As collective violence erupts in many parts of the world, the media often links this to age-old ethnic or religious hostilities, thereby freeing the state, its agents and its political elites from responsibility. This book encourages readers to look more closely at the issues of violence, ethnicity and the state by focusing on specific instances of violence in their local contexts and questioning the prevailing interpretations of them. Through five case studies of both rural and urban public violence, including police-public confrontations and Hindu-Muslim riots, this book shows how, out of many possible interpretations applicable to these incidents, governments and the media select those that support existing relations of power in state and society. Adopting different modes (narrator, detective and social scientist) Brass treats incidents of collective violence arising intitially out of such common occurences as a drunken brawl, the rape of a woman and the theft of an idol, and demonstrates how some incidents remain localized whilst others are fit into broader frameworks of meaning, thereby becoming useful for upholders of dominant ideologies.
He argues that incessant talk about violence and its implications in these circumstances contributes to its persistence rather than to its reduction. Such treatment, he claims, serves in fact to mask the causes of violence, displace the victims from the centre of attention and divert society's gaze from those responsible for its endemic character. He explains how this process ultimately implicates everyone in the perpetuation of systems of violence.