Rituals of War is an investigation into the earliest historical records of violence and biopolitics. In ancient Iraq (ca.3000-500 BC) rituals of war and images of violence constituted part of the magical technologies of warfare that formed the underlying irrational processes of war. Building on Michel Foucault鈥檚 argument in Discipline and Punish that the art of punishing must rest on a technology of representation, Zainab Bahrani investigates the ancient Mesopotamian record to reveal how that culture relied on the portrayal of violence and control as part of the mechanics of warfare. Moreover, she takes up the more recent arguments of Giorgio Agamben on sovereign power and biopolitics to focus on the relationship of power, the body and violence in Assyro-Babylonian texts and monuments of war. Bahrani brings together and analyzes facets of war and sovereign power that fall under the categories of representation and display, the aesthetic, the ritualistic, and the supernatural. The author describes these as the magical technologies of war, the realm of the irrational that enables the ideologies of just war in the distant past as well as today.
Awards and Recognition
- Winner of the James Henry Breasted Prize, American Historical Association
Zainab Bahrani is the Edith Porada Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Art History and Archaeology at Columbia and she is also a native Iraqi who has been deeply involved in chronicling the destructive consequences of present imperial war and violence in a region she knows well. Although this book, which appeared in 2008, only indirectly addresses the then ongoing US sponsored war and occupation, its larger concerns are very much shaped by her experience of contemporary circumstances.
"Rituals of War is an ambitious attempt to find new ways of viewing the ancient past, and for that Zainab Bahrani should be applauded. What makes Bahrani’s examination of the Battle of Til-Tuba so fresh and exciting is that she is the first to combine the art-historical and narrative evidence."鈥�Times Literary Supplement
“Bahrani’s groundbreaking study of the arts of war in ancient Mesopotamia may seem at first glance to have only a distant connection to the current war on terror and the war in Iraq. But her investigation of the ‘magical technologies’ of ancient imperial warfare could not be timelier. Beheadings, mutilations, images of torture and triumph, displacement of populations, and ethnic cleansings justified as sacred missions are just as common today as they were in 1500 BC. Instead of the divination of animal entrails, we have ‘actionable intelligence’ to provide the rationale for war and a set of dubious predictions of its outcome. This brilliant book is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the role of images in war, and the way that media, symbolic representations, and ritualistic spectacles of iconoclasm play a role just as important as weapons and the movement of armies.”—W.J.T. Mitchell, author of Image Science
“Rituals of War applies as much to the U.S. war machine and the arts of war today as to ancient Mesopotamia. Even more so, given the blindness to magic and myth in the technological language of power that would shape destiny in the Middle East and the future of the world. With verve and enviable clarity, Bahrani gives us new ways to think the magic of the state, from torture to its reading of omens. How poignant that this superb work of theory and scholarship, while speaking of ancient Iraq, can be read allegorically in this way.”—Michael Taussig, author of Palma Africana
