Violence and Subjectivity

Rating:
Summary: Blindness is power ....
Review: Blindness, the inability or refusal to see why we commit violence and to see the effects of violence on ourselves and others that continue for generations, is a kind of spiritless, hopeless and, in the end, impotent power.

That is one of the points of this marvelous book, a collection of articles written by anthropologists who have been through or who have been with those who have been through violence. Not only does violence kill, main and destroy, it changes those who live after. Violence sears identities, amputates parts of self, twisting how the survivors see themselves and others. We are some of those others.

From China to South Africa to Sri Lanka to the former Yugoslavia to India to Pakistan to Nigeria to what we call Western civilization, these essays carry us around the world to meet people to have done their human best to deal with inhumane circumstances. Sorting identities of the circumsized as opposed to the non-circumsized, trying to be a man when men have no fathers and whose primary role is to serve as targets for the enemy, the erasure of identity through steralization and the importance of memory are questions faced by the most ordinary of people. One of the most riviting and thought-provoking essays is titled, "On Not Becoming a "Terrorist"". In a culture of terrorism, can a person refuse to become one - and survive? It was a Mayan social commentator, Sam Colop, coming to terms with the decades of mass murder, who described the conqueror type. "It is not merely that his power makes him blind," he wrote, "nor that his power is accompanied by blindness, nor even that his power required blindness; it is, instead, quite simply that is blindness, his willed amorality, is his power, or a large part of it." And is it then the victims who should likewise seize power?

Arthur Kleinman brings it all home to "the violence in middle-class life under the regieme of disordered capitalism." "Rather than view violence, then, simply as a set of discrete events, which quite obviously it can also be, the perspective I am advancing seeks to unearth those entrenched processes of ordering the social world and making (or realizing) culture that themselves are forms of violence: violence that is multiple, mundane, and perhaps all the more fundamental because it is hidden or secret violence out of which images of people are shaped, experiences of groups are coerced, and agency itself is engendered." Or, to use a "mundane" example, can you recall in either a movie or TV show a single non-family dispute that was resolved without violence or aggression? Can we any longer imagine a way of solving social and political problems without violence, the threat of violence, creating new weapons, passing "tougher" laws, building new prisons or insisting (making) "the other person" make the sacrifice?

A great book.