Full Description
Loss is a fundamental human condition that often leads both individuals and groups to seek redress in the form of violence. But are there possible modes of redress to reckon with loss that might lead to a departure from the violence of collective and individual revenge? This book focuses on the redress of political crime in Germany and Lebanon, extending its analysis to questions of accountability and democratization in the United States and elsewhere. To understand the proposed modes of redress, John Borneman links the way the actors define their injuries to the cultural forms of redress these injuries assume and to the social contexts in which they are open to refiguring. Borneman theorizes modes of accountability, the meaning of "regime change" and the American occupation of Iraq, and the mechanisms of democratic authority in Europe and North America.
Contents
Preface: Political Crime and the Memory of Loss
I. Accountability
1. Modes of Accountability: Events of Closure, Rites of Repetition
2. On Money and the Memory of Loss
3. Public Apologies, Dignity, and Performative Redress
4. Reconciliation after Ethnic Cleansing: Listening, Retribution, and Affiliation
5. The State of War Crimes following the Israeli-Hezbollah War
6. Terror, Compassion, and the Limits of Identification: Counter-Transference and Rites of Commemoration in Lebanon
II. Regime Change, Occupation, Democratization
7. Responsibility after Military Intervention: What is Regime Change? What is Occupation?
8. Does the United States want Democratization in Iraq? Anthropological Reflections on the Export of Political Form
9. The External Ascription of Defeat and Collective Punishment
III. An Anthropology of Democratic Authority
10. What do Election Rituals Mean? Representation, Sacrifice, and Cynical Reason
11. Politics without a Head: Is the Love Parade a New Form of Political Identification? (with Stefan Senders)
12. Is the United States Europe's Other? On the Relations of Americans, Europeans, Jews, Arabs, Muslims
Notes
References
