Book

Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery

Author
Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret M. Lock, Mamphela Ramphele, Pamela Reynolds
Publication Year
2001
Region
Global
Thematic Area
Law & Policies
Topic
Memorialization / Mental Health / Transitional Justice
Access
Subscription required

Remaking a World completes a triptych of volumes on social suffering, violence, and recovery. Social Suffering, the first volume, deals with sources and major forms of social adversity, with an emphasis on political violence. The second, Violence and Subjectivity, contains graphic accounts of how collective experience of violence can alter individual subjectivity. This third volume explores the ways communities "cope" with—endure, work through, break apart under, transcend—traumatic and other more insidious forms of violence, addressing the effects of violence at the level of local worlds, interpersonal relations, and individual lives. The authors highlight the complex relationship between recognition of suffering in the public sphere and experienced suffering in people's everyday lives. Rich in local detail, the book's comparative ethnographies bring out both the recalcitrance of tragedy and the meaning of healing in attempts to remake the world.