This groundbreaking multidisciplinary book presents significant essays on historical indigenous violence in Latin America from Tierra del Fuego to central Mexico. The collection explores those uniquely human motivations and environmental variables that have led to the native peoples of Latin America engaging in warfare and ritual violence since antiquity. Based on an American Anthropological Association symposium, this book collects twelve contributions from sixteen authors, all of whom are scholars at the forefront of their fields of study.

All of the chapters advance our knowledge of the causes, extent, and consequences of indigenous violence—including ritualized violence—in Latin America. Each major historical/cultural group in Latin America is addressed by at least one contributor. Incorporating the results of dozens of years of research, this volume documents evidence of warfare, violent conflict, and human sacrifice from the fifteenth century to the twentieth, including incidents that occurred before European contact. Together the chapters present a convincing argument that warfare and ritual violence have been woven into the fabric of life in Latin America since remote antiquity.

For the first time, expert subject-area work on indigenous violence—archaeological, osteological, ethnographic, historical, and forensic—has been assembled in one volume. Much of this work has heretofore been dispersed across various countries and languages. With its collection into one English-language volume, all future writers—regardless of their discipline or point of view—will have a source to consult for further research.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction
Richard J. Chacon and Rubén G. Mendoza

1.  Status Rivalry and Warfare in the Development and Collapse of Classic Maya Civilization
Matt O’Mansky and Arthur A. Demarest

2.  Aztec Militarism and Blood Sacrifice: The Archaeology and Ideology of Ritual Violence
Rubén G. Mendoza

3.  Territorial Expansion and Primary State Formation in Oaxaca, Mexico
Charles S. Spencer

4.  Images of Violence in Mesoamerican Mural Art
Donald McVicker

5.  Circum-Caribbean Chiefly Warfare
Elsa M. Redmond

6.  Conflict and Conquest in Pre-Hispanic Andean South America: Archaeological Evidence from Northern Coastal Peru
John W. Verano

7.  The Inti Raymi Festival among the Cotacachi and Otavalo of Highland Ecuador: Blood for the Earth
Richard J. Chacon, Yamilette Chacon, and Angel Guandinango

8.  Upper Amazonian Warfare
Stephen Beckerman and James Yost

9.  Complexity and Causality in Tupinambá Warfare
William Balée

10.  Hunter-Gatherers’ Aboriginal Warfare in Western Chaco
Marcela Mendoza

11.  The Struggle for Social Life in Fuego-Patagonia
Alfredo Prieto and Rodrigo Cárdenas

12.  Ethical Considerations and Conclusions Regarding Indigenous Warfare and Ritual Violence in Latin America
Richard J. Chacon and Rubén G. Mendoza

References
About the Contributors
Index

How does an inquiry into life as it lives (or dies) amid mass violence look like from the perspective of the “social”? Taking us from Sierra Leone to India to Lebanon, Life, Emergent challenges conventional understandings of biopolitics, weaving a politics of life through the lens of life, not death. 

Arguing that the “letting die” element of biopolitics has been overemphasized, Yasmeen Arif zeros in on biopolitics’ other pole: “making live.” She does so by highlighting the various means and the forms of life configured in the aftermath—or afterlives—of violent events in contexts of law, justice, community, and identity. Her analysis of the social repercussions is both global and local in scope. Arif examines the convictions made in the Special Court of Sierra Leone, the first hybrid court of its nature under international criminal law. Next, she explores the making of a justice movement in the context of Hindu–Muslim violence in 2002 in the state of Gujarat, India. From there she revisits the Sikh carnage in Delhi of 1984. Finally, she explores a span of civil violence in Lebanon, and particularly, its effects on the city of Beirut. 

This rigorously argued book brings together the various strands of life and the social that each chapter has disentangled—and in doing so it begins to frame a politics of, and in, life. 

For all of Brazil's efforts to reduce poverty-and its progress-the favelas in Rio de Janeiro still house one-third of the city's poor, and violence permeates every aspect of the city. As urban drug gangs and police wage war in the streets, favela residents who are especially vulnerable live in fear of being caught in the crossfire. Politicians, human rights activists, and security authorities have been working to minimize the social and economic problems at the root of this "war."

Living in the Crossfire presents impassioned testimony from officials, residents, and others in response to the ongoing crisis. Maria Helena Moreira Alves and Philip Evanson provide vivid accounts from grieving mothers and members of the police working to stop the war and, among officials, from Brazil's President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, who discusses his efforts to improve public security.

 

The Long Shadows is the first book-length work to offer global perspectives on the environmental history of World War II. Based on long-term research, the selected articles represent the best available studies in different fields and countries. With contributions touching on Europe, America, Asia, and Africa, the book has a truly global approach.

While other edited volumes on the environmental history of warfare discuss multiple wars and various time periods, The Long Shadows is devoted exclusively to World War II and its profound and lasting impact on global environments, encompassing polar, temperate and tropical ecological zones. Divided into three main sections, the first offers an introduction to and holistic overview of the War. The second section of the book examines the social and environmental impacts of the conflict, while the third focuses on the history and legacy of resource extraction. A fourth and final section offers conclusions and hypotheses. Numerous themes and topics are explored in these previously unpublished essays, including the new and innovative field of acoustic ecology, the environmental policies of the Third Reich, Japanese imperialism and marine resources, and the control of Typhus fever.

Aimed at researchers and students in the fields of environmental history, military history, and global history, The Long Shadows will also appeal to a general audience interested in the environmental impact of the greatest military conflict in the history of the world.

CONTRIBUTORS
 
Outi Ampuja
Alla Bolotova
Chris Boyer
Matthew Evenden
Paul Josephson
Simo Laakkonen
Helene Laurent
Carol MacLennan
Gregory Maddox                                                                                              
Ilmo Massa
Evan Mawdsley
Micah Muscolino
William Tsutsui
Richard Tucker           
Timo Vuorisalo            
Anna-Katharina Wöbse

Accounts of lynching in the United States have primarily focused on violence against African Americans in the South. Ken Gonzales-Day reveals racially motivated lynching as a more widespread practice. His research uncovered 350 instances of lynching that occurred in the state of California between 1850 and 1935. The majority were perpetrated against Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans; more Latinos were lynched in California than were persons of any other race or ethnicity.

An artist and writer, Gonzales-Day began this study by photographing lynching sites in order to document the absences and empty spaces that are emblematic of the forgotten history of lynching in the West. Drawing on newspaper articles, periodicals, court records, historical photographs, and souvenir postcards, he attempted to reconstruct the circumstances surrounding the lynchings that had occurred in the spaces he was photographing. The result is an unprecedented textual and visual record of a largely unacknowledged manifestation of racial violence in the United States. Including sixteen color illustrations, Lynching in the West juxtaposes Gonzales-Day’s evocative contemporary photographs of lynching sites with dozens of historical images.

Gonzales-Day examines California’s history of lynching in relation to the spectrum of extra-legal vigilantism common during the nineteenth century—from vigilante committees to lynch mobs—and in relation to race-based theories of criminality. He explores the role of visual culture as well, reflecting on lynching as spectacle and the development of lynching photography. Seeking to explain why the history of lynching in the West has been obscured until now, Gonzales-Day points to popular misconceptions of frontier justice as race-neutral and to the role of the anti-lynching movement in shaping the historical record of lynching in the United States.