War and Peace/La Guerre et la Paix

Ellen R. Judd University of ManitobaAt the Halifax meeting of the Canadian Anthropology Society in 2003, the Anthropologica Editorial Board decided to respond to continuing and immediate problems of war with a special issue.1 In opening its pages to engaged anthropological research on war, this issue seeks to respond to critical demands in a way that is both timely and cognizant of the long-term, intransigent conditions of war in our time. The articles that follow examine war and peace substantively in work located in diverse places-in Iraq, Mexico, Kosovo, UNESCO, Sierra Leone, Peru, Guatemala and Haiti. Many are the product of engagement in war zones during periods of open conflict or its immediate aftermath; all are the result of sustained fieldwork and anthropological reflection.We will be reading these articles in unavoidable intertextuality with the accounts of war that pervade public discourse in the present. It is nearly impossible to escape such accounts, often marked by vivid images instantaneously transmitted from the front lines. But each of the following articles represents a dramatically different picture. The anthropology of war and of violence-in common with much other scholarship, literature and personal accounts-provides a sharp contrast with prevailing cultural frameworks. Those frameworks are diverse and complex tissues of misrecognition, including such transparent fictions as the idea that wars are predominantly military matters, fought on defined battlegrounds by more or less willing combatants, and the more subtle and compelling myth of the just war. Beyond debating matters of evidence or interpretation, this work questions the implicit concepts within which the prevailing frameworks trap much of even the critical thought on war and peace. The anthropology of war and of violence, as represented powerfully in the articles here, conveys the practical, embodied reality of living in war zones. This does not simply add to what we know of war and peace; it offers a mirror through which the culture of militarism in our comparatively safe worlds can be discerned more clearly.One of the recurring themes in this endeavour is a questioning of the cultures of war and of peace, exploring how these are created, acquire meaning and are challenged. A major issue here is the way in which war leaks into what is or appears to be peace, and the ways in which peace is deployed in war. The murkiness of the boundary and the ways in which war is nurtured and promoted in apparent peacetime is underlined in the studies presented in this special issue. Much can be understood about war if we understand better the permeability of the frame of peace that provides its margins.Here, too, lies much of the discourse that generates the legitimacy for state or quasi-state violence. The articles in this collection are not inhabited by the usual fetishized entities of states and quasi-state bodies that populate conventional language on war. Those fetishized entities are real in their ability to mobilize people and resources and shape the discourse of war and peace, especially at a distance, but their fictive organic substance dissolves in the light of examined practices closer to the front lines. The ethnography of war (and peace) zones documents and analyzes people and collectivities crossing boundaries, creating and deploying new or renewed cultural repertoires and exercising agency under extreme conditions.The articles are sensitive to the relation between the violence of war and the structural violence of both war and peace. As each traces in its particular analytic context, these are interconnected and the cessation of gunfire is not the end of violence. The theme of war and peace problematizes this relationship. The thematic foci as developed here (other foci are regrettably possible in this large area) are those of the legitimation of state and quasi-state violence and the implications of intentional killing with the intensity of loss, trauma and suffering that makes the wounds of war so intractable. …