The essays in this book address the inter-relationship of power, politics, and violence, examining why the political process of managing power within states sometimes becomes physically violent. This volume brings together some of the classic writings on the relationship between states and violence within some of the best new work on political violence in local settings. The essays address state-backed violence against citizens and subjects, and violence by citizens against the state and between citizens for control of the state.

Violence: A Reader (Main Trends of the Modern World)

Besteman, Catherine

Science & Math

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

In this fresh, literate, and biting critique of current thinking on some of today's most important and controversial topics, leading anthropologists take on some of America's top pundits. This absorbing collection of essays subjects such popular commentators as Thomas Friedman, Samuel Huntington, Robert Kaplan, and Dinesh D'Souza to cold, hard scrutiny and finds that their writing is often misleadingly simplistic, culturally ill-informed, and politically dangerous. Mixing critical reflection with insights from their own fieldwork, twelve distinguished anthropologists respond by offering fresh perspectives on globalization, ethnic violence, social justice, and the biological roots of behavior. They take on such topics as the collapse of Yugoslavia, the consumer practices of the American poor, American foreign policy in the Balkans, and contemporary debates over race, welfare, and violence against women. In the clear, vigorous prose of the pundits themselves, these contributors reveal the hollowness of what often passes as prevailing wisdom and passionately demonstrate the need for a humanistically complex and democratic understanding of the contemporary world. Available: November 2004 Pub Date: January 2005

Why America's Top Pundits Are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back (California Series in Public Anthropology) (Volume 13)

History

Gusterson, Hugh

Americas

University of California Press

This study provides a window into the lives of ordinary South Africans more than ten years after the end of apartheid, with the promises of the democracy movement remaining largely unfulfilled. Catherine Besteman explores the emotional and personal aspects of the transition to black majority rule by homing in on intimate questions of love, family, and community and capturing the complex, sometimes contradictory voices of a wide variety of Capetonians. Her evaluation of the physical and psychic costs to individuals involved in working for social change is grounded in the experiences of the participants and illu-minates two overarching dimensions of life in Cape Town: the aggregate forces determined to maintain the apartheid-era status quo, and the grassroots efforts to effect social change.

Transforming Cape Town (California Series in Public Anthropology)

Africa

This study provides a window into the lives of ordinary South Africans more than ten years after the end of apartheid, with the promises of the democracy movement remaining largely unfulfilled. Catherine Besteman explores the emotional and personal aspects of the transition to black majority rule by homing in on intimate questions of love, family, and community and capturing the complex, sometimes contradictory voices of a wide variety of Capetonians. Her evaluation of the physical and psychic costs to individuals involved in working for social change is grounded in the experiences of the participants and illu-minates two overarching dimensions of life in Cape Town: the aggregate forces determined to maintain the apartheid-era status quo, and the grassroots efforts to effect social change.

Transforming Cape Town (California Series in Public Anthropology) (Volume 19)

Americans are feeling insecure. They are retreating to gated communities in record numbers, fearing for their jobs and their 401(k)s, nervous about their health insurance and their debt levels, worrying about terrorist attacks and immigrants. In this innovative volume, editors Hugh Gusterson and Catherine Besteman gather essays from nineteen leading ethnographers to create a unique portrait of an anxious country and to furnish valuable insights into the nation's possible future. With an incisive foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich, the contributors draw on their deep knowledge of different facets of American life to map the impact of the new economy, the “war on terror,” the “war on drugs,” racial resentments, a fraying safety net, undocumented immigration, a health care system in crisis, and much more. In laying out a range of views on the forces that unsettle us, The Insecure American demonstrates the singular power of an anthropological perspective for grasping the impact of corporate profit on democratic life, charting the links between policy and vulnerability, and envisioning alternatives to life as an insecure American.

Insecure American: How We Got Here and What We Should Do About It

Politics & Social Sciences

Ehrenreich, Barbara

Anthropology

Unraveling Somalia: Race, Class, and the Legacy of Slavery (The Ethnography of Political Violence)

In 1991 the Somali state collapsed. Once heralded as the only true nation-state in Africa, the Somalia of the 1990s suffered brutal internecine warfare. At the same time a politically created famine caused the deaths of a half a million people and the flight of a million refugees. 
During the civil war, scholarly and popular analyses explained Somalia's disintegration as the result of ancestral hatreds played out in warfare between various clans and subclans. In Unraveling Somalia, Catherine Besteman challenges this view and argues that the actual pattern of violence—inflicted disproportionately on rural southerners—contradicts the prevailing model of ethnic homogeneity and clan opposition. She contends that the dissolution of the Somali nation-state can be understood only by recognizing that over the past century and a half there emerged in Somalia a social order based on principles other than simple clan organization—a social order deeply stratified on the basis of race, status, class, region, and language.

University of Pennsylvania Press

In 1991 the Somali state collapsed. Once heralded as the only true nation-state in Africa, the Somalia of the 1990s suffered brutal internecine warfare. At the same time a politically created famine caused the deaths of a half a million people and the flight of a million refugees. During the civil war, scholarly and popular analyses explained Somalia's disintegration as the result of ancestral hatreds played out in warfare among various clans and subclans. In Unraveling Somalia, Catherine Besteman challenges this view and argues that the actual pattern of violence -- inflicted disproportionately on rural southerners -- contradicts the prevailing model of ethnic homogeneity and clan opposition. She contends that the dissolution of the Somali nation-state can be understood only by recognizing that over the past century and a half there emerged in Somalia a social order based on principles other than simple clan organization -- a social order deeply stratified on the basis of race, status, class, region, and language. Unraveling Somalia makes this argument by focusing on those particularly targeted in the recent violence: the people of the Jubba valley Gosha area. The people of the Gosha, whose ancestors were brought to Somalia as slaves, have always confronted discrimination in Somalia on the basis of their Bantu heritage and their history of enslavement. In tracing their struggles to legitimize their Somali identity, Unraveling Somalia reveals the critical significance of racial and class divisions in contemporary Somalia. In addition to offering a new explanation of the collapse of the Somali state, Unraveling Somalia contributes to our understanding of how constructions of raceand class in Africa are related to supposedly tribal warfare on the continent. In drawing connections among race, class, and violence, this book also contributes to the building of a comparative theoretical analysis of the global disintegration of nation-states and the politics of terror.

Since 1991 Somalia has experienced the complete collapse of its central government, the death or displacement of at least two million people, and a brutal civil war that has destroyed much of the country's infrastructure and productive capacity. Why did a country whose people shared a common language, religion, and culture fragment so deeply? Most explanations have stressed the divisive effects of personalities, clan affiliations, or Cold War competition, but in this book, the contributors examine issues of land and resources as key ingredients in the politics of modern-day Somalia and in the events that precipitated the civil war. Drawing on evidence of disputes over land rights and natural resources that date back several decades, they add a critical new dimension to our understanding of factional politics and ethnic/regional rivalries in Somalia. Local case studies further reveal the tensions between village politics and state policies and between local and national land use practices. They provide invaluable data on rural life, interethnic relations, and resource struggles in Somalia.

The Struggle For Land In Southern Somalia: The War Behind The War

Business & Money

Cassanelli, Lee

Real Estate

Westview Press

Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine (Global Insecurities)

How do people whose entire way of life has been destroyed and who witnessed horrible abuses against loved ones construct a new future? How do people who have survived the ravages of war and displacement rebuild their lives in a new country when their world has totally changed? In Making Refuge Catherine Besteman follows the trajectory of Somali Bantus from their homes in Somalia before the onset in 1991 of Somalia’s civil war, to their displacement to Kenyan refugee camps, to their relocation in cities across the United States, to their settlement in the struggling former mill town of Lewiston, Maine. Tracking their experiences as "secondary migrants" who grapple with the struggles of xenophobia, neoliberalism, and grief, Besteman asks what humanitarianism feels like to those who are its objects and what happens when refugees move in next door. As Lewiston's refugees and locals negotiate coresidence and find that assimilation goes both ways, their story demonstrates the efforts of diverse people to find ways to live together and create community. Besteman’s account illuminates the contemporary debates about economic and moral responsibility, security, and community that immigration provokes.

Duke University Press Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Besteman, Catherine. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Besteman, Catherine

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Besteman, Catherine. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Violence: A Reader (Main Trends of the Modern World)

Why America's Top Pundits Are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back (California Series in Public Anthropology) (Volume 13)

Transforming Cape Town (California Series in Public Anthropology)

Transforming Cape Town (California Series in Public Anthropology) (Volume 19)

Insecure American: How We Got Here and What We Should Do About It

Unraveling Somalia: Race, Class, and the Legacy of Slavery (The Ethnography of Political Violence)

Unraveling Somalia: Race, Class, and the Legacy of Slavery (The Ethnography of Political Violence)

The Struggle For Land In Southern Somalia: The War Behind The War

Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine (Global Insecurities)

Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine (Global Insecurities)