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van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1996., ‘Trajectories of violence: An anthropological perspective: By way of introduction’, in: van Binsbergen, W.M.J., ed., Anthropology on violence: A one-day conference, Amsterdam: Department of Cultural Anthropology/ Sociology of Development, Free University, pp. vii-xvi (the present texts was slightly abridged, leaving out logistic and organisational conference details and acknowledgements)
© 1996-2002 Wim vanBinsbergen
The present conference and
collection of papers
The choice of subject for the present
conference was inspired both by the topicality of violence in the
world today, and by the considerable extent to which these
developments in the wider world have come to be represented in
our own ongoing research. We are restructuring our departmental
research around globalisation and localisation, and this
inevitably implies a focus on identity issues. The erosion of a
sense of local belonging as engendered by globalisation, is
usually met with an insistence on old or more typically new kinds
of the construction of self, home, value and meaning. The present
conference may serve as a reminder that violent conflict is often
the other side of the identity coin; and at the same time as
proof that research in the department is sufficiently grounded in
current social reality to look at both sides of this coin.
The seventeenth century philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1962; cf.
Bennett Ross 1980) already understood that the implication of
violence is at the heart of any society. Given the variety of
societies, therefore, violence is an extremely wide and diverse
phenomenon, that invites vastly different social-science
approaches, from a variety of levels ranging from face-to-face
relations in small groups like the family or the village; via
classes, genders, ethnic groups, religious denominations; or
again, via violence experienced in the lives of individuals from
the part of representatives of the state, from deviant and
criminal strangers acting on their own initiative, or from
members of their own family and neighbourhood; to the conflict
between states and even alliances of states; and all sorts of
shades in between. Vastly different discourses exist about all
these forms and contexts of violence. The same set of papers
could, in other words, be structured in several very different
ways.
Violence and anthropology
If this were a mature, edited collection of
papers, I should now have to discharge my editorial
responsibility of delineating the domain of violence research as
presented here, indicating essential differences and adducing old
and new theoretical perspectives. The provisional and ephemeral
nature of the present collection put me in the comfortable
position that I can legitimately postpone this necessary but
difficult task. A handful of remarks, none too original, may
suffice at this stage.
The study of violence presents far greater dilemmas for
anthropologists today than is suggested by the avid and
high-quality participation in this conference. Hobbes defined
social life not as essentially violent in itself, but rather as
the alternative to violence. The main-stream development of the
social sciences since their first articulation (in the course of
the nineteenth century) as distinct branches on the tree of
science, was towards an emphasis on order, on the
conditions for non-violence. Violence was regarded as
the exception, as the uninvited guest, relegated to deviant
behaviour and political and military crises in our own society,
and to the remote periphery of exotic places. Distant groups
seemed to uphold alien forms of being human, of which an
important indicator was that violence might occupy a conspicuous
place in their social life; they were not yet ‘pacified’ —
i.e. effectively brought under the aegis of a state exercising
the monopoly of violence.[1] The history of
anthropology right up to the 1960s could be written as the
history of theories about the societal construction of a
generalised condition of non-violence. When from the 1950s
onwards Coser (1956) and Gluckman (1955, 1963) sought to
reintroduce conflict into the complacently peaceful picture of
structural-functional social science, this represented nothing
less than a paradigm shift, a prelude to the revitalising of the
social sciences by the Marxist approaches of the 1970s and 1980s.
When round about the same time violence then began to move from
the remote periphery towards the centre of the social experiences
of the majority of people in the world, — when violent forms of
social life became usual, sometimes even the norm, in new states
in Africa and Asia, but also in the cities of the North Atlantic
and in the civil wars of Europe, a social science without
violence became obviously obsolete. And among many other
intellectual responses to this state of affairs, an anthropology
of violence began to be developed (cf. Campbell & Gibbs 1986;
Feldman 1991; Marsh & Campbell 1982; Riches 1986)
Its main difficulty still is to define a place for violence in a
theoretical framework conceived in terms of structure, order,
repetitive behaviour, predictability, institutionalisation.
Should we reverse the orientation of the social sciences, and
raise violence and conflict to the status of norm, defining the
conditions under which the exception (notably: the existence of
order, structure) can be realised? Or is violence not to be
accorded such an exalted and unique status, and it is rather to
be seen in the terms that cynical political parlance has used for
the special category of military violence, as a ‘continuation
of diplomatic communication with different means’ — as a
specific but ordinary form of being sociable, not as an instance
of opting out of the social. When trying to bring violence back
into our conception of society, should we be Manichaean dualists
who accord a separate existence to violence as existing in
varying tensions with order and structure, or should we be
monists who see violence and order as co-varying opposing sides
of one and the same thing?
The present-day attention for violence also implies a shift in
level and scale of analysis. Long past is the time that
anthropologists were merely interested in behaviour and
representations as manifested in face-to-face contexts and as
eminently suitable for participant observation; and perhaps we
should be less proud of this development than most
anthropologists seem to be. Participant observation is probably
(from a point of view of the researcher’s availability for the
publication of results) the least advisable research technique in
situations of violence. As Robert Buijtenhuijs, a major
researcher of revolutionary movements in Africa today, uses to
say: ‘I am not prepared to sacrifice my life for the sake of
research.’ At least two papers in the present collection bring
out the dilemma of participation in violence research, and — as
I shall briefly indicate below — I have myself shocking
experiences of the limits of participant observation in South
Central and Southern Africa, where royal cults and traditional
healers are conducive to an occult violence which often crosses
into actual, actionable murder (also cf. Fisiy & Geschiere
1996; Geschiere & Fisiy 1996).
So it is not only intellectual responsibility in the face of the
widening analytical horizons of the modern world, that brings
anthropologists to contemplate such large-scale phenomena as
civil war and ethnic violence, at a level of abstraction amenable
to arm-chair theorising; it is also that violence defines no-go
areas for the average researcher, who does not normally have the
death-defying courage of a war-time journalist. A further dilemma
of theoretical and methodological competence arises here: trained
almost exclusively for a research context of participant
observation, and lacking the specific training of, e.g., the
documentary or political historian, or of the political
scientist, one sometimes wonders if the macro-analyses as
propounded by anthropologists at the level of states, continents,
the world at large, are sufficiently grounded as far as data and
method are concerned.
If violence was scarcely (unless as a peripheral or borderline
case) written into the canon of classic anthropology during its
formative years which coincided with European colonial domination
over much of the rest of the world, this was not only because of
a peculiar insistence on structure and middle-class tranquillity
on the part of its authors, and not even merely because of their
myopia vis-a-vis ‘the violence of empire’ (cf. Martin 1983).
It was also largely an acknowledgement of the fact that
anthropology as a form of intellectual production took place in,
and implicitly reflected, a North Atlantic society that had
declared violence anti-social, even non-existent; and that
successfully offered most of its local citizens most of the time
(with the exception of World War II) a rather impervious shelter
from violence in their personal lives.
The embarrassed silence, in classic anthropology, vis-a-vis
violence, also has an internal reason springing from the
systematics of the social sciences themselves. If in Hobbesian
fashion the effect and even purpose of the social fabric is to
keep out violence, this largely implies the impossibility of an
explanation of violence in terms of the enduring, repetitive
structure of society — terms which nonetheless became the
absolute norm in anthropology from the 1930s onwards, as
exemplified in the seminal works by Evans-Pritchard (1967) and
Fortes (1945, 1949; cf. Fortes & Evans-Pritchard 1969). The
problem is not simply resolved by exchanging the
structural-functional paradigm for one that claims to be more
dynamic and historical; certainly Marxist approaches, although
much more conflict-minded than their predecessors, have had the
same propensity towards systematics and structure, and therefore
(despite their claims of being historical and dialectical) can
hardly account for the absence of violence in the face of
unmistakable conflicts, or for the precise moment when
pre-existing conflicts break into open violence. Hence the
attractiveness not only of historical but also of decidedly
non-sociological, individual-centred approaches to the study of
violence: psychological, psycho-analytical, even biological (cf.
Ross 1986a, 1986b).
Meanwhile violence has come to represent a profound dilemma, not
only of social science today, but of late twentieth century
society as a whole. On the one hand the canon of the integrity of
human life and the human person has never been more vocal and
more explicitly enshrined in national laws and international
human rights treaties. Life is sacred, the human body is sacred,
and strict adherence to these tenets is the hallmark of
civilisation (cf. Elias 1939); if this canon were strictly
implemented in social life, open violence would not occur
(although one would need an unprecedented amount of structural
violence in order to ensure such implementation). On the other
hand there has been in recent decades a marked increase in the
occurrence, awareness, experience, and social acceptability, of
violence. Large sections of the media and entertainment industry
today concentrate on the production and diffusion of images of
violence, and often these images do nothing but depict true life
situations. One of the most conspicuous aspects of the
globalisation process (cf. Kloos & de Silva 1995; Appadurai
1996; de Silva 1996) in which the entire world has been
increasingly involved in the course of the twentieth century CE,
has been the enhanced presence of violence in places and
situations where previously it was securely kept out. The forms
which this expansion has taken is only too familiar: civil war,
arms trade, terrorism, urban violence, state violence inflicted
on citizens, repeated genocide in Europe, Asia and Africa, two
world wars... There is a remarkable parallel between our present
age and the age of Hellenism in the circum-Mediterranean region,
which was likewise characterised by high levels of personal
violence, fragmentation of political and economic power, and an
increased circulation of people, ideas and goods in what could
conveniently be termed proto-globalisation.
If what we are witnessing today is indeed not just increased
information on a constant rate of violence, but a demonstrable
increase in the rate of violence, then this suggests that
violence constitutes one of the unexpected main products of the
project of modernity. It makes u wonder if modern civilisation is
on a collision course. Our attempts at understanding it should
then not be limited to a social-scientific classification and
analysis of its forms, appearances, conditions and trajectories,
but should mobilise the entire edifice of specialist academic
knowledge production, modern science which is another outcome of
the same project of modernity.
From socio-biology and ethology to psycho-analysis, media
studies, irenology and philosophy, the question of violence is at
the heart of much current debate. From anthropology in the
narrower sense the world may expect two main contributions in the
study of violence:
• insight
in extremely specific, small-scale situations of the infliction,
experience and justification of violence (in families, villages,
neighbourhoods, gangs, combat groups, committees, presidential
advisory groups); and
• insight
in the extremely general questions concerning mankind as a whole:
what is it, in the make-up of man or of modern man, that makes us
violent animals given to intra-species aggression?
Reflection on the latter point should not be
left to philosophers or to palaeontologists, precisely because
the available evidence on man’s earlier forms of violence, on
the uniqueness of our intra-species violence, and hence on the
possibly innate nature of human aggression, is patchy and
contradictory. Was homo pekinensis, 300,000 years ago,
truly a cannibal, or (as the prominent palaeontologist Binford
(1981) has convincingly argued) is this a myth based on a
misreading of the traces left on human bones by animal predators?
Is intra-species killing among mammals such as lions and deer
always the result of pre-mating contests accidentally gone out of
hand (cf. Casti 1989: ch 3)? Is culture our life insurance
against an innate violence inherited from nature? Or is culture,
on the contrary, the very source of violence? Is our official
respect for life a universal human value and as such a likely
ingredient for inclusion in the global culture whose construction
we see all around us? Or is such respect, far from universal and
culture-free, a specific (post-)Neolithic response based on
deferred reciprocity between generations, whereas in earlier,
Palaeolithic contexts the presence of an extra, unproductive
mouth to feed was usually an invitation to infanticide and
senicide (cf. Darlington 1969). If the latter is the case then
the absolute nature of the sacredness of human life reveals more
about the dramatically increased capacity of (post-)Neolithic man
to create absolutes (as part of a package to which also belong:
writing, science, the state, agriculture, cities, religion; cf.
van Binsbergen 1996 and references cited there), than that it
reveals a universal and possibly innate propensity towards
respect for human life. Or did violence yet originate as the most
obvious solution of a truly primordial condition of conflict,
which we might try to conceptualise (of course, at some
a-historical, archetypal and hypothetical plane) as a standard
form of rebellion against the male elder (Freud 1918), or as a
standard form of annihilation of the focus of mimesis (Girard
1977; Hamerton-Kelly 1987)? Does man possess, in the thanatos drive,
a propensity to violence and destruction which is not primarily
determined by economic frustration and therefore will not be
eradicated by socio-economic reform or even revolution along
socialist lines (Freud 1972)? Does the preparedness for violence
and hence the temporary shedding of internalised social
inhibitions depend on individual regression in the face of the
contagion by group behaviour and of the construction of the
patriarchal image of a Great Leader (cf. Fromm 1973)? Does the
occurrence of violence in general largely depend on the lowering
of thresholds and inhibitions, under conditions of group
contagion, ecstasy, use of drugs including alcohol, and other
psychological and physiological crises?
Violence and being an
anthropologist: a personal account
Violence constitutes much more than a timely topic for anthropological research; it rents the fabric of sociability and as such addresses fundamental anxieties, values and aspirations, also on the part of the researcher herself. Allow me to briefly illustrate this from my own case as a researcher.
My own feeling has always been that violence,
more than death, more even than sexuality, constitutes the true
secret of social life; and let me simply add, a secret so
terrifying that hitherto I have usually gone out of my way to
avoid being confronted with it in my academic work — while
those confrontations that were unavoidable have proved very
productive if rather explosive.
My rather conspicuous avoidance of the
topic (all the more remarkable in someone who holds a chair in
ethnic studies) has been largely a non-rational form of
self-protection.
Born immediately after World War II, the
violent war-time experiences of close relatives and their
business associates (prominent among whom were Jews who had
survived) as shared in household conversations, are among my
earliest and most vivid recollections; they continue to hold sway
over me and often move me to tears when confronted with images of
World War II, the holocaust, and more recent instances of ethnic
conflict and genocide. Their effect on me, frankly, is paralysis,
not a kindling of the holy fire of inquisitiveness; I have never
felt tempted to write on ethnic violence, and probably never will
— I cannot handle it academically. More important even, and
strangely merging with these vicarious war-time reminiscences,
has been the unspeakable domestic violence that was endemic in
the family in which I grew up; I was never the physical victim,
but for many years the witness — trembling and sobbing with
powerless rage and protest as my mother and sister were being
abused. And this is perhaps the key to my life also as an
anthropologist: the outside onlooker who pays with
self-destructing empathy and vicarious guilt for the fact that he
— physically at least — escapes unscathed.
In retrospect I am beginning to discern
how much of my intellectual work, both as a literary writer, as
an anthropologist, and since 1990 also as an African traditional
healer, has hinged on the relations (cf. Bloch 1986, 1992)
between violence and symbolic production: the latter as
concealment, as alternative, as escape, as compensation, as
exposure, as therapy, as prevention, as redemption, of the
former. This, I suppose, made me into an anthropologist primarily
of religion.
A sense of the secret of violence
persuaded me to re-cast the results of my first field-work, in
the highlands of northwestern Tunisia, around a murder that had
occurred in the research area in the early twentieth century CE,
and I came to read the subsequent massive restructuring of the
landscape, its territorial shrines and the attending cults, as
the dramatic aftermath of this one event (van Binsbergen 1988);
my Tunisian fieldwork, and the unfolding research skills it
brought me, largely revolved on my struggle to bring the local
people to speak about this secret.
Later, in Zambia in the early 1970s, I
clung desperately to the theme of the Lumpa rising (whose
analysis in neo-Marxist terms was to made my name as an analyst
of African religious change), for no other reason than that I
absolutely needed to understand, for more than academic reasons,
how a religious movement could bring people to such an embracing
of violence that they were prepared to confront the heavily-armed
British colonial army with their bare hands, women in the
front-line, their babies as shields, and carrying in their
pockets hand-written passports to heaven issued by the
movement’s prophetess, Alice Lenshina (van Binsbergen 1981,
1982).
With relish (and with more than
unconscious references to a violent childhood), and frequently, I
have honoured my research hosts’ expectations that I should
make bloody animal sacrifices, not only in Tunisia, but
subsequently also in Guinea Bissau and in Botswana, — and this
is what I still do at my home in Haarlem. These sacrifices have
told me a great deal about the vicarious experience that unites
the god, the slayer, and the slain (cf. Collomb 1978; de Heusch
1985; Hoskins 1989).
Against all stereotypes and warnings from
the local lay public, which is rightly convinced of the sheer violence
that lies at the heart of royal cults in Zambia (van Binsbergen
1992) and of the nganga’s art both there and more to the
South, in Zimbabwe and Botswana, I courted these domains for many
years, crossing boundaries which not only few outsiders, but also
few locals had transgressed (van Binsbergen 1991). And while not
myself engaging in acts of interhuman violence — occult or
overt — but on the contrary greatly enhancing my expertise in
the symbolic production that heals the effects of violence and
keeps it at bay — inevitably the point had to come, in both
African contexts, that I hit the rock-bottom of unmistakable,
unconcealed and intolerable violence among my hosts.
Thus having reached the end of my quest, I
was finally free to tear myself loose and to make two significant
steps to which I was hitherto unable. I embarked on an immensely
ambitious armchair project that has brought me to compare
divination systems, their apparatus and interpretative catalogues
in five continents and across five or six millennia, in other
words as far away as possible, in space, time and method, from
the murderous context of face-to-face interaction in which I have
become a diviner and an adoptive member of the royal family myself
— but taking to that comparative project the full inspiration
and knowledge which prolonged participant observation under
downright dangerous circumstances has afforded me. And secondly,
I feel now finally free to drop the Tarnkappe (largely a veil of
emotional anti-rationality) that for so many years has protected
me from the secret of violence in my life. I am now beginning to
see the practical, personal and liberating value of analytic
thought in the domain of violence — although more so from the
part of philosophers than from anthropologists, and with this
further qualification that rationality not only illuminates
violence but — as we shall see below — could also be argued
to breed it.
Rationality and violence
My only aim in presenting this very personal
perspective is to stress that violence is not a routine subject
of inquiry, but a total social phenomenon that we can only hope
to approach with integrity if we do so at the existential level.
Having long been an anti-rationalist (the frame of mind in which
one becomes a poet and a diviner), I have often suspected that
when all is said and done, violence is not primarily an act, but
a frame of thought on the part of the actor; and it must have
been that frame of thought that my anti-rationalism has sought to
avoid.
Is it not a prerequisite of violence that the actor denies the
application, to his victim, of categories of humanity and
integrity he normally applies to himself and his loved ones; in
other words, does physical violence not always imply the mental
violence of defining the victim as other than human? Is such
denial not a drastic form of the objectification of the other,
which (as we have known since Sartre (1943)) is at the root of
all prejudice, perhaps of all social life, but then also at the
root of the social sciences? Is violence in other words eminently
human because it implies the magical act of the controlling and
dehumanising word which seeks and promises existence and power
outside the body and its tenderness? Is it then nothing but the
magic of modernity?
Such ideas (even if rather disquieting for the well-intending
anthropologist, whose own attempts at understanding violence
suddenly risk to be construed as just another form of violence)
have profound resonances in the philosophical debates of today
(cf. McKenna 1992). Let me end by merely quoting one, very recent
and eminently inspiring example, Brian Schroeder’s Altared
ground, whose title puns on a combination of blood sacrifice,
of alleged Hegelian totalitarianism (Hegel is set up as
Schroeder’s main straw man) and the alterity which is the
central concept in the book’s main inspiration, the work of
Levinas:
‘One of the most pressing concerns for
contemporary society is the issue of violence and the factors
that promote it. This book stages an engagement between Emmanuel
Levinas, one of the leading figures in twentieth century European
and Continental philosophy, and Plato, Hegel, Nietzsche,
Heidegger, Gadamer, Adorno, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Derrida, and
others (...) in the history of ideas. (...) The aim is to
contribute to current discussions of reconceiving subjectivity as
intersubjectivity in a postmodern context by taking up such
diverse themes as alterity, ground, transcendence,
responsibility, language, community, politics, divinity, and
futurity in relation to interpersonal violence. (...) The book
(...) contests, along with Levinas, the claim that peace and
totality go hand in hand, that the overcoming of violence
necessitates the totalization of subject and object, of self and
other, into a metaphysical one or whole expressible as ground,
[ italics original ] despite contentions that such a unity does
not preclude the integrity of difference and multiplicity. (...)
[I]t explores the forceful, surprising, and potentially dangerous
claim that it is precisely conceptuality itself that is the
origin of violence.’ [ italics added ] (Schroeder 1996: 1)
Anthropologists are not very well equipped to appreciate or
refute a claim so frightening, but the question of violence is
too important to ignore the possibility that Schroeder is right.
Personally I am reading this collection with a view of
ascertaining just that. If Schroeder were totally right, there
would be neither hope nor future for an anthropology or
philosophy of violence. But he cannot be totally right, not only
because he abhors totalities, but also because his own
illuminating text hinges on conceptuality which therefore is
implied to have redeeming qualities even if violent.
Is there anything more violent than truth?
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[1] On this point one may profitably
reread Ernest Gellner’s (1969) political philosophy of the
maraboutic anti-state in the mountains of pre-colonial North
Africa, where in a segmentary situation, in the absence of an
effective state, the only forms of social arbitratio and
adjudication are offered by saints who have the monopoly, not of
violence, but of non-violence. In general, the vast anthropology
of segmentary political systems reflects the classic
anthropological dilemma of seeing structure in a social context
marked by violence; cf. Black-Michaud 1975; Boehm 1984; Bollig
1990; Ericksen 1992; Favret 1968; Middleton & Tait, 1958;
Peters 1967; Sigrist 1967; Simonse 1992.
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