The Iraq War has cost innumerable lives, caused vast material
destruction, and inflicted suffering on millions of people.
Iraq at a Distance: What Anthropology Can Teach Us About the
War focuses on the plight of the Iraqi people, caught since
2003 in the carnage between U.S. and British troops on one side
and, on the other, Iraqi insurgents, militias, and foreign al Qaeda
operatives.
The volume is a bold attempt by six distinguished anthropologists
to study a war zone too dangerous for fieldwork. They break new
ground by using their ethnographic imagination as a research tool
to analyze the Iraq War through insightful comparisons with
previous and current armed conflicts in Cambodia, Israel,
Palestine, Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, and Argentina. This
innovative approach extends the book's relevance beyond a critical
understanding of the devastating war in Iraq. More and more parts
of the world of long-standing ethnographic interest are becoming
off-limits to researchers because of the war on terror. This book
serves as a model for the study of other inaccessible regions, and
it shows that the impossibility of conducting ethnographic
fieldwork does not condemn anthropologists to silence.
Essays analyze the good-versus-evil framework of the war on terror,
the deterioration of women's rights in Iraq under fundamentalist
coercion, the ethnic-religious partitioning of Baghdad through the
building of security walls, the excessive use of force against
Iraqi civilians by U.S. counterinsurgency units, and the loss of
popular support for U.S. and British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan
after the brutal regimes of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein had been
toppled.
eISBN: 978-0-8122-0354-7
Subjects: Anthropology
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