October 2004 vol 20 no 5

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anthropology today
Front cover caption (see back cover) NEIL L. WHITEHEAD 1 Rethinking anthropology of violence LETTERS M. Strathern, P. Gathercole, B. Durrans on the BM Department of Ethnography 20

at

Rethinking anthropology of violence

Guest editorial by Neil L. Whitehead

I. Harper, J. Pettigrew & S. STEPHEN J. COLLIER, ANDREW Shneiderman on Nepali Maoists 21 LAKOFF & PAUL RABINOW 3 P. Kalve on globalization and insecurity 21 Biosecurity: Towards an anthropology of the contemporary L. Riddle on Routledge publishing 21 MONICA SCHOCH-SPANA 8 Bioterrorism: US public health and a secular apocalypse RICHARD A. WILSON 14 The trouble with truth: Anthropology's epistemological hypochondria KEITH HART 18 Letter from Europe, October 2004 COMMENT Alan Barnard Indigenous peoples 19 P.-J. Ezeh, Keith Hart Anthropology and relevance 19 CONFERENCES F.K.G. Lim and S. Thiranagara 22 Locating the field: Metaphors of space, place and context in anthropology Max Carocci 23 Making it explicit: Presentation and representation of Native North Americans Marta Bolognani 24 Generational interaction and social change in Pakistan R. Angelopoulou and G. Lavranos 25 Palaeoanthropology and modern human populations of Eastern Mediterranean
CALENDAR 26 NEWS 27 CLASSIFIED 28

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The war on Iraq was justified by the US government and its allies as a wholly legitimate and necessary form of violence, as if it had been sanctioned by international opinion. The purported aim of the war was to bring democracy to a repressed people and to pre-empt worse violence that Iraq might perpetrate through abuse of weapons of mass destruction. But democracy is proving hard to implement in Iraq. Moreover, the abuse of prisoners by US forces seems to have deeper roots than just the psycho-pathology of individual soldiers. Was the military hierarchy involved, and was it part of a more systematic policy of torture? Abuses of this kind raise questions about how liberal democracies can and do perpetrate shocking and cruel forms of violence: what form do these take, and how do we recognize and interpret them? Anthropology has proved resistant to coming to terms with violence perpetrated from within our own society. Indeed, despite pioneering work by some authors, we have yet to understand and incorporate into anthropological theory serious studies of violence perpetrated by states and communities (including our own), whether it be torture, mutilation or ethnic cleansing. Witnessing violence is, of course, deeply problematic. But without informed perspectives, anthropology will never effectively counter media and popular commentary that stresses only the primitive or tribal nature of many of these conflicts. Such pseudo-anthropological attempts at explanation recapitulate colonial ideas about the inherent savagery of the non-Western world and thus offer no hope for better understanding. In policy terms, the failure to appreciate how violence can be culturally sanctioned, even in our own society, leads to intractable political quagmires, like those in Iraq or Afghanistan, Ireland or the Middle East, where the violent insertion of external political solutions only serves to induce even fiercer opposition using violent means. This is why, in part, there is so much hatred. Such cultural contexts are then linked to the discourse on tribalism and savagery by reference to the religious (or anti-modern) nature of the participants motivations. *** Anthropology has principally concerned itself with the birth of war, the political economy of small-scale conflicts, and with the general context of the encounter between tribal and colonial military traditions. As a persistent aspect of social relations for example amongst genealogical units, or as an elite expression of political or ritual power violence has been extensively theorized and studied by anthropology. This certainly provides an important material context for understanding the development of cultural forms of violence. But new domains of anthropological analysis for example state violence and death squads, post-colonial ethnic conflicts and revitalized forms of traditional killing such as assault sorcery offer a more comprehensive conceptualization of the range of the discourse and practice of violence. Little attention has been paid to violence as a cultural expression or as a performance. This does not mean that culture, conceived of in a simplistic sense, should be cited as a cause of violence, as in Daniel Goldhagens controversial analysis of the Nazi genocide. Moreover, even the most careful analyses of Western forms of violence are not necessarily relevant to understanding post-

Neil L. Whitehead is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. His email is nlwhiteh@wisc.edu. Web-site https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/ nlwhiteh/web/

colonial ethnic violence, such as the genocide in Cambodia, precisely because genocide is here mediated through cultural forms with which we are often unfamiliar. A growing body of ethnographic and historical work suggests a potential new domain for anthropological analysis in particular the work of Africanists in examining the Rwandan/Burundian genocide and the destruction of Liberia, as well as studies of the resurgence of traditional witchcraft as a political force in various global contexts, analyses of the discursive practice of violence in the South and Southeast Asian contexts, and the materials concerning state terror in Central and South America. Any study we make must clearly reach beyond the political and economic conditions under which violence is triggered, or indeed the suffering of victims and the psychology of its interpersonal dynamics. We now also need to focus on the role of perpetrators, their motivations and the social conditions under which they are able to operate. We need to redress any imbalance, in terms of focus, between victims and perpetrators. *** To come to terms with violence properly, we must go beyond the anthropology of identity, and embark on the anthropology of experience, to which individual meanings, emotive forces and bodily practices are central. Committing violence is more than an instrumental way of getting what one wants: it is also very much a discursive practice with symbols and rituals. To recognize this is a first step towards affirming and interpreting, and not just condemning, the presence of violence within our own society, and appreciating its intrinsic meanings. Violence is an ultimate but rarely final instrument for achieving change. In order for acts of violence to be rendered credible within the communities of the aggressor, particular conditions must prevail, followed by consequences that are pragmatically anticipated. Key questions are: how and when is violence culturally appropriate? Why is it only appropriate for certain individuals or groups, and what are the ideas which make violence appropriate, even legitimate, in a given cultural tradition? We may need to re-evaluate in what ways violence is a cross-cultural category, and especially how it maintains or subverts ideas of culture. Richard Wilson, in his article in this issue of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, discusses the epistemological basis for such comparative knowledge with regard to atrocities more widely, stressing the need to examine the empirical as much as the discursive nature of such claims. The case of bioterrorism, as discussed in this issue of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, also presents an important new field of enquiry. Monica Schoch-Spana demonstrates how culture can be a factor in the response to the threat of bioterrorist attack, with groups bonding together against a perceived aggressor when attack scenarios are acted out in counter-terrorist preparations. As Stephen Collier, Andrew Lakoff and Paul Rabinow point out, like the Foucauldian understanding of health, the invocation of security opens unending vistas of Infinite Justice (the original codename for the US militarys first operations against the Taliban). Like the now forgotten war on drugs, the war on terror, and particularly the constant anticipation of it through security preparedness, creates a cultural poetics for violence that legitimizes government policies and discredits dissonant voices, whether internal or external to the canopy of security that enfolds us. The most critical fields of analysis for anthropology in my view are the generative schemes (after Bourdieu), the logical substrate of oppositions, analogies and homologies upon which the cultural representations are based. We need greater efforts at mapping how cultural conceptions

of violence are used discursively to amplify and extend the cultural force of violent acts, or how those violent acts themselves can generate a shared idiom of meaning for violent death, sometimes referred to as the poetics of violent practice. The ethical position of the ethnographer witnessing and interpreting violence is a most critical issue. Apart from the physical dangers involved, conducting fieldwork under fire necessarily entails asking uncomfortable questions that may in themselves be threatening and have material consequences for all parties involved, however remotely. There is no doubt that such research is difficult. Moreover, our preferences as anthropologists undoubtedly lie mostly elsewhere, in more positive topics for research. We tend to fear that to discuss violent cultural practices amongst our informants leads to a negative stereotyping of others. Whilst there is thus a price to be paid, it is to be hoped that by building a more adequate theoretical framework for engaging with such topics, we can improve our ethnographic research of this vital issue, for it directly affects the lives of the people that anthropology studies. *** In the economically and politically marginal spaces of the global ethnoscape, the very area where anthropologists are often active, violence becomes a forceful, if not inevitable, form of affirmation and expression of identity in the face of a loss of tradition and a dislocation of ethnicity. Violence is often engendered not simply by adherence to globalized ideologies such as communism or Islam, but through the regional and sub-regional disputes which have their origins in the complexities of local political history and cultural practices. In fact, it is precisely the local interpretations of such global ideologies that drive community and ethnic conflicts. Unless anthropology can develop the conceptual tools and ethnographically driven understanding of such violent contexts, it risks becoming intellectually marginal to both the subjects and consumers of its texts. The studies now done in conflict areas worldwide cry out for new theories. This is not a task that can wait we face burgeoning ethnic and community violence on a global scale in many of the traditional field sites for anthropological analysis, and this is affecting ethnographic research even in those areas that seemed to have negotiated their colonial past peacefully. It has also given rise to a renewed debate within anthropology about the meaning of traditional violence. It is time for us to compare our ethnographic interpretations systematically and to seek new principles for representing and studying violence as a cultural practice. !

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ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 20 NO 5, OCTOBER 2004