Violence as Lived Experience
A good deal of thought regarding violence in Colombia assumes that the intensity and frequency of violent actions lead to indifference or, further, assume its incorporation in daily life by way of the cultural acceptance of violence.
These assumptions overlook the social relationships and cultural meanings present in acts of violence. A certain normative bias clouds violence by excluding the matrix of meanings which allow actors to overcome their suffering, and which guide their daily actions. A certain fatalism ascribes the extreme and cruel aspects of acts of violence to “Colombian culture.” Diverse forms of violence are thus converted into one, violence, the product of a macabre tendency in Colombians. It then becomes extremely difficult to understand the mechanisms behind individual expressions of violence, and to identify common threads among them.Everything in this approach points to confusion of the explanations of violent events provided by actors, and the cultural and psychological mechanisms used to overcome suffering, with indifference and habit. This is probably due to close proximity with the phenomenon and to the enormous impact that acts of violence can have on the conscience of individuals. Analysts, just like cultural natives, move jointly with their referential systems, so that external cultural complexes are not easily perceptible, according to Levi-Strauss (1983). But in this case it is not a matter of distance and contrast, whereby others are traveling on different roads at different speeds, but of precisely the opposite: we are so involved we cannot focus. If we distance ourselves from the most common stereotypes seeking to explain violence in Colombia as social pathology (rooted in history or other features of our make-up), and if we likewise distance ourselves from a certain fascination with reaffirming Colombia as a violent nation, then we may advance in understanding the violence which effectively strikes at us daily.
Society and culture create conditions, such as the need to continue working, which help mitigate critical situations and provide new tasks and goals for people. It also reminds us that the need to understand the meaning of life, its organization, and the significance of social actions “do not disappear under horrible conditions” (Peacock 1986).
An inquiry into the events regarded as experiences of violence by individuals from low-income sectors of Bogota, and on the ways in which they explained them, was conducted between 1993 and 1994. This paper summarizes the results of the Estudio Exploratorio de Comportamientos Asociados a la Violencia [Exploratory Study of Behaviors Related to Violence], conducted jointly by the author and Drs. Ismael Roldan (psychiatrist), David Ospina (Ph.D. in statistics), Luis Eduardo Jaramillo (psychiatrist), Jose Manuel Calvo (psychiatrist), professors of Universidad Nacional de Colombia, and Sonia Chaparro (anthropologist) (Jimeno 1993). Research was supported by the Universidad Nacional, COLCIENCIAS, and ACAC. The goal was to understand the dynamics involved in these events, the interpersonal relationships present, the psycho-cultural points of reference, and their relationship to specific institutional configurations. The methodology sought to understand the psycho-cultural significance of experiences of violence for a low-income urban population, rather than focusing only on cases of extreme violence.
Violence was understood as a social fact that discriminates between scenarios, chainevent situations, relationships, actors, and cultural apprenticeship. Thus there are people, beliefs, values, expectations, forms of communication, and individual and institutional actions that are specifically associated with violence. Violence is therefore not an inexorable factum which has always hounded us; it becomes possible to recognize its expressions and to locate critical areas, critical actors, critical relationships and perceptions, and eventually to act upon them.
If violence is a specific form of interaction between individuals and groups in specific environmental contexts, characterized by the intent to harm others, we can relate its occurrence to certain elements of the cultural orientation and social organization.As with other forms of human interaction, violence may be seen as the oneness of situations comprising a series of observable events, cognitive cultural frameworks which assign meaning, and the specific motivations of social actors (see Gibbs 1986; Barth 1992; Bateson 1991). Thus, violent interaction is produced where socio-environmental settings, circumstantial structures providing the opportunity or direction for violent interaction, and culturally constructed cognitive complexes, converge.
Socio-structural or psychological factors cannot monopolize the explanatory power in violent interactions. They are not reduced to social needs, psychological disturbances, or access to material goods, power or prestige. More than understanding violence as an abstract notion, the goal is to characterize experiences of violence in their specificity and particularity. Identifying the distinctive features of specific forms of violence, and the physical, cognitive and emotional contexts associated with them, makes it possible to discover common traits and to identify the elements which structure them.