College aantekeningen Anthropology of Violence

Lecture 1 What is violence?
Forms of violence
Narrow definition of violence (manifest or direct violence)
 Visible forms of violence: “an act or physical hurt”
 Violence targeted on the body/can be psychological
 Identifiable perpetrators and victims
 Violence we see on the news on television, on our computer, in movies & docu’s
 Examples: suicide attacks, urban riots, bombings, (mass) murder, torture, rape
 Violence as a spectacle (staged, performed – messages; appall and/or fascinate an audience –
pornography (appealing, but guilt) of violence
 Fals to see the role of history, culture and political-economic structures  wider definition of
violence

“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.”

Structural violence
 Wider definition
 Galtung (1969) – model of violence
- Direct violence (visible)
- Structural and Cultural violence (invisible)
 Violence built into unequal, unjust and unrepresentative social structures
 Structures of exploitation and repression – harmful, damaging, hurtful, violent
 Invisible violence and perpetrator
 Examples: imperialism, capitalism, caste society, patriarchy, racism & colonization
 Phenomena caused by these structures: pverty, inequality, racism, underdevelopment
 Focusses on history & (social)economic factors and local context
 Critique: Container concept – disguises the underlying forms of violence

Galtung: The violence is built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as
un equal life chances

Farmer: Structural violence is violence exerted systematically – that is indirecty – 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: 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
 Not whole cultures but for example aspect A from culture B
 Prominent social norms that make direct and structural violence seen “natural” or “right”
 Violence within culture or against culture
 Aspect or norms exemplified by religion & ideology, language and art, empirical science and
formal science

,  Examples: hate, negative stereotype images, racist or sexist expressions, cultural erasure
(forgotten or abandoned), language discrimination, cultural appropriation
 Normalization of violence
 Cultural essentialism (categorizing groups of people within a culture or other cultures
according to essential qualities) versus cultural relativism
 Cultural relativism and moral relativism (is it morally oke?)

Symbolic violence
 Pierre Bourdieu (1970s)
 Non-physical and often invisible form of violence
 Manifest in power differential between social grpups
 Visible perpetrators
 Relations of domination and inequality
 Examples: power difference within gender relations, class relations
 With consent or complicity ”it is violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or
her complicity”
 Blaming those in lower power positions themselves 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 unwritten consent of the dominated”
 Examples: gaslighting (negative remarks), bullying (harmful relations)

Everyday violence
 Concept of Nancy Scheper-Hughes
 Daily practices and expressions of violence on a micro-interactional level: interpersonal,
domestic and delinquent (Bourgois)
 To focus on the individual experience that normalized petty brutality and terror at the
community level and creates a common sense of ethos of violence
 No sudden eruptions of violence
 Part of the everyday, routinized, normalized
 Visible or at least discernable
 Examples: domestic violence, gang violence, drug trafficking, shootings

Violence continuum
 Violence is reproduced overtime, in chains, spirals and mirrors that form a 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 can not 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



Lecture 2 Post/colonial violence
What is colonialism?
 The domination of a territory and its people by a foreign power with the aim of military,
economic, or other gain