The Partition Motif in Contemporary Conflicts

Smita Tewari Jassal, anthropologist, teaches Gender and Development at Columbia University, New York. She has taught at SAIS, John Hopkins University and American University, Washington DC. She was Visiting Fellow at the Truman Institute for Peace, Hebrew University, Jerusalem (2003-05) and Senior Fellow at the Center for Women’s Development Studies (1995-2002). Author of Daughters of the Earth: Women and Land in Uttar Pradesh (2001), her forthcoming book explores gender constructs and oral traditions of marginalized castes and communities.

Eyal Ben-Ari was Professor of Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is currently Director of the Kinneret Center for Society, Security and Peace at Kinneret Academic College on the Sea of Galilee. He has carried out fieldwork on Japanese white-collar suburbs, institutions of early childhood education and the Japanese community in Singapore. In Israel, he has studied Jewish saint-worship and social and cultural aspects of the Israeli military. He is currently engaged in projects on Special Operations Forces, the Japanese Self-Defense Forces, anthropological approaches to civil-military relations and creativity in the creative industries.