Front and Back Covers, Volume 26, Number 5. October 2010

Abstract

Front and back cover caption, volume 26 issue 5Front coverRETHINKING SUICIDE BOMBINGThe body is a key focus for anthropological research and analysis. The cover photographs highlight the way multiple aspects of life, including political life, are mapped onto the body, and the emergence of a collective, as well as individual, identity through these experiences.The front cover shows a young Palestinian boy staring at an Israeli guard's gun, inches from his face, while waiting at the Abu Dis checkpoint in East Jerusalem. Although the scene is calm, the photograph captures an implicit violence (any step out of line can and will be punished) and reveals the daily reality of political and structural violence in the lives of Palestinians. In this image, the child can be seen as an individual who may experience personal trauma as a result of these daily encounters with violence. But he can also be seen as representing a collective Palestinian body which, under the occupation, is humiliated and forced into a childlike position, with daily decisions, including over movement, entirely in the control of Israeli forces.In her article in this issue, Natalia Linos calls on anthropology to offer a critical analysis of suicide bombing and examine the central role of the body in this act. She posits that in a context of political and structural violence that encroaches on both individual and group identity, suicide attacks may be considered an extreme form of reclaiming the violated body through self‐directed violence. Through suicide attacks in public spaces, the body may be used to contest physical barriers imposed by an oppressor, resist power imbalances, and reclaim authority over one's body as well as geographical space.Back coverASSEMBLING BODIESThe back cover shows a South African ‘body map’, on display at the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) until 6 November 2010 as part of the exhibition ‘Assembling bodies: Art, science and imagination’, reviewed in this issue.This self‐portrait by Babalwa depicts her life as an activist and epitomizes the ethical and political negotiations that surround definition and treatment of particular bodies in contemporary South Africa. Babalwa was a member of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), which successfully campaigned for the widespread availability of antiretroviral treatment therapies. Her self‐portrait is one of a series of life‐sized body maps made by members of the Bambanani Womens Group in 2003, as part of a project documenting the lives of women with HIV/AIDS.The body maps and associated narratives trace the co‐existence of multiple ways of understanding and experiencing bodies and disease in these women's lives. The imagery — referring to family and friends, political life, biomedical science, anatomical details, moral pollution and religious beliefs — suggests many bodies existing within a single corporeal form.In addition to revealing individual subjectivities, the body maps also highlight the shifting dynamics of sociality. Behind each self‐portrait is the outline of another shadowy form, a reminder of the help received and the potential for future support.