Out of War

"Out of War draws on author Mariane C. Ferme's three decades of ethnographic engagements to examine the after-effects of the harms of a civil war, the legacy of which is experienced in both physical and psychological ways. Ferme examines the relationship among violence, temporality, trauma, and forms of knowledge. She also puts an emphasis on "war times"--The different qualities of temporality. She considers the persistence of pre-colonial and colonial figures of sovereignty re-elaborated in the context of war, and the circulation of rumors and neologisms that freeze in time as collective anxieties (or "chronotopes"). Above and beyond the expected traumas of war, Ferme explores the breaks in the intergenerational transmission of techniques of farming and hunting knowledge, and the lethal effects of remembering experienced traumas and of forgetting local knowledge. In the context of massive population displacements and humanitarian interventions, this ethnography traces strategies of survival and material dwelling, and the juridical creation of new figures of victimhood, where colonial and postcolonial legacies are reinscribed in neoliberal projects of decentralization and individuation"--Provided by publisher.