Violence & the cultural order

2007

This article deals with violences of culture and cultures of violence. After reviewing the specificity of anthropological views of violence, we propose a processual reconceptualisation of this, reflect on the forms and possible consequences of ethnographic research and representation in this field, and end by outlining the future of an anthropology of violence that can also be an anthropology of peace. An epilogue on 11 March serves to relocate this theoretical sketch in the context of global terrorism.

Violence induces a strong state of fear and fear is not only embodied by the victims of violence alone. Fear in violent circumstances or in “dangerous fields” runs through all participants from the perpetrators to the victims and the observers alike. With fear at the back of their mind, the perpetrators exert violence and with fear the victims responds as either a way to survive or a way to resist and this fear in turn influences the participant observer or creates more sense of fear for the observer.

Modern Psychoanalysis, 2003

Cultures of Violence: Interpersonal Violence in Historical Perspective, ed Stuart Carroll (Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 79-96. , 2007

Conceptualizing Cultures of Violence and Cultural Change.

The Many Faces of Violence: Toward an Integrative Phenomenological Conception Events of extreme violence, such as suicide-attacks, 9/11, or the “return of a new archaic violence,” have recently renewed attention about physical violence. Interestingly, there has also been a reappearance of concern about social, cultural, and structural violence. However, while all these forms have been subject to special studies, interdisciplinary research is still hampered by the lack of a unifying approach. What is missing is a paradigm that allows us to think these forms of violence as aspects of a unified phenomenon. To resolve this deficit and elaborate an integrative conception of violence, this project will use the phenomenological method. Generally viewed, phenomenology studies how we make sense of the world. Our working hypothesis holds that violence is destructive of sense and, on a more foundational level, our bodily capacities of sense-making. We see embodiment as a multi-level phenomenon, beginning with the physical “I can” and proceeding through various levels of cultural, social, and political practices. Given this correlation, we will analyze how violence destroys the ways we make sense of the world and ourselves according to our traditions and institutions. Because such sense structures delineate our world by forming a series of dependencies, we can be exposed to indirect violence, i.e. symbolic, cultural, and structural. To unfold the implications of our research, we will examine specific examples of cultural and political collapse, so-called “cultures of violence,” “coercive environments,” as well as structures of multiple social exclusion. In this context, we will also address the poietic function of violence and analyze how it is used for the formation and expression of identity, involving both individuals and collectivities. As to the traditional equation of sovereignty and freedom, expressions of identity imply determinations of the other in terms of irrationality and threat that can be used to justify one’s own violence. In uncovering this circle of violence and counter-violence, we, finally, seek to rethink our political categories beyond the logic of confrontation that rests upon essentialist misconceptions of our communal being. To construct an integrative approach to violence, our research will present a non-subjectivist phenomenology that enables us to see how violence is destructive of sense. In testing this hypothesis on historic, sociological and anthropological materials, we will ground our research empirically. Thus, we will, in the last analysis, elaborate a methodology for interdisciplinary research that will foster a deeper understanding of the many interrelated faces of violence. Project underwritten by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF P 20300) (1.11.2007 - 30.06.2011)

Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture

Violence works at the same time as what we find in the world according to our best description of reality, and as what we fight and reject, hoping for a more peaceful world. It may also be what we recommend, as the only way to change things, or even what we celebrate, as the key resource of true art. Sometimes we even think that adequate theory arises from violence against given paradigms. How can it be so? Do we really understand what we refer to when we speak about violence?