eBook - ePub

Rituals of War

Name: Rituals of War
ISBN: 9781945861291

The Body and Violence in Mesopotamia

Zainab Bahrani,

English
ePUB (mobile friendly)
Available on iOS & Android

eBook - ePub

Rituals of War

The Body and Violence in Mesopotamia

Zainab Bahrani,

About this book

Rituals of War is an investigation into the earliest historical records of violence and biopolitics. In Mesopotamia, ancient Iraq (ca. 3000–500 BC) rituals of war and images of violence constituted part of the magical technologies of warfare that formed the underlying irrational processes of war. In the book, three lines of inquiry are converged into one historical domain of violence, namely, war, the body, and representation.

Building on Foucault's argument in Discipline and Punish that the art of punishing must rest on a whole technology of representation, Zainab Bahrani investigates the ancient Mesopotamian record to reveal how that culture relied on the portrayal of violence and control as part of the mechanics of warfare. Moreover she takes up the more recent arguments of Giorgio Agamben on sovereign power and biopolitic to focus on the relationship of power, the body and violence in Assyro-Babylonian texts and monuments of war.

Bahrani brings together and analyzes facets of war and sovereign power that fall under the categories of representation and display, the aesthetic, the ritualistic, and the supernatural. Besides the invention of the public monument of war, and the rituals of iconoclasm, destruction, and relocation of monuments in war, she investigates formulations of power through the body, narrative displays in battle, the reading of omens before the battle, and historical divination through the body and body parts. The author describes these as the magical technologies of war, the realm of the irrational that enables the ideologies of just war in the distant past as today.

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Yes, you can access Rituals of War by Zainab Bahrani in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Art & History of Ancient Art. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.