NOTES

Carolyn Nordstrom, 1995, "War on the Frontlines" in Fieldwork Under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival, C. Nordstrom and A.C.G.M. Robben, eds., Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 128-153.

Nordstrom describes the experience of people in Mozambique and of herself as ethnographer in a war zone through a series of stories and commentary. She labels her methods "runway anthropology" because she traveled to different areas devastated by war by hitching a ride on cargo planes transporting emergency supplies. In the vicinity she interviewed average people of both sexes and all ages about their individual war experience and collected their stories (140). In this manner she explored the lived experience of the theme of war--- the "ethnography of a warzone" (139). She documents the "statements constructed by the victims themselves to convey the complex way violence is lived, learned, subverted, and survived" (144). However, she did not work in areas still occupied by rebel forces (Renamo).

Nordstrom's reflexive interpretation of these stories is exemplary of postmodernist ethnography. She emphasizes the subjective experiences of local people within an analytical framework of particularism, relativism, and constructionism. She transcends the dehumanizing generic and abstract categories in the usual formal description and analysis of war--- numbers of combatants, civilians, and casualties, or, political ideologies, military strategies and tactics, international arms, etc. Through revealing the stories of individual people Nordstrom humanizes the tragedy of the war experience.

Moreover, Nordstrom cautions that "A concern with the reasons of war comes dangerously close to a concern with making war reasonable." She continues: "I suggest we consider the fact that this search for the "reason" for war actually silences the reality of war" (138) (emphasis added). This is her primary argument as a postmodernist ethnographer of war, emphasizing its complex and contradictory multiple subjective realities (143).

What impresses Nordstrom most is the senselessness of the violence on the one hand, and on the other the resistance, creativity, imagination, resilience, and humor of people who nevertheless try to make sense of their experience. The disorder and destruction of war they counter by the order and constructions they create to give meaning to their lives and experiences. In the midst or aftermath of violence and war, paradoxically, Nordstrom discovers the coexistence of nonviolence and peace. For example, she discusses the role of folk healers in rehabilitating individuals, families, and communities. Thus, periods of war involve more than chaos, anarchy, havoc, or mayhem. Warriors may disrupt and destroy lives and communities as they attempt to undermine by terrorism individual and social identity, will, and meaning, but survivors reconstruct their lives (132). Victims find sense and humanity in life (and death) despite the apparent senselessness and dehumanization of the violence and war. They are "constructing social order out of chaos" (145, 147). [Note that the war in Mozambique was instigated by the then pro-apartheid governments of Rhodesia and South Africa, but had no coherent political ideology and little public support in Mozambique (133)].