Remaking a World

Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery

Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret M. Lock, Mamphela Ramphele, Pamela Reynolds, Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret M. Lock, Mamphela Ramphele, Pamela Reynolds

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.


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,

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Marginality, Suffering, and Community The Politics of Collective Experience and Empowerment in Thailand
• Reimagining Aboriginality An Indigenous People’s Response to Social Suffering
• The Bomb’s Womb? Women and the Atom Bomb
• Spirit Possessions and Avenging Ghosts Stories of Supernatural Activity as Narratives of Terror and Mechanisms of Coping and Remembering
• Boundaries, Names, Alterities A Case Study of a “Communal Riot” in Dharavi, Bombay
• Speech and Silence Women’s Testimony in the First Five Weeks of Public Hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission
• Contributors
• Index