Recapitulating the Interlocking, Amplifying, and Inhibiting Institutions of Violence
While the subject of violence remains as dark as the habitual practices it concerns, violence does permit a level of unpacking. Throughout these chapters, authors have avoided attributing violence to straightforward, simple, linear causes, or addressing violence through correspondingly simple solutions.
Indeed, in the cultural settings themselves, folk analyses of violence are typically complex, taking into account historical time and personality quirks. Not uncommonly, those at risk of violence find that the cultural setting affords first approximations of rationalization and defense, although not always prevention.In the home environment which bleeds, figuratively and literally, into school and society, each child approaches fear of violence and violence itself from within a personal perspective colored by unique relations with kin, neighbors, and friends—all responsive to personality, age, gender, birth order, and past behavior of self and kin. Violence against the most helpless in a society, the children and other living things, frequently is moderated as well as inculcated by those very victims. McDonald (chapter II) mentions the various configurations of social and antisocial relations that buffer the victim in her urban U.S. school setting. McDonald, and Rogers (chapter IV), both document child survivors establishing a sort of apprenticeship within a peer group. Children’s narratives acknowledge a missed childhood, while focused on the sources of danger over which they as actors hold no or minimal control. Rogers’ Irish subjects benefit from more enlightened social services; bullying, at least on school grounds, was eradicated through a reconciliation program, and children were trained as peer mediators.
Insofar as all social systems operate through both feedback and feedforward loops, it’s not surprising that expecting violence in a population can contribute toward its happening.
In urban U.S. schoolyards, the expectation of violent behavior during recess has led some schools to do away with recess altogether. In a closer observation of actual recess interaction, Beresin (chapter III) noted that children only became unruly at the time of the closing bell. This liminal phase, between the playground and the classroom, precipitated mock violence which was temporary and easily controlled. She points out that ethologists have established that mammalian interactors in mock violence will stay together, and face-to-face, following a bout, as the tenor of behavior returns to normal. Serious violence fractures social relations, while mock violence is more of a pastime. One can imagine that interfering with mock fights, and separating the protagonists, could quite unintentionally reify their mis-alignments.Interpretation, over-interpretation, and under-interpretation exacerbate social and anti-social roles in other cultural settings as well. Hautzinger (chapter VI) finds in her Brazilian setting that male and female participants and the outsiders in an altercation must be able to distinguish between ordinary conflict and violence. A culture endows ordinary conflict with transformative potential, as it is part of an open dynamical system which has always and will always be in flux. Violence tests the limits of that system, and in fact can destroy it. Hautzinger notes that male insecurity tips social relations toward more serious imbalances.
Hautzinger observed couples and others in close relationships in Brazil, finding that there were checks and balances within the culture itself. Fonseca (chapter X) and Jimeno (chapter XI), also carrying out research on relationships in Brazil and Colombia, respectively, find that a medley of emotional states work together to moderate violence. Recurring in all these chapters is the interplay among love, fear, respect, reciprocity, and reputation. Jimeno boils this down as love plus fear equaling respect. Women hold many of the strings in incidents of partner conflict.
Much the same has been documented by Winkler (chapter V) and Sault (chapter IX) in Mexico, and by Holtzman (chapter VII) among Nuer immigrants in the Midwest compared to their domestic structure in Africa. In addition to noting the nature of the interaction between primary protagonists, these authors also observe how kin and kin groups figure in preserving and in modifying social conventions. The practice of bride-stealing and rape documented by Winkler has tapered off when the Mexican community as a whole exerted control over practices and reputations. Sault points out that there is often a tendency to overlook the impact of women in regulating mock and serious violence. She particularly focuses on the power of the godmother. On the other hand, when an individual family or an entire group of persons migrates, kin and fictive kin relations often fail to consolidate in the new cultural setting. This is manifestly the case with respect to the Nuer immigrants studied by Holtzman. Social service agencies have had to cope with different kinds of violence, different cultural definitions and expectations surrounding violence, as well as different explanations for unfortunate incidents. Thus far there has been too little time to judge whether the Nuer and their new neighbors are moving toward a more positive rapprochement.
Repeatedly, faced with the complex antecedents and inputs of what one intuitively terms “violence,” researchers mention moderating and meliorating factors such as trust, respect, and something as subtle as politeness (Cohen and Vandello, chapter XII; Brown and Levinson 1987). In the past 20 years, social scientists have returned to look more closely at emotions as expressed in behavior (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999) and language (Wierzbicka 1999). Regarding both external behavior and internal emotion, universal patterns obtain—some ethnological and cross-cultural, and others more deeply ethological.
Looking at violence at close hold—in family, school, and neighborhood— individuals have been socialized to accept what's meted out, and in the process they learn all sides of the relationship, becoming in due time the abusing (or blind) parent, spouse, teacher, neighbor.
This said, each cultural setting is replete with contradictions which can be mined by the individual, regardless of age or sex. At the same time, stepping back to let some common variables fall into place, Mackey (chapter VIII) pinpoints the pivotal role of fathers in child-rearing cross-culturally. Despite the variety of social systems, each functioning at some adequate level, Mackey can demonstrate patterns in murder levels tied to the absence of fathers. Exactly what all the fathers contribute to the less pathologic of families is unclear, but it will not reduce to either financial stability or “discipline.” Perhaps here also the ephemeral factors of trust and respect figure in the crucible of forging social selves. One recalls also the recent research of Donahue and Levitt (2000), linking decreasing U.S. crime rates to the liberalization of abortion since Roe v. Wade in 1973.Socialization affects not only the young in family and school, but adults as they enter all manner of institutions. Socialization in either instance can be soft or severe. In the case of policing in the U.S., as pointed out by Lutes and Sullivan (chapter XIII), officers must attend to the legal limits of their enforcing of the law. That is, force itself becomes a philosophical practice. The same dilemma obtains with respect to military training, which licenses killing while also training recruits how not to be killed, as documented by Ben-Ari (chapter XV) in Israel and Moore (chapter XVI) in the U.S. marines. Legitimate killing costs heavily, psychologically, both before, during, and following the act (Grossman 1995, MacNair 2002). Some analyses suggest that the individual has to be broken down through physical and mental violence, built back up as a soldier, dissolved into the group, and thereafter subjected to authority. The cruel rigors of military training may inculcate the ability in the recruit to “do” violence, while secondarily it serves as a pre-test, and pretext, of the recruit's ability to withstand torture.
Recalling Bateson's (1936/1958) observation that persons learn role relations, not autonomous single roles, military training must simultaneously consist in lessons in torture. Along the same vein, intermittent reinforcement inclines the subject to fix the behavior (Bateson 1977).When it comes to war, “necessary” and spurious violence can be placed in the same frame as positively valued behavior, such as bravery, and be thereby positively regarded. War occurs in only some larger-scale societies. Men in particular may recall with some degree of pleasure their bonding with mates in training and in battle, and, in smaller-scale societies, in inter-family feuds (as coming up in Smith, chapter XX). While provincial feuds are not oiled by specialized training, mercenaries usually do have prior training in conventional state-bound forces, illustrating a by-product of military training whether in peace or for war. Hacker (chapter XIV) adds that war, whether deemed justified or not, will be sporadic, while military institutions are enduring, and within their training programs and petty bureaucracies one will not find the likes of bravery. Indeed, bureaucracies promote other genres of violence. One is the random and motivated exercise of hierarchical privilege, and another is the foothold of bureaucracies among the resource priorities of a society. Still another factor in the naturalization of violence, throughout culture and cultures, is the obfuscation of open and provisional heterarchies through the expectation and acceptance of deterministic hierarchies.
Torture crops up in cultures throughout history and around the world today. It is not exclusively a concomitant of warfare or conventional military practices. Many pathologic domestic practices are tantamount to physical and mental torture. The taunting by a rapist or stalker cannot be called anything less than torture. In Winkler's narrative (chapter V), the persistence of her voice eventually brought about a resolution that removed one dangerously violent rapist from the streets.
This should not be a luxury, and indeed it was not enough for Winkler. Before and since the arrest, trial, and sentencing of the perpetrator, Winkler has been in the public eye as an educator about the system which generates and protects rapists, batterers, and stalkers (Winkler 2002, cf. Buchwald et al. 1993, Matoesian 1993, Websdale 1998).Naveh demonstrates how insidious a culture of torture can be, this in Romania (chapter XXV). While the art and craft of torture can be readily taught to the first wave of victims, who are inducted to become perpetrators, it has proven extremely difficult to treat the collective perpetrators-survivors as they seek curing in order to return to ordinary society. In Guatemala, a culture of impunity has legitimated torture, murder, and every imaginable inhumanity; Afflitto (chapter XXIII) is hard pressed to bring more than the witness of survivors against this violence. The bloodbaths in too many such societies in too many regions of the world are matched by the bloodless spiriting away of the disappeared. Perice (chapter XXIV) relates how oppressive it is to be watched in Haiti, and to have to watch others as well, just to calculate one's next move. Long-term armed conflicts whose tactics range from murder, to torture, to mobster-like guerilla operations, can mix with politics, as Fandino relates from Colombia (chapter XXVI). There, power can seem to slide into authority. Urban gangs sometimes behave like guerillas when they articulate demands, especially when they can maintain some continuity through time and across space. Trappey's (chapter XXII) Taiwanese case illustrates how rampant gangsterism can become before the citizenry recognizes the scope of the problem. Indeed, the phenomenon of gangsterism resonates with adult crime, urban schools, sports events, hooliganism, and the media—which can reward behaviors emerging in all these venues (e.g., BBC 2003, Bower 2000, Brownstein 1999, Vigil 2003).
In the contemporary third world, the first world has been experienced as occupier, colonizer, usurper of voice, and rapist of both humans and resources—at various times, literally and figuratively. Beyond the historical patterns and particularities, the third and fourth worlds now serve as the dumping ground and playground for the affluent other worlds. Among the Saami (Anderson, chapter XXVII) and throughout the Pacific islands (Teaiwa, chapter XVIII), in very different climes and terrains, tourism has been introduced, and welcomed by some. Tourism, even ecotourism, extracts money from some visitors, which in turn distracts some locals about the larger and larger dis-economies at work. While many parts of the world are now plugged firmly into a tourism economy, the Saami and Pacific islands share a more unique souvenir from the outside world: radioactive contamination from atomic bomb tests and nuclear accidents. Because the health and environmental consequences of this known radioactivity cannot be established for many years, and then only by indirect statistical inference, the victims themselves find the situation they're in rather hypothetical.
Around the globe many individuals choose to smoke a known carcinogen, yet populations such as those in radioactivity's path have no option but to continue their traditional lifeways, even if it means eating, drinking, and inhaling poisons. Complaints about these toxic conditions have to be addressed in many directions, from local authorities and their own state apparati, to global powers, yet the transgressions occurred decades in the past far beyond the pale of accountability. In monitoring ongoing environmental condi-
tions, what's going on today may be flying under the radar. Few of us have the expertise to judge the alleged dangers from nuclear energy or genetically engineered crops, especially when scientists themselves cannot attest to “safe” levels of toxins when nonlinear hormesis effects may be the rule rather than the exception.
Here also a critical awareness has often been the only antidote to conditions that render some victims silent (see Elia, chapters XVII and XIX). While language serves violence, even in torture, as documented by Naveh (chapter XXV), language can also be enlisted in intentional protest as well as be unpacked as inadvertent documentation (cf. Lemke 1995). This is true in instances of brutalized children exploring their own logics to explain violence (Rogers, chapter III), in the case of the structures of myth and rhetoric serving the diverse populations of the Peruvian Andes (Dean, chapter XXI), and in any structures of pornography (Dworkin 1999/1988) and other crimes against person and property (Fox 1996).
Violence—precipitating stochastically or from individual, societal, cultural or even biological “habit”—can be anticipated and triggered by those very systemic patterns. Ironically, perhaps, public outrage against some violence can provoke reactionary and escalating violence, as in the case facing environmental movements (Helvarg 1994). A seldom acknowledged prefigurement to violence is fear, itself a form of violence. This situation sums up the art and craft of terrorism very well: one can instill terror without acting, or at most only intermittently reinforcing that substrate of terror.
However, if habit can sustain actual and perceived violence, habit can also undermine it, theoretically.