American Ethnologist
Volume 30, Issue 1
Foreword
Virginia R. Dominguez
On Fear and State Violence
Darker than midnight: Fear, vulnerability, and terror making in urban
Burma (Myanmar)
Monique Skidmore
The Burmese military State constructs fear and vulnerability among its
citizenry through the strategic use of political violence. Fear is inherently
temporal and, unlike despair, requires that one have the ability to envisage
alternatives to a future of complete domination. Burmese people strive not to
express fear, and the anthropologist’s articulation of fear contrasts
with the silence that fear engenders among them. In this article I reflect on
strategies for the ethical collection of experiences of fear in situations where
suppressing or denying fear is the most common survival strategy.
[Burma, Myanmar, violence, fear, state construction of affect, vulnerability,
time]
“In our own hands”: Lynching, justice, and the law in Bolivia
Daniel M. Goldstein
Vigilantes in the marginal communities of a Bolivian city take the law
into their own hands both to police their communities against crime and as a
way of expressing their dissatisfaction with the state and its official policing
and justice systems. In this article, I examine an incident of vigilante violence
(lynching) in one such Bolivian barrio to explore the ways in which vigilantism
acts as amoral complaint against state inadequacy, challenging state legitimacy
and redefining ideas about justice, citizenship, and law in the process. I also
analyze the range of discourses that surrounds lynching in contemporary Bolivian
society, exploring the interpretive conflict that results as barrio residents
attempt to counter official representations of the meaning of vigilantism in
their community.
[violence, vigilantism, legal anthropology, citizenship, Bolivia, the Andes]
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