LYNCHNING: EN SVØBE FOR MENNESKEHEDEN

The article explores the phenomenon of mob violence in predominatly Mayan towns in rural Guatemala. Since 1996, more than 100 people have been killed by crowds in rural towns. The victims have usually been young men accused of often minor criminal acts, or representatives of the state trying to protect the victims. The occurrence of mob violence coincides roughly with the area where the army organized civil self-defence patrols during the civil war from 1981-96 as part of the national security counterinsurgency program. The post-conflict transition has paradoxically brought security back to the top of the political agenda as political violence has been substituted and overshadowed by violence related to drug trafficking and other forms of criminality. The article shows how mob violence has been interpreted in the context of postconflict transformations where the elimination of violence and violent conflicts has been addressed as an object of development, and suggests that we, in addition to common sociological interpretations, may understand lynchings as an exclusive practice of communal sovereignty within a transnational political field of politics of in/security. &nbsp

Corporealities of violence in Southern and Eastern Africa

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Disavowing 'the' prison

This chapter confronts the idea of ‘the’ prison, that is, prison as a fixed entity. However hard we, that is, prison scholars including ourselves, seek to deconstruct and critique specific aspects of confinement, there is a tendency to slip into a default position that envisions the prison as something given and pre-understood. When it comes to prison our imagination seems to clog up. It is the political solution to its own failure, and the preferred metaphor for its own representation

Anthropology and the enigma of the state

This chapter provides an inventory of ‘the anthropology of the state’. It starts from the insight that the anthropology of the state drew considerably more on scholars of political science, political philosophy and sociology than on political anthropology. The ‘theoretical genealogies’ of the field challenged the taken-for-grantedness of the state as a ‘distinct, fixed and unitary entity’ operating outside and above society. The chapter concludes that the state as an idea of transcendental political authority and a centralizing organizational practice is not withering away, as observers in the 1990s suggested, but rather is transforming. The strongest contribution of political anthropology in grasping the manifold transformative processes is to combine rich ethnographic studies of this blurriness and the fragmentation of states with analyses of underlying rationales

Diane M. Nelson: A Finger in the Wound. Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala

Anmeldes af Finn Stepputat &nbsp