Violence

Mayan farmers in rural northwest Guatemala perceive the U.S. Department of Agriculture fruit-fly eradication program, MOSCAMED, as a government and agribusiness scheme designed to addict them to agrochemicals by despoiling subsistence agriculture. This bitterly accusative view depicts the state, capital, and U.S. government as interlinked sovereigns willing to kill and harm hapless Mayas. Considering political processes in the town of San Pedro Necta in light of local mistrust of and engagement with MOSCAMED, I argue that neoliberal democracy extends an affective imaginary of defeat produced by decades of counterinsurgency warfare through targeted violence and by exchanging meager resources for complicity with racial dispossession. My research findings illuminate how Mayas live the violence of neoliberal democracy and navigate a thicket of sovereignties, including ones widely viewed as predicated on their collective misery. They also reframe Mayan participation in authoritarian politics since the 1996 peace accords.

"With spears and arrows, atl-atls and slings, the people of the New World fought to defend themselves against European invasion and conquest. Over a century of scholarship on warfare has substantially enhanced our understanding of the scope and scale of violent conflict in Pre-Columbian America. Yet we still struggle to understand the nuances of indigenous warfare and its importance for native politics and society. This volume sheds new light on the nature of war in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Relying on methodological and theoretical developments in anthropological archaeology, bioarchaeology, and ethnohistory, contributors highlight the particularities of warfare in indigenous societies and examine the commonalities of warfare in cross-cultural perspective. Their essays focus on place and the body, as they explore the importance of captive-taking, sacrifice, performance, and political history in the conduct of war.

Observers have debated whether the indigenous peoples of the Americas were distinctly noble or frightfully savage in their way of war. This volume shows that such polarized positions are unfounded. By focusing on the nuances of indigenous violent conflict, the contributors demonstrate that war in the Americas was much like war elsewhere in the ancient and modern world: strategic, political, bloody, socially productive, yet terribly destructive."

Brazilian geographer Milton Santos is among the most influential theorists in Brazil and in the rest of Latin America yet his work has not until now been popularized in Anglo-American scholarship. Santos created a solid theoretical framework composed by a set of articulated concepts, some of which are discussed in this paper: technical-scientific and informational milieu, technical unicity, convergence of moments, enlargement of contexts, knowability of the planet, contemporary acceleration, psycho-sphere, techno-sphere and counter- rationalities. This article also presents Santos’conception of globalization as fable, perversity and possibility. Through a review of the author’s main works, particularly the book Toward an Other Globalization, and through the application of some of his concepts to the analysis of contemporary events, this article intends to offer an introduction to Santos to the Anglo world and to demonstrate how his conceptual framework can contribute to the literature on surveillance and urban security.

Interes za kulturu obilježio je Nietzscheovu filozofiju do te mjere da bismo u tome interesu mogli situirati logiku njezine koherencije. Simptomatičan je za to „Schopenhauer kao obrazovatelj“, jedno od Nietzscheovih „nesuvremenih razmatranja“. U njemu Nietzsche razmatra kulturu kao takav kritički pogon kakav osigurava neprekinutu transfiguraciju physisa. Naravno, „ja“ je instrumentalno za kultivaciju takve transfiguracijske inteligencije i racionalnosti; ipak, upravo zato „ja“ u kulturi svodi se na scenu nasilja, jer kultura nije skript njegova održavanja (čak i kad zadovoljava njegove potrebe). Pozivajući se na Emersona, Nietzsche kulturu stoga opisuje kao revolucionarnu; iz toga proizlazi da revolucija označava političko kulture, ono u kulturi što je fundamentalno politično, i obratno, da se u revoluciji vrijednoj toga imena pokazuje ono što je u politici fundamentalno kulturno. Istina, revolucionarnoj kulturi Nietzsche suprotstavlja kulturu i politiku koje nisu združene i ne pridonose transfiguracijskoj kritičkoj praksi, niti su u njoj utemeljene; ako naoko i služe održavanju ega, one to čine po cijenu represije njegove transfiguracijske inteligencije, pa je „ja“ i opet primarno scena nasilja. U tome okviru zanimaju me dvije pozicije. Prvo, želim postaviti hipotezu da je revolucionarna kultura kod Nietzschea metonimijski kompleks, za razliku od kulture koja ne pridonosi transfiguraciji physisa, a utemeljena je u metafori. Drugo, želim pokazati kako se, refrakcijom kroz Nietzschea, Emersonov projekt Amerike nameće kao prascena za Freudovu teoriju sebstva u kulturi.

Les temps modernes marquent l'émergence de la littérature criminelle en France. Les canards, livrets bon marché remplis d'histoires merveilleuses et sanglantes, offrent des récits fondés sur le quotidien, établissant ainsi un lien avec l'univers des lecteurs. Comme les Histoires tragiques, ils privilégient les narrations de crimes, où les actions féminines sont mises en relief. Associée aux peurs du temps, la femme y incarne les figures de l'infanticide, de la parricide, de l'adultère et de la sorcière, attaquant l'ordre masculin du monde. Produits et moteurs de la moralisation grandissante du royaume, surtout au début du XVIIe siècle - moment de plein essor de la Réforme catholique -, ces pièces avertissent des dangers représentés par les femmes insoumises. Considérant la littérature des rues comme source privilégiée pour l'histoire culturelle, ce travail cherche à l'appréhender en tant que puissant système de diffusion de modèles de comportement vers un large public.