What There is to Fear: Scenes of Worldmaking and Unmaking in the Aftermaths of Violence.

'What there is to fear', is how a taxi driver put it. That is, in different worlds 'what there is to fear' shifts. It's a dark definition of a world – a universe of shared fears. But in Ecuador's Amazon, snakes are one thing there is to fear, while in metropolitan Quito, among Colombian forced migrants, other Colombians are what there is to fear: paramilitaries, decommissioned guerillas or extortionists who cross the border to exact a price – in blood, pain or money. Yet, in therapeutic encounters several forced migrants I know were told they suffered from persecution anxiety or that the face of the killer they saw across the market stall was probably just another Ecuadorean face. Working through a series of 'scenes' this article asks how fear works to create and break human kinship–or what Sahlins has called the 'mutuality of being'–and what I am calling a world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]