Suffering in the Cultural Construction of Others: Robert Spott and A. L. Kroeber

Abstract

ELAINE SCARRY, IN The Body in Pain (1985), analyses the political use of torture as a means of deconstructing the victim by separating voice from body.* The voice, disembodied by pain, is made to speak as the torturer wishes and is thus appropriated and utilized in the ongoing construction of the torturer's self, the reality of which is continually in doubt. In the terms utilized by Robert Jaulin in his Introduction to Ethnocide, La paix blanche (1971), the torturer affirms his self through negation of the other whose very existence is perceived by the torturer as having the potential to negate him. Like Sartre, Jaulin considers the affirmation of self through negation of others the principal paradigm for self-affirmation in the West. He extends his analysis to ethnography, seeing it as a means of anthropological self-affirmation through negation of the ethnographic other. Scarry's analysis is powerful here, for it is precisely through the disembodiment and appropriation of native voices that the ethnographer is professionally affirmed. Scarry's concern is with the Western tradition, beginning with the Old Testament and extending through Marx to contemporary political terror. Jaulin takes a cross-cultural perspective and contrasts the Western (particularly, colonial) mode of self-affirmation through negation of the other with a non-Western, tribal alternative, a paradigm for affirming the other who affirms you. Regarding this alternative paradigm, the ethnohistorian Richard Drinnon writes, Jaulin's abstract formulations neatly dovetailed with all of the evidence from colonial South America,