NOTES

Joseba Zulaika,"The Anthropologist as Terrorist" [Basque], in Fieldwork Under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival, Carolyn Nordstrom and Antonius C.G.M. Robben, eds., Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 205-222.

Professor Joseba Zulaika teaches Anthropology and Basque Studies at the University of Nevada in Reno. He has a Ph.D. from Princeton University. His interests are symbolic anthropology, discourse of terrorism, and Basque country of northern Spain and southern France. In 1988, Zulaika published his book Basque Violence: Metaphor and Sacrament (University of Nevada Press).

As both anthropologist and Basque he returns to his home community (birthplace) to study the political violence of terrorism. His aim is to find meaning in the violence, that is, to understand as well as know it.

The author is faced with at least three dilemmas which he repeatedly wrestles with in his essay. The first dilemma is that the author is simultaneously ethnographer and villager, outsider and insider, observer and participant, not one or the other.

The second dilemma is that in the same community [village to world] the exact same act of violence may be seen as murder, immoral, unjust, and cowardly by some, and by others as moral, just, and courageous or heroic.

The third dilemma is to deal with the problem of when writing about violence starts to become acceptance or even advocacy. According to Zulaika, there is as much risk, in an intellectual and moral sense, in approaching terrorism for ethnography as in speaking out openly against a terrorist organization (216).

These dilemmas are a central concern of the postmodern approach to the anthropology of violence--- that everything is constructed and relative. There is no scientific neutrality, absolute truth, invariant meaning, or universal morality. The community was itself divided over what was true, moral, and just (211). All meaning is socially constructed (213). Furthermore, the same person may consider violence to be meaningful at one point and meaningless at another (210, 213). Thus, the author remained ambivalent about the violence, he could neither accept it as heroism nor reject it as murder (208). One conclusion he reached is that the meaninglessness of terrorism--- randomly targeting innocent civilians to be victims of violence--- can be the ultimate message (217).

Two main results emerged. First, some ethnographic distance for understanding the violence was provided by the history of the village. However, ethnographic proximity through face-to-face interaction and dialog allowed an understanding of the personal and human aspects of the violence. The "other" is a person, a human, and a part of our own community in one way or another, thus, ultimately, the "other" can never be understood by distancing as something else apart from ourselves (219-220). Zulaika emphasizes that: "This was a face-to-face interaction that eliminated the privileging of any representation" (220).

This is contrary to the "scientific" approach of terrorism experts who follow the taboo of not recognizing and dealing with the humanity and personhood of the terrorist, but instead promote depersonalization and dehumanization which in turn promotes further violence (207, 212, 216, 219). On the one hand, Basque nationalists accused Zulaika of being CIA, on the other, the CIA viewed him as a terrorist sympathizer and withholding critical security information (216).

Second, the ethnographer was invited by the village to give a public lecture in which it became obvious that the specialist did not have any special knowledge of violence (209). However, the lecture provided a context and catalyst for the community to better realize that violence is socially constructed and relative (211). As Zulaika states: "...ethnographic perspectivism was at least able to carve out a communal space in which people with irreconcilable conceptions could talk to each other without turning one another into monsters" (210). [This is an extraordinary accomplishment, recalling that peace can cease and violence begin when communication fails]. Zulaika states: "I felt proud of the role of the ethnographer as a provider of a discursive space in which we could reflect on our collective rituals and neutralize the deadly mechanism of scapegoating. We were forced to reconsider "political responsibility," "innocence of the victim," "patriotic commitment," and so on" (218). Furthermore, Zulaika's interpretation actually changed the minds of some activists and became a dominant interpretation (216)!