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.
