Suchergebnisse

This article focuses on sorcery, revenge, and anti-revenge among the Qom people in Argentina. For them, death is the result of sorcery or a shamanic attack. When a relative dies, the family may decide to avenge him through practices performed on his body. Nonetheless, under specific circumstances relatives decide not to take revenge, performing what I refer to as 'anti-revenge'. Ethnographic analysis of relations among victims, aggressors, and avengers reveals how alternation between relational
excess and fissures makes individuation possible. The processes
responsible for the composite character of personhood lead to a relational
excess that needs to be restrained. The relation between revenge and
anti-revenge is a key aspect of a Qom understanding of personhood, in
which individuation needs to be achieved to avoid indifferentiation.

In Violence and the Sacred, René Girard argues that vengeance is a vicious circle that is broken only when the power to seek reprisal is consolidated in a sovereign authority. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, and in particular her concept of natality, I argue that Girard fails to appreciate how revenge is an act that may be repeated with a difference. When this possibility is admitted, we need no longer depend upon sovereign authority to disrupt the cycle of vengeance and, practicing humble resolve, may be surprised by what unfolds.

Discusses upcoming general elections May 13, 2001; prospects for re-election of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi; Italy.

The traumas of decolonisation were not felt in the colonies alone - Portugal itself is still living through the aftershocks of 1974