NOTES

"The Culture of Conflict: Field Reality and Theory" - Carolyn Nordstrom and JoAnn Martin, eds., The Paths to Domination, Resistance, and Terror, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

INCREASED VIOLENCE AND ETHICS OF PORTRAYING IT

"The widespread sociopolitical violence in the world, especially in the Third World, has altered the terrain of ethnographic research, raising new questions and requiring different types of ethnographic presentations. Anthropologists and other social scientists are confronting the challenge of portraying violence without encouraging or rationalizing it." (p.3)

KEY QUESTIONS

1. What ethnographic voice do responsible researchers give to the perpetrators and to the victims of sociopolitical violence? (p.3)
(What ethnographic voice conveys the social reality of these unarmed victims of aggression --- the families who essentially live their lives on the frontlines of today's conflicts --- if researchers focus on the politicomilitary systems whose members [?] may declare war, but certainly do no bear the brunt of it?
Worse, who gives resonance to those repressed, tortured, and disappeared in undeclared wars? p. 14)
2. What theoretical perspectives best portray the destabilizing effect of violence on cultures?
3. How is conflict "lived" by the people caught in its throes? (p.3)
4. What social and cultural dynamics foment, perpetuate, and resolve conflict? (p. 9)

ANTHROPOLOGIST'S ROLE

1. Participant observation to capture the experience of conflict and violence through a focus on people's everyday life instead of formal institutions (also see p. 14)
2. Analyze and interpret experience in the framework of the particular cultural and through theory
3. Privileged position to move theoretically and personally through local, national, and international levels (p. 5) (micro- to macro-levels, p. 7)

ETHICS

1. Avoid encouraging, rationalizing, justifying violence
2. Be neutral-- portray both perpetrators and victims (p. 3)
3. Represent conflict as a manifest phenomenon that raises pressing moral issues (p. 9)
4. Recognize role of the anthropologist regarding colonialism, genocide, state, etc. (pp. 9-10, Bodley chapter)
[5. What about the choice to study sociopolitical conflict and violence (p. 15), but NOT nonviolence and peace?]

2.
"Violence is not a socioculturally fragmented phenomenon that occurs "outside" the arena of everyday life for those affected. It is part and parcel of life for the millions of people who live under oppressive, repressive, or explosive politicomilitary conditions. If we are to understand peace and conflict, it is to people themselves, to the social dynamics and cultural phenomena that inform them, that we must turn." (pp. 13-14)

"Violence starts and stops with the people that constitute a society; it takes place in society and as a social reality; it is a product and a manifestation of culture. Violence is not inherent to power, to politics, or to human nature. The only biological reality of violence is that wounds bleed and people die." (p. 14)

CULTURE AND POWER (AS DIALECTICAL STRUCTURE AND PROCESS)

"The most striking finding of this volume is that repression and resistance generated at the national level are often inserted into the local reality in culturally specific ways." (p. 5) Violence can permeate every aspect of everyday life for everyone!

Culture = "a lived system of meanings and values"

Culture can be the central domain of contests for power, including in the expanding capitalist system and in powerful and repressive states (p.6)

DIRECT AND INDIRECT VIOLENCE (manifest or public and "intangible" or hidden)

Not everyone recognizes violence nor is all violence recognized as such, or in the same way (e.g., individuals or groups in different positions in the social, economic, and political hierarchy) (p. 7)

Violence can serve as a metalanguage that is understood and all too often employed across social, ethnic, linguistic, and political boundaries when normal channels of communication are ineffective (p. 7)

Violence can be symbolic--- violence enacted is but a small part of violence lived, and violence can be unconscious; in other words, the ideational manifestation of violence is as important as its concrete expression (p. 8) (e.g., art as strategy, weapon, political process, revolutionary voice in Ireland, p. 12)

Concluding paragraph (see p. 15)

Suggested reading:

R.D. Kaplan, 1994, "The Coming Anarchy," Atlantic Monthly 273(2):44-76.