The case histories in previous sections each focus on a genre of violence within a circumscribed relationship or group.
The narratives speak for themselves; they cannot be summarized in any meaningful way, nor do they lead to packaged conclusions. Yet, in many instances, those examples of violence shaped by culture are accompanied by antidotes within the cultural frame, and sometimes even prophylactic preventions.
In still other cultures, we have become familiar with other approaches to curb and heal violence as it has waxed and waned throughout history. Drawing on these observations, this volume will end with two chapters, both by the editor.A case history reflecting on the Saami people, an indigenous ethnic minority living in arctic Fennoscandia and northwestern Russia, defies placement in any of the four sections of this volume. In fact, it was composed to pull together features about the family, the interpersonal, the institutional, and larger systems from a single cultural group, interrogating those systems for indicies and relations of violence. This chapter serves other ends as well. First of all, the Saami are relatively tranquil as a society, and would not ordinarily be included in a treatise on violence. However, the seams in their social and environmental relationships do bear tinges of the violent, and they stand as victim vis-a-vis the linguistic and cultural assimilationist policies of the state and of global events such as Chernobyl. At the same time, the chapter explicitly raises serious questions as to the attributions of and definitions for violence within a particular culture.
The epilogue picks up on categories and definitions of violence, being in part a response to the promissory note of the introduction. The case histories present data and analyses about a finite number of cultures and genres of violence. Some of those genres are tested, as it were, on the Saami in the penultimate chapter, where one discovers some, but only some, common constellations of violence. In the epilogue, the case histories and a wider literature are summarized to inspect a greater variety of categories and theories of violence, in order to foreground the variety of cultural counters to violence. These preventative measures, neutralizing gestures, and social policies are likewise shaped culturally. Yet, even though solutions cannot be transplanted, they permit a gentler landing for a volume on the cultural shaping of violence.