Ruptures

Martin Holbraad · Bruce Kapferer · Julia F. Sauma

Jun 2019 · UCL Press

About this ebook

Ruptures brings together leading and emerging international anthropologists to explore the concept of ‘rupture’. Understood as radical and often forceful forms of discontinuity, rupture is the active ingredient of the current sense of a world in turmoil, lying at the heart of some of the most defining experiences of our time: the rise of populist politics, the corollary impulse towards protest and even revolutionary change, as well as moves towards violence and terror, and the responses these moves elicit.

Rupture is addressed in selected ethnographic and historical contexts: images of the guillotine in the French revolution; reactions to Trump’s election in the USA; the motivations of young Danes who join ISIS in Syria; ‘butterfly effect’ activism among environmental anarchists in northern Europe; the experiences of political trauma and its ‘repair’ through privately sponsored museums of Mao’s revolution in China; people’s experience of the devastating 2001 earthquake in Gujarat; the ‘inner’ rupture of Protestant faith among Danish nationalist theologians; and the attempt to invent ex nihilo an alphabet for use in Christian prophetic movements in Congo and Angola.

Ruptures takes in new directions broader intellectual debates about continuity and change. In particular, by thematising rupture as a radical, sometimes violent, and even brutal form of discontinuity, it adds a sharper critical edge to contemporary discourses, both in social theory and public debate and policy.

About the author

Martin Holbraad is Professor of Social Anthropology at UCL and author of The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition (Cambridge, 2016, co-authored) and Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination (Chicago, 2012).

Bruce Kapferer is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen and Honorary Professor at UCL. His recent publications include 2001 and Counting: Kubrick, Nietzsche and Anthropology (Chicago, 2014) and Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia(Berghahn, 2011).

Julia F. Sauma is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Bergen. She has published articles in Revista de Antropologia and Cadernos de Campo, and is currently preparing a monograph titled Collective: A Maroon Sociology.