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Chapter 2 investigates some themes related to resilience and ‘an extended normality’ under crisis. In the political void the camp inhabitants found themselves in, some events and behavior related to the violence that in ‘non-occupied time’ would be considered abnormal needed to be reframed as normal to be rendered manageable. On the other hand, some events, such as violent and premature deaths of fellow Palestinians, remained extraordinary and were therefore accentuated by the belief in martyrdom so as to be comprehensible and at least partly meaningful. The main argument is that normalizing processes were not without contradictions and that Dheishehans were thrown between extremes. The chapter also discusses the challenges, for instance, outbreaks of panic and deep mistrust, which emerged as camp inhabitants attempted to maintain hope and personal sanity and failed to deal with calamities. The local concept sumud is discussed as an important tool when practicing resilience.

The chapter explores connections among postsocialism, neoliberal capitalism, and shamanism. The author traces the multiple contexts behind current misfortunes by revealing the cumulative repercussions of the socioeconomic procedures that have been implemented as modernization projects in Mongolia since the advent of socialism in 1921. These include, during socialism, forced collectivization and semi-sedentarization of nomads, and the neoliberal reforms that were pushed by the international community after socialism. The chaos and corruption of privatization in particular, with the inheritance of risks and liabilities that Verdery has noted, led to economic devastation and inequality. The author argues that while these external processes and projects constitute sources of misfortune, they have also transformed the local world itself into an additional source that generates more calamity. The author uses the concept of genealogy to highlight the ways in which shamanic epistemology explains misfortunes not as individual mistakes or karma, but as intimately linked with the life-events of ancestors in longue durée, as part of larger historical processes. At the same time, in everyday life, shamanic competition together with gossip, mistrust, and the assumption of ill-intention by others tend to undo the Buryats’ efforts to deal with misfortune, and in fact exacerbate it.

The terms of the third ‘peace of religion’(1570) were crucial to the rising tensions that sparked the 1572 massacres, especially its insistence that acts of violence by Catholics and Protestants should be forgotten if not forgiven. Charles IX’s firm commitment to the peace and its core terms was key to his policy of restoring order, but it was opposed, especially by Catholic pamphleteers and preachers bent on eliminating heresy. For them, forgetting recent actions in defence of the true religion was akin to apostasy. Royal control over government, central and provincial, was also at stake, given that religious differences had sharpened the political rivalries among the political elites, but as royal commissioners sent to impose religious peace discovered, many provinces were hostile or difficult to control. At the centre, rivalry between the leading aristocratic groupings threatened Charles IX’s capacity to sustain a deeply unpopular peace. In mid-1572 France was increasingly edgy, with rumours and memories of earlier conspiracies still capable of triggering alarms. Paris, the capital, epitomised these fears.