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Taking off from a single episode, Donald L. Donham provides readers with a rich account that makes an important point: ethnic identification is often more the consequence of violence than the cause. Since people involved may, in retrospect, interpret an event using ethnic categories, understanding the complexity of the processes leading up to violence requires peeling back layers of backward projection and a reconstruction of the flow of events, tasks Donham performs here with sensitivity and insight. Frederick Cooper, author of Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History Violence in a Time of Liberation is an absorbing and exceptionally clear-sighted analysis of violence and ethnic consciousness in South Africa. Focused on a specific set of events that occurred at a gold mine in the mid-1990s, Donald L. Donham brings vivid ethnographic description and analysis to bear on some of the thorniest questions faced by social analysts of violence. His book is lucidly written and cunningly constructed, with a substantial narrative pull. It is a very significant contribution both to scholarly understandings of contemporary South African society and to theoretical debates around ethnic violence. James Ferguson, author of Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order

"""Taking off from a single episode, Donald L. Donham provides readers with a rich account that makes an important point: ethnic identification is often more the consequence of violence than the cause. Since people involved may, in retrospect, interpret an event using ethnic categories, understanding the complexity of the processes leading up to violence requires peeling back layers of backward projection and a reconstruction of the flow of events, tasks Donham performs here with sensitivity and insight."" Frederick Cooper, author of Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History # ""Violence in a Time of Liberation is an absorbing and exceptionally clear-sighted analysis of violence and ethnic consciousness in South Africa. Focused on a specific set of events that occurred at a gold mine in the mid-1990s, Donald L. Donham brings vivid ethnographic description and analysis to bear on some of the thorniest questions faced by social analysts of violence. His book is lucidly written and cunningly constructed, with a substantial narrative pull. It is a very significant contribution both to scholarly understandings of contemporary South African society and to theoretical debates around ethnic violence."" James Ferguson, author of Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order ""Violence in a Time of Liberation by Donald Donham, a University of California anthropologist, published last year, offers a prescient narrative of mine violence. Based on a study of a mine called Cinderella, it provides a piercing and lucid exposition of the path to this violence in a post-1994 moment... Violence in a Time of Liberation offers an exemplary example of how historical ethnography can be used to study violence. It probes us to give time and labour to understand better what has happened, even if its meanings remain elusive. For violence, too, is a way of remembering our disappointed hope."" South Africa's Mail & Guardian, September 28th 2012"

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Donald L. Donham is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution; History, Power, Ideology: Central Issues in Marxism and Anthropology; and Work and Power in Maale, Ethiopia.

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