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Violence, Crisis, and the Everyday

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2013

Veena Das*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md.; e-mail: veenadas@jhu.edu

Extract

An important issue in considering violence at both the conceptual and empirical levels is the question of what counts as “violence” and how it is acknowledged. In many polities of the Middle East, including Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan, there is no clear boundary between war and peace. Conflicts have lasted over a long period and even the project of securing a future in which the struggle for decolonization and political autonomy can be kept alive faces enormous hurdles as everyday life is corroded by betrayals, accusations, and the sheer exhaustion of keeping political energies from waning. Most acute observers of prolonged conflicts recognize the corrosive effects of these conflicts on everyday life. In this brief thought piece, I want to reflect on one aspect of the problem: that of the relation between sexual violence as an aspect of dramatic and spectacular violence—in wars (including modern ones), pogroms against ethnic or religious minorities, or episodes of lethal riots between sectarian groups—and everyday forms of sexual violence that could be both part of the public domain and constitutive of domestic intimacy. Said otherwise, I am interested in how experience of violence travels from one threshold of life to another.

Type
Roundtable
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

NOTES

1 See Das, Veena, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley, Calif.: California University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

2 Das, Veena, Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

3 Jha, Saumitra and Wilkinson, Steven, “Does Combat Experience Foster Organizational Skill? Evidence of Ethnic Cleansing during the Partition of South Asia,” American Political Science Review 106 (2012): 883907CrossRefGoogle Scholar.