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What is terror? What are its roots and its results -- and what part does it play in human experience and history? This volume offers a number of timely and original anthropological insights into the ways in which acts of terror -- and reactions to those acts -- impact on the lives of virtually everyone in the world today, as perpetrators, victims or witnesses. As the contributors to this volume demonstrate, what we have come to regard as acts of terror -- whether politically motivated, or state-sanctioned -- have assumed many different forms and provoked widely differing responses throughout the world.At a deeper level, the contributors explore the work of the imagination in extreme contexts of danger, such as those of terror and terrorism. By stressing the role of the imagination, and its role in amplifying the effects of experience, this collection brings together a coherent set of analyses that offer innovative and unexpected ways of understanding a major global problem of contemporary life.

Professor Andrew Strathern and Dr Pamela J. Stewart are long-term research collaborators in the Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, USA, carrying out research in the Pacific, Asia and Europe. Dr Neil Whitehead is Professor of Anthropology and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA.