New Book Series from Duke University Press

The Cultures and Practices of Violence

Series Editors
Neil L. Whitehead, Jo Ellen Fair, Leigh Payne
Anthropology, Media and Political Science
University of Wisconsin-Madison

The study of violence has tended to focus on the political and economic conditions under which it is generated, the suffering of victims and the psychology of its interpersonal dynamics. Such work has vastly improved our conceptualizations of violence but ignores the role of perpetrators, their motivations and the social conditions under which they are able to operate. In the context of post-colonial state-building, and more latterly collapse and implosion, community violence, state repression and the phenomena of judicial inquires and panels of reconciliation in the aftermath of civil conflict, foreground the need to better comprehend the role of those who actually do the work of violence - torturers, assassins and terrorists - as much as those who suffer its consequences. In this latter context the role of gender is critical to analyze and ideas of masculinity, as well as the feminization of victims, with regard to the exercise of violence are particularly significant factors.

The Cultures and Practices of Violence Book Series aims to publish the work of researchers in a variety of disciplines who study such perpetrators of violence. We envisage this potentially vast field of enquiry generating manuscripts along five interlocking themes that are the main subject areas of the book series. Our primary interest is in high quality monographs but we also see coherent edited works as being very relevant to innovation in academic debate and would certainly consider making such works part of the Series. We believe that this will also serve the purpose of acquiring new authors, especially younger scholars and those working outside the US.
As Series editors we share the perception that the topic of violence will continue to force its way onto a range of scholarly agendas and we want to be positioned to identify and develop the very best of this research.

The following themes, describe the field of interest for this book series;

1) Vigilantism and Popular Justice Seekers
Scholarly and political interest in the rising rates of crime in countries emerging from authoritarian rule has produced a veritable growth industry for police and military reformers, studies on the link between neo-liberalism and poverty and crime, new militarization, and corruption. Our orientation is to root this current crime wave throughout the world to violent pasts. Works that examine the legacy of violence in terms of the supply and trade of weapons used in wars and repression, the persistence of a “psychology of war” that survives into peacetime, the enduring glamour of soldier/warrior imagery (particularly among young people), and the echo of past violence through re-enactments of past forms of violence and uses of symbols of an earlier period of conflict, would all be relevant here.

2) Collaboration and the Culture of Violence
There is a notable absence of published scholarly work on collaborators, although Daniel Goldhagen’s recent work on Nazi Germany has made the notion of culture a key concept to invoke in this context. Perpetrators do not operate in a vacuum despite the secrecy and cover-up which often surrounds the work of torturers and death-squads. The paradox here being that this must also be an open secret if the instrumental effects of exemplary violence, as in death squad killings or the routinization of atrocity and torture, are to be achieved. For these reason it is not just the individual psychology and motivations of the perpetrator but the wider context in which they feel themselves justified or even heroic in their actions that needs to be connected with the notion of collaboration.

3) The Media of Conflict and the Cultural Imaginary
Linked to the above theme is the need to also consider how specifically the media plays into the cultural production of violence, as notably was the case in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Violent acts may embody complex aspects of symbolism that relate to both order and disorder in a given social context, and it is these symbolic aspects that give violence its many potential meanings. This is a particularly important point when we consider the violent acts taken by peoples around the world in the name of a particular religion or in a belief that these acts conform to a set of “moral” or “patriotic” teachings directly linked to specific ideologies. When atrocity or murder take place they feed into the world of the iconic imagination. Imagination transcends reality and its rational articulation; but in doing so it can bring further violent realities into being.
4) Memorializing the Authoritarian Past
Much of the literature on memorials focuses on those used to condemn the authoritarian past. But we often hear about efforts to remember the "heroic past" on the part of the old authoritarian order and its supporters. These come in the form of days of commemoration, monuments or other public events. We want to publish innovative studies of the politics behind “counter-memorializing,” the residual political spaces that try to remember the authoritarian past, not to condemn it but to glorify it.

5) Perpetrators and the Heroism of Violence
In the light of recent approaches to perpetrators of violence, we seek manuscripts that build on and break out of traditional disciplinary constraints and boundaries, incorporating media and performance studies, literary and cultural studies. Of particular interest are accounts of “terrorists”, torturers and death-squad assassins.

We thus identify a field of scholarship on The Cultures and Practices of Violence that is reaching critical mass and we feel that this is the right moment to encourage and develop the very best of this scholarship through the medium of a book series.

Please contact any of the Series Editors for further information:

NEIL L. WHITEHEAD
Professor of Anthropology & Religious Studies
Editor - Ethnohistory, Department of Anthropology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706

Phone: (608) 262-2866/7395
Fax: (608) 265-4216
E mail: nlwhiteh@wisc.edu

LEIGH ANN PAYNE
Department of Political Science
University of Wisconsin-Madison
110 North Hall; 1050 Bascom Mall
Madison, WI 53706

Phone: (608) 263-9429
Fax: (608) 265-2663
Email: lpayne@polisci.wisc.edu

JO ELLEN FAIR
School of Journalism and Mass Communication
University of Wisconsin-Madison
5164 Vilas Communication Hall
Madison, WI 53706

Phone: (608) 263-2199
E mail: jefair@facstaff.wisc.edu