Social Anthropology

Globalisation of the war on violence

Israeli close‐combat, and sudden alterations in intensity1

This article examines how male rites of initiation in Europe have been replaced by adjustments to lifecourse events located within the enlarged sphere of entertainment. These adjustments foster new forms of attachment and separation. Based on an interpretation of European films and informed by ethnographic fieldwork, it argues that contemporary European masculinity no longer relies on violent, transformative, collective rituals. This violence still exists, however, experienced vicariously within Europe, while actual violence is largely displaced outside the West. Masculinity nonetheless survives, as a counterconcept to femininity to give expression to the comic, the lost, the confused, the contingent, the unnecessary, the needy, the playful.

In this article, I shall argue that concepts of Creoleness are used both to formulate an ethics of modern time and mobility, and to form social realities whose experience, among others through tourism, brings this very ethics alive. Creoleness presents itself here as a powerful allegory to think about time in terms of a linear process, as ‘history’ emanating in an imaginary point of purity and origin, and leading towards a state of increasing melange and ‘creolisation’. Through a historical and ethnographic study of landscape poetic, spatial planning and museum initiatives in the Indian Ocean island of La Réunion, I will show how the island and islanders were made to inhabit and ultimately to perform this allegory as a means to participate in a global modernity. Through the particular focus on a recent museum project, the article will point to the ambivalences underlying this new sign‐economy within which facets of the islanders’ everyday life are elevated as to be or become a ‘model for the world’.

This paper examines how anxieties about ethnic identity proliferate as state borders begin to shift and open in response to accelerating possibilities of cross‐border cooperation. As the border becomes more porous, social and cultural boundaries become marked in other ways, spatially re‐scaled to reflect new uncertainties consequent upon border change. Using an example from the Irish land border, the paper traces how national space is re‐imagined and re‐placed in the everyday practices of residents in a violent border zone from which the state is ostensibly retreating. It shows that communal division is as sharply drawn as ever at a time when the ‘visibility’ of the state border itself is beginning to diminish.

A just rule of law?