Abstract

This article examines the cultural meanings of suicide, self-sacrifice, military and terrorist violence in the context of contemporary Israel, Palestine and the U.S. ‘War on Terror’. Notions of ‘sacrifice’ and ‘suicide’, employed in the anthropological and sociological literature, are evaluated with regard to these materials using a theoretical framework for interpreting violent acts as part of cultural expression and as critically linked to collective imagination and memory. This theoretical approach is then also deployed to re-examine other apparently unintelligible forms of violence, such as school-shootings, serial-killing in the U.S., as well as ethnic-cleansing and community violence elsewhere.