Form Of Symbolic Violence Research Articles

Religion as Race, Recognition as Democracy

Apartheid South Africa enacted physical, structural, and symbolic forms of violence on racially marked South Africans, and postapartheid South Africa has enacted ambitious—though also limited—laws, policies, and processes to address past injustices. In this article, the author traces the South African political histories of one self-defined group, the Lemba, to understand how the violence they collectively experienced when the apartheid state did not acknowledge their ethnic existence continues to shape their ideas of the promise of democracy to address all past injustices, including the injustice of nonrecognition. The Lemba are known internationally for their participation in DNA tests that indicated their Jewish ancestry. In media discourses, their racialization as black Jews has obscured their racialization as black South Africans: they are presented as seeking solely to become recognized as Jews. The author demonstrates that they have in fact sought recognition as a distinct African ethnic group from the South African state consistently since the 1950s. Lemba recognition efforts show that the violence of nonrecognition is a feature of South African multicultural democracy in addition to being part of the apartheid past. The author argues that the racialization of religion that positions the Lemba as genetic Jews simplifies and distorts their histories and politics of race in South Africa.

‘Who am I?’ and ‘Who are we?’ Audit consciousness and the Further Education Funding Council in the 1990s

This paper explores a ‘critical incident’ in relation to a Further Education Funding Council inspection during 1995. The FEFC's short lived and under-researched ‘project’ is discussed against the background of the Major Government's ‘Back-to-Basics’ policy. The FEFC, through its inspection regime and the ways in which that inspection informed ‘good’ practice in relation to appraisal, self assessment and annual subject review, had the discursive power to construct a commonsense reality that it then attempted to insert into the cultural life of the further education sector. Making use of a critical incident, the paper attempts to identify the FEFC discursive patterns as a cultural arbitrary and describe the way in which this surveillance based ‘strong discourse’ was used in an effort to reconstruct the subjectivity of teaching staff. The FEFC could engage in this form of symbolic violence because of their dual role as controllers of the inspection regime and the financial distribution body that could determ...

Violence and the Arts of Resistance: An Expedition in Critical Communicology

In this article, the author reviews conceptions of symbolic violence, especially that developed by Pierre Bourdieu, and argues that there are dimensions of the symbolic that are left unaccounted for by the idea that such violence is “gentle,” “quiet,” and “mitigated.” Group forms of communication under authoritarian and semiauthoritarian conditions of existence are drawn upon to show how traces of physical violence are lived and how forms of symbolic violence are conscious experiences for perpetrators and victims. Correlatively, opacity rather than absolute transparency of meaning marks effective resistance under such constraints—that is, emancipatory potential is not necessarily contingent on raising the normative bar but on foiling the dominant other's game in singular instances. Violence is understood here as both multivocal and redirectable, with those who resist using whatever means are available to counter actual and potential violation. The task for the critical communicologist is to take up gradations between and among forms of violence, as embedded in everyday practices and inscribed on human bodies and psyches, and to identify efficacious modes of resistance that illustrate the courage and subtle tactics of persons and groups who refuse subjugation. The author provides for such an analysis based on his fieldwork in Morocco.

`Rude Boys': The Homosexual Eroticization of Class

Since 2002, the`chav' has become a ubiquitous symbol of class difference in Britain. Simultaneously, a heterogeneous industry has appropriated `chav culture' in order to market a range of products and services orientated to gay men. In this article I explore some of the representations employed by this industry to argue that they function within a symbolic economy in which the chav is positioned as a subject lacking any intrinsic worth. However, while representations continually impute a lack of value to such subjects, it is precisely this lack which is converted into symbolic capital to be bought and sold.The effect of such representation is performative since it both constructs and inscribes subject positions in social space. In conclusion, I argue that a form of symbolic violence is created by such representation through the legitimacy it lends to normative conceptions about, what become imagined as,`real' people.

“Around here, they roll up the sidewalks at night”: A qualitative study of youth living in a rural Canadian community

The paper is based on an ethnographic study conducted in a rural community in British Columbia, Canada. The study examined the impact of community culture on youth's development as sexual beings. We describe how social and geographical forces intersect to affect youth's lives and trace the ways in which deprivation of various forms of capital as well as social practices contribute to some youth being located in undesirable social positions. Our findings illustrate how the effects of stigmatisation, self-segregation, and other forms of symbolic violence can extend beyond health impacts and into the broader social realm.

‘I'd rather you'd lay me on the floor and start kicking me': Understanding symbolic violence in everyday life

Synopsis In this article we argue that to understand the intransigence and plurality of violence, we need to understand the presence of symbolic violence with other direct forms of violence. We argue that it is important to analyse symbolic violence since its subtle and non-visible ways of working do not allow us to understand its mechanisms completely. Drawing on the narratives of women who have experienced violence, we have identified specific features of symbolic violence that were evident in these narratives. We illustrate features of symbolic violence embedded in everyday life such as consent, complicity and misrecognition. At the same time, we also analyse how institutional language and implementation of procedural norms can also be a form of symbolic violence.

Manufacturing the (In)visible: Power to Communicate, Power to Silence

The paper develops the argument of two faces of censorship as a form of symbolic violence over individuals directed either inward or outward. In both instances, the resistance to disclosure and an effort to keep things hidden are normally complemented by strategic control over the process of making things visible. Silence is usually considered a sign of censorship, but in reality it can indicate not only the suppression of, but also a resistance to, communication. Despite the changes leading toward the “structural censorship” in modern complex societies, the essential questions remain: What are the strategies to confront the (hidden) forces of censorship, and how successful can they be?

The Harki Identity: A Product of Marginalisation and Resistance to Symbolic Violence?

This paper seeks to demonstrate that since their arrival in France in 1962, the Harkis – the Algerians who fought with rather than for the French side against the Algerian independence movement (1954–1962) – have been the victims of symbolic violence. They have been assigned by the French state to the periphery of French towns, French history and French identity. As, since 25 September 2001 (the first national Harki remembrance day) and 5 December 2002 (when President Chirac inaugurated the Algerian war memorial in Paris), the Harkis ceased to epitomise ‘the archetype of official non memory’ (Rosello, 1998, p. 170), this paper ultimately asks whether the end of a certain form of symbolic violence may not result in the ‘delegitimisation’ of the Harkis’ main (historical) claims and, consequently, in the weakening of the Harki identity.

The micropolitics of quality

This paper discusses how the audit culture has impacted on UK academics in terms of professional identities, priorities and social relations. Micropolitics, performativity, psychic economy and the changing political economy of higher education are some of the theoretical tools used to offer some explanatory power for the range of engagements with quality assurance. Questions are raised about the polysemic discourse of quality and how it has been subjected to multiple interpretations. For example, there are those members of the academy who see it as a major form of modernisation and student empowerment, while others see it as a form of symbolic violence. Specific attention is paid to peer review, impact studies, gendered power relations, productivity measures and whether quality intersects with equality in the academy. The paper concludes with calls to consider what the gestalt is of higher education.

The Contours of Tolerance: Jews and the Corpus Domini Altarpiece in Urbino

In fifteenth-century Urbino, Duke Federigo da Montefeltro upheld policies of toleration that offered Jews only limited social forbearance but forestalled expulsion and extermination. Although the Jews of Urbino did not suffer the expulsions and pogroms endemic elsewhere in Europe, they endured symbolic forms of violence. This essay explores how the Urbino Corpus Domini Altarpiece functioned in Duke Federigo's campaign of toleration and how the dynamics of tolerance were inevitably linked to violence. Painting served to represent to the Christian society the duke's policy on Jews and to define the limits of tolerable behavior for non-Christians dwelling in the community.

Violent youth or violent schools? A critical incident analysis of symbolic violence

Utilizing critical incidents primarily from a year‐long ethnographic study of a single gender middle school, the authors attempt to capture the mechanisms of symbolic violence as described by Bourdieu and Passeron in Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture and by Bourdieu in latter publications. Our analysis suggests that problems of persistent social inequality, crime, and incarceration are linked to symbolic forms of violence that occur in schools and that current policies attempting to address these issues are flawed, based on a limited theorization of violence.

In the Shadow of the State: The Politics of Denunciation and Panegyric during the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, 1940-1958

In the Shadow of the State: The Politics of Denunciation and Panegyric during the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, 1940-1958

Cultural Capital Accumulation on a World Scale

Pierre Bourdieu’s work can help to clarify precisely how culture in general and literature in particular operate among and within societies as a form of symbolic violence and as a mechanism of distinction. All agents within any cultural field possess a specific set of cultural interests that are determined by their location within that cultural field as well as in the social field and the field of intersocial relations. The power to represent the world becomes a stake within the literary field, a form of cultural authority that writers and critics have an interest in preserving. Asserting the superiority of national culture and its products yields symbolic profits. These interests fulfill rather than contradict the norms of autonomy within the field. Theoretical attempts to attribute a critical potential to this autonomy may therefore reach their limit at the point where culture and imperialism meet.

Rumour and Other Narratives of Political Violence in West Papua

This article addresses the neglected subject of political violence in the Indonesian province of Irian Jaya, known locally as West Papua. It asks how this regime of political violence is reproduced in and through representations of culture, gender and difference. It argues that rumours about state-sponsored violence contribute to both the experience and expression of terror. It examines how West Papuans understand, subvert and imagine alternatives to the political and symbolic forms of violence in which they are enmeshed. Finally, it compares rumour to ethnographic accounts and human rights reports, arguing that anthropologists have both political and ethnographic responsibilities to `bear witness' to political violence and the mechanisms through which it is reproduced as terror.

Business Planning as Pedagogy: Language and Control in a Changing Institutional Field

Language and power are central to an understanding of control. This paper uses the work of Pierre Bourdieu to argue that an enriched view of power, in the form of symbolic violence, is central. We examine the pedagogical function business plans played in the provincial museums and cultural heritage sites of Alberta, Canada. The struggle to name and legitimate practices occurs in the business planning process, excluding some knowledges and practices and teaching and utilizing other knowledges and ways of viewing the organization. We show that control involves both redirecting work and changing the identity of producers, in particular, how they understand their work through the construction of markets, consumers, and products. This process works by changing the capital, in its multiple forms-symbolic, cultural, political and economic-in an organizational and institutional field.

Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (review)

430 China Review International: Vol. 3, No. 2, Fall 1996 Dali L. Young is an assistantprofessor ofpolitical science and the author o/Calamity and Reform in China (Stanford University Press, 1996.) mi James L. Hevia. Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of1793. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995. xv, 292 pp. Hardcover $49.95, isbn 0-8223-1625-0. Paperback $15.95, isbn 0-8223-1637-4. There has been much renewed interest in the historical significance of the 1793 Macartney mission to Qing China in both the West and China. For example, Joanna Waley-Cohen, in her recent article on Chinese reactions to Western technology in the late eighteenth century ("China and Western Technology in the Late Eighteenth Century," American Historical Review 98, no. 5 [1993]: 1525-1544), has revised earlier assessments of Qing dynasty blindness to world developments in the eighteendi century and has shown how these erroneous assessments grew out ofWestern technological superiority after the nineteenth-century industrial revolution, which was then read back into the Macartney mission to China by later historians and diplomats. This misassessment in Western attitudes toward China, Waley-Cohen argues, was also due in part to the Qing court's need under the Qianlong emperor (r. 1735-1795) to reassert the "public Chinese attitude of superiority toward foreigners" in the factionalized domestic politics of1793 at the same time that it avidly employed Jesuit experts in the arts ofwarfare for its late eighteenth-century military campaigns against rebels within the empire. Hevia's book continues this revisionist trend by reevaluating the Macartney mission in light ofQing foreign relations and die development ofmodern European diplomacy. Cherishing Men From Afar explores Manchu and British imperial formations in the late eighteenth century as the cultural productions of two expansive imperialisms with equally universalist pretensions. Their different modes ofpolitical practice based on competing sets ofhierarchical relationships and political claims betray, according to Hevia, substantially different conceptual frameworks and signifying practices. Consequently, the Macartney embassy to the Qianlong court© 1996 by University was not caught up in a simple conflict between a "traditionalist" Chinese tribute ofHawai'i Presssystem and a "modern" European diplomacy whose driving force was an entrenched "culturalism" in the traditional Chinese political world. Instead, Hevia suggests that the Chinese "tribute system" model used by John K. Fairbank and Reviews 431 many others since has overdetermined the confrontation by essentializing it as an inevitable confrontation between tradition (China) and modernity (the West), thereby missing the specific historical challenges that a land-based Qing Imperium and a seafaring British empire each faced when they encountered each other for the first time in 1793. According to Hevia, the two modes of Qing and British diplomacy must each be unraveled in order to understand how the Qing framework for imperial ceremonies ofguest ritual and imperial audience and the British notion ofinternational relations interacted. In the process, we learn how European discourse on diplomacy between equal states was itselfa historical artifact ofEuropean global expansion whose naturalizing discourse of sovereign equality in effect legitimated discursive forms ofsymbolic violence (Western superiority / Qing arrogance) in 1793 before diplomacy was transformed into open warfare (free trade / Opium War) in 1839—an argument that of course derives from Edward Said's Orientalism but is now redeployed in Sino-Western relations. We also see how the Manchu cosmopolitical order for the production and negotiation ofimperial power was based on specific ritual and ceremonial procedures that informed how Qing officials would handle the requests of an emissary ofthe British empire. The strength of Hevia's account lies in its clear delineation ofdie basis for Manchu rulership in the Qing Imperium. In a realm filled with heterogeneous Manchu, Mongol, Tibetan, and other ethnic lords, the Manchu rulers successfully used lordship as the basis for organizing interdomainal relations and incorporated such lords under the Qing emperor's claims to political preeminence. Ritual and its attendant forms ofceremonial behavior (i.e., "disposition ofbodies" via the kowtow, etc.) were the cosmologica! forms ofpolitical interaction between lords that revealed their inclusion under the Qing and the negotiated forms of that inclusion. Accordingly, Hevia makes it clear how the Macartney embassy to China was perceived by the...

Changes in the social definition of early childhood and the new forms of symbolic violence

The nursery school may be considered an institution and a market where the habits produced by the family are moulded, developed and standardized; thus, it is confronted with an objective definition of early childhood embedded in pedagogical practices. The proper objective of a sociology of nursery-school practice is the analysis of the lag between the functions delegated to the school by the different social classes and the functions which it objectively tends to fulfill. Here we have the best test of the lag between the pedagogic demands of the different classes and what the schools supply-which is very abstract, with results that are only visible at a later stage in the school career. It is not so much a question of learning to read or of preparing to do so (the acquisition of certain logical operations or a developed sensitivity, of acquiring a few I.Q. points). This learning takes place through many varied activities which apppear to be far from the learning function.