Jack Eller's book brings together widest range of material on violence as a modern and international cultural problem. It combines comprehensive theoretical discussion from multiple disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, psychology, and biology, with rich empirical description and analysis in a global approach. Violence, if not more prevalent, is attracting more attention in academic arenas as well as the public arena. It has become a central feature of the 21st century. Because understanding violence requires comparisons to nonviolence, Eller examines and contrasts a myriad of violent and nonviolent societies--Publisher's description.

"Each chapter contains recommendations for legislators, policy makers, researchers, and families. This book should be on the desk, and minds, of legislators, attorneys, social workers and other mental health professionals who encounter and wish to ameliorate the effects of violence in the lives of their young constituents, clients, and patients." -JOURNAL OF CHILD AND FAMILY STUDIESQuestions relating to violence and children surround us in the media: should V-chips be placed in every television set? How can we prevent another Columbine school shooting from occurring? How should pornography on the internet be regulated? The Handbook of Children, Culture and Violence addresses these questions and more, providing a comprehensive, interdisciplinary examination of childhood violence that considers children as both consumers and perpetrators of violence, as well as victims of it. The Handbook offers much-needed empirical evidence that will help inform debate about these important policy decisions. Moreover, it is the first single volume to consider situations when children are responsible for violence, rather than focusing exclusively on occasions when they are victimized. Providing the first comprehensive overview of current research in the field, the editors have brought together the work of a group of prominent scholars whose work is united by a common concern for the impact of violence on the lives of children. The Handbook of Children, Culture and Violence is poised to become the ultimate resource and reference work on children and violence for researchers, teachers, and students of psychology, human development and family studies, law, communications, education, sociology, and political science/ public policy. It will also appeal to policymakers, media professionals, and special interest groups concerned with reducing violence in children's lives. Law firms specializing in family law, as well as think tanks, will also be interested in the Handbook.

This volume brings together leading sociologists and anthropologists to break new ground in the study of cultural violence. First sketched in Raphael Lemkin’s seminal writings on genocide, and later systematically defined by peace studies scholar Johan Galtung, the concept of cultural violence seeks to explain why and how language, symbols, rituals, practices, and objects are so frequently in the crosshairs of socio-political change. Recent conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia, along with renewed public interest in the repertoire of violence applied to the control and erasure of indigenous populations, highlights the gaps in our understanding of why cultural violence occurs, what it consists of, and how it relates to other forms of collective violence.

In this volume, Lipman and Harrell explore the prevalence and ubiquity of violence in China, a society whose official norms value harmony and condemn conflict. The book investigates violence in a wide variety of situations through the sweep of history and in contexts ranging from the family to the national polity. The book explores motivations for violence from both a historical and a contemporary perspective. Historically, the authors cover bloody religious rebellions in premodern times, the depiction of violence in traditional popular novels, ethnic strife between Muslims and Han Chinese in the Northwest, and feuding local communities in the Southeast. Modern China is depicted by analyses of rural and urban violence in Mao's Cultural Revolution and an examination of continuing domestic violence. This depiction of the cultural themes and motivations for violence allow lessons drawn from specific contexts to be applied to the nature of Chinese culture in general.

This book focuses on a singular cause of male violence—the perpetrator's sense of threat to one of his most valued possessions, namely, his reputation for strength and toughness. The theme of this book is that the Southern United States had—and has—a type of culture of honor.

'Culture' and 'violence' have always been regarded as antithetical terms. In The Culture of Violence, Francis Barker takes a different view. Central to his argument is the contention that, contrary to post-Enlightenment humanist, liberal and conservative thought, 'culture' does not necessarily stand in opposition to political inequality and social injustice, but may be complicit with the oppressive exercise of power. The book focuses on Shakespearean tragedy and on the historicism and culturalism of much present-day cultural theory. Barker's analysis moves dialectically backwards and forwards between these two moments in order to illuminate aspects of early modern culture, and to critique the ways in which the complicity between culture and violence has been occluded. Rejecting the tendency of both modernism and post-modernism to homogenise historical time, Barker argues for a genuinely new, 'diacritical' understanding of the violence of history.

. These essays will provide new insights and focus for understanding internal violence and its cultural connections to a broad audience of scholars, policy makers, and students of international politics and culture.