Conceptual Accountability—Culture, Society, Behavior
As we perch on the emerging edge of the new millennium, the first two worlds seem to be becoming structurally indistinguishable, and at the same time increasingly distinct from the latter two worlds, which, while never merging, share many features and concerns.
Sometimes the first two worlds have been called the “north” or the “have's,” and the third world the “south” or the “have-not's.” The fourth world, pertaining to peoples or “first nations” rather than nation-states, sometimes falls through the cracks.As outlined here, the various worlds nurture and tolerate different genres of violence at both the direct and structural levels. To appreciate some of these variables, it will be useful to inspect more closely certain of the units of analysis common to social science, and how these interpret violence.
However seriously anthropology continues to interrogate the notion of “culture” (e.g., Bhabba 1994, Fox and King 2002, Henry 1963), the discipline still attaches to it meaning which is both broad and deep: broad, because culture is inclusive of all individual and collective social (and anti-social) practices; and deep, because culture underlies those institutions, materials, beliefs, and behavior, without determining them. Hence, culture self-organizes the spatial and temporal, the material and informatic, and can be recognized by its traces of spatial pattern and temporal continuity in empirical relations—the very society we find around us.
Culture is neither determined by biology, nor reducible to society or human behavior. Yet, culture powerfully shapes society and behavior, even as those activities feed back into ongoing culture; and culture certainly shapes the biological species while it has itself been enabled, not determined, by biology.
Consequently, it makes little sense to inquire: “What are the main forces—political, social, economic, psychological, linguistic, and cultural—that cause and sustain patterns of violence?” (Steger and Lind 1999: xiv-xv), because culture is “all of the above.” Well, we would be advised to remove the “linguistic” from this “all of the above” litany, but not from the list itself, inasmuch as languaging operates alongside culture, not just within it, in most enterprises including the violent.
Were we comfortable with pointing at “causes,” we could likewise say, “all of the above,” and more. But would such a list direct us onwards? It is difficult to build on the above sequence as it includes just a few institutions, two noncoordinate phenomena of the social and linguistic, the still more superordinate cultural, and also conditions such as the psychological.Just to start with, to flesh out an inventory of institutions which may hold clues to and/or be sites of violence—beyond the political and economic often singled out as crite- rial—we should add law, science, education, religion, media, art, and, of course, the family. Each institution emerges from the cultural to the social, where it, other institutions, and cultural actors may mutually define each other. Each and all of these abstract institutions and concrete actors may be implicated in violence, and at either end of it—if indeed we should be thinking dichotomously.
One might ask why and how the four worlds seem to be coalescing in some respects, and moving apart in others. The short response acknowledges similarities arising through hegemonic cultural formations domesticating ever more of the planet, and to differences arising from the asymmetric flows from the sites of most intense commodification and media outwards (Gottdiener 2000, Gramsci 1995, Lasn 1999). The media mediate, naturally enough, and naturalize violence or neutralize it, turning it into entertainment and escape (Tuan 1998). Via the media, war is transformed to sport, and vice versa. While most institutions are bounded by culture, various media have the capacity to spread indiscriminately, especially since there are few barriers erected at the receiving ends— where a passive populace is seldom just saying “no.”
Languaging itself is a partner in the crimes of violence—before, during, and after the acts and facts, and in many guises (Gay 1998, Halliday 1978, Lecercle 1990, Lemke 1995, O'Connor 1995). Metaphor will shortly be mentioned with respect to medicine; it is even more muscular with respect to war (Lakoff 1991) and ethnic cleansing (Ahmed 1995).
English usage favors rather transparent militaristic metaphors for discussing medicine, sports, the stock market, and ordinary conversation, so it is amazing how our language manages to launder the real thing: war. Despite human intelligence collectors and the softening before a full-scale attack, there is always collateral damage. Further linguistic laundering is accomplished through acronyms, which thrive in bureaucracies where discourse becomes a string of increasingly opaque abbreviations, acronyms, and initial- isms. How long will WMD survive—the acronym as well as the CBRM (chemical, biological, radiological, and/or nuclear) weapons of mass destruction sprinkled liberally around the globe? None other than United Nations Secretary-General and Nobel Peace Laureate Kofi Annan has referred to AIDS in Africa and around the globe as a weapon of mass destruction (2003). Indeed, the acronym WMD has already “mutated” in the title of one scientific article referring to certain genes as “weapons of mutational destruction” (KewalRamani and Coffin 2003), and the field of immunology has been labeled a “weapon of mass distraction” in another article (Chin 2003). Denaturing somber labels through paraphrase may divert our concentration, although not for long.