Whitehead - Violence & the cultural order

8/7/2019 Whitehead - Violence & the cultural order

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Almost all theoretical and researchapproaches to violence begin with theassumption that, at its core, violence

represents the breakdown of meaning,the advent of the irrational, and thecommission of physical harm. Certain-ly the violence of language, representa-tion, and the structures of everyday lifeare acknowledged as relevant examplesof harm, but these are peripheral phe-nomena and dependent on the existenceof bodily damage and vicious attack asa substrate to these more ethereal exam-ples of violence. A similar ambiguity ex-ists with regard to the way in which nat-

ural processes or zoological behaviorsexhibit damage of a fleshy kind, but herethe supposed reign of instinct and sur-vival invites not only repugnance but al-so an absence of ethical evaluation.

This informal cartography of the ideaof violence in modern Western thinking

indicates that orthodox solutions or re-sponses to the problem of violence canonly envisage its suppression, as a beha-

vior inappropriate or misjudged to itsends. But what if violence is consideredennobling, redeeming, and necessary tothe continuance of life itself? In otherwords, the legitimacy of violent acts ispart of how they are constituted in theminds of observers, victims, and the per-petrators of such acts; and matters oflegitimacy are not at all separate fromthe way in which given acts and behav-iors are themselves considered violentin the rst place.

Consonant with the recognition thatviolence is not a natural fact but a mor-al one, current anthropological thinkinghas moved steadily away from the no-tion that it is a given category of humanbehavior, easily identied through itsphysical consequences and understoodas emerging from the inadequacies of in-dividual moral or social political systemsof restraint, or from underlying geneticproclivities. In the light of not only en-countering violence more frequently aspart of ethnographic eldwork, but alsothrough more properly understandingthe historical importance of colonialismand neocolonialism in establishing cer-tain codes of violent practice, anthropol-ogy has now moved toward ideas that

Ddalus Winter 2007 1

Neil L. Whitehead

Violence & the cultural order

Neil L. Whitehead is professor of anthropology

at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is

the author of numerous books, including Lords

of the Tiger Spirit (1988), War in the Tribal

Zone (1992), Dark Shamans (2002), and

Violence: Poetics, Performance and Expression

(2004).

2007 by the American Academy of Arts& Sciences

Whitehead.qxd 11/29/2006 1:44 PM Page 1


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stress the centrality of bodily and emo-tive experiences of violence to the nor-mal functioning of any given culturalorder, including that of the West. The

problem now is not how to end violencebut to understand why it occurs in theway it does. This involves recognitionthat violence is as much a part of mean-ingful and constructive human living asit is an imagination of the absence anddestruction of all cultural and social or-der.

This essay is intended to outline therole violence can play as meaningful cul-tural expression, whatever its apparentsenselessness and destructive potential.This exercise entails a questioning of as-sumptions as to the self-evident natureof violence. It also involves asking howissues of legitimacy critically influenceunderstandings of violent acts, and howsuch acts themselves are often complexsocial performances expressive of keycultural values. It also implies a critiqueof analyses that suggest historically tran-scendent biological and evolutionaryhomologies in human violence, as wellas of Hobbesian analogies drawn be-tween a primitive, savage past and con-

temporary tribalism and terrorism.

In archaeology, controversy as to theorigins of, and reasons for, human vio-lence and warfare is intense. Some ar-gue that the archaeological record showsendemic warfare going back indenite-ly in time. However, the archeologicaldata to support such arguments appearto have been deliberately assembled toillustrate prehistoric violence, with theworst cases being given rhetorical prom-

inence.1 In fact, the overall distribution

of the archaeological data, which arecertainly punctuated through time withexamples of organized killing, surpris-ingly reveals a starkly less violent record

when contrasted to the bloody historicaland ethnographic accounts of the pastfew centuries.

No one is suggesting that we cling toa Rousseau-like image of the peaceful,noble savage, but many others2 whohave carefully studied the archaeologi-cal record have come to a very differentconclusion about the incidence of vio-lence and war. Basically, they have con-cluded that war leaves archaeologicallyrecoverable traces. And with few excep-tions, the evidence is consistent with arelatively recent development of war asregular practiceafter the transition tosedentary existence (though not neces-sarily to agriculture) or, to put a dateand place on it, around 6000 bc in Turk-ish Anatolia. From then and there wardeveloped in and spread from other lo-cales, such that, by ad 1500, war wasquite common around the world, in allkinds of societies. But with the impor-tant codicil that the intensity and lethal-ity of warfare then spiked strongly as a

direct consequence of European imperi-alism.3

Certainly then, archaeology can playa key role by focusing on the indicatorsof ancient violence. But it has no logical

2 Ddalus Winter 2007

Neil L.Whiteheadonnonviolence& violence

1 See, for example, Lawrence H. Keeley, WarBefore Civilization (New York: Oxford Universi-ty Press, 1997), or Steven A. LeBlanc and Kath-erine E. Register, Constant Battles: The Myth of

the Peaceful, Noble Savage (New York: St. Mar-tins Press, 2003).

2 See, for example, Debra Martin and DavidFrayer, Troubled Times: Violence and Warfarein the Past (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach,1997), or Raymond C. Kelly, Warless Societies

and the Origin of War (Ann Arbor: Universityof Michigan Press, 2000).

3 See R. Brian Ferguson and Neil L. White-head, eds., War in the Tribal ZoneExpandingStates and Indigenous Warfare, 2nd ed. (SantaFe: School of American Research Press, 1999).



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priority in understanding violence andwar, since locating the temporal originsof such cultural patterns do not explaintheir persistence. There is, of course, a

wider cultural meaning in this debate asthe more strident advocates of a Hobbe-sian scenario are obsessively concernedto explode ideas of a noble savagewho lives in harmony with the naturalworld. Their agenda relates more to aneed to discover ourselves in the past,as a means to evade the hard questionsabout the persistence and increasing in-tensity of our own violence and warfare,than it does to the actual distributionsof archaeological data.4 However, thisdebate is without end and beyond reso-lution through archaeological evidencesince it is an attempt to limit the mean-ings of past violence to the politicalagendas of the present day.

In a similar way, recent speculationsabout humanitys warlike nature hasbeen fueled by supposed observations

of warfare by chimpanzees and otherprimates.5 These are indeed very influ-ential views, reportedly even reachinginto the White House.6 But in fact, the

chimpanzee comparison, and much oth-er work on the comparative genetics andevolution of violence, is based on twodefective premises: the rst one, whichI have already discussed, is that war hasbeen continuously present throughouthumanitys evolutionary and archaeo-logical past; the second is that the recordof recent ethnography is a valid reflec-tion of that past level of violence. Thelatter premise does not hold when oneconsiders the fact that local state expan-sion and imperial domination, especiallyin the last ve hundred years, have beencritical in intensifying patterns of tribalconflictmuch as is true of the spread ofhigh-tech weapons into contemporaryregional conflicts with an ethnic com-ponent, such as in the Horn of Africa.

Moreover, if primatologists clamorto have their insights applied to human-ity, they must recognize that it is a two-way street: they, in turn, must consid-er anthropological theory on collectiveviolence when interpreting chimpan-

zee violence. In just this vein, many pri-matologists7 have argued that both ob-


Violence &the culturalorder

4 Such presentations also miss the point thatthe presence of violence in the archaeologicalrecord is not the same as the presence of war-

fare. For example, recent attempts to proveAnasazi cannibalism in the Southwest, as inChristy G. Turner II and Jacqueline Turner,Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Pre-historic American Southwest (Salt Lake City:University of Utah Press, 1998), or Steven A.LeBlanc, Prehistoric Warfare in the AmericanSouthwest (Salt Lake City: University of UtahPress, 1999), simply ignore the logical possibil-ities of many other kinds of violent behaviorto produce the skeletal and coprolitic evidencetrumpeted as demonstrations of cannibalism,and instead blithely assume a relation to expan-sive warfare. Likewise, claims as to the Cauca-sian form of skeletal remains more than nine

thousand years old found in the Northwest alsoexploit a persistent cultural need to barbarizeand question the status of Native American cul-ture; see David Hurst Thomas, Skull Wars: Ken-newick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Na-tive American Identity (New York: Basic Books,2001).

5 See, for example, Michael Ghiglieri, The DarkSide of Man: Tracing the Origins of Male Violence(Reading, Mass.: Perseus Books, 1999), andRichard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Demon-ic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996).

6 See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History andthe Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

7 See Margaret Power, The EgalitariansHu-

man and Chimpanzee: An Anthropological Viewof Social Organization (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1991), or Frans B. M. deWaal, Peacemaking Among Primates (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), andmost recently, Christopher Boehm, Hierarchyin the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior



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served collective violence and extremehierarchical behavior among chim-panzees is a manifestation of changebrought on by an intensifying human

presence. Notably, those primatologists8

who argue that lethal chimpanzee vio-lence occurs in the absence of major hu-man disruption have asked to have thischaracterization accepted on faith. Butas with tribal warfare and with ethnicviolence more widely, if these claimsare to be taken seriously, their defend-ers must publish thorough descriptionsof historical contexts illustrating an ab-sence of exogenous stimulation of suchviolence.

Antedating but reinforced by prima-tologists claims, sociobiologists andevolutionary psychologists, and indeedSocial Darwinists before them, claimthat our evolutionary heritage has en-dowed or cursed us with an inherenttendency for in-group amity and out-group enmity. These tendenciestocling to those close to us and to reactwith unreasoning hostility to those whoare differentare then taken to explainethnic violence in the modern world.9

These views, in reality, often propound

naive caricatures of contemporary con-flict, as with Michael Ghiglieris sugges-tion of a three-way association amongcultural difference, genetic distance, andproclivity to violence.

In contrast to all of these approaches,the recent work of cultural anthropolo-gists can provide a markedly more so-phisticated frame of reference, in which

identity and violence are understoodas being historically and culturally con-structed. As is patent even to the casualobserver, ethnic conflict emerges fromcomplex and highly variable processes;it is anything but the eruption of someprimitive and xed group loyalty so be-loved of the sociobiologists and their ar-chaeologist supporters.

After the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraibwas revealed, many wondered whetherindividual psychopathology or systemat-ic military policy was at fault. Few un-derstood that the revelations also under-lined the importance of understandinghow violence works as part of our cultur-al order. Since the form of abuse prac-ticed by the U.S. soldiers seemed to em-phasize sexual humiliation and religiousdesecration rather than gross forms ofphysical injury, and since it is widely un-derstoodincluding by the interrogatorsthemselvesthat torture is not an effec-tive means of intelligence gathering, the

purpose of such abuse clearly requiresfurther thought. In particular, we needto examine the relationship of the abuseto the cultural meaning of the war inIraq and to the place of the military inAmerican society.10 In this light, home-land security, and preparedness for bio-logical attack, is no less a part of a per-formance of our own violent sociocultu-ral order than tanks, guns, and bombsare.

Unfortunately, the Western media, in

automatically locating the bases for vio-lence and terrorism in radical Islamand other unfamiliar political ideologies,



(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,1999).

8 As in Wrangham and Peterson, DemonicMales, or Ghiglieri, The Dark Side of Man.

9 See, for example, Vernon Reynold, Vincent

Falger, and Ian Vine, The Sociobiology of Eth-nocentrism: Evolutionary Dimensions of Xeno-phobia, Discrimination, Racism, and Nationalism(London: Croom Helm, 1987), or R. Paul Shawand Yuwa Wong, Genetic Seeds of Warfare: Evo-lution, Nationalism, and Patriotism (Boston: Un-win Hyman, 1989).

10 See, for example, John Conroy, UnspeakableActs, Ordinary People (New York: Knopf, 2000).



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has obscured this need to understandthe role of violence in our own culturalorder. The dominance of this commen-tary is part of the reason we consider

only the violence perpetrated by liberaldemocracies as legitimate. However,the Abu-Ghraib revelations destabilizedthese presumptions to some degree,leading to the broader questions of howand when does our society regard vio-lence, or at least torture and prisonerabuse, justiable.11

Anthropology offers the best methodof exploring these questions. But under-standing violence through anthropol-ogys standard approach to human re-searchethnographyis fraught withintellectual and personal risks. Witness-ing violent acts is problematic in itself,to say nothing of the challenge present-ed by the fact that ethnography is amethod of participant observation.12

And while various theoretical approach-es to the anthropology of war have cer-tainly emphasized the relevance ofchanging global conditions to the vio-

lent contestation of nationalism, eth-nicity, and state control, the question ofwhy such violence might take particularcultural formssuch as specic kinds ofmutilation, ethnic cleansing, or othermodes of community terrorhas notbeen adequately integrated into anthro-pological theory, despite the pioneeringwork of a few authors.

As a result, anthropology has beenunable to counter the commentary ofthe popular media, which stresses theprimitive or tribal nature of many ofthese conflicts by repeatedly referringto the culturally opaque violent prac-tices observed in these clashes. Thesepseudoanthropological attempts at ex-planation only recapitulate colonialideas about the inherent savagery ofthe non-Western world and, as such,proffer no hope for better understand-ing. In policy terms, the failure to appre-ciate the connection between culturalafrmation and violence often leads tointractable quagmiressuch as in Iraq

or Afghanistan, Ireland or Israelwherethe violent insertion of external politi-cal solutions has only served to induceeven ercer opposition. Of course, suchresistance is then linked again to the dis-course on tribalism and savagery by ref-erence to the religious (or antimodern)nature of the insurgents motivations.

Understanding violence as a discursivepracticewhose symbols and rituals areas relevant to its enactment as its instru-mental aspectsis an indispensable as-

pect of being able to interpret, and notjust condemn, violent acts. In order foran act of violence to be considered legiti-



11 See Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: Amer-ica, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (NewYork: New York Review of Books, 2004).

12 See accounts of such entanglements withwitchcraft and sorcery by Paul Stoller, In Sor-cerys Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship Amongthe Songhay of Niger (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1989), or Neil L. Whitehead,Dark Shamans: Kanaim and the Poetics of ViolentDeath (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,2002), as well as Carolyn Nordstrom and An-tonius C. G. M. Robben, eds., Fieldwork UnderFire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Sur-vival (Berkeley: University of California Press,1995). In more general terms, such topics are adifcult and possibly deadly subject for ethno-graphic research. Moreover, cultural anthropol-ogists are apt to elect more positive topics forresearch, justly fearing that to discuss violentcultural practices with our informants can lead

to a negative and deadly stereotyping, as wasclearly demonstrated by the recent controver-sy over ethnographic practices in Amazonia.See Patrick Tierney, Darkness in El Dorado: HowScientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon(New York: Norton, 2000), and Robert Borof-sky and Bruce Albert, Yanomami: The Fierce Con-

troversy and What We Can Learn from It (Berke-ley: University of California Press, 2005).



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mate, it needs not only to have the ex-pected pragmatic consequences but al-so to be judged appropriate. Therefore,among the key questions we must ad-

dress are how and when violence is cul-turally appropriate, why it is only ap-propriate for certain individuals, andthe signicance of those enabling ideasof appropriateness to a cultural tradi-tion as a whole. In addition, it is neces-sary to ask how a reevaluation of vio-lent cultural expression affects the con-cept of culture and to consider wheth-er violence is itself a cross-cultural cat-egory.13

We therefore need to pay more atten-tion to the generative schemes for cul-turally appropriate behavioras wellas the historically constituted matrixof symbolic and ideational forms uponwhich cultural representations, expres-sions, and performances are based. Thiscritical eld of analysis has largely beenignored. As a result, there have been fewattempts to map how cultural concep-tions of violence are used discursivelyto amplify the cultural force of violentacts, or how those acts themselves canproduce a shared idiom for violent

death. (This discursive amplication is

precisely what is meant by the poeticsof violent practice.)14

Instead, the study of violence hastended to focus on the political and eco-

nomic conditions under which it is gen-erated, the suffering of victims, and thepsychology of its interpersonal dynam-ics. Such work has vastly improved ourconceptualizations of violence, but it ig-nores the role of perpetrators, their mo-tivations, and the social conditions un-der which they are able to operate. How-ever, this imbalance in theorizing vic-tims rather than perpetrators is just be-ginning to receive better attention fromboth anthropologists and others work-ing on humanistic approaches to vio-lence.15

Also, until recently, the anthropologyof violence was principally concernedwith the birth of war, the political econ-omy of small-scale conflicts, or withthe general context of the encounter be-tween tribal and colonial military tradi-tions. This approach certainly providesan important material context for under-standing the development of culturalforms of violence. But new domains ofanthropological analysisstate violence

and death squads, postcolonial ethnicconflicts, serial killings, and revitalizedforms of traditional killing, such as as-sault sorcery and witchcrafthave re-quired a much closer consideration ofthe symbolic, ritual, and performativequalities of violent acts in order to con-ceptualize cultural variety in the discur-sive practice of violence more fully.



13 As Christopher Taylor points out in his 1999study of the Rwandan genocide, Sacrice as Ter-ror: The Rwandan Genocide of 1994 (New York:Berg, 1999), this does not mean that culture,conceived of in a simplistic way as in DanielGoldhagens controversial analysis of the Na-zi genocide, Hitlers Willing Executioners (NewYork: Vintage Books, 1997), can simply be citedas a cause of violence. Moreover, even the mostcareful analyses of Western forms of violence,such as of the Nazi genocide, are not necessari-ly relevant to the understanding of postcolonial

ethnic violence, such as the genocide in Cambo-dia, precisely because genocide is here mediat-ed through cultural forms with which we areoften unfamiliarsee Alexander Laban Hinton,Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow ofGenocide (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 2005).

14 See Whitehead, Dark Shamans, and Neil L.Whitehead, ed., Violence (Santa Fe: School of

American Research Press, 2004).

15 The website for the Legacies of Violence re-search circle at the University of Wisconsin-Madison illustrates many of these approaches,http://www.internationalresearch.wisc.edu/lov/.



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In any case, violence is becoming anunavoidable fact of anthropological re-search. We face burgeoning ethnic andcommunity violence in many of the tra-

ditional eld sites for anthropologicalanalysis, even in those locations thatseemed to have already peacefully nego-tiated their postcolonial economic andpolitical conditions. Research on vio-lence has also become an importantpart of anthropologys understandingof globalization. In the economicallyand politically marginal spaces of theglobal ethnoscape, violence has becomea forceful, if not inevitable, form of cul-tural afrmation in the face of a loss oftradition and a dislocation of ethnicity.Violence here is often engendered notsimply by adherence to globalized ide-ologies, such as communism or Islam,but also by the complexities of localpolitical history and cultural practices.This is true even where global ideologiesdo come into play, since it is the localmeaning of those ideologies that drivesconflicts.

In tandem with this changing contextfor ethnographic research is the resur-gent debate within anthropology as to

the existence and meaning of tradition-al violence, which cannot be charac-terized simply as a return to barbarity.A growing body of ethnographic andhistorical work is seeking to developaspects of cultural theory in a way thatovercomes these problems: work exam-ining the Rwandan/Burundian genocideand the destruction of Liberia; studiesof the resurgence of traditional witch-craft as a political force in various glo-bal contexts; studies of the discursive

practice of violence in the South andSoutheast Asian contexts; or materialconcerning state terror from Central andSouth America. Such studies, and oth-ers, clearly suggest that the moment isright to compare ethnographic interpre-

tations and seek new principles for rep-resenting and studying violence as a cul-tural practice.

Violent acts embody complex aspectsof symbolism that relate to both order

and disorder in a given social context.Because of these symbolic aspects, vio-lence has many potential cultural mean-ings. This is particularly important toremember when we consider the violentacts committed in the name of a particu-lar religion, or in a belief that these actsconform to a set of moral or patrioticteachings directly linked to specic ide-ologies.

When an atrocity or murder takesplace, it feeds into the world of the icon-ic imagination. Imagination transcendsreality and its rational articulation, butin doing so it can bring more violent re-alities into being. We should not under-estimate the signicance of this phe-nomenon. Under early modern Europe-an regimes, simply showing torture in-struments to a prisoner was often suf-cient to produce the required confessionof heresy or apostasy from him or her.So, today, simply seeing the aftermath of

terrorism is enough to induce each citi-zen to rehearse complex political com-mitments to freedom and democracy.These pledges, in turn, sustain those pol-itical regimes that locate the terroristthreat at the very gates of society.

In many popular presentations of in-digenous, or tribal, ways of life, themessage is usually that the lives beingportrayed are subject to the kinds ofarbitrary violence that Western liberaldemocracy has banished from everyday

existence. Accordingly, we are repeated-ly exposed to the notion that these so-cieties face the pervasive threat of theHobbesian condition, a war of all menagainst all menwith the inevitableconsequence that the lives of most men





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are nasty, brutish, and short. This modeof representation, and the imaginationof others subjectivities it entails, is par-ticularly evident in the treatment of top-

ics such as sorcery and witchcraft, andin the televisual dioramas of tradition-al violent rituals, such as initiation cere-monies, mystical practices of self-muti-lation or pain endurance, and so forth.16

What such portrayals neglect in theirurgent concern to convince us of the de-gree to which such lives are immured insuperstition and fear is that we, too, livein a state of constant fear, kept activein the public consciousness by such de-vices as government-issued threat levels,civic exercises in disaster preparedness,and the nightly news bulletins and tele-vision dramas. For these measures implythat, even if we are somewhat defendedagainst the terrorist of yesterday, the po-tential for similar violent disruptions al-ways exists.17

These representations overlook notonly the way in which states of terrorand acts of violence are entangled withthe social and political order, but alsohow those apparently undesirable con-ditions are nonetheless valorized as the

contexts for the expression of desirablecultural valuesbe they heroism andself-sacrice, or physical endurance andindifference to pain.

Moreover, the televisual contrasts be-tween savage, violent others and ourpacic, sophisticated selves are not justimplicit endorsements of Western cul-ture. They also efface our own capacitiesfor, and institutions of, violence, with aresulting enfeeblement of the individu-

al in the face of, or prospect of, the ex-ercise of violence. We sit entranced bythe sights and sounds of terrorist vio-lencethe twisted piles of metal and

rubble, the wailing of women, the shout-ing of men, and the telltale pools ofbloodwhich conrm the overridingimportance of this kind of violence asa token of the perpetrators barbarityand an occasion for our condemnation.Implicitly, we are invited to infer the rel-ative insignicance of our own counter-violence, which is rarely itself so starklypresented, in defeating the monstrousperpetrators of such acts. We also learnthat we are dependent on the profession-als of violence to achieve that end.

This is partly why the visual materi-als emanating from Abu Ghraib wereso shocking to, and incommensurablewith, our understanding of the violencewe deploy. Although American culturalvalues were overtly shaping the formsof violenceall of the torturers woreplastic gloves, focused on sexual humili-ation, and generally gave off the impres-sion that this was merely a frat party orhazingthe automatic responses of an-alysts were either that the individual of-

fenders were psychopathic or that thehigher authority was aberrant (albeit un-derstandably so, since the aim of defeat-ing terror is far more important). Evenliberal-inspired commentary sought tovalidate the U.S. government and thenations body-politic by suggesting thatfree journalistic inquiry, and a Freedomof Information Act that would help jour-nalists uncover the truth of such abuse,balances out the mistakes of AbuGhraib. Presumably, then, the detainees

at Guantnamo Bay are doing just ne.18



16 A recent series of programs on such topics,made for the U.S. Discovery Channel, was thusentitled Culture Shock Week.

17 Carolyn Nordstrom has aptly named thisthe tomorrow of violence; see her chapterin Whitehead, ed., Violence.

18 See the review of Mark Danners Torture andTruth by Andrew Sullivan in the New York Sun-day Book Review, January 23, 2005.



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Of course, the latest terrorist pande-monium is in many ways just a rein-scription of the pervasive threats thatwere earlier evident during the cold war.

Weapons of mass destruction are backin vogue, again suggesting the imminentpossibility of another terrorist catastro-phe in the vein of the September 11 at-tacks, if not the emergence of a coldwarstyle stand off with North Koreaor Iran.19

In the imagination of terror and vio-lence, there is no limitation on how farsuch discourses can travel, or at leaston the mediums in which they are ex-pressed.20 Such discourses, however,often proliferate locally through gossipto constitute a cultural imaginary, sug-

gesting a useful comparison betweenthe discourses surrounding sorcery andwitchcraft and our current conceptionsof terrorism.21

In the contemporary West, the gureof the suicide bomber has replaced thatof the sorcerer in our cultural imaginary.The suicide bomber evokes the imageof an irrational violence whose motiva-tions are buried in the obscurity of reli-gious cultism. It is important to notethat the suicide bomber is a formula-tion of the Western media. For the per-petrators, martyrdom and self-sacrice,or ghting to the death, are much clos-er renderings of the ideas that motivatethem. Moreover, recent studies are be-ginning to reveal the multiple culturalimaginaries from which such acts actu-ally emerge.22 In Japan, Iraq, Chechnya,Sri Lanka, and Palestine, such acts ac-quire meaning from quite distinct ethi-cal traditions and practices of violence.Just as was the case for an older idea ofexotic terror, cannibalism, the apparentbehavioral similarity of these acts beliestheir distinct cultural meanings and tra-jectories.23



19 Clearly, though, certain forms of violentterrorist action cannot serve this cultural pur-pose, as shown by the way in which responsesto Timothy McVeighs bombing of a federalbuilding in Oklahoma have been noted but notintroduced into the wider public discourse onthe war on terror. This precisely highlightsthe difference between personal safety and na-tional security as relating to different realmsof political thinking and priority. Security isthe politico-military prerogative of government

while safety remains a culturally diverse and in-dividualized idea. Safety in this sense can on-ly be realized by the occupation of a differentkind of space to that of threat and terror. Per-haps a nostalgic retreat, as in the sudden popu-larity of American folk music and the movie OBrother Where Art Thou? in the immediate wakeof September 11, or the current vogue for re-making and recycling movie/tv formats from,or about, the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.

20 My own discussions in Dark Shamans ofa regional form of terror, the kanaim, under-scores this delocation, since, despite regionaluse of the idea in Brazilian and Venezuelan

lm and literature, it has not connected witha global discourse of terror in the way thatother local imaginings, such as vampires, zom-bies, or werewolves, have done; see also LuiseWhite, Speaking With Vampires: Rumor and His-tory in East and Central Africa (Berkeley: Univer-sity of California Press, 2000).

21 See Andrew Strathern, Pamela Stewart, andNeil L. Whitehead, eds., Terror and Violence:Imagination and the Unimaginable (Ann Arbor,Mich.: Pluto, 2005), and Peter Geschiere, TheModernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occultin Postcolonial Africa (Charlottesville: Universi-ty of Virginia Press, 1997).

22 See Christoph Reuter, My Life is a Weapon: AModern History of Suicide Bombing, trans. HelenaRagg-Kirkby (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni-versity Press, 2004), and Nasser Abufarha, TheMaking of a Human Bomb (Ph.D. thesis, Univer-sity of Wisconsin-Madison).

23 This is very strikingly born out by EmikoOhnuki-Tierneys study of Japanese kamikaze,whose motivations were more the result of anadmiring contemplation of Western moderni-ty than a remnant of anachronistic and tradi-tional samurai ethics; see Emiko Ohnuki-Tier-



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The gure of the suicide bomberalso makes dramatically overt the iden-tication of the human body with thebody-politic: through the social order

our bodies are shaped. The body is al-so joined to locations and landscapes,such that the destruction of sites ofcivic identity are felt as bodily inva-sions, from which the invader must berepelled, purged, cleansed. So, too, inthe absence of specic kinds of bodiessuspects, offenders, terroristsorphysically distinguishing features forsuch categories, the site of a war on ter-ror or other kinds of enemies withinmust become internalized as an aspectof mind and attitude. It is obviousnow that acts of violence are acted outnecessarily, and sometimes only, in theimagination.

Earlier colonial commentators on sor-cery were no less aware of the signi-cance of the imaginative order in under-standing sorcerys cultural influence.24

Just as the modern-day expansion ofglobal media can ll many more mindswith a conviction of the reality of pres-ent terror, an elaborate theater of pub-lic punishment and execution imbued

people in the colonial era with the be-lief that the destruction of the bodiesof the condemned was integral to thereproduction of societyparadoxicallyachieving the incorporation of societythrough the exclusion of its victims.

It is signicant then that colonial de-pictions of other rituals of public bodilydestruction, particularly cannibalistichuman sacrice, put great stress on thecollective-participation aspect of the vic-tims destructionboth commentators

and illustrators would repeatedly alludeto the participation of women and chil-dren in the cannibal momentas a wayof emphasizing the barbarity of the ritu-

al exercise of cannibalism. It is strikingthat this community participation in theincorporating cannibal moment, not itscruelties and torments, shocked the ear-ly modern Europeans.

By contrast, an exclusion, not inclu-sion, of the victim is envisaged in theEuropean tradition of torture and exe-cution as an adjunct to judicial process.Such is now the fate of detainees atGuantnamo, whose marked bodies andtortured minds leave them in a limboof nonbeing, excluded from the societyof human rights and law. British anthro-pologist Sir Edmund Leach noted in re-sponse to the ira terrorist campaignsnearly thirty years ago:

We see ourselves as threatened . . . by law-

less terrorists of all kinds . . . . [W]e feel

ourselves to be in the position of the Eu-

ropean Christians after the withdrawal

of the Mongol hordes rather than in the

position of the unfortunate Caribs . . . at

the hands of the Spanish invaders . . . . We

now know that the dog-headed cannibalsagainst whom Pope Gregory ix preached

his crusade were representatives of a far

more sophisticated civilization than any-

thing that existed in Europe at the time

. . . . However incomprehensible the acts

of terrorism may seem to be, our judges,

our policemen, and our politicians must

never be allowed to forget that terrorism

is an activity of fellow human beings and

not of dog-headed cannibals.25

Control over bodiesboth alive and

dead, imaginatively and physicallyis away of engendering political power. And



25 In Edmund Ronald Leach, Custom, Law andTerrorist Violence (Edinburgh: University Press,1977), 36.

ney, Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nation-alisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japan-ese History (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 2002).

24 See Whitehead, Dark Shamans.



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of all the modes of controlling bodiesthe violence of physical assault is anirresistible mode of domination. Buteven as we contemplate the shock and

awe of attacks on terrorist hideaways,or the systems of secret cia prisons andtorture camps that have most recentlysurfaced in the nightly news, we are re-minded that a war on terror of all kindsshould also confront our own deep tra-ditions of violence, which persist as partof a quasi-mystical and deeply imagina-tive search for the nal triumph of dem-ocratic progress over the terror, violence,and barbarity of others.




Documents

Whitehead - Violence & the cultural order