Carolyn Nordstrom

Rape: Politics and theory in war and peace

(1996). Rape: Politics and theory in war and peace. Australian Feminist Studies: Vol. 11, No. 23, pp. 147-162.

A question of medicine answering. Health commodification and the social relations of healing in Sri Lanka.

Biomedicine although institutionally powerful in Sri Lanka has not been able to depersonalize illness or promote a notion of treatment efficacy disconnected from social relations. An ideology of healing crosscuts the trend toward health commodification. This paper focuses on three concepts fundamental to the interactive dynamics of treatment efficacy: constitution, habit, and power of the hand. A movement between two distinct types of health care seeking behavior is described. One is inspired by finding the right medicine fix, the other by finding a practitioner having a sensitivity toward ones sense of person and all this entails.

Exploring pluralism—The many faces of Ayurveda

This paper argues that because Ayurveda is commonly approached as a single coherent tradition of medicine characterized predominately by the doctrines, clinical practitioners, and medical infrastructure that supports it, the rich diversity of empirical indigenous medicine available in the daily lives of the Sinhalese is often obscured. Thus the numbers of IMPs, the wide range of services they provide, and the importance of Ayurveda and Sinhala medicine as basic explanatory models of health and illness within the general population may be significantly under-estimated in analyses of Sri Lankas medical system. In practice, Ayurveda is a dynamic phenomenon that offers multifaceted approaches to healing. These diverse healing formats develop to meet the constantly changing needs of the society and of illness patterns. This analysis views illness and health care in terms of the multiple systems of knowledge and action, phenomena and interaction, that characterize them as well as in terms of the medical treatises and institutions that formalize them. In this light, Ayurveda emerges as a plural medical system in itself. As such, it remains a fundamental means of defining and treating illness in Sri Lanka.

Four Ways to Tell a Story on Violence

Adriana Qui ones Giraldo Gilsenan, Michal. Lords of the Lebanese Marches: Violence and Narrative in an Arab Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997.

Women, economy, war

24.95, hardcover.

Girls behind the (front) lines

Political violence amplifies contemporary trends occurring worldwide in the twenty-first century: globalization, an increasing reliance on the informal economy, a shift from twentieth-century manufacturing to resource and labour wildcatting, and the growth of complex international extra-legal trade networks. Women are central to all of these, though their roles both as leaders of development and victims of violence are often overlooked in mainstream analyses. To explain these invisibilities, this article introduces the concept of vanishing points – places where formal analyses and policy effectively cease, such as the dividing lines between formal and informal economies, and the violence associated with controlling extra-legal profits that is effectively invisible to the public at large. The realities of womens work amid political violence and postwar development, and across the spectrum of in/formality are explored. The conclusions serve to challenge established notions of power, profit, and economy, and the role of gender within these.

Casting Long Shadows: War,Peace, and Extra-Legal Economies

Behind the rhetoric of soldiers fighting soldiers that fuels military propaganda and popular accounts of war around the world, children are maimed, tortured, starved, forced to fight, and killed in numbers that rival adult civilian casualties, and outnumber those of soldiers who die. These youthful casualties—some one and a half million in recognized armed conflicts in the last decade alone—are largely invisible: most of the military texts, the political science analyses, and the media accounts of war ignore the tactical targeting of children. In over a decade of studying war, I have seen children victims of war lying maimed in hospitals or dead in bombed out villages, and living or dying of starvation in refugee camps and on the streets after their families and homes have been attacked. I have seen children sold into forced labor and sexual servitude by international networks of profiteers who exploit the tragedies of war and the powerlessness of children. This constitutes a multi‐billion dollar transnat...

A Different Kind of War Story

This is an ethnography of the shadows.1 The term shadows as I use it here refers to systems of association and exchange that occur outside the law. Ethnography underscores the fact that the data presented here comes from live fieldwork conducted in epicentres of political violence and apart from formal state systems – in the poorly illuminated yet powerful realm of the extra-legal.2