ABSTRACT
In topics such as these, there are always legitimate grounds for differences of
of knowledge we can have of them ....
This is specially the case when it is a matter of trying to mark out what
appears to be a new area of human experience for preliminary analysis,
define its contours, identify the elements in its field, and discern the kinds
Terrorism is an event , a news story, a social drama, a narrative. It is a genre of "emplotted" action in which narrative sequence is a moral and discursive construct, and in which "the event is not what happens. The event is that which can be narrated:' 1 The initial problem that the writer must confront , as is the case with any storyteller or historian , is
selection of the narrative form in which to plot the events and the arguments. Whether searching for the longue duree of historical "causes" or seeking explanation within the more immediate realities of a personal biography, whether viewing terrorism as a recent form of warfare or as a type of ritual action, such "emplotments" are intimately connected with "tropes." Metaphor, metonym, synecdoche, and irony
are the ultimate keys, the master tropes of distinctive narrative modes as well as their associated types of consciousness. How such tropes function in the various arguments and performances of terrorism dis-
course is the subject of this chapter. "Type of warfare," "ritual," "pathology," "social drama," and so on,
are some scholarly categories and poetic strategies-each equipped with its disciplinary literature and prominent authors-commonly
applied to the study of terrorism. These are for the most part selfenclosed genres in which each author refuses to relinquish or transcend the vocabulary and premises of his/her discipline. "Ritual," for example, is high on the list of anthropological preferences, for that omnivorous concept sums up much of what is distinctive about anthropological understanding; yet such preference does not preclude that "theater" might serve equally well. Wagner-Pacifici's work on the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, with its concluding argument for "the victory of melodrama over tragedy in the Moro social drama, "2 brings the selfconscious competition over narrative genre to the center stage of terrorism analysis.
