The Paths to Domination, Resistance, and Terror

Bys: Carolyn Nordstrom and Joann Martin

The Paths to Terror offers a new and refreshing perspective on sociopolitical violence: one that highlights the human experience of domination, resistance, and terror as they are woven into the fabric of everyday life. These innovative essays take the reader from the Americas, through Europe and the Middle East, and to Asia to capture the cultural construction of sociopolitical violence. The authors expand our view of the ethnographic reality, revealing the complex interplay among local, national, and international actors in the perpetuation of violence and terror. The organization of the essays along a continuum from domination, through the emergence of resistance, to the development of cultures of conflict and terror underlines the value of understanding the growth and resolution of violence as cultural dynamics.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520073169
• ISBN13: 9780520073166
• Release Date: February 1992
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 312 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.8" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

A must read for those interested in inequality and conflict

This is an excellent collection of anthropolgical investigations of political resistance that charts new territory in the way that the political and the social are percieved. Moving away from a traditional "social movement" perspective, in which resistance is seen only in terms of levels of organization and results are seen only in terms of whether demands are met, the contributions to this anthology show that domination consists of more than just "states" and resistance can take place without organization and even where organizations appear to be cooperating with the state. I have not read all the essays, but some have been vital to my own work--such as Parnell's chapter on squatter settlements in the Phillippines where he shows that resistors can coopt the state (a vital concept I adopt in modified form in my book on street vendors in Mexico City). Another devastating chapter is Winans' "Hyenas on the Border" in which Winans brilliantly shows that witchcraft can form the basis of a dispersed form of resistance that responds to the uncertainties created by the juxtaposition of modernity and traditionalism.