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University of California Press

About the Book

The Paths to Terror offers a new and refreshing perspective on sociopolitical violence: one that highlights the human experience of domination, resistance, and terror as they are woven into the fabric of everyday life. These innovative essays take the reader from the Americas, through Europe and the Middle East, and to Asia to capture the cultural construction of sociopolitical violence. The authors expand our view of the ethnographic reality, revealing the complex interplay among local, national, and international actors in the perpetuation of violence and terror. The organization of the essays along a continuum from domination, through the emergence of resistance, to the development of cultures of conflict and terror underlines the value of understanding the growth and resolution of violence as cultural dynamics.

About the Author

Carolyn Nordstrom is a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. JoAnn Martin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Earlham College.

Table of Contents

The Culture of Conflict: Field Reality and Theory
The Anthropology of Conflict
Anthropology and the Politics of Genocide
Domination, Acting, and Fantasy
Resisting "Ethnicity": The Israeli State and Bedouin Identity
Hyenas on the Border
Ideas on Philippine Violence: Assertions, Negation, and Narrations
Time and Irony in Manila Squatter Movements
When the People Were Strong and United: Stories of the Past and the Transformation of Politics in a Mexican Community
The Politics of Painting: Political Murals in Northern Ireland
A Grammar of Terror: Psychocultural Responses to State Terrorism in Dirty War and Post-Dirty War Argentina
The Backyard Front
Conflict and Violence