Culture in chaos : an anthropology of the social condition in war / Stephen C. Lubkemann.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lubkemann, Stephen C., 1968-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

War.

Social conflict.

Political violence.

Forced migration.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (414 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Fought in the wake of a decade of armed struggle against colonialism, the Mozambican civil war lasted from 1977 to 1992, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives while displacing millions more. As conflicts across the globe span decades and generations, Stephen C. Lubkemann suggests that we need a fresh perspective on war when it becomes the context for normal life rather than an exceptional event that disrupts it. Culture in Chaos calls for a new point of departure in the ethnography of war that investigates how the inhabitants of war zones live under trying new conditions and how culture and social relations are transformed as a result. Lubkemann focuses on how Ndau social networks were fragmented by wartime displacement and the profound effect this had on gender relations. Demonstrating how wartime migration and post-conflict return were shaped by social struggles and interests that had little to do with the larger political reasons for the war, Lubkemann contests the assumption that wartime migration is always involuntary. His critical reexamination of displacement and his engagement with broader theories of agency and social change will be of interest to anthropologists, political scientists, historians, and demographers, and to anyone who works in a war zone or with refugees and migrants.

Contents:

Introduction: The "ordering of violent things" : war and displacement

Contending with colonialism : migration and resistance

Other struggles : migration and the transformation of social relations

Imposing the new Mozambique : sowing the seeds of postcolonial disillusion

Society and the state : mutual misrecognition at the gathering of war

Prosecuting life by other means : the social logic of violence in a fragmented war

Terrains of displacement : war-time mobility and immobility

Tambem aqui fazemos amor : living in war

Postconflict displacements : the social problematics of refugee return

Transnational contentions : the moral economy of postconflict migration

Where to be an ancestor? : the struggle for the postconflict social imagination.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [361]-391) and index.

ISBN:

9786612537356

9780226496436

0226496430

9781282537354

1282537350

OCLC:

593341851