Anthropology of Violence

El perdón real en Castilla a fines de la Edad Media. El ejemplo de la Cornisa Cantábrica  Los monarcas bajomedievales tuvieron, entre las prerrogativas esenciales derivadas de la configuración de su poder real, la capacidad de perdonar los delitos cometidos por sus súbditos. Siempre y cuando se diesen una serie de condiciones, podían llevar a cabo la remisión de las penas y la restitución de los atributos personales del delincuente al estado en que estaban antes de haber cometido el delito.  En este libro se analiza este perdón real desde varios enfoques. Por un lado se toma en consideración la legislación al respecto, para posteriormente analizar el proceso de tramitación de las solicitudes en la Castilla bajomedieval. Su estudio permite, además, realizar una aproximación de cierta entidad al análisis del delito en la época, especialmente de aquellos casos más graves, que fueron los que merecieron con mayor frecuencia la obtención de la gracia regia. Además del análisis de variables cuantitativas y cualitativas referidas al conjunto del reino, se incluye en el libro un estudio de caso dedicado a la cornisa cantábrica.  Por último, completa la edición la transcripción de más de sesenta documentos que recogen todas las fases del procedimiento y algunos actos jurídicos que se daban al margen, con la intención de poseer los requisitos previos con los que poder alcanzar el perdón regio.

In Ecuador's Yasuní rainforests and the lived history of the Waorani that live there, the commodification of first rubber and then oil shaped territorialization into particularly violent form. The formative role of rubber production in the 19th century involved local despots' imposition of a regime of violence. Reacting to this violent capitalist system, individual Waorani forged new socio‐spatial territories through violence with rubber slavers and cooperation with the Taromenane, a people who continue to live in isolation. Today, an oil complex exerts control to bring the end of Yasuní's commodity frontier, even while the Waorani Nation and Taromenane hold legal rights to parts of the forests. In this article, I analyse how rubber and oil exploitation has unfolded as capitalist territorial violence, spurring Waorani and Taromenane social expressions and political mobilizations that are at times violent, but primarily not.

"When I Wear My Alligator Boots examines how the lives of dispossessed men and women are affected by the rise of narcotrafficking along the U.S.-Mexico border. In particular, the book explores a crucial tension at the heart of the “war on drugs”: despite the violence and suffering brought on by drug cartels, for the rural poor in Mexico’s north, narcotrafficking offers one of the few paths to upward mobility and is a powerful source of cultural meanings and local prestige.

In the borderlands, traces of the drug trade are everywhere: from gang violence in cities to drug addiction in rural villages, from the vibrant folklore popularized in the narco-corridos of Norteña music to the icon of Jesús Malverde, the “patron saint” of narcos, tucked beneath the shirts of local people. In When I Wear My Alligator Boots, the author explores the everyday reality of the drug trade by living alongside its low-level workers, who live at the edges of the violence generated by the militarization of the war on drugs. Rather than telling the story of the powerful cartel leaders, the book focuses on the women who occasionally make their sandwiches, the low-level businessmen who launder their money, the addicts who consume their products, the mules who carry their money and drugs across borders, and the men and women who serve out prison sentences when their bosses' operations go awry."

This essay intends to explore how anthropology understands violent relationships between the elite and oppressed, and it's subsequent study in the Middle East region. This essay argues that violence is a broad, changing and nebulous category of human action that is expressed and best studied through the investigation of power relations and exertions of power. Furthermore, this essay suggests

Since the end of the Georgian-Abkhaz war, the often-precarious status of the Georgians displaced from Abkhazia has received significant academic attention. In contrast, the consequences of displacement from the reverse perspective—how it has affected the people who stayed behind—remains underanalyzed. Drawing on narratives collected during several months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article argues that although ethnic Abkhazians see themselves as victims of ethnic violence rather than perpetrators, the re-distribution of Georgian property nevertheless caused significant distress. Many condemned the practice of appropriation, suggesting that taking what is not one’s own is not only a violation of the property of the original owner, but also of the Abkhaz moral code and therefore shameful. To them, the trophy houses were a curse, both literally—as spaces haunted by former occupants—and metaphorically, as a source and reminder of a certain “moral corruption” within Abkhazian society. However, while the stories around the trophy houses reflect substantial intra-communal divisions, I suggest that they are also an expression of a shared postwar experience. Like the horror stories of Georgian violence, and the tales of Abkhaz heroism, they have become part of an intimate national repertoire constitutive of Abkhazia’s postwar community.

In this piece I consider emptiness as a consequence of war. War creates and leaves behind a particular form of emptiness—deadly environments contaminated with military waste. BiH is the country most heavily contaminated with military waste in Europe. Despite much progress in clearance, over 0.5 million people in nearly 1,400 local communities are still living around such deadly environments/ located mainly in rural areas, where the levels of contamination are particularly high for forested and agricultural land. Deadly environments are uncanny timespaces of late modernity. They might have been emptied of humans and littered with military waste as consequences of modern warfare. But these human-induced disturbances might also initiate new stories and sediments of life.

The Ifugaos seem to be the only people in the world who have developed peacemaking ideology in a typically aggressive genre of oral literature. The rich literature on epic traditions worldwide portrays a highly male-centered genre of song glorifying heroic values and warlike acts. Ifugao male epics represents aggressive ideology, which it shares with all the corresponding genres from India to Iceland. But what is specific of the Ifugao epic lore is that it contains two trends. The /hudhud/, female epic tradition of the Ifugaos, is a unique specimen of peacemaking, even pacifist ideology in epic form. This ideology has developed in the peak of headhunting period, i.e. it is genuine, not imposed by the influence of other cultures as, for instance, the motives of regret that appeared in Kalinga Ullalim under the influence of Christianization and American "order".

Muitos trabalhos recentes acerca da violência sugerem que, quando se contempla a violência, atinge-se uma espécie de limite da capacidade de representar. Em geral apresentados sob o signo do “horror”, eles nos fazem pensar como seres humanos podem ter sido capazes de atos tão hediondos, em tão grande escala, como em Ruanda ou na ex-Iugoslávia. A violência da Partição da Índia, em 1947, fornece um tropo de horror comparável na historiografia da Índia.

On September 26 th , 2014, students in Mexico from the school of Ayotzinapa were attacked and forcibly disappeared. As hundreds of thousands of people took to the street in an unprecedented outpouring of anger and rage, the attack became the largest scandal in recent historical memory, revealing the horror of contemporary forms of governance. Situated at the interstices of the Drug War, the militarization of the Mexican State, political corruption and impunity, neoliberal reforms, and the residual national trauma of the Dirty War of the 60s and 70s, the attack quickly transformed into a metonym of ubiquitous contemporary forms of violence and loss experienced across Mexico. This work explore how Ayotzinapa became an event which called into question the very legitimacy of the occult powers of the state, challenging the very organization of secrecy, the epistemological conditions and contradictions of governance. This work argues that by mobilizing the horror of Aytozinapa, the unspeakable scandal that lies at the heart of the event, the movement was able to open a breach in historical time and allow people to sense the violence concealed within the everyday. This work looks at both at the epistemic conditions of governance by which the constitutive violence of the state-form is continually figured as exceptional and how other ways of knowing, characterized by refusal and negation, are capable of overcoming these conditions.

America’s Army, the official and free downloadable US Army video game franchise, has been continually updated with new versions for the past twelve years. Formerly managed out of the Office for Economic and Manpower Analysis (OEMA) at West Point, it has been an immersive, interactive advertisement for the Army, resting its
rationale within in a military desire to recruit in a cost-effective way a new kind of ‘talented’ soldier. This reflects a military desire to, in the words of an OEMA publication, ‘move the Army beyond personnel management to talent management’. Drawing on a 2009 interview with OEMA director Colonel Casey Wardynski (retired), I argue that America’s Army has been primarily oriented towards recruiting the labour of a new kind of post-Fordist soldier – one who is part of the growing mass of immaterial labourers who can be identified as ‘the cognitariat’.

Zimbabwe like Many states in African south of the Sahara faced violence in Colonial times from a multiplicity of bases such as ethnic and religious differences . With the coming of Independence hopes were high that violence would end or at least gradually decline. High hopes were tied on the independent state to end violence for 'all' its citizens women and other marginalized groups included. This paper will borrow from feminist theory and argue against the simplistic portrayal of patriarchy as indigenous to Zimbabwe. The paper exposes a complex interplay of factors and explanations other than patriarchy and also expose the complex nature of patriarchy itself.

The story of Zanzanù is symbolically the history of the birth of  outlaw imagine in early modern age. Zanzanù firstly became a 'bandit' because he received a banishment penalty owing to the killing of a member of a rival family. But then, unable to establish a peace with his enemies, he couldn't return to his village and he followed a vengeance for his father killing. Survived to several ambushes of his enemies and of bounty killers who chased him, he soon entered the  dimension of myth until he died the 17th of august 1617 in a bloody battle which lasted a full day.

Neste artigo debruço-me sobre dados etnográficos obtidos em diversas favelas cariocas para discutir a dimensão de insulto moral que determinadas práticas conduzidas por traficantes e policiais adquirem para os moradores destas áreas. Suas narrativas permitem-nos ir além na reflexão sobre como certas categorias recorrentemente empregadas pelos moradores de favelas dão acesso à teia de significados que revelam visões de mundo que são centrais para se compreender o que está em jogo quando essas pessoas falam das suas experiências. Tomar as categorias locais e os contextos nos quais elas surgem como objeto de análise permitem-nos vislumbrar determinados episódios e comportamentos que são apontados como problemáticos pois são experimentados pelos moradores de favelas como gestos de desconsideração, uma ofensa à dignidade de determinado “tipo de pessoa” que vive nas favelas.

"This course is for undergraduate students who are interested in anthropological research on peace and violence. The topics covered will reach from the everyday violence in the streets of New York (Bourgois 2003) and the headhunting practices of the Ilongot (Rosaldo 1980) to the ethnic violence surrounding the collapse of former Yugoslavia (Macek 2009). At the same time, we will not lose sight of potential dissolution of violence through peace-building, and reconciliation. Students will also be exposed to the ethical and pragmatic dilemmas of conducting ethnographic research on peace and violence.

We will ask questions such as: What are the contributions of ethnographic research on peace and violence to the wider scholarship on the subject matter as well as to practitioners and policy-makers? Have anthropologists a responsibility to become 'activists' when faced with injustice? What are the benefits but also fallacies of conducting fieldwork in a dangerous environment?  How, if at all, does ethnographic research change or shape our understandings of 'peace', 'violence', and 'conflict'?  "

Sous la direction de Sabrina Melenotte
Avec les contributions de : Josemaría Becerril, Collectif Paris-Ayotzinapa, Emmanuelle Corne, Paola Díaz, Luis López Aspeitia, Sabrina Melenotte, Natalia Mendoza, Marcos Nucamendi, Verónica Vallejo Flores.

Résumé :
Depuis la « guerre contre le narcotrafic » impulsée en 2006, le Mexique est devenu une terre de disparu.e.s. En donnant voix et visages aux familles de victimes qui suivent les traces de leurs êtres chers, les récits et les photographies de cet ouvrage livrent des clés de compréhension sur la façon dont une société vit dans, avec, contre et après des violences extrêmes et massives. Face à un État dysfonctionnel et des institutions fragmentées, les recherches « en vie », « dans la nature », auprès des institutions, dans les villes et villages reculés, mais aussi les expressions artistiques et mémorielles, sont autant de clameurs de justice d’une société qui embrasse à bras le corps le destin de dizaines de milliers d’anonymes, disparu.e.s ou retrouvé.e.s mort.e.s.

Un format original :
https://www.fmsh.fr/fr/diffusion-des-savoirs/Mook-Mexique
Le mook Mexique : une terre de disparu.e.s est le fruit d'une collaboration originale et inédite entre une équipe de recherche, des photographes, un collectif de solidarité internationale contre les violences d'État, et la FMSH.

Composé de 19 récits, 2 enquêtes et 1 portfolio, ce nouveau format d'édition et de valorisation de la recherche permet de raconter "autrement" une tragédie humaine et ses conjurations, en vue de s'adresser à un public plus large que les cercles universitaires restreints. Il propose au lecteur des éléments de contextualisation sur les violences et les disparitions au Mexique, des histoires individuelles et des expériences collectives ainsi que des exercices et des expériences d'arts et de mémoires non-officielles.

À l'initiative de l'anthropologue Sabrina Melenotte, ce projet de publication hybride est né de travaux menés dans le cadre de l'ANR "SoV-Sortir de la violence", et s'est progressivement élargi à de jeunes chercheurs et chercheuses provenant de plusieurs disciplines des sciences sociales (anthropologie, sociologie, histoire) et une photographe référente. Projet collectif et interdisciplinaire, cet ouvrage est le témoin d'une recherche engagée aux côtés des acteurs sociaux d'une histoire en train de s'écrire.

Les équipes de la FMSH ont accompagné le dessein de ce mook sur la photographie, le maquettage, la production, la co-édition et la diffusion des résultats de recherche. Sa parution couronne quatre années d'accompagnement sur le volet diffusion des connaissances de la Plateforme Violence et sortie de la violence. Dans ce cadre, la FMSH a également soutenu la création d'une nouvelle revue, Violence: An international journal, et a assuré l'organisation, la captation et la diffusion de nombreux colloques et séminaires mobilisant des centaines de participantes et participants.

Violent Becomings conceptualizes the Mozambican state not as the bureaucratically ordered polity of the nation-state, but as a continuously emergent and violently challenged mode of ordering. In doing so, this book addresses the question of why colonial and postcolonial state formation has involved violent articulations with so-called ‘traditional’ forms of sociality. The scope and dynamic nature of such violent becomings is explored through an array of contexts that include colonial regimes of forced labor and pacification, liberation war struggles and civil war, the social engineering of the post-independence state, and the popular appropriation of sovereign violence in riots and lynchings.

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/citedby/10.1146/annurev-anthro-101819-110415


The mid-1990s through the first decade of the new millennium marked an increase in publications pertaining to war and violence in the ancient past. This review considers how scholars of the past decade have responded to that work. The emerging consensus is that war and violence were endemic to all societies studied by archaeologists, and yet the frequency, intensity, causes, and consequences of violence were highly variable for reasons that defy simplistic explanation. The general trend has been toward archaeologies of war and violence that focus on understanding the nuances of particular places and historical moments. Nevertheless, archaeologists continue to grapple with grand narratives of war, such as the proposition that violence has decreased from ancient to modern times and the role of war and violence in state formation and collapse. Recent research also draws attention to a more expansive definition of violence.

The paper deals with the history of the Venetian criminal trial in early modern age. Particularly the research speaks of the relations between inquisitorial and 'open' (or adversarial) trial. It was the last procedure which may be considered the mean through which were achieved new forms of social control.

The article refutes the claim that the Kalasha may be the descendants of the Greeks of Asia. First, traditions of Alexandrian descent in the Hindu Kush are examined on the basis of written sources and it is shown that such legends are not part of Kalasha traditional knowledge. Secondly it is argued that the Kalasha were an integral part of the pre-Islamic cultural fabric of the Hindu Kush, and cannot be seen as intruders in the area, as legends of a Greek descent would want them. Finally, through comparative suggestions, it is proposed that the possible similarities between the Kalasha and pre-Christian Europe are to be explained by the common Indo-European heritage rather than by more recent migrations and contacts.

This article examines the history of China from 1600-1949. By using a psychohistorical approach to understand the deep humiliation enacted upon the Chinese at the hands of primarily the British and the Japanese, we understand how the Chinese Communist Party was so successful in establishing their Cultural Revolution. As a cultural anthropologist, I examine my time in Suzhou, China in October of 2019, during the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party and question the Chinese sense of national identity and how they will collectively define themselves going forward.

L’article décrit l’itinéraire d’une enquête judiciaire pour recrutement d’enfants soldats en posant la question suivante : comment trouve-t-on les enfants soldats, comment les fait-on advenir sur la scène judiciaire ? Il explore les différents moments qui ont fait l’enquête du Bureau du Procureur dans la toute première affaire portée devant la Cour pénale internationale de La Haye, l’affaire Thomas Lubanga Dyilo. Ce commandant d’un groupe armé actif en Ituri, à l’est de la République démocratique du Congo, a été condamné à quatorze ans de prison pour recrutement d’enfants âgés de moins de 15 ans. Après avoir décrit les différentes étapes de l’enquête judiciaire, l’article détaille les conditions dans lesquelles les anciens enfants soldats ont déposé devant la Cour. Aucune de leurs neuf dépositions ne sera finalement jugée « digne de foi » par la Chambre de première instance de la Cour. Les différents moments qui ont marqué cette enquête judiciaire nous éclairent autant sur l’instabilité de la catégorie d’enfant soldat, que sur l’incertitude qui menace régulièrement le travail d’élucidation judiciaire.

This article follows a criminal investigation for recruitment of child soldiers, by asking the following questions: how does one find child soldiers? How does one bring them onto the judicial stage? The article explores the different moments that marked the investigation by the Office of the Prosecutor in the very first case brought before the International Criminal Court in the Hague, that of Thomas Lubanga Dyilo. This leader of an armed group in Ituri, in the Eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, was sentenced to fourteen years in prison for enlisting and conscripting children under 15. After describing the successive stages of the investigation, the article analyzes the conditions under which former child soldiers testified before the Court. None of their nine testimonies was eventually judged credible by the Trial Chamber I of the Court. The different moments that marked these legal proceedings bring to light the instability of the category of child-soldier and the uncertainty that regularly threatens the labor of judicial elucidation.

This Afterword reviews the special issue of the Journal of Sustainable Tourism on Critical Geographies, which focuses on the intricate relationships between tourism and various forms of tourism related violence. It notes the slippery and complex concept of violence in tourism, and that it is typically seen from the viewpoint of the tourist, with researchers working from the anthropological host and guests relationship model as a way of negotiating kinship and friendship between societies, with broader aspects of tourism's power play with socio-cultural change perhaps conveniently forgotten. Tourism and tourists are seen as hiding their corporate and personal violence behind destination branding, tourism imaginaries and saleable commodification. While the innovative approaches adopted by papers in the special issue are commended, two key and still outstanding issues are highlighted. Tourism researchers must find ways to share their work more effectively across all stakeholders, as well as publishing in academic journals. And researchers should become more self reflexive and critical of themselves, seeking to address the complex practical challenges for sustainable tourism thinkers and doers of creating better links between the visitors and businesses of developed societies, and the culture and communities of developing societies. In the acclaimed novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, writer Milan Kundera (1984) reflects on the insignificance of a single lifetime, thus the title, the " lightness " of being. Tourists, too, are usually imagined and portrayed as light-hearted figures, visiting peoples and places across the globe without caring much about the systemic inequalities that make their travels possible, and having, for the unaware casual observer, a light impact on their destinations. Consequently, tourism was, for a long time, not considered as a topic worthy of serious scientific inquiry. Nobody within academia wanted researchers to be confused with tourists (although I met dozens of scholar-tourists while conducting ethnographic fieldwork on tourism). Times have changed. The special issue of which this Afterword forms a part is far from being " light ". On the contrary, some may even feel that the mass of frivolous tourists is not given enough voice. The focus of this special issue is on the intricate relationship between tourism and various forms of violence. Violence is a slippery concept (Scheper-Hughes & Bourgois, 2003; Whitehead, 2004). When queried about the links between tourism and violence, most people spontaneously mention overt physical manifestations that involve (international) tourists: different types of personal crimes (including assault, battery, false imprisonment, kidnapping, homicide, and rape), or terrorist attacks (in countries such as Afghanistan, Egypt, Indonesia, Tunisia or Turkey). These are also the typical things that are

Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights examines the political and social implications of this sensitive undertaking in specific local and national contexts. International forensic methods, local-level claims, national political developments, and transnational human rights discourse converge in detailed case studies from the United States, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Spain, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Greece, Rwanda, Cambodia, and Korea. Contributors analyze the role of exhumations in transitional justice from the steps of interviewing eyewitnesses and survivors to the painstaking forensic recovery and comparison of DNA profiles. This innovative volume demonstrates that contemporary exhumations are as much a source of personal, historical, and criminal evidence as instruments of redress for victims through legal accountability and memory politics.

The article presents the lesser-known practice of a male dance in Northwest and North Russia, closely related to ritualized fights at parish fairs. While incorporating instrumental music and quatrain singing in the combative situation was widespread, fight dances were more common in the Pskov and the Vologda oblasts (provinces). Recent ethnographies reveal the persistent fascination with the vanished tradition of lomat’sya in both local discourses and urban revival.
Drawing from evolutionary psychology (Pinker), popular music studies (Johnson, Cloonan), anthropology and ethnomusicology of war and violence (Pettan) as well as from cultural criticism (Peterson) the article discusses general issues of male culture and anthropology of violence. Martial-art revivals can be understood in a context of modern popular culture as a strategy for reclaiming masculinity against the hegemony of postmodernism.

The argument developed in this contribution begins from a reflection on the complex network of meanings involving the Latin word hostis, a word tinged with ideas both of 'parity' and of 'otherness' and which paints a picture of relationships based on partnership and struggle. First, we analyse the ambivalence of the term hostis in Roman culture and its relation with the notion of bellum iustum, and then compare the resulting notion of 'cultural proximity' with the one that emerges from historical and anthropological works, such as those about the Tupinamba or Nuer. The 'parity' of the enemy in terms of specific shared social values is related to the construction of that enemy's identity. In particular, we focus on the dichotomy between processes that attribute inferior status to the enemy and those that recognize the enemy’s status as peer.

This article explores how Muslims in Central Bosnia engage with the violent past through acts of prayer to make history. It traces two idioms expressed in prayers whereby Bosnian Muslims affectively apprehend, remember, and temporalize the past: witness (šahit) and martyr (šehit). These two idioms, I argue, allow Muslims to reanimate recent critical events as the realms of personal moral-cum-temporal orientations rather than unreflectively participating in an ongoing nationalization of the past in the public discourses. This article thus suggests to take seriously an act of prayer as a mode of historical consciousness—an assemblage of divergent sensibilities, materialities, practices, and ethical conduct—in order to develop a more nuanced perspective on the past as actively and ethically in-the-making in the present.

Bioarchaeological research has become one of the main subdisciplines, either in archaeology or in biological anthropology that has contributed to the information of ancient society through the study of human remains applying different theories and methods. Bioarchaeological research has focused on both individuals (osteobiographies) and populations. From its origin, bioarchaeology has positioned itself in diverse topics such as gender, identity, violence, ethnicity, and so on in different geographic areas. The main aim of this symposium is to put together diverse topics from bioarchaeological specialists who have been working in the area of Oaxaca, Southern México, among groups such as the Zapotecs, Mixtecs and the Chontal people as an example. This symposium is the first academic forum either in the US, Mexico, or in other countries to invite and concentrate a variety of Mexican and foreign researchers to present, share, discuss and enrich the bioarchaeology of Oaxaca.