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"In recent years much has been written about what Tambiah calls 'the strange malformations' that have resulted at the end of the twentieth century from complex combinations of nationalism, ethnicity, demands for self-determination, and social groups defining each other in terms of religious identity. No one, however, has analyzed how these factors lead to the violence that has become the characteristic of our time as brilliantly as Tambiah has in this remarkable book. His insights as a social science into the political and cultural history of South Asia are informed by a passionate humanism that gives us a new understanding of the dark tragedies of our time."—Ainslie Embree, Professor Emeritus of History, Columbia University
"Resolutely transgressing disciplinary and spatial boundaries, Tambiah offers a scholarly but accessible, a focused but wide-ranging analysis that places ethnicity on the borderlines of the old and the new, the past and the present, politics and culture...With uncanny skill, he turns the contemporary worry about ethnic politics and violence into a brilliant meditation on the history of nationalism, nation-states, and world-capitalism—in a word, modernity itself. No student of modernity, let alone ethnicity in South Asia and other regions, can afford to ignore this thoughtful inquiry into our modern history."—Gyan Prakash, Princeton University
List of contents
List of Figures, Maps, and Tables
Preface
PART ONE: SELECTED SITES OF CONFLICT IN SOUTH ASIA
1. The Wider Context
2. Orientation and Objectives
3· The 1915 Sinhala Buddhist-Muslim Riots
in Ceylon
4. Two Postindependence Ethnic Riots in Sri Lanka
5· Sikh Identity, Separation, and Ethnic Conflict
6. Ethnic Conflict in Pakistan
PART TWO: RETHINKING THE NATURE OF COLLECTIVE VIOLENCE
7· Some General Features of Ethnic Riots and Riot Crowds
8. The Routinization and Ritualization of Violence
9· Hindu Nationalism, the Ayodhya Campaign, and the Babri Masjid
10. Entering a Dark Continent: The Political Psychology of Crowds
11. Reconfiguring LeBon and Durkheim on Crowds as Collectives
12. The Moral Economy of Collective Violence
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Stanley J. Tambiah is Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University. Among his several books is Sri Lanka: Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy (1991).
Summary
This work is concerned with the ethno-nationalist explosions that have occurred in many regions of the world. It focuses primarily on collective violence, in the form of civilian "riots" in South Asia, using selected instances in Sri Lanka, Pakistan and India.
