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"Jon Holzman has written a thoughtful, multilayered meditation on the complexities, contradictions, and cultural contexts of violence and ethnographic research: How do friends become enemies, and enemies friends? Can we make sense of the often ambiguous stories people tell to justify or explain violence? How can we study violence between people and groups ethnographically?"—Dorothy Hodgson, Professor of Anthropology, Rutgers University
"Killing Your Neighbors takes us to the heart of a highly topical predicament arising in almost manic shifts between peace and vendetta verging on feud. Holtzman’s fresh and humane insights are about a remarkable ethnographic crossover. Evoking ‘the certainty of uncertainty’ through incompatible perspectives, Holtzman reveals important comparative lessons about the social and cultural force of memories and stories of violation, treachery, and failed amity."—Richard Werbner, author of Tears of the Dead and Emeritus Professor in African Anthropology, University of Manchester
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Being There, Being Friends, Being Uncertain
2. A Case of Testicles: Manufacturing Consent of an Ethnography of Lies?
3. Green Stomachs, Mau Mau, and the Government of Women
4. Killing the Sheik
5. Bad Friends and Good Enemies
6. Views on a Massacre: Government and the Making of Order and Disorder
7. War Stories
List of Videos Online
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Jon Holtzman is the author of Uncertain Tastes: Memory, Ambivalence, and the Politics of Eating in Samburu, Northern Kenya and Nuer Journeys, Nuer Lives: Sudanese Refugees in Minnesota. He is Professor of Anthropology at Western Michigan University.
Summary
Neighboring communities who once lived together in peace have committed some of the most disturbing genocidal violence in recent decades: ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia; the slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda; or Sunni-versus-Shia violence in today's Iraq. This book examines how peaceful neighbors become involved in lethal violence.
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"Holtzman’s elegant writing interweaves strong empirically grounded argumentation with a wit and levity that makes for an enjoyable read as much an informative one. This book contributes to the anthropology of inter-ethnic violence, and would be of interest to Africanists, peace and conflict scholars, historians, and narrative scholars across a variety of disciplines."
