Introduction: Humanistic Approaches to Violence

Abstract

This issue derives from a panel session at the American Anthropological Association (AAA) meetings in 2006 that was sponsored by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. The topic of violence is central to our current social and cultural life as much as it is for those beyond the United States. The mediation of our political relations, economic entanglements, and cultural imagination through the exercise of violence has become an almost unremarkable feature of modern life. Certainly our own militarization since the events of September 11, 2001, as the needs of “homeland security” and an ever-expanding “war on terror” keep growing even with the advent of a new presidency suggest that we must think about violence as integral to the social and cultural life of modern society, and as a valued part of expressive culture. Some would suggest that it is no longer sufficient to imagine violence as the marginal and pathological expression of negative social and cultural value, but that it may be integral and inevitable in human social and cultural relationships (Whitehead 2007). The problem of whether, when, and how that may be true is precisely a measure of cultural difference, and anthropology has only just begun to engage this problem ethnographically, despite the prevalence of the phenomenon of violence. As Michael Harkin also argues in this issue with regard to the system of exchanges among Algonquians and colonists, much the same has been true in the interpretation of ethnohistorical evidence, and violence has been factored out of otherwise holistic ethnological depiction. The result of this culturological and uniform treatment of violence is also clearly illustrated by Bilinda Straight in this issue. As she argues, where such wholesale treatments have permitted violence to become part of the perceived ethnological order the effect is to imprison others in a form of cultural reductionism, such that individuals who are part of “violent cultures” are necessarily expressive of their cultural norms. Bilinda Straight writes: These unidimensional representations can distract from the culpability of political elites and from the role of economic and political disenfranchisement in sustaining violence. They can also mask the ways in which some elites benefit from the propagation of cultural stereotypes even while deliberately engaging in manipulation of ethnic fault lines. As Straight emphasizes, and as this issue highlights overall, such ubiquitous representations based on cultural stereotypes and endlessly recycled in the media, contribute to a global political order in which the violence of the marginalized is seen as “politically expedient, routine, and forgettable.” Accordingly, the topic of the ethnography of violence is timely and was appropriate to the AAA theme of “dangerous ideas” in a number of ways. “Dangerous” because any attempt to challenge normative categories, even those embedded within anthropology, risk at best incomprehension and at worst vilification. Moreover, there are critical issues to be considered as to the relevance of ethnographic methods to the understanding of violence, because even to observe violent acts is already to be entailed in the cultural production of violence as culturally meaningful (Whitehead 2009). However, humanistic interpretations and approaches to violence have proved highly innovative and therefore of wider relevance to anthropology as a whole—particularly in the matter of ethnographic approaches to the issue. Emphasis on the meaningful and performative aspects of violence, the subjective experience of violence, and the ways in which perpetrators might be considered as cultural agents are all themes that have informed recent ethnographic approaches to violence. Many of those themes are therefore also reflected in the articles collected here, as well as the original panel contributions. For example, as was shown in the papers given during the original panel by Ventura Perez and Andrew Darling, current archaeologically and ethnographically based presentations on cannibalism—a notoriously ideologically constructed exotic savagery—have been greatly improved by the example of humanistic approaches that produce more nuanced and contextualized interpretations of sacral manipulations of the human body (see also Whitehead 2008). Also, more widely, such approaches encourage a direct engagement with indigenous understandings of the anthropological and archaeological process—as in the case of current debates over Anasazi “cannibalism” and how that impedes Native American causes. Similarly, not just ritual but also “religious” violence and the putative connections between religion and violence (Whitehead and Abufarha 2008), can be fruitfully explored by humanistic approaches. Part of the resolution of the problem of how violence can be engaged ethnographically, without contributing to that violence through its further representation, stems from the way in which ethnographic understanding allows for forms of cultural contextualization. Such contextualization may show how violence may be in one sense meaningful and valued, rather than inevitable, socially negative, and culturally destructive for the Western cultural order, as it is always construed. Specifically, this may happen through the ways in which the performative, poetic, and semiotic aspects of violence and its imagination are only revealed through close ethnographic engagement with the subjectivities of others. In this way Zucker's discussion in this issue of “matters of morality” among Cambodian villagers recalling the days of the Khmer Rouge, illustrates how the cultural “habitus” for violence is deeply intertwined with other aspects of moral life, and so how it is that violence (which all may condemn in the abstract) is intimately grounded in the moral calculations of everyday life. More widely recent work on state terror, terrorism, and suicide bombing, for example, all demonstrate the timeliness and relevance of ethnographic attention to such “dangerous ideas” (Aretxaga 2004; Strathern et al. 2005; Whitehead and Abufarha 2008). The ethical commitments that the ethnography of such violence implies also means that anthropological witnessing of ethnic and class-based struggles entailing both state terror and armed resistance or civil disobedience of various kinds are also critical areas of ethnographic research. Such research also speaks directly to recent controversies, as in the case of the Venezuelan Yanomamö and the AAA El Dorado Report (2002). This officially sanctioned inquiry examined professional responses to the publication of a series of accusations as to the unethical conduct of field work by anthropologists in the Venezuelan Amazon (see Tierney 2002). This professional cause célèbre underlined the serious professional issues academia and media representations raise through the way in which they can play into the outcomes of civil conflicts, development projects, and human rights campaigns. Assault sorcery, witchcraft, and other forms of mystical violence are deployed in a wide variety of life contexts for many different purposes, and this makes “witchcraft” a fundamental and pervasive ethnographic reality in many regions of the world today. My own ethnographic focus in recent years has been on the dark shamanism of the Patamuna and Makushi of the Guyana Highlands, peoples who straddle the borders of Guyana with Venezuela and Brazil. The term kanaimà refers to a particular mode of assault sorcery that involves the ritual mutilation and killing of its victims. The term also can allude to a more diffuse idea of active spiritual malignancy that possesses the assassins and has existed from the beginning of time. Kanaimà as an ethnographic issue is thus complex because it is a phenomenon that operates at a number of levels, referring simultaneously to the dynamics of the spirit world, physical aggression by individuals, the tensions and jealousies between villagers and family members, and the suspicions of distant enemies and outsiders. As a result one is simultaneously dealing with convincing case histories, wild rumors, considered attributions of blame, false accusations, ungrounded gossip, and justified suspicion. As Finnström shows in his chapter for this issue, “rumor” or “gossips,” are critical social vectors for the meaning and making of violence. The paradox of violence may be considered this way, that it is an imagined material physical harm and the product of what is imagined. But, as Finnström notes: The rumors are stories that say something profound about lived entrapments and political asymmetries in Uganda and beyond. . . . So, rather than seeing rumors as the expression of some bizarre conspiracy of alienation, we need to acknowledge that people live with a seriously harsh wartime reality. The circulation of stories and rumors in a society is in reality no different from what anthropology has often, as a result of failing to appreciate the dynamic and changing nature of oral literatures, called myth making. Like myth in anthropological theory, stories reach a subjective level within individuals in the midst of what may be unwelcome and bewildering events (“violence”), just as such stories also simultaneously refer to the social groups among whom they circulate. Such routes of knowledge or culturally recognized understanding may be part of the violence in the cultural order like any other aspect of social life. The pervasive and profound discourse of kanaimà is a central ethnographic fact of the lives of the people of the Guyana Highlands. It both dramatizes the human condition and can appear to suggest its futility. It is a daily matter of conversation and appears closely to influence the decisions that people make through the vision it supplies of a cosmos filled with predatory gods and spirits whose violent hungers are sated on humans. The decision to go to the farm, to go with another or not, to carry a gun or not, to pass by the spirit abode of a famed killer or to walk by a longer route, thus appears to be woven into the texture of every day life. For those who participate in this discourse there are also the distant but steady rumors of killings that are discussed as possible proof of the malign nature of the cosmos and the enmity of others. For the people of the Guyana Highlanders the practice of kanaimà involved criminal activity, and informants would include the families of victims, as well as avowed killers and practitioners. However, a constant theme in commentaries on such killings was the indifference and inattention of the Guyanese national government and police. In this context, the people felt that ethnographic forms of witnessing and reporting were relevant to their attempts in gain development resources and government infrastructure. At the same time this risked provoking a campaign of “Law and Order” being unleashed on the people of the Highlands, and such exercises in justice are themselves apt to become indiscriminately lethal. Given this situation kanaimà is somewhat accepted and endured as a mark of Amerindian autonomy even as it is energetically projected to an external audience. In this way it can easily be appreciated how the politics of ethnographic representation in Amazonia, as elsewhere, are complex and how the issues raised by the increasing “darkness in El Dorado” at that moment, because of the uproar over Tierney's book, weighed heavily in my own subsequent publications about kanaimà. In short, the issue of how representations of assault sorcery might be used beyond the anthropological community needs careful assessment, including a consideration of how anthropological representations might be used in the service of the state. Western ideas about kanaimà sorcery, as with cannibalism more widely, cannot be taken as simply reflecting the results of an encounter with some objectively present form of native savagery or exoticism. Rather, our Western interest in the savagery of others, and in particular when it supposedly takes the form of cannibalism, clearly has served an ideological purpose in both politically justifying and morally enabling violent conquest and occupation of native South America. Nonetheless, this cultural proclivity on our part does not rule out forms of cultural practice by others that are truly challenging to interpret, in the sense that others do apparently give meaning and value to acts that we might abhor or simply deny to be “real.” This “lack of reality,” however, more often constitutes a misunderstanding on our part, and what we actually mean is that the “incomprehensible” act is one of savagery. 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