LAUSR

To explain war rapes in former Yugoslavia, the work of cultural ideology is never complete, but an unstable relation between cultural activism and cultural norms and practices provides the point of departure to move beyond the stereotyped accounts of mass rapes and develop a neo-structural model of canonical formalization based on discourse analysis and transformational morphodynamics. Methodologically, the new model takes lead from the abstract mathematical operations and canonical transformations suggested by Lévi-Strauss for the structural study of myth. The assumption is that mass rapes are fueled by a specific cultural activism that activates a cultural ideology that makes mass rapes effective in a military strategy of ethnic cleansing.