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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book project started at an EASA workshop in Ljubljana 2008 and was carried on in a follow-up workshop at the Austrian Academy of Science in Vienna. We are indebted to the participants of these workshops and their stimulating discussions, especially to Henrik Vigh (University of Copenhagen) for being the discussant during the EASA workshop.
Our aim when putting this volume together was to present different analytical and methodological approaches to studying expressions of violence, and to find a balance between well-established researchers and the younger generation of anthropologists. We thank the contributors to this volume, whose stimulating discussions and ideas throughout the publishing process were essential in turning this idea into a comprehensive reader. Special thanks to Andre Gingrich for his valuable comments and helpful suggestions on the introduction.
We are grateful to Ismene Weiss for proof-reading the entire manuscript and to our editor Neil Jordan for his continuous support and patience. Finally, we want to acknowledge the financial and organizational support of our host institutions, the Institute for Social Anthropology at the Austrian Academy of Science (Maria Six-Hohenbalken), and the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo (Nerina Weiss).
Notes on Contributors
Eyal Ben-Ari is professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Hebrew University. His fieldwork and publications focus on the Japanese Self-Defence Forces, peace-keeping forces and the Israeli military. He is the author of Mastering Soldiers: Conflict, Emotions, and the Enemy in an Israeli Military Unit (New York: Berghahn Books, 1998).
0ivind Fuglerud is professor of social anthropology at the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo. His research interests include ethnicity, political violence and Diaspora formations. He has published a number of works on the conflict in Sri Lanka and its consequences, including Life on the Outside — the Tamil Diaspora and Long-Distance Nationalism (Pluto Press 1999).
Andre Gingrich is director of the Austrian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Social Anthropology and an ERC panel chair. His ethnographic work has focused on Yemen and Saudi-Arabia and on nationalism in Europe. His publications also cover methodological issues (Anthropology, by Comparison, Routledge 2002, coedited with Richard Fox) and the history of anthropology.
Erella Grassiani recently defended her PhD dissertation with the title Morality and Normalcy in Asymmetrical Conflict: Distancing, Denial and Moral Numbing among Israeli Conscripts in Everyday Practices of Occupation at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of VU University Amsterdam, Netherlands. She is currently working as a lecturer in Qualitative Methods at the Methodology Department of VU University.
Linda Green is an associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. Her ethnographic research in Guatemala, along the US-Mexican border and in Alaska, explores the relationship between individual suffering and the collective trauma among indigenous peoples across the currents of history. She has published a number of works on violence including Fear as a Way of Life: Mayan Widows on Rural Guatemala (Columbia University Press 1999).
Janine Klungel studied at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris and worked at Radboud University Nijmegen. Her fields of interest are violence, power, gender, religion, and memory. Her research focuses on rape in Guadeloupe, the ways it is expressed and remembered, and its long-lasting effects on family relations. This has resulted in a range of articles. Her teaching concentrates on the anthropology of violence.
Esben Leifsen is senior lecturer at the Department of International Environment and Development Studies, The Norwegian University of Life Sciences, As. His research interests include child welfare and interpersonal violence, urban anthropology and marginalization. He has published various articles and chapters on non-ideal childhoods, child-trafficking, reproductive governance and child circulation. Leifsen has carried out his research in Ecuador and among the Ecuadorian Diaspora in Spain.
Adelheid Pichler is a social worker and cultural anthropologist. She has been research assistant at the Austrian Academy of Sciences from 2003 to 2006 and is currently lecturer at the University of Vienna.
Antonius C.G.M. Robben is senior professor of Anthropology at Utrecht University, Netherlands, and author of the award-winning ethnography Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).
Michaela Schauble is a lecturer in Social Anthropology at the Martin-Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. She studied social anthropology and comparative literature at the Universities in Tubingen (Germany) and Yale (USA) and has trained as a documentary filmmaker at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology (Manchester University, UK). Her PhD thesis entitled Narrating Victimhood is a study of memories of war violence in the former Yugoslavia.
Maria Six-Hohenbalken is researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology, Center for Asian Studies and Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her research interests are political anthropology, Diaspora and transnational communities, border studies and historical anthropology.
Nerina Weiss is research fellow and PhD student at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University in Oslo, Norway. She has done fieldwork in Cyprus and among Kurds in Turkey. Her research focuses on political violence, histories of victimhood, border studies and gender. Since 2010 she is Marie Curie IE Fellow at the Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Victims in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Introduction
Nerina Weiss and Maria Six-Hohenbalken
Several scholars have stressed the limits of language in the course of researching violence or when writing about it (Appadurai 1996, Das 2007). Our language seems insufficient to describe the horrors of violence (Binford 2004). Often, words seem to be frozen, and experiences of violence thus appear as if they could only be voiced from a distant position (Das and Kleinman 2001). How can we grasp the meaning of violence? How can anthropologists document the far-reaching and long term effects of violent actions? Focusing solely on narratives of violence and the context in which they emerge, is not sufficient to understand the meaning and the effects of violence. Particularly in realms of human experience, it is obvious that verbal language represents merely one among several ways of expression like gestures, rituals or certain kinds of public manifestations. An exploration of the vast range of different modes of expression thus promises to be the more adequate way to approach, register and understand the comprehensive manifestations and long-lasting effects of violence.
This is the basic consideration why we chose ‘expressions’ of violence as the title for this volume, and asked the contributors to document and to analyze the diverging forms in which violence is addressed or conveyed. All the chapters of this volume thus deal with a paradox, as they attempt to turn into text violent experiences that, as we just presumed, cannot be expressed through verbal everyday language. The chapters discuss violence that is communicated through silences, rumours, literary narrations, represented in muted bodies, in rituals or role models. In order to grasp the meaning of violence as such, the contributors applied different perspectives, methods and analytical approaches. To comprehend the unspoken and the silence, most of the researchers have chosen a haptic approach. We borrow this term from Nordstrom (2010), who has defined her approach as ‘research through the senses’. Nordstrom has described the complexity of violence, its blurriness and its routinization or almost naturalization. In a similar approach, Verrips (2007) criticized researchers’ self-imposed restriction on visual manifestation in general, and claimed that a more balanced attention should be paid to our entire bodily sensorial experience. ‘We would then focus on [the] difficulty to grasp phenomena as deeply felt emotions and desires [...] as well as the irrational and the fantastic, the absurd and the surreal.’ Our heavy emphasis on the role of the mind, reason and rationality, should give way to an increased interest in the sensual and emotional dimensions that are inherent in ‘our somatic experience of reality’ (Verrips 2007: 31).
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