Formations of Violence : The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland

Rating:
Summary: Interesting but difficult to get through
Review: I read this book for a course in social anthropology and while it is a detailed ethnographic monograph it is difficult to understand the language and it would help to know more about the history of the conflict in Northern Ireland before reading it.

Rating:
Summary: specific yet expansive
Review: i used this book in a paper on faciality, but found it enlightening for nearly every register of anthropological/social theory. feldman explicates a lacanian-derived theory of spatial violence, or zones of power, in which specific agents (e.g. gunman/hardman, the black man, the butchers) serve as archtypes for applications outside of the struggle in ireland. he argues that the body is itself agentized by the very violence which pretends to dehumanize; the subject of state violence is resubjectivated as state agent (defaced) by paramilitary agents which are themselves defaced by the state. this, in turn, resembles a lacanian mirror relation in which the paramilitary subject reflects his own defacement onto the tortured subject. the point is that the violence reconstitutes the tortured subject as a state entity, enabling the state to literally 'reproduce' more and more subjects under its ideological paradigm. this is the most valuable book i've read in the past year, and i can't recommend it enough. also refer to feldman's essay, 'cultural anaesthesia' (sp?) for a revealing discussion of otherness and rodney king. fantastic!

Rating:
Summary: A most facinating and informative book!!!
Review: To read this book took more time and capacity than I had expected. Most of the students in my group choosed not to read this book, because of its reputation which was rather ambivalent. I decided not to give it up before I had given it a try, and I do not regret a moment... I have to admit that my frustration (but indeed my admiration too) grew during the reading. The theme is a complexe one, but the author has taken his therorethical fundation seriously. As a book most theoretically influenced by Michel Foucault and Friedrich Nietzsche, takes theese two philosophers out of the abstract theroretical discourse and add to it the empirically based reality of Northern Ireland. The manner in which this has been done is elequant; the mixing between the oral histories told by the informants together with the analytical parts in between. The book is absolute worth reading, and the insight one (hopefully) gets through Feldmans narration can be used on several arenas and in different academic diciplins, for my part in social science.