World in Shadow (The Illuminated Universe Book 1)

And quite pragmatically, it must be able to delve into why a soldier pulls the trigger against one human and not another; to illuminate how people suffer the ravages of violence and grieving and still craft humanitarian resistance; to chart the realities of how weapons are traded for diamonds and power, and the lives of those who trade them. Today, such questions can't be encompassed by studying a single site. It was traded through a vast network of agents, "advisors," and alliances—all of whom have a say in how the weapon should be used: Perhaps the weapon was smuggled through the legal world into the shadows, entering another global set of alliances.

The soldier who aims the gun aims along years of training, not only on how to kill, but how to draw divisions, hatred, fears, and justifications—a mix of cultural and military lore that has been fed by everything from local grievances through foreign military advisors to global media and music. It was at the height of the war in Mozambique, itself a long way from Europe and the conflicts in Northern Ireland. The boy and I sat in a bombed-out town in the middle of Mozambique, many hundreds of kilometers from the country's capital and cosmopolitan centers.

We were, as traditional scholarship would say, in a profoundly "local" setting. The boy was thin, and dressed only in a pair of tattered shorts and T-shirt. His gun was strung on an old piece of cloth. He had been press-ganged into joining the military, and had never left his home village region until he walked out as a "soldier" about the time he hit puberty. The boy settled in the sun, and began to talk: You know, these white guys are often a whole lot meaner than we are.

I mean, we fight and we kill and all, but it's like these white guys think killing is the answer to everything. We have so many white guys, so many foreigners, around; training us, getting mad at us, fighting us, making money from us. Some are OK, I got sent to this training camp far away, and there were some who were friendly, tried to make sure we got enough to eat, and worked to teach us. People from all over.

Got a whole lot of strange ideas, stuff that sometimes' useful, but a lot of times just didn't make a lot of sense, like it was a lot of trouble to do things that way, and dangerous too. I think fighting like that gives them weird ideas about fighting. Bruce Lee, he laughs , now that's who they should send out to train us. That's where it's at. But who knows, it's all beyond trying to guess. Truth is, I don't think a lot of these guys care if we win or lose. We all see them moving on the mines, doing "business. If I were going to understand this war, and this youth's experiences in it, what story would I best follow?

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I could follow his movements; those of his compatriots and the foreigners he interacted with; the media and movies that shaped his ideas; the war merchants and profiteers from around the world that passed through his life, his country, and its war; the various cultures of militarization that move from warzone to warzone around the world; the vast international systems of economic gain that shape political violence.

This "local" youth-soldier was far from "local. Where does war begin and end? Ethnography must be able to bring a people and a place to life in the eyes and hearts of those who have not been there. But it must also be able to follow not a place, but "place-less-ness," the flows of a good, an idea, an international military culture, a shadow; of the way these place-less realities intersect and are shaped by associations with other places and other place-less forces.

And, as this book will explore in discussing shadow powers, ethnography must be able to illuminate not only a non-place, but also the invisible—that which is rendered non-visible for reasons of power and profit. Power circulates in the corridors of institutions and in the shadows. I will in fact argue that ethnography is an excellent way to study the invisibilities of power—invisibility that is in part constructed by convincing people not to study the shadows, convincing them that the place-less is impossible to situate in study, that it is "out of site.

In a study such as this, some things must remain in the shadows, unseen. And this in turn requires new considerations of what constitutes ethnography. Anthropology developed as a discipline rooted in fieldwork, and as such it named names and mapped places. In the localized settings in which anthropologists worked, every quote was enmeshed in a web of social relations such that everyone knew who spoke, to whom, and why.

It was this "factuality" that lent anthropology an aura of objectivity; and alternatively, the respect of the subject. But war and the shadows change this equation. Local knowledge is crucial to understanding, yet quoting local informants can mean a death sentence for them. When it comes to massacres, human rights violations, massive corruption, and global profiteering, even situating one's quotes and data in a "locatable" place and person can be dangerous. Academic responsibility here rests in protecting one's sources, not in revealing them.

Traditional scholarship might say that leaving out the names and the places behind the quotes waters down the impact of the research. Having struggled with this question for years now, I have come to disagree. Part of the reason so many aspects of war and extra-state behavior are "invisible" to formal accounting is precisely the problems and dangers of the research: The systems of knowledge and action that undergird these realities resonate around the world.

Exposing the name of the poor peasant who saw his family murdered will not shed light on the circumstances surrounding that murder—it will merely endanger his life; and exposing the name of the general who is profiteering from war will not illuminate the international networks of extra-legal economies and power—it will merely endanger my ability to return to this field site.

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This is not to leave a study hanging in mid-air. The field data presented in my work is all firsthand. In lieu of naming specific names, it sheds light on roles found from one conflict to the next; it maps the flux and flow of violence, shadow powers, and peace-building along connected sites to larger transnational patterns.

The quotes throughout this work are from people who populate the immediacy of these realities. In protecting these people and their larger stories, I have given considerable thought as to how to present each story: When asked to provide more concrete and situated data—the names and places of traditional scholarship—I must respond that endangering those with whom we work endangers the very integrity of our discipline. Weaving together these layers and levels is the best way I know at present to explore, and begin to expose, the visible and invisible realities that attend to war, peace, and shadow powers that are shaping the course of the twenty-first century.

I'll never know why my friend in Sri Lanka left her handbag, wrap, and suitcase in the roadway, yet carried a watermelon as she struggled to get home through the rioting. She says she doubts she will ever figure it out herself. But we speculated about this for months: You know, she said , it seems illogical to leave what I might most need in the midst of a life-threatening night. But, when you think of it, it seems illogical to kill people for an identity: It seems illogical to target people on their jobs and associations, voter registration designations, and location of their homes.

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My handbag was filled with such "identity": It just occurred to me: Leaving my glasses, my keys? Perhaps I just didn't want to see what was going on; and what are keys but an illusion of safety shattered by mobs who just break windows and enter houses? What did I care that night if I broke my window to get into my home? If I had to break in, that would be wonderful, it would mean my house had not been attacked. It was heavy, and when your life is on the line, all those pretty saris and comfortable shoes don't mean a whole lot.

But I think it was more: What have we humans become, I believe I worried that night, that we will feast on the dead for a television or a trinket? When did we begin to value goods above good? My suitcase, filled with my goods, became heavy in more ways than one. I left those behind. I left behind the presents I bought for my family. Somehow I think they seemed to embody the religious strife that was tearing my country to shreds that night.

Illuminated Universe Series

It was heavy, and unwieldy, and I can't imagine what I looked like, an old mother struggling down burning streets covered in dirt and ash carrying a large watermelon in her arms. But it was something pure of violence; a present for my family that cost no one their life; something that seemed to represent sanity and succor in a world gone mad. A watermelon carries its own seeds for the future. Perhaps that is what I was trying to do. Patricia Pinnock, Skyline Johannesburg: David Philip Publishers, , The riots reflected larger and more enduring religious, ethnic, and political fissures in Sri Lanka.

The population of the country is 30 percent Sinhalese Sinhala speaking Buddhists, and approximately 12 percent Tamil Tamil speaking Hindu. Government and military positions are predominately held by Sinhalese Buddhists. The Tamils, a majority of whom live in the North of the country, have long sought better representation in government and policy—either by democratic process or by the creation of a separate state. In , an armed Tamil faction retaliated against government repression of Tamils by a guerrilla attack that killed thirteen soldiers.

The riots were ostensibly sparked by this: Tamils did not riot against the Sinhalese in return. The violence spread nationwide and lasted a full week, during which time thousands of Tamils lost their lives and one-sixth of the country's infrastructure was destroyed. Wildcatting, as I use the term here, is based in international business concerns that can be legal, indeterminately legal, or downright illegal—but yield quick, and often vast, profits, commonly in the context of political instability.

War so little matches classic accounts of war that a truism has emerged for me through the years I have studied violence at its epicenters: Amsterdam University Press, , Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites London: Virago, , Avner Greif, "Contracting, Enforcement, and Efficiency: World Bank, , These shadows are not peripheral to a country's economic and political systems, but deeply enmeshed in them, as the following quote addresses: It is an astonishing and lamentable chapter in the history of American law enforcement that almost until the end of a half century as Director of the FBI, J.

Edgar Hoover denied the existence of "mafia" or "Cosa Nostra" and refused to devote any special intelligence or law enforcement resources to this species of American criminal. It is not only law enforcement that has failed to come to grips with organized crime. The American political system has not set itself against organized crime, in part no doubt because organized crime is active in politics.

The Final Report of the N. New York University Press, , xxvi-xxvii. The work presented here is not traditional ethnography, though it may well become traditional along the course of a continuously interconnected twenty-first century. It addresses questions that flow across borders and neat distinctions. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about World in Shadow , please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia.

James rated it really liked it Jun 01, Vivek rated it it was amazing Mar 31, Marcy rated it liked it Jan 24, Carrie rated it really liked it Sep 24, Anji marked it as to-read Aug 23, Pam Smith Faber marked it as to-read Sep 23, Grampy marked it as to-read Sep 23, Christine marked it as to-read Sep 23, BookishDreamer marked it as to-read Sep 23, Jackie Lane marked it as to-read Sep 25, Kathie added it Sep 25, Tera marked it as to-read Sep 26, Stacy marked it as to-read Sep 27, Rita marked it as to-read Sep 30, Angel Starr marked it as to-read Oct 05, Over the course of the series, Ryan Cawdor and his band have fought and defeated countless power-mad villains, and most died within one book.

Many villains were Barons- rulers of small dictatorships scattered across The Deathlands notably, Barons are also the primary antagonists of the sequel series Outlanders, except there are now only a small number of technologically adept superhuman barons instead of the hundreds of lesser kingpins. Another notable group are the mutants- humanoid beings that have adapted and gained inhuman powers, psionic and otherwise, due to radiation exposure and natural selection. There are a few notable villains in this list, which include:.

Laurence James then solely wrote the Deathlands series up to and including Eclipse at Noon.

However, due to failing health he was forced to leave the series in Prior to his death in February , James wrote one last novel, Crucible of Time , which was released in All other Deathlands novels have been written by a number of other authors, including Mark Ellis who produced the first post-Laurence James entry, Stoneface. Gold Eagle is owned by Harlequin. In , Harlequin was purchased by HarperCollins.

It was decided that Gold Eagle would be shut down. After December , Deathlands novels stopped being produced following the company's closure, with the rights transferred to Graphic Audio and all subsequent sequels being in an exclusive audio drama format. Below is a list of the books in the Deathlands series. Following the closure of Gold Eagle Publishing in , Graphic Audio, the primary provider of audiobook adaptations of the Deathlands franchise, acquired the rights to produce more content for the series. All titles produced in-house by Graphic Audio are exclusively in a narrated audio drama format.

The characters of Doc Tanner and Lori Quint were absent. Many of the Deathlands and Outlanders novels have been adapted to the Graphic Audio audio book format. They are primarily targeted at long-distance drivers. With an average running time of nearly 8 hours, each of the books is a definite favorite of many OTR long distance, over-the-road truck drivers. The Cutting Corporation sets the Deathlands and Outlanders audio books apart from others by using a multicast. Each character has their own voice, and so makes it easy to picture the events from the book actually taking place.

Music and background sound effects also accompany the sound track, setting their productions apart from most normal audio-books. The Deathlands Graphic Audio series currently has plans to continue the series after the events of the books end, the first completely original story releasing in Fall Created in by Mark Ellis, Outlanders is the official spin-off series from Deathlands , although it established an identity distinct from Deathlands with the first novel, Exile To Hell.

Outlanders provided a more expansive and complete backstory for the "Axlerverse" and the causes for the nuclear holocaust rather than relying on the " US vs. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.