Sartre
28 From On Violence 236
Hannah Arendt
29 Dirty Protest: Symbolic Overdetermination and Gender in Northern Ireland Ethnic Violence 244
Begoña Aretxaga
30 Who's the Killer? Popular Justice and Human Rights in a South African Squatter Camp 253
Nancy Scheper-Hughes
Part VII: Peacetime Crimes: Everyday Violence 267
31 Terror as Usual: Walter Benjamin's Theory of History as State of Siege 269
Michael Taussig
32 Symbolic Violence 272
Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant
33 Two Feet Under and a Cardboard Coffin: The Social Production of Indifference to Child Death 275
Nancy Scheper-Hughes
34 On suffering and Structural Violence: A View from Below 281
Paul Farmer
35 Suffering Child: An Embodiment of War and Its Aftermath in Post-Sandinista Nicaragua 290
James Quesada
36 "The Lower Classes Smell," from Road to Wigan Pier 297
George Orwell
37 US Inner-City Apartheid: The Contours of Structural and Interpersonal Violence 301
Philippe Bourgois
38 Denaturalizing Disaster: A Social Autopsy of the 1995 Chicago Heat Wave 308
Eric Klinenberg
39 The New "Peculiar Institution": On the Prison as Surrogate Ghetto 318
Loïc Wacquant
Part VIII: Gendered Violence 325
40 Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain 327Veena Das
41 From The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War 334
Mark Danner
42 Gender and Symbolic Violence 339
Pierre Bourdieu
43 The Everyday Violence of Gang Rape 343
Philippe Bourgois
44 Hooking Up: Protective Pairing for Punks 348
Stephen Donaldson
45 Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intell

About the author

Jane Kilby is Senior Lecturer in English and Cultural Studies in the School of Arts and Media at the University of Salford. She is the author of Violence and the Cultural Politics of Trauma (2007).
Larry Ray is Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent. He has researched and published on topics in sociological theory, globalization, post-communism, social memory, collective and interpersonal violence; and is the author of Violence and Society (2011).

Product details

• Authors: Jan Kilby, Jane Kilby, Jane Ray Kilby, Larry Ray
• Assisted by: SOM (Editor)
• Publisher: Wiley, John and Sons Ltd
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 30.01.2015
• EAN: 9781118942017
• ISBN: 978-1-118-94201-7
• No. of pages: 230
• Series: Sociological Review Monographs; The Sociological Review Monographs
• Subject: Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories