Violence

The Kashmir valley experienced a painful, unsuccessful armed movement for national self-determination against Indian rule from 1989-2002. [1]  While a ceasefire was declared in 2002, Kashmir’s political future continues to be mired in uncertainty, caught between the national interests of Pakistan and India.  Despite the end of the armed struggle, the vast majority of Kashmiris aspire to the yet-unfulfilled promise of self-determination (azaadi). The Indian state responded to the movement for self-determination, not as an indigenous struggle for political autonomy, but rather, as cross-border terrorism.[2]  As such, the significant militarization of Kashmir has been, and continues to be, justified on the grounds of protecting the Indian nation-state’s territorial integrity.  The Indian state’s repressive response to Muslim “terrorists” in Kashmir has been further buttressed by a continuing global “war on terror,” leading Kashmiri activists and political figures to, in turn, reevaluate their strategies of protest away from an armed movement to mass street protests.

In this post, I reflect on the multiple temporalities that characterize militarized everyday life in Kashmir, including how these affected my own ethnographic field experience.  In the process, I think through two rather different kinds of public “events” to understand how militarization is conceptualized and temporalized.  Finally, I introduce another temporality—that of ethnographic writing—which I suggest has the potential to hold these events in tension, while also deviating from them in important ways.

Dans cet article, nous nous proposons d’interroger la forme, la fonction et la portée du silence dans l’œuvre romanesque de Boubacar Boris Diop. Cette question du silence a fait l’objet d’une attention particulière chez les critiques qui se sont penchés sur les écritures dites « modernes », qui entendent témoigner de la rupture entre, d’un côté, la langue et, de l’autre, le monde et le sens. Pour reprendre Rachel Boué, « l’image n’est pas ce qu’elle montre et la parole n’est pas ce qu’elle dit. » La mise en scène de ce clivage est une des constantes des romans de Boubacar Boris Diop. Chez cet auteur, la parole devient alors un véritable protagoniste. À travers ses diverses représentations, il se met en place le schéma d’une quête de l’authenticité où vérité et mensonge se côtoient sans cesse, mais en empruntant, réciproquement, le masque de l’autre. C’est dans ce cadre précis que les espaces de non-dit sont intéressants à analyser. Le non-dit fait appel à un acte énonciatif in absentia ; une modalité particulière de la parole par laquelle celle-ci veut attirer l’attention sur une béance. Faire parler le non-dit, c’est donc chercher à combler les lacunes qui sont désignées dans la narration, comme les signes d’un code à déchiffrer. Or, on constate que les silences textuels des récits de Boubacar Boris Diop font office, au même titre, d’indice révélateur. Selon notre hypothèse, ils suggèrent l‘inscription d’un langage — ou d’une mémoire — qui n’est pas donné à tous d’entendre. Celui-ci ne sera jamais proféré (parce qu’il est rendu totalement inaccessible) ou, s’il l’est, c’est sous le couvert d’une « fiction » : d’un pur mensonge. À l’inverse, ces silences s’inscrivent sur le fond d’une parole survalorisée, expansive et exubérante et, dès lors, extrêmement accessible, confortable. Notre analyse portera sur trois romans de Boubacar Boris Diop qui ont l’intérêt de mettre en valeur cette problématique d’une parole silencieuse selon des modalités singulières. Ce sont Les tambours de la mémoire (Nathan, 1987), Le cavalier et son ombre (Stock, 1997) et Murambi : Le livre des ossements (Stock, 2000). Le premier texte met en scène un personnage mort — Fadel Sarr — qui s’installe progressivement dans le récit par les traces écrites qu’il a laissées dans ses carnets et qui sont comme des énigmes à résoudre. L’évocation de Fadel, qui cherchait à démontrer l’existence de la reine Johanna Simentho, ramène à la surface les bribes d’une mémoire nationale refusée et refoulée, quand, pourtant, elle associait vérité et révolte. Niée, tournée en dérision par les autorités, celle-ci n’est toutefois pas complètement étouffée. Elle réapparaît de façon couverte, par ses multiples mises en fiction. Dans Le cavalier et son ombre, Khadidja doit raconter, jour après jour, des histoires à un inconnu, muet et caché derrière une cloison. Cette situation d’une parole lancée dans le vide ouvre la voie à une quête de l’idéal, qui s’incarne à travers la figure symbolique de l’enfant Tunde. Or, cet idéal est aussi celui d’une parole qui n’est par orientée vers un destinataire, qui ne peut donc pas être manipulatrice (à la manière des récits héroïques mis en scène par Khadidja). Cette parole est sans doute à l’image de conteuse parlant au néant, mais c’est oublier qu’elle n’a ni commencement, ni fin, d’où la folie qui s’empare de Khadidja et, après elle, de son compagnon Lat-Sukabé. Enfin, Murambi introduit une parole problématique sur le génocide, parce qu’elle ne parvient pas à s’extraire. Le récit illustre des personnages qui désirent raviver une mémoire des événements, mais dont les velléités oratoires finissent par avorter. Notamment, Cornélius Uvimana, revenu au Rwanda avec le projet de réaliser une pièce de théâtre sur le génocide, doit renoncer et faire face à l’inadmissible : le massacre de l’École technique de Murambi, organisé par son propre père.

This article examines the possible connections between language and silence in three novels by Boubacar Boris Diop: The Drums of Memory (1990), The Knight and His Shadow (1997) and Murambi : The Book of Bones (2000). Thus, our analysis will show that, for the storyteller, silence plays a significant part in the elaboration of literary language. Indeed, it seems that speech and, moreover, the memory of the past just spring up from silence, without really splitting away. By questioning this paradox of a “speaking silence”, Boubacar Boris Diop hints at the possible disclosure of a memory that “cannot be heard by anybody”. It would be discovered through the traces of a code that must be deciphered (if ever decipherable). Ismaïla Ndiaye, Lat-Sukabé and Cornelius Uvimana are all of them different faces of this endless and hopeless quest. At the same time, the author reveals another kind of voice that comes into contrast with the first one and bears alienation and incomprehension, leading ultimately to violence and destruction.

Ethnographically, I explore imaginaries in Latin American societies where death has a role and relevant agency; as well as its connection to some figures and emerging cults that claim to embody death as a self possession and heritage. From the Santa Muerte in Mexico, I will make a comparison to the processes of cultural patrimonialization of the death in other American societies. I focus the manufacture of miraculous dead –folk saints– in cemeteries, and the processes of “adoption” of Colombia’s violence victims of unknown dead citizens –called dead NNs–. These emerging cults connected with the experience of its practitioners to take control of their lives in a precarious state of social vulnerability, homeless state institutions and formal structures. These are considered as “walking dead” who enjoy a very good health.
KEYWORDS: Cultural heritage, Emerging cults, Violence, Holy Death, Miraculous dead.

Quelques années après sa sortie en 1999, le film Fight Club, du réalisateur américain David Fincher, est considéré comme une œuvre culte, notamment auprès du public adolescent. Ce film décrit le parcours d’un homme d’une trentaine d’années qui bouleverse sa vie monotone de cadre et de consommateur lorsqu’il fait la connaissance de Tyler Durden, un homme marginal, enclin à la violence, avec qui il créera un club de combat underground, le Fight Club. Cette organisation secrète va ensuite se développer, prendre une dimension politique et engager des actions d’importance contre la société de consommation. Il est selon nous possible de lire ce film comme une synthèse, une allégorie du passage de l’adolescence dans la société contemporaine. C’est cette lecture que nous développons ici, en conjuguant les approches psychologique et sociologique.

The study sets to catagrafy the “violence” phenomenon in actual human society. The diversity of violence types, the education segments, the age segments who aggress and who are aggressed, get more and more extended. The social context is crucial for both the performance and understanding of violence. The term „senseless violence‟ is often heard in cases where a serious violent incident was apparently unprovoked or has emerged from “insignificant” insults or altercation. The notion of “senseless” violence is, by implication, contrasted to some other „reasonable‟ kind, or perhaps suggests that what we find repugnant needs to be placed beyond the bound of sense. Most people probably have a wordless conception of what is a reasonable response to offence or provocation, for example, a fatal shooting following an altercation over a parking place appears inexplicable and senseless. Still many acts of extreme violence occur in response to apparently minor incidents and violence nearly always has “sense”, that is, social meaning, to both perpetrators and victims. The targets of violence are rarely chosen randomly and the victims and perpetrators are frequently already known to each other. In some cases the attribution “senseless” refers to an assumed mental illness or other pathology that might account for otherwise incomprehensible behavior. Human society registered besides direct violence: war, murder, rape, assault, verbal attacks, that is the kind that we physically perceive, another two invisible forms and can‟t be eliminated without eliminating them, cultural violence and structural violence. Direct violence has its roots in cultural and structural violence; then it feeds back and strengthens them. All three forms interact as a triad. Direct violence reinforces structural and cultural violence. We are trapped in a vicious cycle that is now threatening to destroy life on earth.

Background

Low socioeconomic status in childhood is a well-known predictor of subsequent criminal and substance misuse behaviours but the causal mechanisms are questioned.

Aims

To investigate whether childhood family income predicts subsequent violent criminality and substance misuse and whether the associations are in turn explained by unobserved familial risk factors.

Method

Nationwide Swedish quasi-experimental, family-based study following cohorts born 1989-1993 (ntotal = 526 167, ncousins = 262 267, nsiblings = 216 424) between the ages of 15 and 21 years.

Results

Children of parents in the lowest income quintile experienced a seven-fold increased hazard rate (HR) of being convicted of violent criminality compared with peers in the highest quintile (HR = 6.78, 95% CI 6.23-7.38). This association was entirely accounted for by unobserved familial risk factors (HR = 0.95, 95% CI 0.44-2.03). Similar pattern of effects was found for substance misuse.

Conclusions

There were no associations between childhood family income and subsequent violent criminality and substance misuse once we had adjusted for unobserved familial risk factors.

Why do some authoritarian rulers, such as Saddam Hussein, kill or torture other people personally, whereas others, like Joseph Stalin, delegate such violence to subordinates? Such politically motivated interpersonal violence committed by authoritarian leaders has never before been theorized. Through a comparison of Hussein and Stalin, we explain why some dictators engage in this behavior and others do not. We propose a model based on three components: the individual’s prior habituation or non-habituation to violence; regime characteristics that ‘select for’ a personally violent or non-violent ruler; and, once a ruler takes power, the interaction of the first two variables. We also
suggest that most communist regimes featured organizational characteristics that discouraged such violence by the leader.

The Middle English word ‘geant’ encompassed several different types of monstrous humanoid, from the Spanish gigans of the Historia Regum Britanniae, to the monstrous Irish bachlach of the Fled Bricrenn, to the antediluvian nephilim of the Bible. Uniting these disparate monsters under the singular category of ‘giant’ was their savagery and excessive masculinity. Hirsute, rapacious, and wild, the giant embodied the fear of the ‘Other’ which dwelt outside of the moral and geographical bounds of civilised society.

One breed of giant which interests me in particular is the monstrous peasant, or ‘churl’. The monstrous churl’s signature characteristic is his mighty and emasculating strength, which reflects aristocratic anxieties about the tremendous bodily strength of the labouring peasantry. The methods through which the protagonists of Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain, Wace’s Roman de Brut, and Layamon’s Brut overcome these monsters - dexterously avoiding the giant’s blows, chasing the giant around a tree, striking the giant’s unarmoured body - serve to belittle and neutralise their emasculating potential.

In this paper, I will explore the extreme defence of masculinity found in the battle with the giant in the Alliterative Morte Arthure (c.1400), where Arthur savagely and graphically castrates his opponent. This battle, despite drawing upon Wace and Layamon for source material, departs dramatically in its treatment of the combat itself - the giant here is preternaturally resilient and threatening, apparently untroubled by Arthur’s sword blows, yet is finally slain with a series of blows from a small and unremarkable dagger.

In addition to offering a reading of this particular scene from the Alliterative Morte Arthure, this paper will explore an alternative methodology for interpreting literary combative sequences from the medieval period. Rather than mere concessions to an unsophisticated martial audience, combative sequences can be read as encoding sophisticated social and moral commentary within the blows and wounds of the combatants themselves.

Este artículo busca proporcionar una reflexión sobre la dinámica de la violencia política en la ciudad de Bogotá. La ciudad y sus habitantes han experimentado diferentes cambios tanto en procesos educativos como sociales; se analiza el impacto de los diferentes movimientos insurgentes y el resultado de sus actividades en la comunidad capitalina, sin olvidar los cambios sufridos en esta. Intenta analizar la sociedad, la cultura y la conciencia social que se ha generado a través del uso de la violencia en el pensamiento de los capitalinos en un contexto que implica la realidad social y política; destaca la Influencia política del grupo insurgente conocido como el M – 19, y su frustrado intento de toma del poder en la década de los 80´s

El fenómeno político que abarcó el período comprendido entre los años 1958 a 1974 fue denominado el Frente Nacional. Dentro del marco de referencias conceptuales acerca de este periodo trabajaremos el concepto de “hegemonía” cuyo eje temático abordaremos a partir de la categoría de Antonio Gramsci. El siguiente trabajo busca desentrañar los diversos intereses políticos que se tuvieron bajo un tiempo de unidad nacional mantenido desde el bipartidismo. Nuestro interés general consiste en acercar nuevas voces a la reflexión y el análisis de nuestra cultura política desde una mirada histórica principalmente hacía la comunidad estudiantil, quienes una vez insertos en la realidad nacional podrían tomar una posición frente a los actos políticos, evitando de este modo que el dominio y la hegemonía basados en acuerdos de Unidad Nacional  se conviertan en nuevas formas totalitarias de la “democracia”.

The image of the "Dark Ages" is not least associated with the idea of the Middle Ages as a period marked by excessive violence. From today's perspective, violence appears basically negative and problematic: it must be justified and explained, if not at all avoided.
My study takes the medieval perspective into view and asks how violence was described and interpreted by authors of the 14th and 15th centuries. Using late medieval France as an example, I analysed which practices of violence were accepted or disapproved and how ways of description were used in order to cause enthusiasm or disgust.