Pretext

The organization of this volume around the first four major sections—parts one, two, three, and four—moves from what some have called direct violence toward the more clear instantiations of structural violence, or from the (inter)personal to the social, and from the domestic to the cultural (including the political).

Following this introduction (chapter one), the four main sections contain twenty-five chapters (chapters two through twenty-six), and the editor has appended a fifth section, part five, containing two chapters in her voice.

The altogether twenty-eight chapters, involving twenty-eight authors of seven na­tionalities, document violence in twenty-two distinct cultural settings in seventeen na­tion-states on five continents. Most of the authors are anthropologists, but also repre­sented are persons trained in psychology, sociology, criminology, pedagogy, literary studies, consumer sciences, and business management; secondarily some authors have experience as teachers and therapists, and in policing, soldiering, consulting, and activ­ism, besides living in the world.

The first of the four sections, part one, “Children and Women First? Violence Close to Home,” deals with relations between generations and genders. Three authors consider the quality of life for children in inner cities and areas of civil strife. The geographic set­tings for these studies are the United States (Linda McDonald and Anna Richman Bere- sin, in chapters two and three, respectively), and Ireland, with a reference to Australia (Linda J. Rogers, chapter four). Children take up much of the slack in a society while waiting in the wings, absorbing the behavior of others, and they often bear silent witness to the violence around them. Sadly, learning well, they are also capable of being more, or less, than “just” victims. Happily, sometimes their behavior turns out to be more sensible than that of their elders.

As with children, sometimes women too seem to be regarded as resilient and durable, or perhaps expendable, or even peripheral to the scenes of the crimes of violence. These very assumptions can also render women as handy victims. Too frequently women find themselves stretched to the limit as they try to secure family life in an inhospitable envi­ronment, or when physically violated by assailants. The geographical contexts of three more studies in part one are the United States and Mexico (Cathy Winkler, chapter five), Brazil (Sarah Hautzinger, chapter six), and African immigrants in the United States (Jon D. Holtzman, chapter seven). In fact, geographic and cultural dislocation may exacerbate interpersonal violence close to home. Domestic violence victimizes the entire intimate social fabric of the family, not just the most typical recipients of abuse, namely the women and children—and pets, the scapegoats that too often slip under the radar. Do­mestic abuse and neglect as well as sexual predation have repercussions beyond the fam­ily, violating the social fabric of the entire community, leaving everyone ripped up emo­tionally and ill at ease, permanently, with other vulnerable individuals becoming fearful as well.

Part two looks into the “Social Regulation of Anti-Social Behavior.” Here the issues pivot on the nature of kinship (Wade C. Mackey and Nicole Sault, chapters eight and nine, respectively), to the role of women in a gendered arena (Claudia Fonseca and Myriam Jimeno, chapters ten and eleven, respectively), and to the culturally nuanced practices of politeness (Dov Cohen and Joe Vandello, chapter twelve). The first of these, chapter eight, provides a state-by-state and international ethnological comparison of the positive consequences of the presence of fathers in the household, showing impressive negative correlations with indices of crime. The other studies in this part focus on Mex­ico, Brazil, Colombia, and the United States. Besides other family members, godmothers, friends, and neighbors, the ethological dimensions of politeness in a society can frame potential for anti-social behavior as well as for civility. The last chapter in part two, like the first, is comparative, looking at cross-cultural patterns in politeness and their ramifi­cations.

Part three, “Institutional Architectures Mediating and Memorializing Violence,” brings together studies of police culture (Steven V. Lutes and Michael J. Sullivan, chap­ter thirteen), with a focus on the United States in general and San Francisco in particular; pre-modern and modern warfare (Barton C. Hacker, chapter fourteen); the sculpting of civilians into soldiers by the military in Israel (Eyal Ben-Ari, chapter fifteen) and by the U.S. Marine Corps (Rhonda J. Moore, chapter sixteen); and the enduring and subliminal violence of colonialism, referencing Palestinians (Nada Elia, chapter seventeen), Pacific Islanders (Katerina Teaiwa, chapter eighteen), and Arab-Africans (a second essay by Nada Elia, chapter nineteen). Among the case studies in part three, there is one, Hacker's chapter fourteen, which also surveys broader ethnological data concerning a single insti­tution, warfare. The ethological and ecological repercussions of intra-cultural institu­tional confrontations and inter-cultural violence show no signs of subsiding with this mil­lennium.

The fourth section, part four, “Escalating Ecologies of Perturbation,” addresses the dynamics between people and their environments in space and through time. This theme obligates close attention to the complex and interlocking constraints of natural resources, cultural resources, sociopsychological conditions, and the long arm of history itself. The violence documented in this section weighs particularly heavily: it is less personal but more personally devastating, bigger than the family and still larger than the socio­ecosystem, deeper than one's experience in the world and still deeper than history or even prehistory. The media, with various motivations, attempt to communicate such large-scale insults to the human condition, but our language cannot suitably classify them, and our cognitive faculties short out. Each case implodes on itself.

While any single individual portrayed in earlier sections may be violated more than once, even daily—in the family, in the streets, by insidious discriminations, and in the cultural invention and intervention called war—an outsider may posit that the victim could walk away, turn the other cheek, or just focus on the positive. In part four we are confronted by situations so severe, with possibilities for regulation so bleak, and with es­calating outcomes so over-determinedly tragic, that there is no way to “blame the vic­tim.” Instead, the reader joins the victim in grief and despair.

Perturbations within the social and ecological system often engage longer calendars, and hence have kinky, nonlinear histories that do not readily unravel. The first three au­thors in part four deal with resource imbalances infecting the social fabric, in Indonesia (Glenn Smith, chapter twenty), in Peru (Bartholomew Dean, chapter twenty-one), and in Taiwan (Charles Trappey, chapter twenty-two). Three more authors document instances of politically inspired abuse-unto-torture-unto-murder in Guatemala (Frank M.

Following part four are two chapters by the editor under the umbrella of part five. Chapter twenty-seven, about the seemingly non-violent Saami reindeer breeders of Nor­wegian Lapland, would be an anomaly in this volume were it not an opportunity to braid together historical trajectories of both subtle and incontrovertible violence in a setting of colonialization, together with deconstructions of patterned infelicities relating to material culture and the ecosystem, all tying in with violence when painted with a more inclusive brush. Here colonialism, technology, and alcohol play pivotal roles.

Thereafter, the final chapter twenty-eight serves as an epilogue for the volume as a whole, picking up on the issues and genres of violence barely sampled in the introduction and other chapters, to close the volume with some more positive approaches in the pre­vention of, curbing of, and coping with violence. There can be no meaningful synthesis of the patterns and particularities from the chapters of case studies that precede the epi­logue, and a straightforward recapitulation would be redundant—but more must be said. If one dare refer to the subject of violence as vast, this collection is poor, incomplete, in­consistent, and indefinite, although hardly inconclusive. So much remains on the table, and even more under it. We have mentioned infanticide, for example, but then there is also animal abuse, correlated with both infanticide and the abuse of children and others.

The epilogue deals further with Galtung's cultural violence in the contemporary world, incuding terrorism. No single other contribution in this volume addresses global terrorism per se, yet each author presciently prefigures it, unpacking the unfortunate pat­terns found at different scales in various cultures. Local, state-level, and global terrorism have had long histories that insulated publics have chosen to ignore. No longer. Lamen­tably, “nine-one-one” personified as tragedian and trickster will be writing its own his­tory for a long time to come, eventually to become less surprising, more suspenseful, and forever incomprehensible. That is our fear.

Fear itself figures into all genres of violence, as does sacrifice, and even healing. An extremely valuable collection of seminal writings on violence, Violence and Its Alterna­tives, was assembled by Manfred B. Steger and Nancy S. Lind in 1999. In fact, any num­ber of works on violence came out during the late 1990s and even more since then. Can one wonder why! Here and in the epilogue, however, we will take gentle issue with the implications of suggesting “alternatives” to violence. Would “alternatives” trivialize vio­lence? It might then seem that cultural violence will be obvious and perversely logical, that it comes about through rational or irrational choice, and that it can be addressed and mended within the system through a combination of recognition plus enlightened agency. In addressing the cultural shaping of violence, any alternatives at all will be uniquely embedded, visible or not, in the fabric of the culture. Today more and more scholars recognize this, and also that violence is neither universal nor indelible in culture, nor is it in biology either. For once and for all, aggression is not “genetic,” nor is it a nec­essary precursor to violence. All the same, to be maintained, both violence and any en­demic “alternatives” also need care, feeding, and selection, and these processes integrate both long-term phenomena such as biology, and cultural habits of substantial vintage, along with agency drawing on unique individual experience. This merits expansion in the epilogue.

For the ordinary practitioner in society, the quotidian exists on the surface plane of the obvious but un-inspected, not at deeper cultural levels. Christopher M. Hann (2002: 259) has related these by referring to the realm of the cultural as “congealed so­ciality.” What practitioners do, mindfully or not, will feed back into the culture, but in trickles and lumps. To find and nurture “alternatives” to violence will not be an option for everyone or for every society, nor will these be typologically comparable alternatives, let alone solutions. But we do have instances and labels for some practices, and if utter­ing them can do magic, if also “alternatives” can be self-fulfilling prophecies, then we might try them on for size: non-aggression, dispute-resolution, conflict-avoidance, pas­sive-resistance, optimism, reconciliation, performance therapy, trust, love—but not de­nial. These issues, too, will be served up in the epilogue.

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