Killing Your Neighbors: Friendship and Violence in Northern Kenya and Beyond by Jon Holtzman (review)

This book is a great contribution to the scholarly field of conflict anthropology in particular, but also conflict studies more broadly. It is a rare study because, just as Holtzman says, it "focuses on deliberately talking with enemies—that is, the enemies of my friends" (18). To my knowledge there are few, if any, similar studies out there. Most conflict anthropologists tend to be deeply embedded in one side of the story. Indeed we ponder upon alternative accounts to those we record and often talk about truth in brackets, but hardly venture beyond that. But this is exactly what Holtzman does. With great clarity, this study accounts for a multitude of divergent "truths" so prevalent in war accounts, but so seldom preserved and systematically elaborated in scholarly writings of history, political science, or in anthropology for that matter. This book is about small scale conflicts, yet still it can equally teach those doing research in larger war-zones a great deal. From a methodological vantage point, all researchers working in conflict zones should read this book and compare it with their own fieldsites.

Holtzman has been carrying out research amongst Samburu herders in north central Kenya for nearly two decades. In an area where small-scale wars and cattle raiding are rife, the Samburu generally claim that they are the victims of attacks by neighboring people. This is a story oftentimes heard amongst people residing in conflict zones: we are peaceful, but the people around us are violent; they started it, we merely defend ourselves. Generally, the anthropological researcher stays loyal to one community, one ethnic group, despite being aware of the imbalance of accounts. However, in this book the author ventures into the fields of the enemy (neighbors) in an effort to balance the hackneyed voices of "the friends of the anthropologist." Holtzman does so by comparing a number of case studies about local conflicts, old and new, involving the Samburu. Thus, in Chapter 4, for instance, he bases his analysis on conversations with the surviving family of a Somali sheik who was killed by the Samburu, as well as a person, who in his youth was the one who killed the sheik. It is an obvious way to go about research in highly politicized theaters of war; yet still it is rare. In a formidable way, this and other chapters show wide discrepancies of historical interpretation and collective memory between different ethnic groups.

Holtzman presents, compares, and contextualizes narratives from different participants of the same conflicts, and thus carefully unpacks events of violence. He is not implying that he, because of his close relationship, in opposition to other researchers, gets to the superior truth, but rather humbly analyzes shared histories with different meanings. And, it is fascinating how different they are. Naturally during conflict neighbors are almost always perceived as the instigators and aggressors, and paraphrasing Evans-Pritchard narratives of one's own group comes in a format of "'collective irresponsibility'; killers are people like us but not actually us" (100). The juxtaposition of different views of the same events is eye-opening. Instead of getting lost in stories in an effort to find out what really happened, Holtzman finds factual interest in the stories of violence, what they purport, and what kind of messages they send.

It is a truism that first-hand research in war and conflict zones requires a lot of trust. It takes a lot of time making people open up and tell us about what they do or did during a war. It would be odd for somebody to immediately start to trust a random person and without any hesitation commence narratives about active participation in atrocities or of committing violent crime (recall that much of research by non-anthropologists conducted in conflict zones is actually based on one-off interviews). Without a doubt, it requires a lot of trust for a person to open up to a stranger. But...