Acknowledging and Recognizing Violence

Violence has emerged as a major concern, globally and locally, as history has turned the leaf to another decade, a new century, a fresh, still single-digit millennium. How have we survived, individually and collectively, when in fact the numbers of terminal victims, or “megadeaths,” due to various obvious kinds of violence in the last century, number 10 percent of those living at the beginning of it (Hobsbawm 1994: 12; Eagleton 2003: x)? Certainly, violence is the tragic marker of this historical moment, self-consciously poised as it is between the embarrassments of past progress and the tenuous promise of a future encumbered with overpopulation, (other kinds of) pollution, a disembodied cybersociety, and a threadbare institution: the nation-state (Anderson 1996, Gastil 1993, Keane 2002, Tuan 2002).

All of this was palpably the case before September 11, 2001; since then, all assess­ments of past and future pale as we are rendered speechless, at least in the West, and es­pecially in North America. We experience a collective astonishment at the ratcheting up of global terrorism and at all the responses to it, including fear, leading to as well as magnified by “homeland security” in the United States, and the dreaded war, or wars.

Meanwhile, mundane cultural expressions of violence thrive in the usual sites of in­dividual pain and societal inequities. Insofar as most persons become consciously aware of violence nearby as well as in exotic locations mainly through the media, rather than as witness or through gossip, they may not perceive much of violence as all that immediate or threatening—unless and until they recognize themselves as victims. The media, the Janus-faced tricksters, manage to distance us even as they make their content intimate; perhaps this is summed up in connotations of the “virtual.” Yet, in every society, some violence is palpable close to home—particularly in the home—and in every society still other sites and styles of violence impact every individual, directly or indirectly.

Contemporary media themselves constitute another source of disturbance, as they graphically report, in real time and then in iterated segments ad infinitum, the hitherto unspeakable and even unthinkable—yet nonetheless imitable. This mediated information assaults our every sense and sensibility. As though adult terrorism, ethnic cleansing, child soldiers, and children killing other children were not enough, the media are also saturated with what one might call recreational violence. The news (though never new or true), the documentaries, soap operas, reality series, and—dare it be said—sports and the stock exchange altogether epitomize the recreational violence attracting persons of all ages, genders, and walks of life into a post-modern addiction with a novel sort of dull, mediated “reality” craving ever more of our attention. Indeed, beyond the print, the ra­dio, and the TV, many seek further saturation via the Internet, computer games, and video arcades. While the youth in affluent societies may be more afflicted and addicted than others, the situation is both general and increasingly global.

Thanks to the relatively immaterial media and the ideas/ideals they promulgate, and to the material traffic in people and goods around the planet, humans living today over the brink of the millennium participate in a synchronicity described as “global monocul­ture.” Each individual culture—working through its historical patterns, societal habits, and psychobiological constraints, and subjected to sheer unmitigated serendipity— integrates macro- and micro-level dynamics to generate a somewhat unique worldview with its own set of habits, preferences, avoidances, and expectations. The Rorschach of phenomena labeled “violence” in each culture—so labeled by insiders or by outsiders— will likewise be culture-specific at each of their conjunctions in space and time.

There has been considerable debate during recent decades about the possible human propensity for violence against other humans, and also against other animals, plants, other living things, and the ecosystem as a whole; when it comes to material culture and the built environment, humans have amplified their capacity for violence as it can occur both in the construction and in the destruction of artifacts. One ongoing discussion about influences on or determinants of human behavior, labeled “nature or nurture,” long pre­dates the current debate between sociobiologists and culture-determinists. Fortunately, most scholars now eschew “either-or” questions, especially those purporting to pinpoint antecedent “causes” in a simplified linear or predictive model. Reducing phenomena as nuanced as those encountered in culture, society, and behavior to algorithms of cause and effect actually insults the complexity we seek to understand. In its precipitation and in its consequences, violence qualifies as a complex, but not inevitable, attribute of human cul­ture and behavior.

Apropos the discussion of nature/genetics versus nurture/culture, the transcendent re­sponse to “either-or” is now embodied in the contemporary litany of “both-and” and in the emerging mantra of “neither-nor”; yet any mechanical antidote also sidesteps the real issues about what the meaningful units of and processes for analysis might be, and how, even perhaps why, they function, or misfire, as they do. The wisdom in understanding both the culture-bound and the culture-free or universal aspects of violence may lead to less folly in prevention, intervention, and denial. This collection of articles inspects some of the ways that the cultural shaping of violence occurs, foregrounding the variety of situated meanings in the experience of violence—whether confronted directly or indi­rectly. There will be no magic pill or silver bullet, there can be no quarantine, when the subject is violence. Violence is neither sickness nor accident, neither malady nor enemy; it is us.

Anthropologists, and others who gaze critically at the patterns and puzzles of human behavior, have useful observations to bring to these debates about “human nature.” Vio­lence occurs in many guises and in many settings and with many consequences. It is also sometimes noticeable by its very absence or by the shock following our blindness to it. To define “violence” operationally may not open up discussion as fruitfully as we can accomplish by unpacking specific, if intuitively delimited, instances of “violence.” That is the agenda here. Violence usually ensues from intent and agency in the case of indi­vidual actors. At the cultural or structural level, violence generally appears as an entropic element, one that erodes both constituent selves and extruded society (and ecosystem, as will be argued). Violence at any level may be negatively sanctioned and/or rewarded, at least intermittently. Intermittent reinforcement has powerful consequences (Bateson 1977), as violence comes to be stylized, enabled, managed, curtailed, and rationalized— and most importantly suspensefully anticipated and indelible—within the fabric of cul­ture itself, by perpetrators and victims alike. Violence is less a virus than an old- fashioned parasite, collaborating in some mutuality with its host-matrix. Again, it is us.

Whether there are commonalities across cultures in the conditioning of each genre of violence may be a moot issue. Yet, given the physical and social dependence of children within families, and sometimes females within society, it seems useful to start with con­ditions close to home and family. The family itself serves as the initial crucible for encul- turation and socialization, whose processes, “adaptive” or otherwise, simultaneously mimic and foreshadow processes of the larger system.

The editor, Myrdene Anderson, is indebted to Cara Richards for jumpstarting this project on the cultural shaping of violence, which was set into motion by Richards’s ex­tensive research on infanticide.

Even though the documentation in this volume does not exhaust all the ways humans have found to be inhuman and inhumane, the chapters do range from domestic affairs to war and torture, and touch on every continent. It would be presumptuous to subject all of this data to ethnological comparisons and contrasts; what we have is apples, orange­sections, and banana-peels. So, instead, the authors focus on close readings of particular conditions conducive to, amplifying, mediating, dampening, or preventing violence, and to its inadvertent nurturance within the social (including anti-social) tensions that config­ure personal and historical experience.