The Politics of Anthropology

Abstract

Virtual War and Magical Death: Technologies and Imaginaries for Terror and Killing. Edited by Neil L. Whitehead, Sverker Finnstrom. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013. 289 pp., $24.95 paperback (ISBN: 978-0-8223-5447-5). Neil L. Whitehead and Sverker Finnstrom's edited collection, Virtual War and Magical Death , announces itself, though never explicitly so, as a Derridean project, in that one of the book's objectives concerns the subject position of the anthropologist—never a neutral observer—and the function of anthropology in a weaponized culture, a culture in which “war is always, everywhere” (p. 108). The starting point is, then, that philosophical vigilance forming one of Jacques Derrida's injunctions—a vigilance against the supposed neutrality of acts of witnessing or recording, the practices of a scholarship whose research is now frequently funded by and feeds back into the “military–industrial complex,” tentacular compound whose “magic” ostensibly occupies the heart of this collection. In particular, the early chapters, initiated by Whitehead's interrogation of his discipline, focus on precisely this act or state of vigilance. “Ethnography, Knowledge, Torture, Silence” opens the book with …