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By placing in brackets conventional ways of contrasting modernity and pre-modernity, the contributors to this groundbreaking collection of essays bring into startling relief the phenomenological commonalities that underlie warfare and witchcraft, militarism and magic, while offering radically new insights into the virtual and ritual dimensions of violence and the 'war on terror'. - Michael D. Jackson, author of Life Within Limits: Well-Being in a World of Want .

Virtual War and Magical Death is a creative project that is bound to stimulate constructive conversation. It inserts contemporary technologies of warfare, particularly the U.S. Army's Human Terrain System, into sociocultural anthropology's current reflections on its theoretical and methodological practices, as well as the purposes of ethnographic inquiry within and beyond the discipline. -Carol J. Greenhouse, author of The Paradox of Relevance: Ethnography and Citizenship in the United States By placing in brackets conventional ways of contrasting modernity and premodernity, the contributors to this groundbreaking collection of essays bring into startling relief the phenomenological commonalities that underlie warfare and witchcraft, militarism and magic, while offering radically new insights into the virtual and ritual dimensions of violence and the 'war on terror.' -Michael Jackson, author of Life Within Limits: Well-being in a World of Want The book is strongly recommended, not least to those who are tasked with finding out whether 'smart' warfare does what it says on the box. -- Paul Richards Journal of Military History [E]nchanting, ethnographic- and analysis-full... this volume gathers some of anthropology's most knowledgeable war scholars who collectively identify the enormous scope of contemporary virtual war in its multiple meanings and applications. -- Alisse Waterston The Australian Journal of Anthropology The volume elegantly frames early-twenty-fi rst-century militarism as a form of magical thinking. The result is a collection that successfully, and productively, brings into dialogue chapters that cover the origins of the US military's Human Terrain Systems and drone warfare programs with chapters on diamond diggers in rural Tanzania and the expansion of police violence in postwar Guatemala. -- Danny Hoffman Journal of Anthropological Research A powerful critique of the hubristic illusion perpetuated by the military, that the infinite diversity, ambiguity and creativity of the social may be tamed through proper techno-cultural management. -- Malay Firoz Social Anthropology This is a valuable collection... It is a fine tribute to Neil Whitehead, whose insights on why we kill each other will be sorely missed. -- Chris Hables Gray Technology and Culture

By placing in brackets conventional ways of contrasting modernity and premodernity, the contributors to this groundbreaking collection of essays bring into startling relief the phenomenological commonalities that underlie warfare and witchcraft, militarism and magic, while offering radically new insights into the virtual and ritual dimensions of violence and the 'war on terror.' --Michael Jackson, author of Life Within Limits: Well-being in a World of Want

Author Information

Neil L. Whitehead (1956–2012) was Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His books Dark Shamans: KanaimÀ and the Poetics of Violent Death and In Darkness and Secrecy: The Anthropology of Assault Sorcery and Witchcraft in Amazonia (coedited with Robin Wright) are both published by Duke University Press. Sverker FinnstrÖm is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Uppsala University. He received the Margaret Mead Award for Living with Bad Surroundings: War, History, and Everyday Moments in Northern Uganda, also published by Duke University Press.

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