Virtual War and Magical Death

"Virtual War and Magical Death is a creative project that is bound to stimulate constructive conversation. It inserts contemporary technologies of warfare, particularly the U.S. Army's Human Terrain System, into sociocultural anthropology's current reflections on its theoretical and methodological practices, as well as the purposes of ethnographic inquiry within and beyond the discipline." - Carol J. Greenhouse, author of The Paradox of Relevance: Ethnography and Citizenship in the United States

"By placing in brackets conventional ways of contrasting modernity and premodernity, the contributors to this groundbreaking collection of essays bring into startling relief the phenomenological commonalities that underlie warfare and witchcraft, militarism and magic, while offering radically new insights into the virtual and ritual dimensions of violence and the 'war on terror.'" - Michael Jackson, author of Life Within Limits: Well-being in a World of Want

“The book is strongly recommended, not least to those who are tasked with finding out whether ‘smart’ warfare does what it says on the box.” - Paul Richards, Journal of Military History

“[E]nchanting, ethnographic- and analysis-full…. this volume gathers some of anthropology’s most knowledgeable war scholars who collectively identify the enormous scope of contemporary virtual war in its multiple meanings and applications.” - Alisse Waterston, The Australian Journal of Anthropology

"The volume elegantly frames early-twenty-fi rst-century militarism as a form of magical thinking. The result is a collection that successfully, and productively, brings into dialogue chapters that cover the origins of the US military’s Human Terrain Systems and drone warfare programs with chapters on diamond diggers in rural Tanzania and the expansion of police violence in postwar Guatemala."  - Danny Hoffman, Journal of Anthropological Research

"The creativity of this book’s analysis lies more in its invitation to critically reflect on how competition and defeat, domination and resistance, and war and peace in the modern era survive by inspiring ways of living and methods of acting in the world that modernity has too hastily relegated to the past." - Victor Igreja, Comparative Studies in Society and History

"A polemical stance on ‘the agon of war’ (p. 21) that encompasses the military’s infiltration of academe; the military’s abuse of anthropological knowledge (with vehemence toward human terrain mapping and the Human Terrain System);enhanced interrogation techniques and drone warfare; and socialization into a militaristic mindset through video games and entertainment." - Karen Walker, Terrorism and Political Violence

"This is a valuable collection…. It is a fine tribute to Neil Whitehead, whose insights on why we kill each other will be sorely missed." - Chris Hables Gray, Technology and Culture