Collective violence changes the perpetrators, victims, and societies in which it occurs. It targets the body, the psyche, and the socio-cultural order. How do people come to terms with these tragic events? This groundbreaking collection of essays by anthropologists, psychologists and psychoanalysts, drawing on field research in many different parts of the world, profits from an interdisciplinary dialogue. Providing provocative, at times deeply troubling, insights into the darker side of humanity, it also proposes new ways of understanding the terrible things that people are capable of doing...

This volume identifies an emerging synthesis in psychological anthropology and presents the new research agenda taking shape as the discipline moves beyond the postmodernist critique. United by a desire to better understand the relationship of individual experience to culture, the individual authors use a range of contemporary approaches in the field, including person-centered ethnography, activity theory, attachment and object relations theory, and cultural schema theory. Taken together, these chapters demonstrate the importance of basing comparative studies on categories derived from...