This article examines the cultural meanings of suicide, self-sacrifice, military and terrorist violence in the context of contemporary Israel, Palestine and the U.S. ‘War on Terror’. Notions of ‘sacrifice’ and ‘suicide’, employed in the anthropological and sociological literature, are evaluated with regard to these materials using a theoretical framework for interpreting violent acts as part of cultural expression and as critically linked to collective imagination and memory. This theoretical approach is then also deployed to re-examine other apparently unintelligible forms of (...) violence, such as school-shootings, serial-killing in the U.S., as well as ethnic-cleansing and community violence elsewhere. (shrink)

Turning an anthropological eye toward cyberspace, Human No More explores how conditions of the online world shape identity, place, culture, and death within virtual communities. Online worlds have recently thrown into question the traditional anthropological conception of place-based ethnography. They break definitions, blur distinctions, and force us to rethink the notion of the "subject." Human No More asks how digital cultures can be integrated and how the ethnography of both the "unhuman" and the "digital" could lead to possible reconfiguring the (...) notion of the "human." This provocative and groundbreaking work challenges fundamental assumptions about the entire field of anthropology. Cross-disciplinary research from well-respected contributors makes this volume vital to the understanding of contemporary human interaction. It will be of interest not only to anthropologists but also to students and scholars of media, communication, popular culture, identity, and technology. (shrink)