Rethinking Gender and Conflict: Embodiments, Discourses and Symbolic Practices

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the empirical studies are closely related to interpretative anthropology and its ethnographic methodology. Ethnographic research uses meticulous descriptions as a method to interpret human behaviour and the related symbols. It shows how, even in the context of significant power differentials, cognition and behaviour, agency and victimisation are gendered in a way that goes beyond the popular stereotypes. Conflict not only produces and reconfirms social hierarchies and power relations, but it also motivates people to transgress cultural boundaries and reconsider their self-images and identity constructions. Recent developments in discourse analysis have linked the concept explicitly to social action. Fairclough demonstrates how discourses, narratives and imaginaries help constitute and consolidate economic and political systems, including their institutional materiality. It deals explicitly with the body can be viewed as part of what some analysts call the corporeal turn in social theory.