The Body and Other Natural Environments

Cultural violence encroaches on the individual body as well as the body politic, and these can be linked, sometimes through the natural environment. In the first and second worlds, so much incidental waste and intentional discard is produced at every level that some of it has been literally exported to the third world and onto the lands of fourth­world peoples.

Many ordinary environmental practices of the past have returned to haunt us as well, for instance, lead-based paints (Markowitz and Rosner 2002). In affluent neighborhoods, inherited dangers in the built environment are noticed and eradicated, while the poor— faced with other exigencies—may remain oblivious or without recourse. Crimes of per­son and of property associate strongly with disadvantaged classes and abused environ­ments: that is, the victims of inequality are re-victimized with impunity, and again if they land in penal institutions (Foucault 1995, Gilligan 1997, Gramsci 1995). Sometimes the connections between environment and behavior reveal themselves to be chemical and biochemical; usually there will be overlays of the sociocultural and linguistic. Problems that do not lap over to mar the horizons of the advantaged may resist recognition and treatment indefinitely.

The typically more direct and singular “-cides” (infanticide, homicide, suicide), unlike the more structural and multiple “-cides” (genocide, ethnocide, linguacide), are not exclusive to the disadvantaged at all, but do leave deeper tracks there. One could argue that suicide's violence against self might cancel itself out, were the practice careful not to impose on significant others or on strangers who do not sympathize with the deci­sion. Violence enters suicide when the latter act is motivated against the nonself, and when it obliges others to set the scene aright after the fact. Suicide enacted by self­described martyrs actually bent on homicide attains and surpasses the violent (Atran 2003). “Terror,” “terrorism,” and “terrorist” are terms that now take up the slack left by an exhausted “violence.” Terrorism will return to the discussion yet again.

Richards' (2000) study of infanticide has been mentioned in the introduction. One could argue that infanticide carried out in the incidental manner most typical in tradi­tional cultures might not constitute violence (Piers 1978). As described with respect to the Saami people of Lapland (Anderson, chapter XXVII), incidents of infanticide— however traditional—can almost be accidents, when inexperienced persons give birth unassisted or when birth occurs under severe weather conditions. In many other cultures, as well, infanticide entails no more than the mother exposing or abandoning the newborn marked by situational inconvenience, cultural attribute, or individual condition.

Some situations of violent infanticide might have parallels in alloanimal societies, where incoming males taking over a harem have been known to kill the younger off­spring of females, and even to abuse those pregnant. The too-convenient sociobiological explanation rests on the assumption that the incoming males will sooner be able to propa­gate their own genes if they dispose of the progeny of recent males (Dawkins 1976/1989). This line of reasoning is too facile, and, in fact, has found no resonance in Richards' data on human infanticide in the U.S (2000)—nor could it inasmuch as human sexual behavior is not constrained by estrous.

Few public controversies in the U.S. wax with more heat than that surrounding abor­tion and abortion rights, the latter only assured nationwide in the U.S. since Roe v. Wade in 1973, though possibly to be revisited again. Abortion is another practice that appears to be a cultural universal, carried out in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons. Contemporary medical abortion might well appear more violent than traditional abor­tions; there is premeditation in each case, and a complex of fear (not just of the proce­dure, but of the pregnancy condition too, and of any alternative outcomes), yet aggres­sive rage is absent, and the motivations are usually benign, taking into account short- and long-term quality of life for self and for others.

An interesting demographic study will link these cultural practices of infanticide and abortion to the sometimes overlapping domain of crime. Of course, crimes of all sorts are by broad definition apt to be violent, as are the punishments. Most U.S. Americans feel the weight of crime acutely, and are puzzled by statistics reporting its decline. Many tentative explanations—explaining the decline away—don't hold up to scrutiny, but there is an interesting contender. Donohue and Levitt (2000) suggest that the decreasing crime rate is real, and that it really can be explained. Specifically, their data indicates that, following 1973, Roe v. Wade made it possible for more women to avoid having unwanted babies, babies who would certainly discern their precarious situation as they grew up in socially unsupportive environments. Medical abortion, then, whether viewed as violent or not, might in some cases be culling lives that would be unfulfilled to the point of becoming self-destructive as well as violent against others.