Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology Ken Batsalel (bio) Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology, (Nancy Scheper-Hughes & Philippe Bourgois, eds., Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004). 496 pages with index. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois have edited an important book of readings dealing with the nature of violence in the contemporary world. This book should be of interest to all those who are concerned with a deeper understanding of the historical, political and cultural contexts in which violence occurs and has significant implications for our understanding of the social forces that give rise to human rights abuses. The book's thesis is that violence occurs along a generative continuum, from individual action and responsibility to collective action (read communal) and state sponsorship. Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois' argument is that violence begets violence, as they write in their introduction: Violence is a slippery concept—nonlinear, productive, destructive, and reproductive. It is mimetic, like imitative magic or homeopathy. "Like produces like," that much we know. Violence gives birth to itself. So we might rightly speak of chains, spirals, and mirrors of violence—or, as we prefer—a continuum of violence.1 For Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, violence is more than the infliction of pain and the physical assault on the body, though it often includes both. Violence, for these two cultural anthropologists, is an attack on the very essence of personhood. To that extent, violence can strip individuals of their dignity and self worth, thereby undermining their sense of personhood and connection to others. However, Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois do not want to concentrate on the physical aspects of violence alone, as expressed in such acts as cruelty and torture, for that would in their view transform their project into a "clinical, literary, or artistic exercise" which would run the risk of turning into a form of theater or "pornography of violence" in which the voyeuristic impulse subverts the goal of understanding and action. Instead, their aim is to write "against violence, injustice and suffering" through a process of witnessing and critiquing.2 Their hope is to present a series of carefully selected and edited texts that will cause the reader to rethink violence in times of war and peace. [End Page 795] I will say at the outset that as editors Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois have more than succeeded in re-framing the issues of violence in such a way that when the essays are taken together even those who are familiar with the subject will be moved to reconsider what they thought they knew. This text would be especially good for an undergraduate or graduate course on human rights from either a political violence or social suffering perspective. The text is divided into eleven parts containing a total of sixty-two essays, all of which have been previously published either as scholarly articles and books or works of literature. The volume also contains photographs by the Brazilian photo journalist Sebastiao Salgado and other images of documentary significance (for example, there are images of concentration camp atrocities, Indian killers, and the lynching of Lige Daniels, who was hung by a mob in Texas on 3 August 1920). There is also a three page selection from Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Award wining comic book-novel Maus, which graphically depicts his father's tale of survival during the Holocaust. The first part of Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois' anthology places violence in a historical context by presenting both fictional and anthropological articles. Several articles discuss the impact that colonialism and the conquest has had, not only in terms of genocidal practices toward native peoples, but also the way that such genocidal practices were and continue to be informed by Western imagination and thinking about non-Europeans. Setting the tone for the anthology, a selection from Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness is starkly presented, in which the unnamed narrator describes a line of African prisoners enslaved as the result of ongoing colonial conflict: "They were dying slowly—it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now,—nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom."3...