The Various Genres and Worlds of Violence

The introduction to this volume promised an expanded discussion of the concerns sur­rounding violence. Hence, this epilogue will broach and further probe a number of issues and genres of violence beyond those discussed in the previous chapters.

Violence at any level—whether a direct aggressive event, a structural domination process, or yet more endemic cultural patterns (indeed, if distinguishable, adapting Gal- tung 1990)—has been more regularly associated with putative “causes” or “explana­tions,” than with “solutions.” Whether pointing at “aggression,” crystallizing especially at the direct, local, personal level, or at “power,” at the cultural and structural level (which often subsumes the local), these constructions have led scholars deeper into lin­ear, deterministic, and therefore simplistic narratives rather than toward a nuanced appre­ciation of the complexity characterizing cultural dynamics. Causality is a superstition, Warren McCulloch has claimed (1965), inspired no doubt by Wittgenstein. Far-from- equilibrium dynamics (Prigogine and Stengers 1984/1979) and anticipation theory (Rosen 1985) have since expanded on McCulloch to emphasize that in dynamical sys­tems, prediction is illusory and control impossible. Like much else, violence resists sim­plification (cf Cromer and Wagner-Pacifici 2001, Keane 1996, Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004, Turpin and Kurtz 1997).

The organization for the genres of violence indexed in this volume move from ex­amples close at hand, in the family; to other antisocial behavior in small- and large-scale societies; to more dedicated institutions of violence; and finally to extreme examples of escalating collective destabilization. Represented in each of the five parts of the volume are discussions of societies of the first-, third-, and fourth-worlds, with the penultimate part also including a study drawing on the second-world. These somewhat journalistic categories, the notion of “worlds,” are crudely relative (societal scale and economic type) and provisionally heuristic (Graburn 1981). The “first world” includes Western (post-) industrial and especially “capitalistic” societies, the “second world” the secondary indus­trial and perhaps “socialist” powers, and the “third world” the balance of the nation-states rapidly folded into the global economy, although often more focused on survival than

wealth. The third world has also been called, in succession and ethnocentrically: “unde­veloped,” “underdeveloped,” “developing,” and “lesser-developed” or, now, “LDCs,” the acronymically laundered “lesser-developed countries”—all expressions being exam­ples of violence in ordinary language. These three “worlds” came to be labeled; they did not name themselves, nor did their constituents, if we exclude the journalistic commenta­tors from the first world.

Finally, and in important contrast, the “fourth world” consists not in nation-states but in indigenous ethnic minorities within the countries of the first, second, and third worlds. This world did name itself, when representatives of a number of indigenous ethnic mi­norities from around the globe gathered for the first time, in 1975 in Port Alberni, British Columbia, to compare their respective tribulations. The World Council of Indigenous Peoples has met many times in many places since 1975. A fourth-world people may be small in population and limited in resource base, but this does not translate into either homogenous or simple. Insofar as one may summarize their concerns, they pivot on cul­tural survival within a dominant national culture and a global hegemony, at least as much as on more mundane, corporeal survival—each a potential site of violence. Some fourth­world peoples are still buffered from deleterious global economies by their traditional subsistence activities, relying on a “nature” still more kind than the monoculture barrel­ing toward them. These smaller groups often have distinctive languages as well as cul­tures, and even today the public probably associates anthropology with research in the so-called fourth world. Some fourth-world peoples, especially in North America, think of themselves as “first nations,” and are recognized as such, somewhat ironically, just as the notion of “nation” itself has come up for deconstruction (e.g., Anderson 1983, Friedman 2002, Guehenno 1995, Scott 1998).