Violence as a Cultural Process

Abstract

INTRODUCTIONViolence is a complex form of human action embroiled not only in systems of justification but dependent also on habitus, schema development, motivations, and answerabilities. Nonetheless, sociological efforts to understand human action have either explicitly excluded violence from their analysis (Boltanski & Thevenot, 2006) or have dealt with violence only peripherally (Campbell, 1998; Kenny, 2007; Swidler, 1986; Vaisey, 2009). Those approaches that directly address violence tend to view it as structural or systematic rather than as a cultural process. The approach proposed here infuses existing notions of cultural violence, motivation, justification and answerability with feminist theories of intersectionality and assemblages to form an analytical lens which addresses weaknesses of independent theories. Additionally, it examines environment and other factors that result in choice of violence, framing and explanations of violence provided after fact, and accountability (or lack thereof) that makes up a system of answerability. Most importantly this approach for analyzing violence focuses on phenomenon of violence as a process rather than as a singular moment.This introduction of cultural process approach will begin with an overview of relevant strengths and weaknesses of existing conceptualizations of culture, action, and violence as they apply to development of a fuller understanding of violence. This overview is followed by a discussion of three core stages of cultural process approach: unconscious, conscious, and accountability. Finally, remainder of article considers cultural process of violence in context of three distinct phenomena: male perpetration of sexual violence against women, involvement of Reserve Police Battalion 101 in Holocaust in Poland, and ongoing drone war in Pakistan.These phenomena were chosen because they vary on two axes. First, existing data allows for highlighting of different aspects of cultural process for each phenomenon. The discussion of male perpetration of sexual violence will focus on unconscious stage and reflexivity of accountability stage, discussion of Reserve Police Battalion 101 will be centered on conscious stage, and discussion of drone war in Pakistan will specifically address answerability and accountability. Second, they present forms of violence in which actors have varying degrees of distance from their own actions. It is important to note that this is not a full analysis of these cases, but rather an illustration of efficacy of cultural process approach.Furthermore, note that this approach to violence is not an attempt to define violence, but rather an attempt to provide a framework for analysis. Rather than taking on thorny and challenging issue of defining violence, this approach presents researchers with new questions and a new way to structure explorations of specific cases of violence. Veena Das argues that the conundrum of how to square collective and individual responsibility for social violence is not readily resolvable in most cases and often returns us to cul-de-sac of agency/structure debates in social theory (2000:16). This approach attempts to place agency and structure together, to be understood as cogs in same process that carry a variable amount of weight from case to case but, always, in end, both cogs must move for process to move forward.OVERVIEW OF VIOLENCE, CULTURE AND ACTION CONCEPTUALIZING VIOLENCEViolence is not only difficult to define, but definitions of violence actually play a role in how violence is analyzed. This analysis will utilize conceptualizations of violence developed by John Keane, Johan Galtung and Catia Confortini. To Galtung, violence is avoidable insults to basic human needs, and more generally to life, lowering real level of needs satisfaction below what is potentially possible (1990:292). …