Violence and Subjectivity. Edited

Violence and Subjectivity is a compilation of essays by social scientists who have carried out their f ieldwork in a broad range of sociocultural milieus. The focus varies considerably, from the portrayal of social violence in the media to the circumcision ritual within the Muslim community in India and its ties to collective violence. What brings these papers together is the authors’ vantage point. There is a shared view of the role of violence in the shaping of subjectivity in an era characterized by transnationalization. In the editors’ words, “it becomes necessary to consider how subjectivity . . . is produced through the experience of violence and the manner in which global flows involving images, capital, and people become entangled with local logics in identity formation” (p. 1). The study of the role of violence in the construction of subjectivity allows for analysis of the ways in which “moral processes” and “emotional conditions” intertwine. Since the book’s essays approach this problematic with very different objects of study, requiring the exploration of very different dimensions of social and cultural processes—state-citizen relations, family dynamics, global f lows—they encourage readers to develop new ways of conceptualizing the mode of articulation between public and private: the space of politics and the space of intimacy. The editors’ def inition of subjectivity already places the latter in the interface between social and individual. They claim that subjectivity is “the felt interior experience of the person that includes his or her positions in a field of relational power” (p. 1). Three dimensions may be identif ied in these essays that create layers of interpretation, revealing the complexity of the matter at hand: (1) the articulation of global, local, and individual; (2) the effect of violence on individual and collective perceptions and representations; and (3) the inscription in bodies of the violence of domination. Global, local, individual. In this dimension, the authors analyze the ways in which global, national, and local institutions interact in the production of daily practices and representations. Global institutions comprise multilateral agencies (such as the humanitarian agencies studied by Woodward), the media (as in Kleinman’s essay), and the biotechnological industry (explored by Lock); at the national level, the state is B o o k R e v i e w s