Reverberations: Violence Across Time and Space (The Ethnography of Political Violence)

The turn to the nonhuman in the humanities and social sciences has arguably been mobilized through a washing away of political violence, its histories, and its traces. __Reverberations__ aims to redress this problem by methodologically and conceptually placing political violence and nonhuman entities side by side. The volume generates a new framework for the study of political violence and its protracted aftermath by attending, through innovative ethnographic and historical studies, to its distribution, extension, and endurance across time, space, materialities, and otherworldly dimensions, as well as its embodiment in subjectivities, discourses, and imaginations. Collectively, in the study of political violence, the contributions focus on human agencies and experiences in engagement with nonhuman entities such as objects, land, fields, houses, buildings, treasures, trees, spirits, saints, and prophets. In a variety of contexts, the scholars herein ask the crucial question: What can be learned about political violence by analyzing it in the terrain of relationality between human beings and nonhuman entities? How are things such as objects, spaces, natural phenomena, or spiritual beings entwined in histories of political violence? And vice versa—how are histories of political violence implicated in nonhuman things? The turn to the nonhuman in the humanities and social sciences has arguably been mobilized through a washing away of political violence, its histories, and its traces. Reverberations aims to redress this problem by methodologically and conceptually placing political violence and nonhuman entities side by side. The volume generates a new framework for the study of political violence and its protracted aftermath by attending, through innovative ethnographic and historical studies, to its distribution, extension, and endurance across time, space, materialities, and otherworldly dimensions, as well as its embodiment in subjectivities, discourses, and imaginations. Collectively, in the study of political violence, the contributions focus on human agencies and experiences in engagement with nonhuman entities such as objects, land, fields, houses, buildings, treasures, trees, spirits, saints, and prophets. In a variety of contexts, the scholars herein ask the crucial question: What can be learned about political violence by analyzing it in the terrain of relationality between human beings and nonhuman entities? How are things such as objects, spaces, natural phenomena, or spiritual beings entwined in histories of political violence? And vice versa--how are histories of political violence implicated in nonhuman things? Yael Navaro is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, UK. Zerrin Özlem Biner is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK. Alice von Bieberstein is Assistant Professor at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany Cover 1 Reverberations 2 Title 4 Copyright 5 CONTENTS 6 Introduction. Reverberations of Violence Across Time and Space 8 PART I. SPACES OF DEATH 38 Chapter 1. Chronicling Deaths Foretold: The Testimony of the Corpse and the Problem of Political Violence in South Africa 40 Chapter 2. Speculating on Death: Treasure Hunting in Present-Day Moush 70 Chapter 3. Culture of Dispossession in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic: Land, Ethnoreligious Difference, and Violence 90 PART II. VIOLENCE AND THE SUPER NATURAL 122 Chapter 4. Violence and Spirituality: Khidr Cosmography at the Turkish/Syrian Territorial Interface 124 Chapter 5. Icons of Uncaring: Borderland Cartographies of Icon Making 151 Chapter 6. Digging: The Spiritual-Material Imagination of (Dis)possession in Mardin, Southeast Turkey 165 Chapter 7. Maskun: Two Landscapes of War 193 PART III. VIOLENCE AGAINST NATURE AND INFRASTRUCTURAL VIOLENCE 212 Chapter 8. Infrastructural Violence in Jerusalem: Abjection, Incorporation, and Resistance in the “Cyborg City” 214 Chapter 9. Tenses of Violence: Ruination and Accumulation Along the Çoruh Valley, Turkey 240 Chapter 10. The Wounded Landscape: Mass Trauma, Memory, and Human-Object Relations 262 Chapter 11. Architectural Witnessing at the Former Madimak Hotel in Sivas, Turkey 284 Afterword. Reverberations of Political Violence 302 Contributors 318 Index 320 Acknowledgments 324 "The turn to the nonhuman in the humanities and social sciences has arguably been mobilized through a washing away of political violence, its histories, and its traces. Reverberations aims to redress this problem by methodologically and conceptually placing political violence and nonhuman entities side by side. The volume generates a new framework for the study of political violence and its protracted aftermath by attending, through innovative ethnographic and historical studies, to its distribution, extension, and endurance across time, space, materialities, and otherworldly dimensions, as well as its embodiment in subjectivities, discourses, and imaginations. Collectively, in the study of political violence, the contributions focus on human agencies and experiences in engagement with nonhuman entities such as objects, land, fields, houses, buildings, treasures, trees, spirits, saints, and prophets. In a variety of contexts, the scholars herein ask the crucial question: What can be learned about political violence by analyzing it in the terrain of relationality between human beings and nonhuman entities? How are things such as objects, spaces, natural phenomena, or spiritual beings entwined in histories of political violence? And vice versa--how are histories of political violence implicated in nonhuman things?"-- Provided by publisher The turn to the nonhuman in the humanities and social sciences has arguably been mobilized through a washing away of political violence, its histories, and its traces. Reverberations aims to redress this problem by methodologically and conceptually placing political violence and nonhuman entities side by side. The volume generates a new framework for the study of political violence and its protracted aftermath by attending, through innovative ethnographic and historical studies, to its distribution, extension, and endurance across time, space, materialities, and otherworldly dimensions, as well as its embodiment in subjectivities, discourses, and imaginations. Collectively, in the study of political violence, the contributions focus on human agencies and experiences in engagement with nonhuman entities such as objects, land, fields, houses, buildings, treasures, trees, spirits, saints, and prophets. In a variety of contexts, the scholars herein ask the crucial question: What can be learned about political violence by analyzing it in the terrain of relationality between human beings and nonhuman entities? How are things such as objects, spaces, natural phenomena, or spiritual beings entwined in histories of political violence? And vice versa—how are histories of political violence implicated in nonhuman things? "Reverberations aims to generate new concepts and methodologies for the study of violence and its protracted aftermath. The innovative ethnographic studies presented here attend to the distribution, extension, and endurance of violence across time, space, materialities, and otherworldly dimensions, as well as its embodiment in subjectivities, discourses, politics, and imaginations"-- Provided by publisher