Collective violence changes the perpetrators, victims, and societies in which it occurs. It targets the body, the psyche, and the socio-cultural order. How do people come to terms with these tragic events? This groundbreaking collection of essays by anthropologists, psychologists and psychoanalysts, drawing on field research in many different parts of the world, profits from an interdisciplinary dialogue. Providing provocative, at times deeply troubling, insights into the darker side of humanity, it also proposes new ways of understanding the terrible things that people are capable of doing to each other.

Introduction; 1. Interdisciplinary perspectives on violence and trauma Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco and Antonius C. G. M. Robben; Part I. The Management of Collective Trauma: 2. Reflections on the prevalence of the uncanny in social violence Yolanda Gampel; 3. The assault on basic trust: disappearance, protest, and reburial in Argentina Antonius C. G. M. Robben; 4. Mitigating discontents with children in war: an ongoing psychoanalytic inquiry Roberta J. Apfel and Bennett Simon; 5. Child psychotherapy as an instrument in cultural research: treating war-traumatized children in former-Yugoslavia David de Levita; Part II. Cultural Responses to Collective Trauma: 6. The traumatized social self: the Parsi predicament in modern Bombay Tanya M. Luhrmann; 7. Identities under siege: immigration stress and social mirroring among the children of immigrants Carola Suarez-Orozco; 8. Modern Greek and Turkish identities and the psychodynamics of Greek-Turkish relations Vamik D. Volkan and Norman Itzkowitz; 9. The violence of non-recognition: becoming a 'conscious' Muslim woman in Turkey Katherine P. Ewing; Epilogue Robert A. LeVine.