Liisa Malkki's extraordinarily powerful book joins the study of violence and the body with history and nationalism through detailed ethnographic work and a strong grasp of theory. If there is a weakness in the book, it is perhaps that it is burdened with too many themes, since it is also about displacement, marginality and invisibility; about narratives of the self and the conditions of narrative making; and, not least, about the politics of ethnic violence in Burundi from 1972 until the present.