Charred Lullabies

Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence

E. Valentine Daniel

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English

Princeton University Press
10 February 1997

Cultural studies; Violence in society; Anthropology

Series: Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History

"How does an ethnographer write about violence? How can he make sense of violent acts, for himself and for his readers, without compromising its sheer excess and its meaning-defying core? How can he remain a scholarly observer when the country of his birth is engulfed by terror? These are some of the questions that engage Valentine Daniel in this exploration of life and death in contemporary Sri Lanka. In 1983 Daniel ""walked into the ashes and mortal residue"" of the violence that had occurred in his homeland. His planned project--the study of women's folk songs as ethnohistory--was immediately displaced by the responsibility that he felt had been given to him, by surviving family members and friends of victims, to recount beyond Sri Lanka what he had seen and heard there. Trained to do fieldwork by staying in one place and educated to look for coherence and meaning in human behavior, what does an anthropologist do when he is forced by circumstances to keep moving, searching for reasons he never finds? How does he write an ethnography (or an anthropography, to use the author's term) without transforming it into a pornography of violence?

In avoiding fattening the anthropography into prurience, how does he avoid flattening it with theory?

The ways in which Daniel grapples with these questions, and their answers, instill this groundbreaking book with a rare sense of passion, purpose, and intellect."

By: E. Valentine Daniel
Imprint: Princeton University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Edition: 1
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 17mm
Weight: 397g
ISBN: 9780691027739
ISBN 10: 0691027730
Series: Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History
Pages: 272
Publication Date: 10 February 1997
Audience: Professional and scholarly , College/higher education , Undergraduate , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

E. Valentine Daniel is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia Universityr. He is the author of Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way.

Reviews for Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence

Without doubt one of the most important accounts of nationalist violence to be published in recent years... Charred Lullabies is a major addition to the growing theoretical and ethnographic literature on contemporary political violence. tav Ghosh