Religion
Ritual and the Enemy Body: Reconceptualizing Acts of Atrocity
The concept of ritual has been all too loosely applied to violence and atrocity with assumptions of repetitiveness, mythic symbolism, and religious overtones. This book project (based on a submitted academic paper) examines a selection of modern cases of atrocity for specific ritual elements: attention to body and spaces as frames for meaning; a prescripted mode of action; and performative enaction of a new millennial or transgressive order. Chapters explain these models, then the challenges posed by violence in literature for gauging ritual, and then introduce case-studies from American lynching, militia atrocities in Sierra Leone and Liberia (1990s), and incidences of widescale sexual abuse in Bosnia and Iraq (1990s, 2014). The book will contribute to the larger discussion of religious violence by introducing an important dimension of the performance of genocidal and war atrocity.