This summary includes lecture notes from all the lectures, short summaries of all literature, and a summery of In Search of Respect from Philippe Bourgois based on the reading questions.
Summary In Search of Respect - Anthropology of Violence (202100015)
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Universiteit Utrecht (UU)
Culturele Antropologie En Ontwikkelingssociologie
Anthropology of violence
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Week 1 – Anthropology of Violence: What is violence?
Lecture
What is violence?
Towards a definition of violence
Narrow definition of (manifest or direct) violence:
- Visible forms of violence: ‘an act of physical hurt’
Fails to see the role of history, culture, and political-economic
structures
- Violence targeted on the body/ can be psychological
- Identifiable perpetrators and victims
- Violence we can see on the news on television, on our computer, in
movies and documentaries
- Pornography of violence (Bourgois) -> violence as a spectacle, as
entertainment
Broader definition of violence from Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois (2004,2):
- ‘Violence can never be understood solely in terms of its physicality –
force, assault, or the infliction of pain – alone. Violence also includes
assaults on the personhood dignity, sense of worth or values of the
victim. The social and cultural dimensions of violence are what gives
violence its power and meaning.’
Forms of violence
Structural violence
Galtung (1969) – model of violence:
- Direct violence (visible)
- Structural and cultural violence (invisible)
- ‘The violence is built into the structure and shows up as unequal
power and consequently as unequal life chances’ (1969, 171)
Structural violence: violence built into unequal, unjust and
unrepresentative social structures
- Structures of exploitation and repression as a result from history and
(social) economic factors in a local context
- Invisible violence and perpetrator
- Structural violence is the main cause of direct violence
- Phenomena caused by these structures: poverty, inequality, racism,
underdevelopment
- Structural violence also covers institutional violence
- Critique: it is a container concepts -> it disguises the underlying
forms of violence
What other forms of violence are within structural violence?
,Farmer (2001, 307): ‘Structural violence is violence exerted systematically
– that is, indirectly – by everyone who belongs to a certain social order (…)
the concept of structural violence is intended to inform the study of the
social machinery of oppression’
Bourgois (2001, 8): ‘Chronic, historically entrenched political-economic
oppression and social inequality, ranging from exploitative international
terms of trade to abusive local working conditions and high infant
mortality rates’
Cultural violence
- Aspects of a culture that can be used to legitimize direct or
structural violence
- Prominent social norms that make direct and structural violence
seen as ‘natural’ or ‘right’
- Violence within culture or against culture
- Normalization of violence
- Cultural essentialism vs cultural relativism
o Cultural essentialism: the practice of categorizing groups of
people within a culture or form other cultures, according to
essential qualities (Definition from google)
Symbolic violence (Pierre Bourdieu 1970s)
- Non-physical and often invisible forms of violence
- Manifest in power differential between social groups -> relations of
domination and inequality
- Visible perpetrators (difference with structural violence)
- With consent or complicity: ‘it is violence which is exercised upon a
social agent with his or her complicity’ (Bourdieu and Wacquent
2004, 273)
- Those in lower power positions blame themselves for the violence
they suffer
- ‘The internalized humiliation and legitimation of inequality and
hierarchy ranging from sexism and racism to intimate expressions of
class power. It is exercised through cognition and misrecognition,
knowledge, and sentiments, with unwitting consent of the
dominated’ (Bourgois 2004, 426)
Everyday violence (Nancy Scheper-Hughes)
- ‘Daily practices and expressions of violence on a micro-interactional
level: interpersonal, domestic, and delinquent. (…) To focus on the
individual experience that normalize petty brutality and terror at the
community level and creates a common sense of ethos of violence. ’
(Bourgois 2001, 8)
- No sudden eruptions of violence -> it is part of the everyday,
routinized, and normalized
, - Visible or at least discernable
Violence continuum
- Violence is reproduced overtime, in chains, spirals and mirrors that
forma continuum of violence
- Violence is analyzed: ‘along a continuum from direct physical assault
to symbolic violence and routinized everyday violence, including the
chronic, historically embedded structural violence whose visibility is
obscured by globalized hegemonies’
- Violence cannot be categorized: ‘It can be everything and nothing:
legitimate or illegitimate; visible or not visible; necessary or useless;
senseless and gratuitous or utterly rational and strategic’
Literature
Farmer – On Suffering Violence
Case study: violence among the poor in Haiti:
- AJ’s story: build of dam -> poverty -> sex for status and money ->
aids
- CL’s story: tortured for criticizing the government -> killed by the
injuries (political violence)
‘While certain kinds of suffering are readily observable – and the subject of
countless films, novels, and poems – structural violence all too often
defeats those who would describe it.’
Three reasons:
1. The exoticization of suffering as lurid as that endured by AJ
and CL
2. The sheer weight of suffering which makes it all the more
difficult to render
3. The dynamic and distribution of suffering are still poorly
understood
If we want to explain this kind of suffering, rather than going to statistics
we need to explain suffering ethnographically. We need to know the details
of violence to really understand it except of just numbers.
‘But this rethinking [about cultural relativism] has not yet eroded the
tendency registered in many of the social sciences… to confuse structural
violence with cultural difference.’
The world’s poor are the chief victim of structural violence. They are more
likely to have their suffering silenced
‘As the twentieth century draws to a close, the world’s poor are
the chief victims of structural violence – a violence which had
thus far defied the analysis of many seeking to understand the
, nature and distribution of extreme suffering. Why might this be
so? One answer is that the poor are not only more likely to suffer,
they are also more likely to have their suffering silenced’
Skott – It’s Kind of our Everyday Life
Case study: everyday violence and coping mechanisms among youth in
Sweden
Violence among youth:
- Looking holistically, intersectional gender perspective
- Intimate partner violence and online violence lack in research
Invisibility:
- Everyday violence is often normalized and accepted as a (terrible)
part of life
- Lack of holistic research of everyday violence
Results:
- Violence as ubiquitous (omnipresent, pervasive and normalized)
- Women as prey, men as predators -> gender roles
- Symbolic violence found in self-blame and victim blaming
- Solutions: strategies to avoid everyday violence (mainly enacted by
girls)
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