Violence Expressed: An Anthropological Approach

Violence Expressed An Anthropological Approach

Edited by Maria Six-Hohenbalken and Nerina Weiss

Violence Expressed

For Nuria and Ilario

Violence Expressed An Anthropological Approach

Edited by Maria Six-Hohenbalken Austrian Academy of Science, Vienna, Austria and Nerina Weiss University of Oslo, Norway

© Maria Six-Hohenbalken, Nerina Weiss and contributors 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Maria Six-Hohenbalken and Nerina Weiss have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Violence expressed : an anthropological approach. 1. Violence – Social aspects. 2. Violence – Psychological aspects. 3. Victims of violent crimes – Language. 4. Emotions – Anthropological aspects. I. Six-Hohenbalken, Maria, 1965– II. Weiss, Nerina. 302.2’086949–dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Violence expressed : an anthropological approach / [edited] by Maria Six-Hohenbalken and Nerina Weiss. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-7884-7 (hbk. : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-7546-9753-4 (ebook : alk. paper) 1. Violence – Cross-cultural studies. 2. Violent crimes – Cross-cultural studies. I. Six-Hohenbalken, Maria, 1965– II. Weiss, Nerina. GN495.2.V557 2010 303.6–dc22 2010035154

ISBN 9780754678847 (hbk) ISBN 9780754697534 (ebk) I

Contents List of Figures and Table   Acknowledgements   Notes on Contributors   Introduction   Nerina Weiss and Maria Six-Hohenbalken

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Part I: Normalization and Aesthetics 1

The Utter Normalization of Violence: Silence, Memory and Impunity among the Yup’ik People of Southwestern Alaska   Linda Green

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Warriors of Honour, Warriors of Faith: Two Historical Male Role Models from South-Western Arabia   Andre Gingrich

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3 Public Events and the Japanese Self-Defense Forces: Aesthetics, Ritual Density and the Normalization of Military Violence   Eyal Ben-Ari

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2

4

Aesthetics of Martyrdom: The Celebration of Violent Death among the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam   Øivind Fuglerud

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Part II: Discursive Strategies – Muted Language 5

When Soldiers Explain: Discursive Strategies Used by Israeli Conscripts When Recounting Their Experiences in the Field   Erella Grassiani

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Tense Relations: Dealing with Narratives of Violence in Eastern Turkey   Nerina Weiss

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7 Speaking Blood: Metaphoric Expressions of Sexual Violence in a Guadeloupian Family   Janine Klungel

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8 Expressed, Muted and Silenced: Mestizo Childhood and Everyday Violence in a Marginal Neighbourhood in Quito, Ecuador   Esben Leifsen

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Part III: Remembering and Aftermath 9 Silence, Denial and Confession about State Terror by the Argentine Military   Antonius C.G.M. Robben 10

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From Traumatic History to Embodied Memory: A Methodological Challenge for Anthropologists   Adelheid Pichler

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‘All Filmmaking is a Form of Therapy’: Visualizing Memories of War Violence in the Animation Film Waltz with Bashir (2008)   Michaela Schäuble

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12 Blurred Boundaries in World War I: Strategies of Censorship, Denial and the Role of Witness Accounts   Maria Six-Hohenbalken

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Index  

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List of Figures and Table Figures 4.1 Children’s playground, LTTE-controlled Jaffna 1995. Source: Fuglerud 79 4.2 LTTE cemetery, Kopai 1995. Source: Fuglerud. 79 Table 7.1 Isabelle’s ‘Intimate guide of women and young girls’

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Acknowledgements This book project started at an EASA workshop in Ljubljana 2008 and was carried on in a follow-up workshop at the Austrian Academy of Science in Vienna. We are indebted to the participants of these workshops and their stimulating discussions, especially to Henrik Vigh (University of Copenhagen) for being the discussant during the EASA workshop. Our aim when putting this volume together was to present different analytical and methodological approaches to studying expressions of violence, and to find a balance between well-established researchers and the younger generation of anthropologists. We thank the contributors to this volume, whose stimulating discussions and ideas throughout the publishing process were essential in turning this idea into a comprehensive reader. Special thanks to Andre Gingrich for his valuable comments and helpful suggestions on the introduction. We are grateful to Ismene Weiss for proof-reading the entire manuscript and to our editor Neil Jordan for his continuous support and patience. Finally, we want to acknowledge the financial and organizational support of our host institutions, the Institute for Social Anthropology at the Austrian Academy of Science (Maria Six-Hohenbalken), and the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo (Nerina Weiss).

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Notes on Contributors Eyal Ben-Ari is professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Hebrew University. His fieldwork and publications focus on the Japanese SelfDefence Forces, peace-keeping forces and the Israeli military. He is the author of Mastering Soldiers: Conflict, Emotions, and the Enemy in an Israeli Military Unit (New York: Berghahn Books, 1998). Øivind Fuglerud is professor of social anthropology at the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo. His research interests include ethnicity, political violence and Diaspora formations. He has published a number of works on the conflict in Sri Lanka and its consequences, including Life on the Outside – the Tamil Diaspora and Long-Distance Nationalism (Pluto Press 1999). Andre Gingrich is director of the Austrian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Social Anthropology and an ERC panel chair. His ethnographic work has focused on Yemen and Saudi-Arabia and on nationalism in Europe. His publications also cover methodological issues (Anthropology, by Comparison, Routledge 2002, coedited with Richard Fox) and the history of anthropology. Erella Grassiani recently defended her PhD dissertation with the title Morality and Normalcy in Asymmetrical Conflict: Distancing, Denial and Moral Numbing among Israeli Conscripts in Everyday Practices of Occupation at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of VU University Amsterdam, Netherlands. She is currently working as a lecturer in Qualitative Methods at the Methodology Department of VU University. Linda Green is an associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. Her ethnographic research in Guatemala, along the US-Mexican border and in Alaska, explores the relationship between individual suffering and the collective trauma among indigenous peoples across the currents of history. She has published a number of works on violence including Fear as a Way of Life: Mayan Widows on Rural Guatemala (Columbia University Press 1999). Janine Klungel studied at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris and worked at Radboud University Nijmegen. Her fields of interest are violence, power, gender, religion, and memory. Her research focuses on rape in Guadeloupe, the ways it is expressed and remembered, and its longlasting effects on family relations. This has resulted in a range of articles. Her teaching concentrates on the anthropology of violence.

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Esben Leifsen is senior lecturer at the Department of International Environment and Development Studies, The Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Ås. His research interests include child welfare and interpersonal violence, urban anthropology and marginalization. He has published various articles and chapters on non-ideal childhoods, child-trafficking, reproductive governance and child circulation. Leifsen has carried out his research in Ecuador and among the Ecuadorian Diaspora in Spain. Adelheid Pichler is a social worker and cultural anthropologist. She has been research assistant at the Austrian Academy of Sciences from 2003 to 2006 and is currently lecturer at the University of Vienna. Antonius C.G.M. Robben is senior professor of Anthropology at Utrecht University, Netherlands, and author of the award-winning ethnography Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). Michaela Schäuble is a lecturer in Social Anthropology at the Martin-Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. She studied social anthropology and comparative literature at the Universities in Tübingen (Germany) and Yale (USA) and has trained as a documentary filmmaker at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology (Manchester University, UK). Her PhD thesis entitled Narrating Victimhood is a study of memories of war violence in the former Yugoslavia. Maria Six-Hohenbalken is researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology, Center for Asian Studies and Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her research interests are political anthropology, Diaspora and transnational communities, border studies and historical anthropology. Nerina Weiss is research fellow and PhD student at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University in Oslo, Norway. She has done fieldwork in Cyprus and among Kurds in Turkey. Her research focuses on political violence, histories of victimhood, border studies and gender. Since 2010 she is Marie Curie IE Fellow at the Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Victims in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Introduction Nerina Weiss and Maria Six-Hohenbalken

Several scholars have stressed the limits of language in the course of researching violence or when writing about it (Appadurai 1996, Das 2007). Our language seems insufficient to describe the horrors of violence (Binford 2004). Often, words seem to be frozen, and experiences of violence thus appear as if they could only be voiced from a distant position (Das and Kleinman 2001). How can we grasp the meaning of violence? How can anthropologists document the far-reaching and long term effects of violent actions? Focusing solely on narratives of violence and the context in which they emerge, is not sufficient to understand the meaning and the effects of violence. Particularly in realms of human experience, it is obvious that verbal language represents merely one among several ways of expression like gestures, rituals or certain kinds of public manifestations. An exploration of the vast range of different modes of expression thus promises to be the more adequate way to approach, register and understand the comprehensive manifestations and long-lasting effects of violence. This is the basic consideration why we chose ‘expressions’ of violence as the title for this volume, and asked the contributors to document and to analyze the diverging forms in which violence is addressed or conveyed. All the chapters of this volume thus deal with a paradox, as they attempt to turn into text violent experiences that, as we just presumed, cannot be expressed through verbal everyday language. The chapters discuss violence that is communicated through silences, rumours, literary narrations, represented in muted bodies, in rituals or role models. In order to grasp the meaning of violence as such, the contributors applied different perspectives, methods and analytical approaches. To comprehend the unspoken and the silence, most of the researchers have chosen a haptic approach. We borrow this term from Nordstrom (2010), who has defined her approach as ‘research through the senses’. Nordstrom has described the complexity of violence, its blurriness and its routinization or almost naturalization. In a similar approach, Verrips (2007) criticized researchers’ self-imposed restriction on visual manifestation in general, and claimed that a more balanced attention should be paid to our entire bodily sensorial experience. ‘We would then focus on [the] difficulty to grasp phenomena as deeply felt emotions and desires […] as well as the irrational and the fantastic, the absurd and the surreal.’ Our heavy emphasis on the role of the mind, reason and rationality, should give way to an increased interest in the sensual and emotional dimensions that are inherent in ‘our somatic experience of reality’ (Verrips 2007: 31).



Violence Expressed

In an attempt to broaden our understanding of the meanings and effects of violence, the contributors to this volume focus on their and their interlocutors’ senses when examining violence, combining different analytical approaches, and keeping in mind the different perspectives that perpetrators, accomplices, victims and witnesses have. Such approaches allow us a closer look ‘beyond’ (official) representations of violent actions or structures. Science has to critically examine the seductive self-representations of states and powerful institutions that promote the routinization and normalization of violence. A sensitive approach facilitates the identification of violent long-term effects by impunity and silence. The mere recognition of long-term effects brings in a historical dimension, which is why this volume brings together chapters based on ethnographic insights that focus on different expressions in the present, as well as historical analyses relying on archival material. The assembled contributions explore metaphoric language and muted signs and examine rituals, public events as well as films. They outline the (in)visibility of violent acts and structures in official narratives, memories and history, and discuss how, when and why the unspeakable is enacted in visual or narrative forms of (re)presentations. This volume’s contribution is thus twofold and placed on two poles: on the one hand the chapters deal with the subjectivism of experiencing and narrating violence; on the other hand they acknowledge the facticity and positivism of the death and suffering of hundreds of thousands of people. Anthropology of Violence – A Short Outline The twentieth century has seen a series of new forms of wars, from revolutionary liberation-wars to the War on Terror. Especially after the Cold War, the number of ‘new wars’ drastically increased (Kaldor 2000, Robben in print). While wars in the ‘classical understanding’ were defined as a politically motivated struggle for power between states and/or organized political groups, today, the boundaries between the private and the public, state and non-state as well as official and unofficial actors and economically and politically motivated factors have become blurred. New war tactics have turned public and domestic spaces into fields of war and the ‘socio-spatial chaos makes human rights violations inevitable’ (Robben 2009: 8). In these ‘wars of the fourth generation’, ‘asymmetric wars’ or ‘wars against the civil population’ (Robben in print), the civil population has become the battlefield, the target, the strategic object and – in some cases – the combatant. Although these wars have been delineated as civil wars or ‘low intensity conflicts’, and are mostly restricted to a definite area, new wars are embedded in multiple transnational entanglements (Kaldor 2000). Nordstrom (2009) emphasizes the importance of having a closer look at ‘the global supply chains and complex relationships of extra/legal and extra/state networks’ (2009: 72), as it is along these fractured lines that economics, politics and identities are crafted and power is accumulated and abused. It are these ‘shadowy il/legalities

Introduction



that sustain war’, and the reemergence of shadow powers has ‘central influence in in/stability’ (Nordstrom 2004: 12). It was an interest in violence and these new forms of conflict and war that led to the establishment of ‘Anthropology of Violence’ as a new research field within the discipline of anthropology. The increase of anthropological fieldwork in violent settings has enabled a focus on the cognitive aspects as well as on narratives or expressions of violence. In search for an ontological understanding of violence, Ajimer and Abbink (2000) have emphasized communicative, symbolic and ritual aspects. They pointed out the centrality of studying the ‘meaning’ of violence on the diverse levels in and between societies and communities. Following this perspective, anthropologists have shown how these meanings are composed in national or group imaginaries (Malkki 1995), and how emic concepts of violence are deployed as instruments in mobilizing and suppressing people (Elwert, Feuchtwang, and Neubert 1999, Nordstrom and Martin 1992). Other scholars have demonstrated how violent experience is relevant for shaping national selfunderstanding (Hüsken and de Jonge 2002) and how its meaning is ‘redefined’ in order to give sense to violent actions (Ferguson and Whitehead 1992, Schmidt and Schröder 2001). Violence, so these authors argue, is never meaningless or ‘senseless’ and has a constituent as well as a creative dimension. In a similar way, the contributors to Whitehead’s edited volume on ‘Violence’ (2004) understand violence not as an evidence of cultural rupture but as a form of cultural expression itself. They focus on the ‘cultural meanings’ of violence and see violence as a cultural performance. They argue for a hermeneutic, discursive and semiotic analysis in order to be able to understand violence in ‘traditional societies’, in their colonial past, as well as in ‘modern states’. Whitehead provocatively proposed the term ‘poetics of violence’ by focussing on historical developments of power, sociocultural relationships and by stressing semiotic principles. This leads us to a point which was influential in preparing the present volume as well: Whitehead is namely critical to theorizing violence. Part of what has hampered attempts to understand violence is the presumption that all acts that might be termed ‘violent’ share some typological characteristic. However, often the contested nature of what should count as ‘violent’ (with the connotations of illegitimacy the term carries) is at the heart of the very conflicts that give rise to those violent behaviors (Whitehead 2004: 11). Instead of taking violence as a ‘self-evident category of behavior’, Whitehead calls for a closer look at ‘how and when the notion of violence is invoked, and to consider the position of the researcher or observer in the context as much as that of the victim or perpetrator’ (2004: 12). Following such a critical and contextual approach, we emphasize that violence occurs on different structural, symbolic and cultural levels of society and should be scrutinized in ‘the contested space of intersubjectivity’ (Jackson 2002: 39). Such an approach also intersects with certain suggestions by Bourgois (2004). He argues that violent acts operate ‘along multiple, overlapping planes along a continuum that ranges from the interpersonal and delinquent to the self-consciously political



Violence Expressed

and purposeful’ (2004: 428). The contributions in this volume therefore propose a comparative approach over space and time and explore the structural, physical and psychological effects of violence on the different levels of society. They thus ask how violent acts are understood, represented, communicated and how meaning is (re)produced. Violence and its expressions are embedded in wider symbolic structures. In his contribution to this volume Fuglerud stresses the importance of aesthetic manifestations, as they provide a symbolic genre which is stored in a society’s cultural memory. Even after a conflict is settled or a society appeased, these symbolic genres can still re-emerge in subsequent developments. Resistance movements, the military, or nation states thus aim at producing certain kinds of aesthetics in order to reach acceptability or even to ‘normalize’ the violence they produce. The Japanese military of today thus aims at breaking with its past as a colonizing military force. In staging different festivals, air shows and exhibitions, the Japanese professional army aims at naturalizing and popularizing its presence. Ben-Ari argues in this volume that the military modifies its self-representation through these mass events. They are thoroughly adapted to different kinds of spectators and thus produce different forms of aesthetics. To stress the mechanisms of these aesthetic performances, Ben-Ari chose a haptic approach. Focusing on the spectator’s sensations, he shows how these performances contribute to produce a kind of normality and implicitness of latent military violence. The routinization as much as the ritualization of memorizing violence link past experiences with contemporary suffering. Analysing expressions of violence is a way of pointing out the far-reaching effects of violence, even in those cases, where violence has become ‘ultra-normalized’ and thus difficult to detect. In her historical analysis of tuberculosis epidemics among the Yup’ik in Alaska, for instance, Green makes the silence(s) and suffering of victims and survivors visible. Green shows how structural violence always has its effects upon the generations to come. In the Yup’ik case, the social, cultural and moral structure have been destroyed in the name of ‘civilization’, and are today manifest in traumatic memories of the epidemics, but also in high crime rates and increasing numbers of suicides. Violence and the suffering it caused had been silenced and thus ‘normalized’ throughout history. Bourdieu (1977) and later Bourgois (2004) have called the impact of structural and symbolic violence an ‘invert violence’, as structural inequalities often result in physical violence directed against one’s own people. Leifsen (this volume) shows, how the injustice and marginalization of poor mestizo slum-dwellers in Ecuador becomes manifest not only in the mano duro, but can also result in excessive domestic violence, mostly directed against women and children. People thus have to deal with multiple violent situations in their everyday life (Scheper-Hughes 1993). However, Leifsen encourages us to go a step further and to explore the ‘local notions and categories of sociality’ which enable us to understand the internal social logic of violent events. It is thus easier to understand how power inequalities and structural violence continue to shape social dynamics and everyday practice.

Introduction



Expressions of violence are nowhere articulated as purely personal revelations, but authored and authorized dialogically and collaboratively in the course of sharing one’s recollections with others (Jackson 2002). This reader therefore explores the interface between the personal microcosmos and the macro-levels. It depicts the continuities from personal experiences of everyday violence and extraordinary experiences into collective representations of society. In this sense we follow Das (2007), who has convincingly demonstrated how violent acts are not only witnessed and remembered, but become part of ordinary life. The contributions in this volume do not only focus on the discursive expressions, analysing the different meanings of violence, but also on performative acts. Beyond elucidating the victims’ experiences this is also important in order to explain how the perpetrators try to convey meaning to their violent actions. The narrative and the performative dimensions lead such an analysis to a further necessary element: the relationship-triangle between the victim, the perpetrator and the witness. Reflecting on the triangular approach to violence Ben-Ari (this volume) criticizes the existing anthropological literature on violence. To an overwhelming extent, its main focus examines silenced and marginalized groups of society, but mostly overlooks the perpetrators of violence. To a certain degree this volume also deals with victimization and brings examples of gendered violence, violent experience of children and marginalized groups. We are nevertheless consciously avoiding to victimize – which would mean to objectivize (Binford 2004) – entire strata of society. By contrast, we critically look at the political discourses of victimhood. As Weiss (this volume) shows, researching violence is not always synonymous with ‘giving a voice to the marginalized and poor’: we have to be aware of the active parts our interlocutors play in producing meaning. The ethnographer becomes a tool in the conflict over meanings and the legitimatization of violence too easily. Robben (1996) has elaborated on processes of ethnographic seduction, in which the interlocutors attempt to lead the ethnographer astray, to make him adapt their view on violent events. Weiss takes this argument on ethnographic seduction further. Living in conflict areas, the researcher is to a certain degree dependent on the knowledge and judgement of her interlocutors. They thus gain a considerable impact and influence, not only on the outcome of certain interviews, but on the entire fieldwork. In an attempt to convey a certain meaning of violence, her access to differing perspectives on violence was hampered and other opinions silenced. The production and reproduction of violence is thus highly dependent on the different perspectives of perpetrators, victims and witnesses of violence. As the aforementioned examples have indicated, the boundaries between these categories are blurred and their social contents may change. Perpetrators may become witnesses of violence and even its victims (see Schäuble, Robben, SixHohenbalken in this volume), while victims of violence may become perpetrators themselves, as Leifsen has discussed in this volume.



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Along the theoretical concepts of ‘new wars’ it becomes obvious that we have to deal with a steady flow of social actors who can be part of each of the three categories in this triangle. The crucial point is thus not to essentialize, nor to only identify victims and perpetrators since these definitions already are contested by our interlocutors. We rather have to keep in mind our interlocutors’ different perspectives, as these are important for the construction of meaning and the representation of violence. After all, meaning is constructed in the ‘intersubjective field’ and expressions of violence come ‘into being within an “already existing web of human relationships”’ (Arendt 1958: 184 in Jackson 2002: 23). Actors are part of multiple networks and deal with different ideological discourses. In his contribution on male role models, Gingrich shows, how actors play upon different (established) role models within these shifting social spheres and networks. Actors actively perform and adapt their roles and positions in order to survive in a conflict society, and to legitimize certain discourses and meanings of violence (cf. Weiss in this volume). These insights enable us to leave the triangular focus behind and to understand how people act, and are mobilized in civil wars. On Memory and Silence Experiences of violence are transformed through time and space, being retold differently to different audiences (Gilsenan 1996). Anthropologists therefore have to explore the processes through which our interlocutors claim truth and authorship. Why are certain expressions of violence included into collective memories, and what factors are at play when discourses on violence are denied and silenced? In order to shed light on these questions, several chapters therefore touch upon the concept of memory as well as on processes of forgetting. Berliner (2005) has commented on the ‘danger of overextension’ of the concept of memory in the social sciences and humanities, as memory ‘may become indistinguishable from either identity or culture’ (Fabian 1999 in Berliner 2005: 198). The concept of memory might, however, still ‘help us to think through the continuity and persistence of representations, practices, emotions and institutions’, which further allows us to ‘understand the way people remember or forget the past’ (2005: 206). A focus on the verbal and non-verbal expressions of violence could contribute to a better understanding of exactly these processes, as well as understanding the different power factors, political endeavours and contemporary interests that are at play in shaping collective memories Remembering the Past Building on de Saussure’s ([1919] 1966) concept of language and parole, several authors have made a distinction between ‘collective memory’ (Connerton 1989, Halbwachs [1950] 1980) and individual remembering (Funkenstein 1993). ‘Collective memory’, like ‘language’, can thus be characterized as a system of

Introduction



signs, symbols and practices, such as memorial-dates, monuments, texts, customs and manners, stereotype images and even language in de Saussure’s terms. Individual memory, that is the act of remembering, is on the other hand analogous to ‘speech’. Each act of remembering is thus unique (Klein 2000: 133). Authors have mostly stressed the visual, material and narrative aspects of the formation of memory (Kansteiner 2002, Radstone and Hodgkin 2005). Assmann (1992) explained the term ‘cultural memory’ as containing texts, images as well as rituals. Csáky and Stachel (2001, 2002) argue for the imperative of personal experience of violence, as he defines the processes of remembering as ambiguous and equivocal. The study of ‘vicarious memories’, that is, memories that have not been personally experienced, has thus been highly criticized (Berliner 2005: 206). This highlights a crucial problem for studies of violence and memory. The lifelong suffering and trauma of genocide victims and the next generations indicate that the atrocities continue to remain ‘deep memories’ or ‘repressed memories’ even in the lives of the following generations. Kidron (2009) has convincingly shown how nonverbal ‘lived memories’ are handed down in the intergenerational family communications. In her study on descendants of Holocaust survivors, the author has laid special emphasis on the ‘nonverbal, intersubjective, embodied, and material traces of the past in everyday life, forms of knowledge that resist articulation and collective enlistment’. She also asks if ‘these traces subsist as “deep”/repressed memory below the social surface’ (2009: 7). Although further comparative research would be necessary for elaborating a theoretical outline, we here delineate the different layers of remembering and forgetting from one generation to the other apart from official discourse and remembrance. According to Kidron, anthropology provides the holistic and emic perspectives necessary to pave the way for a more grounded exploration of different forms of memory work. In contrast to the aforementioned critical positions towards ‘vicarious memories’, Pichler (this volume) looks at memory construction that goes far beyond testimonies or communicative memory. Based on Assmann’s (1992) and Taylor’s (2003) assumption of ‘cultural memory’, Pichler shows how Afro-Cuban religious communities have developed certain social practices for shaping and reenacting memory. Following Bendix (1996), she argues that violent events are not only ‘stored’ in narratives and ‘archived’ in language, but also in artefacts. In analysing a non-discursive performative ritual genre, she shows how memories are incorporated into rituals, bodies, movements, gestures, actions and objects. Thus memories of the violence during slavery are transmitted from one generation to the next through non-discursive, unconscious social performative practices. Pichler draws on psychoanalysis as she bases her argument on Weigel (1999). Kansteiner (2002) has been very critical to such approach, as he regards psychological or psychoanalytical categories as confusing and little helpful to understand the formation of memory: The concept of trauma as well as the concept of repression, neither captures nor illuminates the forces that contribute to the making and unmaking of

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collective memories. Even in cases of so-called delayed collective memory (as in the case of the Holocaust or Vietnam), the delayed onset of public debates about the meaning of negative pasts has more to do with political interest and opportunities than with the persistence of trauma or with any ‘leakage’ in the collective unconscious. (Kansteiner 2002: 187).

Pichler’s case study however shows that memory is partly stored in unconscious ways, but is also evident as an active way of representing history. Pichler thus refers to signs that are buried in the unconscious, excluded from explicit discourse, or confined by it. Silences Silence and secrets have always intrigued anthropologists. They have been discussed within different analytical frameworks such as ritual and cosmology (Barth 1975, Lattas 1998), gender discourses and resistance (Abu-Lughod 1999) as well as politics and power (Murphy 1980). One of the ways silence has been discussed within the anthropology of violence is as a discourse on pain or within a framework of terror and fear. Anthropologists’ interest in silence often derives from the perception that ‘stories of war and conflict are often distinguished by the fact that many of them deal with violence and pain’ (Coulter 2006). Violence and pain may be too severe, too horrible, and the consequences too painful or loaded with shame, for victims to be unable or willing to express their traumata and pain. Pain thus becomes something that cannot be shared, since pain and terror are hardly expressable in every day language, as Scarry (1985) has argued. Although her works have often provoked their criticism, several researchers (Asad 2003, Das 1995, Das 1997) have taken Scarry’s work on the Body in Pain as their point of theoretical departure. Das (1997) chooses to define such kind of silence as a public silence. Pain needs public recognition, a claim which can be given or denied. Interviewing women about their violent experiences during the Partition of India, she found a zone of silence around the event. This silence was achieved either by the use of language that was general and metaphoric but that evaded specific description of any events so as to capture the particularity of their experience, or by describing the surrounding events but leaving the actual experience … unstated’ (Das 1997: 84).

As Leifsen and Klungel (this volume) argue, experiences of violence might be muted and silenced, but still find their expression in subtle signs and metaphoric language. Instead of taking for granted the (verbal) silence, they regard it as a kind of agency, ‘an agency in refusing to bear witness but to hold inside’ (Ross 2001). Agency thus does not only build on silencing but also on finding other modes of expressing experience that cannot be communicated by words.

Introduction



As Kidron has shown, silence and the loss of words must not only be seen as a ‘psychologically maladaptive repression of the past, the failure of interpersonal interaction, or ultimate forgetting and absence’ (2009: 16). Silence in the domestic realm can be seen as ‘lived memory’, an ‘alternative, nonverbal route through which the emotive and corporeal experience (rather than the recollected cognitive narrative) of the past may be transmitted/communicated and thus made actively present and lived in daily interaction’ (2009: 16). ‘Lived memory’ is thus understood as a kind of strategy against forgetting and also as a strategy against the established forms of commemorations. Aesthetics Adorno (1955) claimed that writing poetics after Auschwitz has become either impossible or barbaric. Inverting Adorno’s famous saying, Žižek (2008) on the other hand is convinced, that poetry might serve as an artistic expression of violence. ‘Poetics is always, by definition, “about” something that cannot be addressed directly, only alluded to’ (2008: 4). Aesthetics, like poetry and music, argues Schäuble (this volume) might thus become a form of expressing the impossible. Folman, the director and main character of the film Waltz with Bashir employs different non-realistic modes of representations to the horrors of war and mass destruction. Folman struggled with his own story as a soldier, his personal involvement and his rediscovering of partial amnesia or long-lost memories of the Lebanon war of 1982. His violent experiences have produced ‘discrepant temporalities − broken histories that trouble the linear, progressivist narratives of nation-states and global modernizing’ (Clifford 1994: 317). Different stylistic effects make it possible to switch between different levels of space and time, thus coming closer to representing the disjuncture of linear time and space, typical for trauma experience and presenting the ‘hazy distorted and fragmented memories’. Schäuble elaborates on the concept of historiophoty (White 1988) which focuses on the representation of history in visual images and filmic discourse. Referring to the connection between traumatic memory and historical truth, Schäuble shows how remembrance takes shape. Through images and narratives of the horrors and traumas of war, violence becomes an integral part of commemorated, imagined and fragmentary history. Anthropology has always been reluctant to uncritically absorb psychological theories of trauma. Biomedical theories are rooted in certain ethnocultural traditions (Zarowsky 2000) and fail to incorporate the many human responses to suffering in different contexts. Although most contributors to this volume share   Adorno himself has later relativised his statement, claiming that although art exists in our world, cheerful art has become impossible. ‘Der Satz, nach Auschwitz lasse kein Gedicht mehr sich schreiben, gilt nicht blank, gewiß aber, daß danach, weil es möglich war und bis ins Unabsehbare möglich bleibt, keine heitere Kunst mehr vorgestellt werden kann.’ (Adorno [1974] 2003: 603).

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that caveat in principle, some discuss traumatic memory as a form that does not imply by any necessity an accptance of psychological paradigms. Trauma in our understanding ‘cannot be interpreted as individual pathology unlinked to social contexts and socio-cultural expressions of its transgenerational transmission’ (see Green, in this volume). Manifestation, Representation and Discursive Strategies As much as silence and omittance may be a strategy to deal with pain and suffering, silence and denial might as well be used by perpetrators, ‘who have no intention of speaking because they have much to hide’ (Peters and Richards 2007: 444). In order to better understand the mechanisms and representations of violence, this volume offers a close look on the strategies that perpetrators use to legitimize their actions. Grassiani (this volume) claims that their accounts are products of the social environment, and thus not private and particular but part of a shared experience. Based on Goffman’s work on total institutions (1961) she explores how Israeli soldiers attempt to legitimize their military involvement in the occupied Palestinian territories. Their accounts are thus also influenced by the military system and by official discourses on the Israeli-Palestine conflict as they use ‘banal language codes and state-encouraged legitimations’. Rhetorical strategies range from the minimization of any active or ‘agentive’ role (Bandura 2002: 106) to producing one or the other form of distanciation with regard to the suffering they caused or witnessed. However, as Grassiani points out, not all among her interlocutors hide behind discourses of professionalism, denial or legitimacy. Others have become very critical to legitimizing the violent acts they had been part of. Instead of distancing themselves from moral responsibility and guilt, these soldiers attempt to ‘re-sensitize’ and to acknowledge their victims’ pain and suffering. Moral agency is also a key topic in Robben’s contribution. While most of those Israeli soldiers described above had shown some empathy towards their Palestinian victims and explained their actions with a discourse of professionalism, Robben describes a reversion of this discursive strategy. The Argentine retired Navy Captain Scilingo had organized the disappearances of political prisoners during the dirty war in Argentina. He was struggling with his own moral dilemmas in his public confessions and tried to legitimize his violent acts as an ‘expedient procedure’. Confessions like his became part of a discursive strategy of legitimizing and denying excessive violence. Secrecy, silence and denial among perpetrators are dynamic expressions of violence that change with shifts in the political context. As Robben (this volume) very clearly shows, the boundaries between silence as an expression and as a manifestation of violence are ambiguous and blurred. In the context of a ‘Culture of Fear’, the Argentinean military is eager to deny and silence any discussion of their involvement in past atrocities. On the contrary, denial of atrocities and the re-writing of violent events is also a strategy for perpetrators to

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appear as victims. The military succeeded in discrediting forensic methodology and the quality of evidence brought forth by truth commissions and human rights activist, thus forcing the latter to rely heavily on survivor testimonies. Confining all expressions of violence to the domain of speech, the military tried to manipulate official narratives, silence dissenting voices and to intimidate survivors of violence. Thus silence and denial may lead to the very violence that has been silenced and denied. The role of spectators and audiences as the third element in the triangle discussed above, has often been ignored. Following the approach of ‘resonant complicity’ (Stoett 2004) Six-Hohenbalken (this volume) reflects on the role of the accomplice in a historical perspective. She analyzes the accounts of AustroHungarian soldiers witnessing genocidal acts against civilians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Their roles ranged from being accomplices across various versions of more or less neutral bystanders on to those of critical witnesses. Depending on their involvement in the violence they had seen, these soldiers used different discursive strategies to convey their knowledge in the face of military censorship. Six-Hohenbalken further outlines how political power relations and ideological discourses shaped these witness accounts also long after those violent events. Critical witness accounts of this first genocide in the twentieth century have been directed to a selected audience and have been kept hidden from the public. Accounts that had been published during and after World War I had mostly silenced, or tried to legitimize, mass violence. They thus contributed to the denial of mass atrocities on (inter)national levels. Shifting Gender Roles In dealing with expressions of violence and taking different perspectives within different social strata, gender is an underlying ‘variable’. In violent conflict gender roles are constructed and manifested (Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989), as the human body is vested in symbolic meanings (Žarkov 2007). A frequent manifestation of gender roles in violent contexts allocates potential or real force to the male side and fear or suffering to women and children. Although this tendency becomes blurred in today’s ‘new wars’, male dominated societies construct their ideals of gendered personhood accordingly. This also includes the social construction of gendered role models and the symbolic role that violence takes in them. Gingrich (this volume) presents two contrasting role models of male warriors in the Yemen. The ‘warrior of honour’ belongs to the tribal upper stratum associated to a chief’s authority whereas the ‘warrior of faith’ obtains his legitimacy through his religious involvement in Islamic political movements. In order to pertain their social position as role model, these warriors self-consciously behave according to certain gender norms, while they are also trying to modify and transform their roles according to their own desires and needs (Butler 1988). This is especially important in the frontstage area of social interaction (Goffman 1959). Gingrich has pointed to the importance of exploring social contexts over time to better understand gender roles and aesthetics

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of violence. While the warrior of honour and the warrior of faith had co-existed side by side in the 1980s, these two groups have now become deeply involved in the early twenty-first century’s violent civil war in northern Yemen. What implications do gendered role models have on people’s lives? In his analysis of the Sri Lankan Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) aesthetics, Fuglerud (this volume) discusses how becoming a Great Hero, i.e. a martyr, is an important aim of every fighter. The LTTE fighters are also called the ‘living dead’, and their dedication to death is symbolized by the cyanide vial they have around their neck. Within and through the LTTE nationalist movement women gained new social position in society. The former ideal of women as chaste has given way for the fighting, liberated and emancipated woman – a virgin fighter who would be ‘married’ and loyal only to the political cause. But as much as these women have been portrayed as free and emancipated within the official nationalist discourse, the new gender roles rarely represent women’s own experiences and subjectivities. On the contrary, such gender roles may rather impose new social restrictions and control mechanisms (Weiss 2010). Experiences of conflict and violence are thus heavily gendered (Cockburn 2004), as is the way these experiences are communicated. Certain gender roles like the martyr, hero or the suffering mother gain a prominent position within society, and their experiences are integrated into the public realm and even into the national imagination. Although speaking of suffering becomes thus possible for and in the public, experiences and forms of suffering that do not fit into the ‘grand narrative’ of victimhood or heroism are silenced (Ramphele 1997). How can people express their experiences if these are not integrated into the ‘official’ narrations about a violated ethnic entity? Or as Das outlined: ‘what “right” words could be spoken against the wrong that had been done them?’ (Das 1997: 87) In reply to this rhetoric question, Klungel (this volume) argues for the importance to scrutinize the metaphoric language women use in order to express their experiences of sexual violence. Within the Guadeloupian context ‘vomiting blood’ can thus be read as a hidden transcript. In expressing sexual violence by means of blood metaphors, women create narratives that challenge the individual and collective denial of sexual violence. How to Study Violent Expressions? Anthropological approaches and methods of observations and enquiry have much to contribute to our understanding of war-torn societies and violence in general. Anthropology provides analytical tools and frames for examining the means by which violence is concealed, naturalized and blurred (cf. Ben-Ari in this volume) and ‘is an approach that has as its focus the complexity of social processes, and at the heart of these processes is the construction of the meaning of individual experiences of violence’ (Coulter 2006, see also West 2000). Several contributions have therefore stressed the importance of intimate and long-time relationships with the interlocutors, as well as the use of alternative and multiple methodologies.

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Informal and formal interviews might not suffice as methodologies to grasp the muted signs and silenced experiences of violence, as ‘interviews presuppose a certain communicational structure and outcome, which can be considered a general limitation in the production of ethnography’ (Leifson this volume). Especially when working with children, Leifsen points out, it is important to apply a greater spectre of communicative interaction like role-plays, dramatizations and visualizations as well as using photographs and filming as modes of talking about things and gaining the child’s interest and trust. As violence and expressions of violence are embedded in symbolic landscapes, we have to explore the aesthetic representations of violence. As Fuglerud has argued, nationalist ideology manifests itself through materializations, as objects ‘reinforce abstract ideas or beliefs’ and are easier to comprehend and relate to. Aesthetic manifestations are however not only applied to give sense to the horrors of violence, but might be used to achieve the opposite, namely the normalization and routinization of violence. A haptic (Nordstrom 2010) approach and a focus on our as well as our interlocutors’ senses enables us to understand how violent institutions attempt at constructing non-violent images and to routinize and normalize the violence they represent (Ben-Ari, this volume). Interdisciplinary approaches and incorporating methodology from neighbouring disciplines (Das 2007, Maček 2005) might further develop our understanding of violence and its effect. Pichler engages with psychoanalysis in order to analyze historical memory, whereas Green critically engages with historiography and uses anthropological methodology to retrieve the silenced histories of marginalized people. As Green’s contribution indicates, such a critical interdisciplinary approach does not only improve our (anthropological) understanding of expressions of violence, but provides also new impetuses and perspectives to neighbouring disciplines, such as psychology, political science and history. Understanding the effects and implications of violent acts, and how they are reproduced over time enables also different perspectives on archive materials and historical outlines. This will contribute to writing histories in which the fate of violated groups is not denied or dealt at the margin (Axel 2002, Schneider and Rapp 1995, Wolf 1982). In an attempt to outline his own methodological approach to a child’s expression of violence, Leifsen pleads for a multi-sited (Marcus 1995) and multi-layered approach. In order to understand and see the subtle signs and muted language children employed, he argued for an intense and time consuming engagement and participation in the lives of children. In addition, he used archival material, and conducted interviews with professionals and key adult persons, in order to make sense of the subtle signs of his young interlocutors. While Leifsen has clarified any ethical concerns with the local community as well as with the ethic committee in Norway, it is obvious that research on violence and conflict raises several ethical dilemmas, which are difficult to be solved. Ethics have become a major concern within our field, and several ethical guidelines have been issued. However, as Bourgois (1990) has indicated, these ethical guidelines are too rigid to fit research in conflict areas. Researchers are thus mostly left to their own ethical judgement

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and have to choose between satisfying the structural ethical demands or fulfilling their ethical – and profundly human – obligations towards their interlocutors in the field. Conclusion In dealing with expressions of violence, this reader presents two extremes. The chapters explore the extreme and radical subjective experiences of violence that shape the world of the people directly concerned with violence as well as the researching anthropologist. Narrating and expressing violent experiences is thus mostly considered a constructivist and subjectivist endeavor. However, the death of hundreds of thousands of violated and assassinated people is indisputable and beyond doubt. We can therefore not deal with the question of perspective or interest but have to deal with the ultimate truth. This is the basis for the empirical and positivist approach in the social and cultural sciences. In order to explore the different meanings of violence and in order to find a way of representing violent experiences, we have to overcome this epistemological antagonism. In this volume we have therefore suggested to focus on the different expressions of violence, and explore its many facettes on different social levels and along a temporal continuum. In that way we hope to overcome extreme subjectivism and total facticism and to step into a new epistemological dimension. The chapters of this book are therefore arranged in three parts. Every part presents different approaches to cope with the above mentioned dichotomy. The first part (‘Normalization and Aesthetics’) explores the ways in which violent structures are embedded in collective memories, narratives, role models and self representations of nation states and in political movements. The part ‘Discursive Strategies and Muted Language’ focuses on the ambivalences and tensions between individual experiences and official narratives. In the last part (‘Remembering and Aftermath’) we finally reflect on the ways memories are shaped, transformed and (re)produced. References Abu-Lughod, L. 1999. Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin society. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press. Adorno, T.W. 1955. Prismen: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. ________ [1974] 2003. Noten zur Literatur. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag. Aijmer, G. and Abbink, J. (eds) 2000. Meanings of Violence: A Cross Cultural Perspective. Oxford: Berg. Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Arendt, H. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Asad, T. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Assmann, J. 1992. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. München: C.H. Beck. Axel, B.K. (ed.) 2002. From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and its Futures. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Bandura, A. 2002. ‘Selective Moral Disengagement in the Exercise of Moral Agency’. Journal of Moral Education, 31(2), 101–19. Barth, F. 1975. Ritual and Knowledge Among the Baktaman of New Guinea. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Bendix, R. 1996. ‘Zur Ethnograhpie des Erzählens im ausgehenden 20. Jahrhundert’. Zeitschrift für Volkskunde, 92, 169–84. Berliner, D. 2005. ‘Social Thought and Commentary: The Abuses of Memory: Reflections on the Memory Boom Anthropology’. Anthropological Quarterly, 78(1), 197–211. Binford, L. 2004. ‘An Alternative Anthropology: Exercising the Preferential Option for the Poor’, in Violence in War and Peace. An Anthology, edited by N. Scheper-Hughes and P. Bourgois. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 420–24. Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: University Press. Bourgois, P. 1990. ‘Confronting Anthropological Ethics: Ethnographic Lessons from Central America’. Journal of Peace Research, 27(1), 43–54. ________  2004. ‘The Continuum of Violence in War and Peace: Post-Cold War Lessons from El Salvador’, in Violence in War and Peace. An Anthology, edited by N. Scheper-Hughes and P. Bourgois. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing 425–34. Butler, J. 1988. ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’. Theatre Journal, 40(4), 519–31. Clifford, J. 1994. ‘Diasporas’. Cultural Anthropology, 9(3), 302–38. Cockburn, C. 2004. The Line: Women, Partition and the Gender Order in Cyprus. New York: Zed. Connerton, P. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coulter, C.C. 2006. Being a Bush Wife: Women’s Lives through War and Peace in Northern Sierra Leone, Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, Uppsala University. Csáky, M. and Stachel, P. (eds) 2001. Die Verortung von Gedächtnis. Wien: Passagen. ________ (eds) 2002. Mehrdeutigkeit. Die Ambivalenz von Gedächtnis und Erinnerung. Wien: Passagen. Das, V. 1995. Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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________ 1997. ‘Language and the Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain’, in Social Suffering, edited by A. Kleinman, V. Das, and M. Lock. Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 67-91. ________ 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press. Das, V. and Kleinman, A. (eds) 2001. Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press. Elwert, G., Feuchtwang, S. and Neubert, D. (eds) 1999. Dynamics of Violence: Processes of Escalation and De-Escalation in Violent Groupconflicts. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Fabian, J. 1999. ‘Remembering the Other: Knowledge and Recognition in the Exploration of Central Africa’. Critical Inquiry, 26(1), 49–69. Ferguson, R.B. and Whitehead, N.L. (eds) 1992. War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare. Sante Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press. Funkenstein, A. 1993. Perceptions of Jewish History. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Gilsenan, M. 1996. Lords of the Lebanese Marches: Violence and Narrative in an Arab Society. London: Tauris. Goffman, E. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. ________ 1961. Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction. Indianapolis, N.Y.: Bobbs-Merrill. Halbwachs, M. [1950] 1980. The Collective Memory. New York: Harper & Row. Hüsken, F., and de Jonge, H. (eds) 2002. Violence and Vengeance: Discontent and Conflict in New Order Indonesia. Vol. 37. Nijmegen Studies in Development and Change. Saarbrücken. Jackson, M. 2002. Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression and Intersubjectivity. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Kaldor, M. 2000. Neue und alte Kriege. Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp. Kansteiner, W. 2002. ‘Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies’. History and Theory, 41(2), 179–97. Kidron, C.A. 2009. ‘Toward an Ethnography of Silence: The Lived Presence of the Past in the Everyday Life of Holocaust Trauma Survivors and their Descendants in Israel’. Current Anthropology, 50(1), 5–27. Klein, K.L. 2000. ‘On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse’. Representations, 69, 127–50. Lattas, A. 1998. Cultures of Secrecy: Reinventing Race in Bush Kaliai Cargo Cults. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Maček, I. 2005. ‘Sarajevan Soldier Story: Perceptions of War and Morality in Bosnia’, in No Peace, No War: An Anthropology of Contemporary Armed Conflicts, edited by P. Richards. Athens: Ohio University Press, 57–76.

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Malkki, L.H. 1995. Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press. Marcus, G.E. 1995. ‘Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-sited Ethnography. Annual Review Of Anthropology, 24, 95–117. Murphy, W.P. 1980. ‘Secret Knowledge as Property and Power in Kpelle Society: Elders Versus Youth’. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 50(2), 193–207. Nordstrom, C. 2004. Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press. ________ 2009. ‘Global Fractures’, in An Anthropology of War, edited by A. Waterston. New York: Berghahn Books, 71-86. ________ 2010. ‘Simultaneity, Multi-plexity, Extra-legal: Emerging Ideas in Times of Global Crisis’. AAS Working Papers in Social Anthropology, OEAW Arbeitspapiere zur Sozialanthropologie. Nordstrom, C. and Martin, J. (eds) 1992. The Paths to Domination, Resistance, and Terror. Berkeley: University of California Press. Peters, K. and Richards, P. 2007. ‘Understanding Recent African Wars’. Africa, 77(3), 442–54. Radstone, S. and Hodgkin, K. (eds) 2005. Memory Cultures. Subjcetivity, Recognition and Memory. Piscatawny, US: Transaction. Ramphele, M. 1997. ‘Political Widowhood in South Africa: The Embodiment of Ambiguity’, in Social Suffering, edited by A. Kleinman, V. Das, and M. Lock. Berkley: University of California Press, 99–117. Robben, A.C.G.M. 1996. ‘Ethnographic Seduction, Transference, and Resistance in Dialogues about Terror and Violence in Argentina’. Ethos, 24(1), 71–106. ________ (ed.) 2009. Iraq at a Distance: What Anthropologists Can Teach Us About the War. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvenia Press. ________ in print. Neue Kriege, in Handbuch der Globalisierung. 100 ethnologische Stichworte für die Praxis, edited by A. Gingrich, F. Kreff, and E.-M. Knoll. Ross, F.C. 2001. ‘Speech and Silence: Women’s Testimony in the First Five Weeks of Public Hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, in Remaking the World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery, edited by V. Das, A. Kleinman, M. Lock, M. Ramphele, and P. Reynolds. Berkley: University of California Press, 250–80. Saussure, F.d. [1919] 1966. Course in General Linguistics. New York: McGrawHill. Scarry, E. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press. Scheper-Hughes, N. 1993. Death Without Weeping: The Violence in Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley et al: Univ. of California Press.

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Schmidt, B.E. and Schröder, I.W. (eds) 2001. Anthropology of Violence and Conflict. London: Routledge. Schneider, J. and Rapp, R. (eds) 1995. Articulating Hidden Histories: Exploring the Influence of Eric R. Wolf. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press. Stoett, P. 2004. ‘Shades of Complicity: Towards a Typology of Transnational Crimes against Humanity’, in Genocide, War, Crimes and the West: History and Complicity, edited by A. Jones. London, New York: Zed Books. 31–55. Taylor, D. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, London: Duke University Press. Verrips, J. 2007. ‘Aisthesis and An-aesthesia’. Ethnologia Europaea, 35(1–2), 29–36. Weigel, S. 1999. ‘Télescopage im Unbewußten. Zum Verhältnis von Trauma, Geschichtsbegriff und Literatur’, in Trauma. Zwischen Psychoanalzse und kulturellem Deutungsmuster, edited by E. Bronfen, E. Erdle, and S. Weigel. Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 51–77. Weiss, N. 2010. ‘Falling from Grace: Gender Norms and Gender Strategies in Eastern Turkey’. New Perspectives on Turkey, 42, 73–94. West, H.G. 2000. ‘Girls with Quns: Narrating the Experience of War of FRELIMO’s “Female Detachment”’. Anthropological Quarterly, 73(4), 180–94. White, H. 1988. ‘Historiography and Historiophoty’. The American Historical Review, 93(5), 1193–9. Whitehead, N.L. (ed.) 2004. Violence. Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press. Wolf, E.R. 1982. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press. Yuval-Davis, N. and Anthias, F. (eds) 1989. Woman, Nation, State. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Žarkov, D. 2007. The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Break-up of Yugoslavia. Durham: Duke University Press. Zarowsky, C. 2000. ‘Trauma Stories: Violence, Emotion and Politics in Somali Ethiopia’. Transcultural Psychiatry, 37(7), 282–402. Žižek, S. 2008. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books.

Part I Normalization and Aesthetics

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Chapter 1

The Utter Normalization of Violence: Silence, Memory and Impunity among the Yup’ik People of Southwestern Alaska Linda Green

A Matrix of Violence In this chapter I will bring attention to a form of violence that has largely been normalized, and examine its crucial relationship to impunity. The type of violence of which I speak is a violence that has left in its wake the almost total obliteration of a mode of life for indigenous people around the globe; a violence that leaves its victims standing, albeit confused. What has been lost is a point of view, a way of being, inextricably tied to its material base and spiritual foundations. I will examine a form of violence that is not an unintended outcome of a social project, but rather intrinsic to that very process; a violence so naturalized that most assume that the victims of this violence are actually its beneficiaries, rescued from their isolated, primitive ways. And even those who may harbor doubt, understand the outcome as inevitable, redeemed in their minds perhaps, by its imputed rendering of equality and freedom. This civilizing myth, as Zygmunt Bauman (1991) has noted, is deeply entrenched in the self-consciousness of Western society. The aggravated assault on indigenous peoples has often been carried out through processes of dispossession, dislocation and partial assimilation. A historical understanding of how these processes are produced is crucial. In a seminal article entitled Pandora’s History, Gavin Smith (1999) explores the paradoxes that belie a rapprochement between anthropology and history in attempts by both disciplines ‘to give voice to the “unspeakable”’. Smith urges us to think through those silences, to peer into ‘those subterranean passages where silence resides’, to interrogate the ways in which they may ‘link up the events’ of  I am referring to those cultural practices tied to social, political and economic activities which now mostly and merely reside as trace memories of what was once. I am, however, not arguing that indigenous peoples are totally bereft of meaningful social relations and social resources among and between kin and communities.   There is ample historical evidence from around the global to support the contention that the assimilation of indigenous peoples was intended to be only partial; they were to be consigned to the margins of society.

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official history. Thus, an examination of history also entails an interrogation of an erasure of history alongside the complicity of that erasure – of ordinary people’s suffering, not just in physical terms, but the emotional, cultural, social parameters of that suffering. The erasure of history, however, is not total, but rather partial – in both senses of the term – one that blocks any real understanding of the full extent of people’s suffering, while simultaneously setting the stage for an engagement with a particular kind of history; one that serves power. William Roseberry (1999), characterizes this as ‘hegemony as history’, that is the way in which those in power actually pose and then define the questions around which struggles are fought (Gramsci 1971). And it is here in these ruptures that violence against a people is often rendered invisible. Moreover without explicitly naming this violence, challenges to the status quo become mostly muted. Impunity in these instances can be thought of as something more than a lack of accountability in its legalistic sense, but rather as a social process that is enabled in part by a characteristic mixture of silence and memory among its victims and historical amnesia and widespread indifference on the part of the dominant society (Green 2008). In the following I explore some of the processes that are implicated in the massive social transformations that have taken place for the Yup’ik peoples of Southwestern Alaska over the course of the twentieth century. I point to the ways in which the dual processes of silence and shame have extended the reach of power into the Yup’ik lives and sentiments. The violence and trauma in its myriad forms that circumscribed the twentieth century for the Yup’iks reworked not only individual lives, but altered in the process much of the connective bonds of kin and community life, i.e. the collective basis of indigenous well-being. This chapter highlights the social consequences of the tuberculosis epidemic that have been largely overlooked in understanding contemporary Yup’ik lives. I suggest that, in fact, it was a watershed moment that must be understood alongside of and in relation to two other major transformations for Yup’ik people in the first half of the twentieth century; missionization and the introduction of merchant capital. I point to some of the historical ruptures and dislocations that are critical to an understanding of the seemingly inexplicable disparities in the social and economic circumstances for some Yup’ik peoples at the beginning and end of the twentieth century. Transforming the Tundra in the Twentieth Century At the end of the nineteenth century the Yup’ik people – or subarctic Eskimos as they were commonly known – were a semi-nomadic people who traveled by dogsled, boat, or on foot in small kin groups over the vast tundra. They were a resourceful people who survived the harsh environment of the Far North with skill and grace. A people, who by necessity, moved seasonally and widely across

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the debouchments of the Yukon- Kuskokwim River Delta, some 30,000 square miles, to hunt, fish, gather foods and trade items necessary for survival (Haycock 2002). For the Yup’ik the tundra was not a vast empty space, but a crucial site for the production of social relations and cultural well-being, as the land provided them not only their material sustenance but embodied the very essence of their lives. Recent mapping and oral history-projects with elders from the Delta region (Chevak Traditional Council 2000) for example, have revealed the tundra alive with local history – of births, battles, burials, myths and ceremonials sites. I am not, of course, arguing for a romantic notion of the Yup’ik as noble savage. The Yup’ik people experienced famines, disease, warfare and violence; all sorts of human and natural calamities, on a fairly regular basis, yet, they lived their lives, as best they could, on their own terms. My interests lie precisely in those aspects of the social transformations in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta villages that may at first not seem obvious. I am interested in the extent to which social relations and social ties were reworked in Native Alaskan communities, even as Native people remained in place – on the tundra and with seemingly unchanged access to subsistence. The enormous changes in the social conditions with the arrival of outsiders made the continuation of the old ways of living and living together increasingly impossible. In the case of Southwestern Alaska, the assault was not on land per se, nor ostensibly labor, but on a constellation of social and material practices, crucial pieces of the organized matrix of their lives and livelihood, that slowly eroded their ability to survive with dignity. I want to index three such important and interrelated events: first, the introduction of merchant capital through the commodification of their subsistence species – wildlife and fish – that reworked the Natives’ relationships to their landscape and to each other through social rearrangements of their productive activities; secondly, the arrival of missionaries and teachers – often one and the same – who spearheaded fundamental changes in their gendered, social and spatial relations as well facilitating the internalization of their imputed inferiority; and lastly, the reworking of Yup’ik lives and social identity in the context of the tuberculosis epidemics. Until the late nineteenth century the peoples of Southwestern Alaska had only limited and sporadic interactions with outsiders, mostly because the natural resources most sought after at the time – seals, walrus, gold and furs – could be procured elsewhere in more accessible regions of Alaska. By century’s end, fur traders began establishing trading posts along the Kuskokwim and Yukon Rivers, and Moravian and Jesuit missionaries were traveling to and soon living in Native settlements, establishing a permanent presence on Native lands and in Native lives.

  The people of the Yukon-Kuskokwim River Delta had long sustained ties through trade and warfare with other indigenous peoples in Alaska. There is little evidence that Russian colonists had much direct contact with the peoples of the Yukon- Kuskokwim River Delta, particularly with the villages on the shores of the Bering Sea.

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Some of the changes thus introduced – like trapping for cash or barter, the introduction of the small engine, sugar, white flour, alcohol and tobacco – increased their dependence on a cash economy (Napoleon 1996). Yet, they were drawn into a cash economy only partially and sporadically, which created both a dependence on outside resources that could not adequately allow them to meet their daily needs for social reproduction, while simultaneously precluding most alternatives. Moreover it altered the connections between them. Gerald Sider (1986) in his magnificent account of changing economic relations among people in the hinterlands of Labrador, notes that ‘the tensions produced between autonomy of work processes and the imposed constraints to produce under merchant capital’ reworked positions of power and authority as traditional leaders coordinated the relations of their production and social reproduction in new and often deleterious ways (1986: 36). With the crash of the fur trade in the 1930s the Yup’iks were, by necessity, thrown back onto their own resources to survive, but in a context where everything had changed. Both before and after the collapse of the fur trade a succession of episodic epidemics – small pox, measles and influenza – occurred, which left Native groups decimated: physically, socially and economically (Napoleon 1996). In many cases whole kin groups perished and in others the sole survivors were young adults. Subsequently, most Yup’iks were lured away from the tundra – although often under duress – with the assistance offered by missionaries. They were offered schools for their children and Western medical care that seemed all the more necessary, as the power and legitimacy of the shamans had waned in the face of diseases and death. The long and slow death march from tuberculosis of which massive numbers of people died in the ensuing decades, was simply the final phase in their dispossession and dislocation from each other and the landscape of their lives, as their social and economic fabric was shredded. The Production of Vulnerability: The Twenty-First Century Today the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta is home to some 25,000 Yup’ik people living in 56 small, geographically isolated villages. The largest village has an estimated population of 1,200 people and the smallest village, a population of 100. The Yup’ik people make up the largest population of all other indigenous groups in Alaska, yet the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta remains the poorest region. The Yup’ik people have the highest rates of unemployment – by some estimates 75 per cent of the active workforce is without steady employment – and there are only a handful   Yup’ik men began to go work in the fish canneries and in crews on commercial fishing boats on Bristol Bay. In many cases, however, the owners preferred migrant laborers to Alaska’s indigenous peoples.  Parents were often threatened that if they did not enroll their children in school, the authorities would revoke their rights of custody.

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of regularly paying jobs in each village. Most people have no productive work to do day after day and must rely on the state welfare system for the cash to survive. Confined in their everyday lives to specific parcels of land, and further restricted by state-imposed hunting and fishing regulations, most people do continue to practice some degree of subsistence, but from a sedentary existence. They go by boat, four -wheeler or snow machine to hunt, fish or collect berries and grasses. Yet this too is becoming prohibitive, as gas for their vehicles in the summer of 2009 was $7 per gallon. Increasingly, even as their dietary mainstay remains their subsistence foods of fish, fowl and game the local village store has become essential to survival. Yet, it is filled with mostly toxic substances – frozen fast food, soda, and candy, which are literally killing them, albeit slowly, as hitherto unknown rates of cardiac disease, type 2 diabetes, and cancer have soared over the past half century. Yup’iks have some of the highest rates of suicide, violent deaths, domestic violence and sexual assault in the state. Most village people live in substandard housing; many lack running water, access to clean drinking water and sanitation. Even in those villages where a sanitation infrastructure exists, many communities and households do not have the monetary resources to keep them operating adequately. And what is slowly being revealed is that the Y-K Delta has been a site of extensive sexual predation and assault by the Catholic clergy over the last half century. I bring these matters to the fore rather starkly to highlight the outcomes of social and economic policies and practices whose manifestations we name poverty. And in many cases poverty, rather unconsciously, is understood as an ascribed status, intrinsic to a population rather than historically produced. In the Yup’iks’ case their poverty can be traced across the contours of the twentieth century. Yet, the violence, suffering and trauma – the utter immizeration that circumscribe Yup’ik lives – remains mostly unacknowledged and thus inadequately attended. Although there are now a whole host of state interventions designed to provide health and behavioral assistance to Alaska’s indigenous peoples, a mostly ineffectual cottage industry has surfaced, that in the words of the Cherokee artist and political activist, Jimmie Durham, service the ‘dying Indian’, not wholly dead nor fully alive. Tuberculosis: The White Plague The 1930s were not only remarkable for the devastating impact of the fur trade collapse, but also because one out of every three deaths of Alaskan Natives was due to tuberculosis (Fellows 1934). In the mid-1940s ten per cent of the Native population, i.e. some 4,000 people, had active tuberculosis. By the 1950s it was estimated that one out of every thirty indigenous Alaskans was in tuberculosis sanatoria, remaining there for an average of two years, mostly outside of Alaska’s borders, with waiting lists for hospital beds often extending over two to three years

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(Comstock 2001, Chance 1990). Also in the 1950s more native babies and small children died mostly of tuberculosis than lived. The Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta was the site of continuous tuberculosis epidemics for the first half of the twentieth century with not only the highest morbidity and mortality rates of all other indigenous groups in Alaska, but whose rates even surpassed those of the mid-nineteenth century urban slums of Europe and the United States. The State’s tuberculosis control program in Alaska initiated soon after the end of World War II, and is understood in medical, public health and international health circles as a success story of considerable magnitude regarding the treatment and prevention of the disease among the aboriginal population. This is, in one sense, quite true. Yet it is also a story of innumerable silences, contradictions and paradoxes that have had enormous implications for the well-being of Alaska’s indigenous peoples today. A commonly held perception is that it was the Russian explorers who introduced tuberculosis into the Native Alaskan population in the eighteenth century (Fortuine 2005). Thus tuberculosis was thought to be a sad but inevitable consequence of modernity, following a trajectory much like the introduction of Old World diseases into the New World by European colonizers that literally decimated the indigenous populations of North, Central and South America. Yet, the historian Paul Kelton (2007) has argued that even the devastating epidemics for indigenous peoples in south-eastern United States in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not due simply to aboriginal peoples’ lack of immunity to European and African introduced germs. Rather the epidemiological significance of colonization for indigenous peoples was that it heightened native vulnerability to infection often resulting in death. In the case of Alaska smallpox, measles and influenza were certainly introduced from outside its borders. The case of tuberculosis is perhaps more contentious. Recent historical and scientific data have suggested that tuberculosis may have been endemic in Alaska for several thousand years prior to Russian colonization. Some scientists have hypothesized that the semi-nomadic lifestyle of Native peoples with their seasonal locales for fishing and hunting, their spring and winter camps and the small number of individuals living together, coupled by the fact that life was mostly spent out of doors, limited the opportunities for the disease’s spread. Further, Native peoples long physical exposure with the tuberculosis organism, that has been postulated to be low in virulence, may have allowed most of those affected by a disease to heal their lesions spontaneously by fibrosis and calcification (Fortuine 2005). In either case, whether endemic or introduced, one of the significant impacts of Russian occupation was to create the ecological and epidemiological conditions that, in the eighteenth century, allowed the tuberculosis bacilli to flourish in the port towns of the Aleutian Islands, the Alexander Archipelago and the Seward Peninsula, which constitute major sites of Russian settlement.

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It was not until the late nineteenth century, with the arrival of outsiders in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, that dramatic changes took place in the daily lives of the Yup’ik people: the resettlement of seasonally nomadic peoples into villages changed the way they practiced subsistence and their relationships with each other. It reworked kin and gender relations, as men were encouraged to move out of the men’s houses (kasmin or quigiq) into nuclear family structures, changing the balance of power and authority between and among men and women, and between the young and the old. Environmentally, people moved out of their semi-subterranean dwellings into housings above ground that were structurally, socially and economically inadequate. The vast tundra, the site where meaningful social relations had been produced, became a space of their confinement. Yup’iks began to live between two cultures – one slowly being hollowed out, and the other one, where they took their place as marginalized people, as Western education, Western medicine and Christianity disrupted the meaning of their lives Thus, the social conditions were created that allowed the tuberculosis bacilli to flourish. Yet political decision-makers, medical experts, and missionaries viewed these changes as positive signs of progress and assimilation of native peoples. Paradoxically, these very changes, that on one hand made survival easier and more predictable, also created the conditions that simultaneously increased the chaos in their lives as individuals and kin. The utter failure by the dominant society to acknowledge, even today, the trauma and violence of this specific iteration of colonization only intensifies its effects across generations, as this history, never spoken, continues to shape and influence those who have survived. Narrowing the Focus of Intervention The German biologist Robert Koch identified the tubercle bacillus as the causative biological agent for tuberculosis in 1884, thus began the quest for effective pharmaceutical therapies. Yet, the causative social agents of tuberculosis had been widely known even before Koch’s discovery; a familiar litany of poverty-induced maladies – malnutrition, depressed immunity, chronic stress, limited access to potable water and sewage, inadequate housing, as well as close and crowded living conditions (Farmer 1999, Lewontin 1993). Over the course of the twentieth century the majority of Western medical resources and public health policies privileged the treatment of individual cases over the social causes of the disease (Dubos 1952). Although tuberculosis affected all social classes, it did so differentially. Racial, class, and gender configurations have long been key determinants in disease morbidity and mortality, as well as health care provisioning. In the early decades of the twentieth century African-Americans, Native Americans and immigrants had some of the highest infection and death rates of tuberculosis in the continental United States which were correctly ascribed to their impoverished living and working conditions. Their opportunities for care were both limited and most often

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punitive. The causative agent of their social inequalities was explained as cultural difference, obscuring the political, economic and ideological underpinnings of capitalist social relations. Moreover, the high morbidity and mortality rates among the poor, particularly people of color, became further justification for their discrimination. In the early decades of the twentieth century the upper classes who were diagnosed with tuberculosis were treated with the ‘rest cure’ in private sanatoriums where a nourishing diet, rest, exercise and fresh air were deemed essential for any likelihood of remission or cure. The working class – African- Americans, Native Americans and immigrants among them – were confined to state-financed institutions where they underwent a ‘work cure’, therapy based on the idea that the poor with tuberculosis should work for their keep (Bates 1993). The rise in tuberculosis in the newly industrialized societies in Europe and America was followed by a long period of gradual decline among certain groups of people. Although the trend in tuberculosis was not continuous over the course of the twentieth century the general movement of tuberculosis mortality in the West has been downward for most of the last one hundred years, a decline that was largely independent of medical intervention. By the time effective treatments of tuberculosis were discovered, especially following World War II, the disease was not longer the dreadful killer it had been for most populations. In the United States racial differentials, however, tightly tied to class divisions, became further entrenched even as these effective therapies developed. Although tuberculosis continued to decline among all US citizens, rates among African Americans and Native Americans remained relatively high. With the development of effective treatment in 1943 energies turned increasingly toward the treatment of individual cases. By the late1950s tuberculosis was regarded as a disease well on its way to being eradicated, and little interest remained in attacking the disease at its social roots. The illusion of conquering the ‘disease’ through treatment became the preferred public heath model rather than advocating for affecting the underlying causes of vulnerability (Farmer 1999). Rene Dubos, the acclaimed French microbiologist (1952: 7) argues that ‘in reality the monstrous spector of infection had become but an enfeebled shadow of its former self by the time serums, vaccines and drugs became available to combat microbes’. Improved housing-, working-conditions and nutrition – not medical science – reduced tuberculosis’ fearsome death toll for some. Research, Diagnosis and the Provisioning of Care By any measure, the American public health response to the ongoing and intensifying tuberculosis epidemics during the first five decades of the twentieth century in rural Alaska, was extremely slow. Federal and territorial officials responsible for Native health and well-being were well aware of the magnitude and severity of the tuberculosis problem among Alaskan Natives as early as the 1920s.

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Missionary and teacher reports and three successive federal health commissions documented over a period of thirty years the continuously deteriorating health and living conditions of Alaska’s aboriginal peoples. Although the problem was well-documented, little was done to address the growing crisis. The scarcity of financial resources was most frequently cited as the constraining factor. What little health services were provided for Natives in the 1930s and 1940s, for example, seemed to have been done, in part, to ameliorate growing fear among the white population that they were in danger of being infected by Natives with tuberculosis. In the white settlers’ imagination Natives soon became associated with contagion. After World War II, two fact-finding teams were sent to Alaska in rapid succession. They were groups of physicians from the American Medical Association that travelled to Alaska in 1947 and 1948. The subsequent reports produced concluded that the resources available to stem the tide of tuberculosis among the Native population were wholly inadequate. The team of 1948 noted that ten times as many Natives died of tuberculosis than whites, even though Natives made up only one third of the population. Between 1948 and 1950 Alaska’s Territorial Biennial Health Report listed 5,509 (active) tuberculosis cases in their case registry. In all of Alaska there were only 300 beds for tuberculosis patients – most of which were newly converted beds at the former military hospitals of Skagway, Seward and Mt. Edgecumbe, near Sitka. With a waiting list for hospital beds numbering between 3,000 and 4,000, the majority of the (active) tuberculosis patients were left in their rural communities to die. In Akiak, a small village on the Kuskokwim River and site of a major trading post for furs, where the tuberculosis was particularly rapacious, a ten bed hospital was opened in 1930. The hospital was closed only three years later, concomitant with the collapse of the fur trade. In 1940 a forty bed hospital was opened in Bethel across that river, from a newly built US military airstrip, which at the time was a strategic site to the Pacific Theatre war effort during World War II after the capture of several islands on the Aleutian Chain by the Japanese. In 1950 when that Bethel hospital burned to the ground by an accidental fire, the US Bureau of Education, at the time the over site agency for federally mandated Indian health care, decided not to rebuild the hospital, but rather to refer patients to the Dillingham hospital, over 150 miles to the south, accessible for most only by boat or dog team. The decision was made in the midst of a tuberculosis epidemic that rivaled the now legendary white plague of mid-nineteenth century Europe. In 1954 there were over 100,000 tuberculosis beds in the contiguous United States, many of them empty. The hospital census was falling as many patients were being discharged because of the success of combined chemotherapy treatments  Bethel, AK is the regional hub community for the 56 villages that comprise the Yukon- Kuskokwim River Delta region.

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– particularly with the combination of streptomycin and para-aminosalicylic acid (PAS), which had both been discovered in the mid-1940s, and isoniazid (INH) in 1952 – that could be administered on an out-patient basis. It was only then that the hospital beds became available for Alaska’s indigenous peoples. Thus Alaska’s indigenous peoples were prescribed a regime of care in the 1950s that was hospital based. It included debilitating surgeries that, according to several of the thoracic surgeons who preformed them, were mostly palliative, even as outpatient chemotherapy became a standard protocol in the continental United States. In 1954 the Parren Commission visited Alaska for the second time and concluded in its report that the current resources available were still woefully insufficient to stem the tide of Native mortality and morbidity from tuberculosis. What Dr Thomas Parren, the chair of the commission and former Surgeon General of the United States, discovered on that second trip to Bethel was that a successful outpatient treatment regime was already under way. In 1952 Dr Beryl Michelson, a white Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) physician, was sent to establish a clinic in Bethel in lieu of rebuilding of the hospital. She teamed up with Michael Chase, a 20 year old Yup’ik man from Nunaptichuk, and launched a home-based treatment program for ten patients using streptomycin and PAS. These patients had been deemed to have tuberculosis too far advanced to warrant care. Within three months the x-rays of their lungs showed dramatic improvement. Dr Michelson instituted the program without authorization, after Dr Edward Hynson, the physician in charge and head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Juneau, denied her initial request. Not surprisingly, after Dr Parren reported Dr Michelson’s experiment to Dr Hynson, she was relieved of her duties in Bethel and told she would never practice medicine among Alaska Natives again. Michael Chase, the young Yup’ik man from Nunaptichuk, said the reason he became involved is because as a young boy he had seen both his father and his older brother die of tuberculosis, helpless to intervene. He understood all too well the deleterious social effects of their deaths on family and community life. Chase not only gave the streptomycin injections and administered the PAS pills daily – some 24 each day. He also organized the community to provide the daily necessities for rest and cure: the provisioning of firewood, water, washing clothes, cleaning the houses and food. This was the last time, he said, that the community really came together for each other. Even today that initial experiment has been almost entirely erased from historical memory, known mostly by people in Bethel and the small village of Nunapitchuk. The 1954 Parren Report urged that ambulatory chemotherapy care be carried out in the Bethel region, and a very minimal program was launched. Within this changing social context two successive tuberculosis control measures in particular are credited with ‘stopping the dying’ over the course of next two decades: first, the long term confinement of vast numbers of people with active (infectious)  Dr Michelson’s protocol had already been established in drug trials in Britain and the results published in an issue of the British Medical Journal (1949).

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tuberculosis to sanatoriums for periods of up to several years; and secondly, intensive surveillance of village populations to monitor out-patient based chemotherapy both for the treatment and prevention of tuberculosis. Together these measures are complexly linked to the furtherance of Yup’ik people suffering, as the strategies simultaneously alleviated their morbidity and mortality from tuberculosis, yet their suffering was rendered invisible. Paradoxes of the Sanatorium Care in the Mid-1950s The removal of family members from their homes and communities, both adults and children had long-term social consequences not only for those individuals, but also kin and communities. Most of the people who were sent to hospitals outside the state were monolingual in their indigenous language, and most had never left their region before. Many had invasive and debilitating pulmonary surgeries – even then recognized by physicians as mostly palliative. The majority of patients were hospitalized for over two years. Many never returned home, and all too frequently family members were never notified what happened to their loved ones. They were in effect disappeared, to borrow an apt phrase from the Latin American context. The recent discovery of bodies buried in bunkers on the grounds of Mt. Edgecumbe Hospital near Sitka, AK are noteworthy in this regard. In 1998 over 100 bodies of people who had died from tuberculosis in the hospital between the late 1940s and mid-1960s were discovered encased in concrete in two World War II ammunition bunkers on the edge of the airstrip (AK Department of Transportation 2000). Many of the next of kin were never notified. Notwithstanding, those who were hospitalized spoke of their experiences with a mixture of fondness for the doctors and nurses who cared for them, and a lingering sadness and self doubt over the effects of their absence from their villages and families. At the same time, their narratives include a profound sense of loss and shame. At the heart of their experiences with tuberculosis, there seems to have been profound silence on the part of public health officials and the people themselves; a silence about the social consequences of separation, disruption, loss and death, a silence produced physical, psychological and cultural chaos in people’s lives. The two stories that follow will help to dramatize my point. I had occasion to interview one of the Indian Health Service (IHS) physicians who worked at the Bethel hospital in the mid-1950s soon after it was rebuilt, following the dismissal of Dr Michelson. This physician flew out to the small village of Chevak, a newly created village of approximately 100 people on the edge of the Bering Sea. The doctor described the people as being mostly monolingual and in his words just moving up from underground – that is from the traditional sod houses to the cheap BIA box houses that were entirely inappropriate for the sub-arctic winters. A plane had been sent to pick up a woman in her early 30s with

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active tuberculosis – a call had just come to Bethel that there was a hospital bed available in Tacoma where her husband was already hospitalized. She was living with her three children in a tent. She packed up her few possessions and was on the plane within an hour. In his interview with me the doctor cited this as an example of the extreme confidence that ‘Eskimo’ people had in Western medicine. Later in the interview, however, he mused, ‘perhaps, if we had given them adequate housing the TB would have gone away on its own.

I also had the opportunity to interview two of those three children, now adults, from the same village, who were left that winter without their mother and father. The boy was eight years old at the time they took his mother away. He was at the time of our interview a 58 year old man. When I, during the course of my fieldwork, had asked most of the 600 people in the village, if they would be willing to tell me about their experiences with the tuberculosis epidemics, the now 56year-old Sam refused. Some days later he sought me out at the small room where I was staying, which was just above the village store. During most of the next two hours we spent together, he cried. Sam said that his uncle had to hold him back forcefully that day they put his mother on the airplane. He remembers screaming for her not to go. His older sister tried as best she could to take care of him, and so did his little sister. They lived without adequate food, clothing and shelter. Most of his relatives also had family members either dying or hospitalized. Sam’s mother stayed at the hospital for three years. When she returned to the village Sam had already been sent away to boarding school. By the time he returned home from school that summer, she had died. His father never returned from the hospital. Sam presumed that he too had died. Mary, another woman from the same village, was in her early 50s at the time of our interview. Mary told me that when she was three years old her mother was sent to the hospital. She then lived with her grandmother whom she came to think of as her mother. Mary was seven years old when her own mother returned. She recalled how terrified she was of her because she thought she was a white nurse – a gussack – whom she associated with injections. Mary’s mother’s hair had been cut short and permed. She was wearing lipstick and Western dress. Among one of the first procedures upon entry into tuberculosis hospitals was refashioning and westernizing the native women’s bodies. During our conversation Mary confided, as tears streamed down, that when she was thirteen her mother died and she had not understood, until now, why she never mourned her death. In fact she had not even attended her mother’s funeral. Surveillance and Suicide By the 1960s the tuberculosis epidemic was winding down and fewer people were confined to hospitals as outpatient chemotherapy-based treatment became more widely available. 1968 was the first year that there were no reported deaths

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from tuberculosis, and the first year since the 1940s that no Native children were hospitalized (Comstock 1961). Tuberculosis control surveillance was, and continues to be, an important feature of public health case management and new case findings. Surveillance included a tuberculosis registry, tracking of compliance with medications, periodic visits by physicians or public health nurses, home visits, village-x-ray teams, sputum exams and local people serving as chemotherapy aides. And with such a small number of people, coupled with their geographic isolation, it was quite possible to track individual lives, even without today’s sophisticated technology. But here, public health officials seem to have been unseeing and silent as another epidemic was unfolding before their eyes. Simultaneous to the decline in active tuberculosis disease and deaths, there was a serious and disproportionate rise in socialbehavioral problems, particularly suicides among young Yup’ik people. During that period a number of people who committed suicide used INH, the tuberculosis drug, which at the time was widely distributed to villagers across the Delta as the Center for Disease Control was conducting drug trials on the efficacy of IHN in the prevention of primary infection (Comstock 2001). Between 1964 and 1989 the suicide rate among Natives in Alaska rose 500 per cent. Although tuberculosis and suicides are seemingly disparate disease entities – one an infectious disease, the other often an outcome of a cluster of behavioral /psychological problems – I want to posit an association of common causes between them in this particular instance. I propose a historical link from the early twentieth century’s internal colonialism in the area to the mid-century tuberculosis epidemics, with the ensuing epidemic of suicides. Together they have left a legacy of devastation with consequences into the twenty-first century. Dr Robert Krause, a psychiatrist and anthropologist at the University of Kentucky, worked in some of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta villages in the early 1970s. Dr. Kraus was interviewing village men and women, who as children had borne the brunt of the tuberculosis epidemics a decade earlier. All of these young adults he interviewed had attempted suicide. Dr Krause related this story to me from the perspective of one of the young men who had been treated for severe depression and attempted suicide. His father was sent to the sanatorium and the boy’s mother was left alone with a ‘houseful of kids’. This young boy was the oldest, but he was too young to hunt and fish for the family, so the family’s wellbeing was dependent on handouts from other community members. Other children in the village, he recalled, made fun of him and his siblings because of their ragged clothes. The boy was ten years old when his mother died. He tried to climb into the grave with her. As a result of his research Dr Krause believes that many of the reported accidental deaths were/are in fact ‘suicides masquerading as accidents’. (personal interview 2003).

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Impunity: Silence and Shame Silence in this case has a dual character. On one hand, the silence produced by indifference is for the most part not an intentionally malicious indifference but rather one born of an imputed superiority. A deafening silence reigns where no impolitic questions are to be asked. So even, for example, as the state created the all-seeing eye through surveillance, it failed to publicly recognize and take responsibility for the skyrocketing rates of suicides among Natives. Regarding the Yup’iks’ suffering, silence on the part of public health officials among many others, and the failure to pay attention to the social consequences of the large and small changes taking place, contributed to and was crucial for the continuing exercise of power over these people’s lives. Silence lies at the heart of both the tuberculosis and suicide epidemics; silence among a host of state and public health officials as well as tribal leaders charged with providing Native Alaskan people comprehensive health care. On the other hand, many of the former IHS physicians that I have spoken with and who worked in the Delta in the 1950s, expressed real concern in retrospect about what the social and personal distress they had seen among the Yup’ik. At an institutional level these connections were never reworked into substantive policies and practices acknowledgeding and attempting to alleviate the suffering and trauma. Decades of suicide intervention programs by the State have had only minimal impact on the continuing suffering of Yup’ik youth. In fact, the suffering for many has grown, albeit normalized, under the guise of modernity, in which the Yup’ik, like so many millions across the globe have become, under a system of rapacious capitalism, quite literally, a disposable population. This façade is punctured only intermittently and experienced locally, with yet another senseless loss to death by suicide. The silence of the victims of trauma is produced through shame co-mingled with confusion. ‘Is it our fault that we got tuberculosis?’ was a question put to me by a 90 year old Yup’ik woman from the village of Hooper Bay. This question still lingers some 40 years after the trauma of tuberculosis has ended. This was not a naive question, however, but rather one that reflects a long history of uncertainty shrouded in silence in many rural communities about the tuberculosis epidemics. Many Yup’ik people who experienced the tuberculosis epidemics seemed to think of themselves to blame. Silence has often been a common reaction to social trauma. Shame and self-blame can be grasped as psychological and emotional responses among survivors, as many of the victims of trauma are stunned into silence, as they try as best they can to cope with their world turned upside down, without any of the familiar certainties to hang onto (see Hayden 1997). The tuberculosis

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epidemics fractured the fragile social bonds among kin and between community members in many ways, both subtle and not, that served to reinforce notions of their imputed inferiority in the context of their partial assimilation which has only intensified their vulnerability (Sider 2006). Tuberculosis was one facet of a one-two-three punch over the course of the twentieth century: missionization, the partial commodification of the subsistence practices, their dispossession and dislocation from each other and the meaning of their lives. A growing body of literature on the effects of intergenerational trauma examines the relationship between a social history of individually experienced trauma and the collective trauma experienced across generations. Recent studies have posited that the lingering and expressive effects of trauma can last well into subsequent generations. Social problems found among Native Americans in the US have begun to conceptualize them within a historical legacy of trauma expressed as ‘soul wound’, understood as the collective, cumulative, and historical effects of racism, oppression and genocide (Duran et al. 1998). Although young adults and youth I spoke with knew very little about the details of the tuberculosis epidemics that had ravaged their parents and grandparents lives, nor did they know about its social costs, one can only imagine that they too may carry within them the hidden legacies and traumas of their ancestors. A century of violence has left Native peoples with little to hang onto except each other. Yet, it is here in these spaces of impunity – of silence and indifference – that the Yup’ik of Alaska continue to struggle together with dignity for their lives. References Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities, 2000. Journey Back Home. Juneau, Alaska. Baldwin, J. 1963. The Fire Next Time. New York: Dial Press. Bates, B. 1992. Bargaining for Life: A Social History of tuberculosis 1876–1938. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bauman, Z. 1991. Modernity and Ambivalence. Oxford: Polity. Chance, N. 1990. The Inupait and Arctic Alaska: An Ethnography of Development. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Chevak Traditional Council, 2001. Agtuquamavermuit. Chevak, Alaska. Comstock, G. 2001. Personal Interview, The Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore MD, July.   I borrow Sider’s (2006) definition of vulnerability to mean the inability of people to completely secure their collective social reproduction with their own social, culture and material resources. The particular shape in which this vulnerability is both expressed and fought over requires an understanding of what has been tried in the past, how it worked and often, why it didn’t.

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Comstock, G. and Robert P. 1961. ‘Decline of the Tuberculosis Epidemic in Alaska’. Public Health Reports, 76(1), 19–24. Dubos, R. and Dubos, J. 1952. The Great White Plague. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. Farmer, P. 1999. Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fellows, F.S. 1934. ‘Mortality in the Native Races of the Territory of Alaska, With Special Reference to Tuberculosis’. Public Health Reports, 49, 289–98. Fortuine, R. 2005. Must We All Die? Alaska’s Enduring Struggle with Tuberculosis. Anchorage: University of Alaska Press. Gramsci, A. 1971. Selections from Prison Notebooks. New York: International Press. Green, L. 2008. ‘A Wink and a Nod: Notes from the Arizona Borderlands’. Dialectical Anthropology, 32(1–2), 161–7. Haycock, S. 2002. Alaska an American Colony. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Hayden, T. 1997. The Irish Hunger: Personal Reflection on the Legacy of the Famine. Boulder, CO: Roberts Rinehart Publishers. Kelm, M.E. 1999. Colonizing Bodies Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia 1900–1950. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Kelton, P. 2007. Epidemics and Enslavements Biological Catastrophe 1492–1715. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Krause, R. 2003. Interview. University of Kentucky, Lexington. Lewontin, R.C. 1993. The Doctrine of DNA: Biology as Ideology. London: Penguin. Napoleon, H. 1996. Yunyaraq: The Way of Being Human Fairbanks. AK Native Knowledge Networks University of Alaska Fairbanks. Parren, T. 1954. Alaska’s Health: A Survey Report. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. Roseberry, W. 1994. ‘Hegemony and the Language of Contestation’, in Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico edited by G. Joseph and D. Nugent. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 355 – 366. Sider, G. 1986. Culture and Class in Anthropology and History: A Newfoundland Illustraton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ________ 2006. ‘The Production of Race, Culture and State: An Anthropology’. Anthropologica, The Canadian Journal of Anthropology, 48(2), 247–63. Smith, G. 1997. ‘Pandora’s History: Central Peruvian Peasants and the Recovering of the Past’, in Between History and Histories: The Making of Silences and Commemorations, edited by G. Sider and G. Smith. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 80–97.

Chapter 2

Warriors of Honour, Warriors of Faith: Two Historical Male Role Models from South-Western Arabia Andre Gingrich

Introduction Based on my ethnographic fieldwork in the ‘tribal zones’ (Ferguson and Whitehead 1992) of north-western Yemen during the 1980s, the present chapter discusses two historical male role models of warriors in southern Arabia. These two role models are explored through several biographical key features of two young men whom I came to know fairly well during my field work. Their interactions among local and wider networks and their encounters with me will be assessed in order to address different expressions of violence in historical and cultural context. In theory and in practice, both of those men pursued local and regional ideals of warriors. In that sense, they were committed to symbols and images, rhetorical claims, practices and the potential threat of resorting to public violence among men. These images, claims, practices, and potentials are analyzed as different forms of expressing violence. The two role models discussed in this chapter will be analyzed through ethnographic examples within the local and wider contexts of those years – that is, contexts shaped by the Cold War relations of a late first modernity. The final sections of this chapter will move on to compare these two role models and their ways of expressing violence, and then explore the radical transformations of contexts that have occurred since the 1980s. The present, globalizing post-Cold War period has certainly brought about profound changes for the Middle East   For their helpful comments, I thank this volume’s two editors as well as Roger Heacock (BirZeit), Joan K. O’Donnell (Cambridge, Mass.), and my colleagues from the Austrian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Social Anthropology, Marieke Brandt, Johann Heiss, and Gebhard Fartacek. For reasons of simplicity, I do not use any standard academic forms of transliterating Arabic terms, with all due apologies to the experts. Instead, anglicized forms are employed for those commonly known in English (e.g., Mecca, Hajj, Imam) and only a few indicators of pronunciation are provided (e.g., long vowels [â, û] on occasion, and an apostrophe [’] in place of the Arabic letter ‫[ ع‬ayn]) for those terms most readers will not be familiar with.

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at large (Korany and Dessouki 2008) and for south-western Arabia in particular. At the time of writing in early 2010, northern Yemen continues to suffer from several years of ongoing armed conflict between pro-republican forces and proShiite rebels. The tribal groups featured in the following text are today deeply involved in that conflict. This chapter will not discuss the conflict’s story per se (for provisional assessments from various angles, see Gingrich in print; Phillips 2005; Wedeen 2008). It might, however, be useful to examine the two historical role models also with regard to the tragic chain of developments in northern Yemen’s Sa’da province since 1997, and in particular, since 2004. This chapter concludes thus with a theoretical assessment of recent transformations and their potential impact upon these two role models. Post-Colonial Transformations of Late Modernity My historical ethnography focuses on two biographical cases: two young men in what was then the Yemen Arab Republic (northern Yemen), who were in their mid-twenties when I came to know them during an extended fieldwork period in the mid-1980s. The social and political constellations in the region have changed profoundly since that time, and by writing some twenty-five years after the events described and by changing the protagonists’ names, I believe the anonymity of these two men will be sufficiently protected today. Before the end of the Cold War, northern Yemen was a military republic that struggled for a more or less independent path between communist southern Yemen (the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen), a former British protectorate, and the theocratic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the north. Northern Yemen had itself emerged as the result of a difficult compromise that terminated the Yemeni Civil War (1962–1970). One outcome of this compromise was that the Zaydi royalists who had formerly ruled northern Yemen lost ultimate power to the republicans; they did, however, remain an influential religious and political force in a Yemen Arab Republic that now officially pursued secular ideals of modernization. The republic was thus situated in the wider global and regional contexts of a first postcolonial phase. Simultaneously informed by the global confrontations of the Cold War and regional conflicts with Israel, several Muslim and Arab countries relied during this phase primarily on secularized military leadership. In northern Yemen, such leadership faced a number of specific challenges. In the northern highlands the country’s predominantly agricultural economy was largely organized along lines of tribal affiliation and kin loyalty, and powerful groups of chiefs and the former ruling theocratic elite had often locally more influence than the distant central government of a relatively weak state. My fieldwork took place more than a decade after the end of a civil war that had introduced the transition towards a first republican phase, but several years before the end of the Cold War and the ensuing Soviet withdrawal from southern Arabia and East Africa (1989–1991). The Soviet withdrawal would facilitate the uneasy

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1990 unification process of southern and northern Yemen into today’s Republic of Yemen (Dresch 2000). I conducted my fieldwork in upper Yemen’s northernmost region, the Sa’da province, where the Munabbih area (pronounced ‘Munebbih’ in local dialect, and so I will spell it here) in the extreme north-west was my main fieldwork site. This is where I met Jibrân and Ahmad. Both men belonged to the Munebbih tribe, but they were members of different sections of the tribe. The tribal contexts in which these two biographical cases will be discussed are significant, but since these have been published in sufficient detail elsewhere (Gingrich 1993, 1997, 2001a; see also Dresch 1989 for a general assessment of the term in Yemen), I will confine myself here to describing only some basic and salient characteristics of those contexts. As elsewhere in the highlands of south-western Arabia, the greater part of the population in Sa’da province is tribal. The residents live mostly in agricultural households, and usually several households make up small villages that are built in defensive locations. Groups of villages constitute the major tribal units and tribal territories of the region. The tribes of the eastern plateau and steppe zones of Sa’da province (Wâ’ila, Wâdi’a, Yâm) represent the northern group of the great Hamdân federation, which also dominates much of the plateau regions farther to the south. The tribes living in the western mountain regions of Sa’da province (Suhâr, Jumâ’a, Khawlân, Râzih, Munebbih) belong to the northern Khawlân federation, which also extends into parts of neighbouring Saudi Arabia (where their fellow tribal groups are Ahl Fayfâ, Bani Mâlik, and Balghâzî). Until the first half of the 1990s, most of the tribesmen in Sa’da province commonly bore arms in public. In the region, minority groups of inferior social status usually pursued specialized professions in crafts and services. Called Ahl al-Thulth, or ‘people of the [lower] third [of society]’, they lived as protected co-residents in the tribal agricultural areas or in separate enclaves together with members of very prestigious groups known as the Sâda. These are said to be descendants of the Prophet Muhammad (also called ‘people of the [his] house’, Ahl al-Bayt), whose homes are usually grouped near the tomb and mosque of one of their ancestors. In these northern parts of Yemen, the Zaydi version of Shiite Islam – or Zaydism – had for centuries been the most influential religious orientation. Out of the Sâda groups emerged the Zaydi Imams, who ruled these parts of northern Yemen for almost a thousand years. The Zaydi Imams even maintained some influence during the two periods of Ottoman colonial administration, and after 1918 they fully took over again until the Civil War of the 1960’s ended the Imams’ rule. The Sâda’s residential enclaves also were ‘protected’, through contracts, by the tribes in whose territories they were situated. The protected asylum or hijra status of these enclaves was also the basis of a quasi-urban lifestyle, of literacy, of refined Islamic scholarship and knowledge, and of state influence. Unlike the tribesmen of the Hamdân and Khawlân federations, Sâda and Ahl al-Thulth usually did not carry arms in public. Until the end of the Civil War in the early 1970s and beyond, these hijras and their tribal allies had been strongholds of royalist support. In the

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decades since, by contrast, a few among the major hijras became gateways for the expansion of market economy and to a minor extent also of republican influence. The majority of new residents who have moved into northern Yemen from other parts of south-western Arabia have also settled in the provincial capital of Sa’da, which formerly had been a major Sâda enclave. The Munebbih tribe, then, belongs to the northern Khawlân federation, and their territory is situated along the mountainous border area (or, since 1934, ceasefire line) with Saudi Arabia. At the time of my fieldwork, the tribe had some 25–30,000 members, most of whom were small-scale agriculturalists working on terraced fields. Unlike the neighbouring tribes of the east and south, the Zaydi Imams never managed to exert any enduring influence among the Munebbih. The tribe’s chiefly lineage, as well as most Munebbih sections, preferred to maintain rather distant relations with the Sâda and the Imams. Thus, no permanent Sâda residence or hijra is recorded among the Munebbih, who used the liberty of their inaccessible but easily defendable home area to pursue alliances with groups other than the Zaydi Sâda, whenever it served their purposes. Widespread aliteracy, and a reputation for being ‘primitive’ and ‘peripheral’, were among the negative effects of the Munebbihs’ sceptical distance towards the Sâda. These were the contexts within which, early in the Civil War of the 1960s, the Munebbih became the first major tribal group in the region whose supreme chief declared the tribe to be neutral. Later, the tribe and their leaders became the first openly republican supporters in a sociopolitical environment of a quite different orientation. To an extent, Jibrân and Ahmad, the two individuals discussed here, represented these two orientations among the Munebbih: Jibrân belonged to the established pro-republican majority of the tribal population, whereas Ahmad came from a family that had been part of the local tribal minority of deeply religious royalist supporters. Jibrân I was introduced to Jibrân when I first visited the supreme Munebbih chief, the Ibn Awfân, in his residence. Jibrân was a leading member of the Ibn Awfân’s armed escort, and when we shook hands he told me that he had already seen me once during an earlier short visit in the Munebbih area. People had told him that I had asked questions ‘about our way of life’, he said, indicating that he was aware of the kind of interest I was pursuing. In the following weeks I lived under the supreme chief’s protection and in his compound, with Jibrân as my daily companion and guide. He helped me to arrange my first interview sessions, and he also served as my translator. For reasons to be described later, Jibrân was one of the few persons among his tribal group who spoke both standard Yemeni Arabic that I understood and the local Munebbih dialect, which I found very hard to understand in the beginning. There is no doubt that during those first weeks, Jibrân carefully observed and influenced my choice

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of interview partners. He was very good at arranging meetings for me with persons who, from his chief’s perspective, could be expected to give me appropriate answers – an expectation that was further emphasized by Jibrân’s presence during those interviews. My early perspective on life among the Munebbih was thus certainly biased through my association with the supreme chief and his escort. After several weeks, I changed residence and moved out of the chief’s compound. For the months to come I lived with regular Munebbih tribal households. I continued to see Jibrân for a while, but less frequently and more informally than before. My initial status and reputation of being ‘the chief’s researcher’ gradually faded, and I was perceived as a guest who lived among average tribal households. Like most members of the Ibn Awfân’s escort, Jibrân came from one of the tribal families with whom members of the chief’s dynasty, the Banu Awfân, intermarried (Gingrich 1989a). The records I was able to access indicated that this dynasty had held its position among the Munebbih for several centuries. In the 1980s, their complex web of marriage relations included long-distance alliances with chiefs’ dynasties from other tribes, as well as regular marriage relations with local sections from Munebbih. Through their special relations with Banu Awfân, these local Munebbih sections gained some distinction and a somewhat elevated status among the rest of the Munebbih population. For example, members of these families served more often than others as mediators and grantors who could help to settle legal cases or could bring them for rulings by the Ibn Awfân himself. Like the Sâda, whom they kept at a social distance, Banu Awfân also did not carry arms in public, and they maintained a more pious and almost urban lifestyle than other tribespeople in those remote and rugged mountainous regions. Contrary to other Sâda and tribal chiefs’ families elsewhere in Sa’da province, Banu Awfân were not particularly wealthy in terms of agricultural production and real estate. Their main sources of income, apart from livestock, were the Ibn Awfân’s activities. Based on his expertise in customary tribal law, the Ibn Awfân served as the tribe’s highest authority in internal conflicts and as a respected mediator in intertribal feuds on both sides of the border. These activities were the source of considerable cash income, most of which was redistributed among the Ibn Awfân’s own lineage members, but some of which was used to maintain his armed escort. As a boy, Jibrân had displayed talent in hunting and shooting. He had also proven his potential as a good juvenile warrior in the blow-by-blow feuds that flared up now and then between his own group and others from the Munebbih or neighbouring tribes, as is common among most tribal groups of south-western Arabia. Being born into the social status of a tribesman confers on a young man some basic honour, which he may increase or diminish according to his behaviour in public. This personal aspect of honour is closely interrelated with the honour of one’s ‘house’ and family group. Being able to respond in words and in action to challenges to one’s own honour – and the ability to challenge others in turn – is the essential logic of tribal honour among the Munebbih, as elsewhere. Jibrân was particularly good at manipulating that logic to his own advantage. Not only did he shoot well, he also had verbal charm and rhetorical skills. The latter are equally if

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not more important qualities in Middle Eastern codes of honour (see also Gilsenan 1996, Jamous 1991, and Bourdieu 1972). Jibrân’s mother’s sister was married to Ibn Awfân’s nephew. When that nephew became aware of his young in-law’s promise, he recommended him to his uncle, the Ibn Awfân, for recruitment into his escort. The Ibn Awfân accepted, and Jibrân became a member of the Munebbih supreme chief’s escort when he was sixteen or seventeen years old. In that position, I even could have easily married a girl from Banu Awfân’, Jibrân laughingly explained to me at one point. Instead of ‘marrying up’, however, he fell in love with and married a local girl from his own village. Marriage customs and gender relations among the Munebbih allowed some space for love marriages of this kind (Gingrich 2001b). When I knew him, Jibrân had already had almost ten years’ experience in the armed escort. On several occasions I was able to witness how indispensable the presence of an escort of ten to fifteen skilled and well-armed fighters was for a supreme chief’s activities. The legal rituals of tribal justice entailed in reaching a settlement obliged both parties to remain calm while the opposite side was arguing its case or when the Ibn Awfân argued a hikma, a legal ruling. But conflicts between tribal groups sometimes had a long and bitter background, and it was not unusual for a discontented party in a conflict to become angry enough to jump up, shout, and threaten the Ibn Awfân or his grantors. This would require the armed escort to intervene. Similar outbursts could happen under the much more explosive circumstances of intertribal mediating by the Ibn Awfân. In such a circumstance, particularly if it involved tribes from both sides of the Yemeni-Saudi border, an escort’s move to block a threat against the Ibn Awfân by one of the feuding tribal representatives might serve to prevent the outbreak of an international conflict. After becoming a member of the Ibn Awfân’s escort, Jibrân no longer had to act primarily in the context of his personal honour as a tribesman. His personal honour, in fact, became structurally limited by its submission to the task of serving another person. In a sense, Jibrân’s status as a tribesman became somewhat restricted by being in the service of someone else. Yet that ‘someone’ was a person who represented tribal law and tribal honour at large, which carries more weight than personal honour, so the limitations upon enacting his personal honour were counterbalanced by something few other men had. In a much more encompassing way than regular Munebbih tribesmen could ever achieve, members of the escort, as part of the armed force of the supreme chief, always represented Munebbih tribal honour; Jibrân’s personal honour was thus a permanent element of tribal honour. Because Banu Awfân and the Ibn Awfân were empowered to ‘speak for’ Munebbih only on the basis that they themselves carried no arms and were protected instead by the tribe, escort members like Jibrân embodied their tribe’s agreement to protect Banu Awfân and to let them speak for all Munebbih. The specific task of the escort, then, was to represent the collective Munebbih obligation of protecting their supreme chief. As a member of the escort, Jibrân’s status was that of a specialized tribal warrior; specialized to place the chief’s interests, and those of the tribe he

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represented, above his own. Those among the Munebbih who supported the Ibn Awfan, and who thus appreciated the role of his escort, sometimes even referred to these men as the chief’s ansâr (aides), which also implied an allusion to the Prophet Muhammad’s earliest and closest supporters. In south-western Arabia, tribal interests and state interests always interact and intersect in many different ways. During the 1970s and 1980s, this had explicit consequences for Jibrân’s career, in which state, personal and tribal dimensions combined in this biography of professional violence. After the end of the Civil War, the Munebbih were the secular republic’s only reliable allies in the north-western part of the state for many years. Other tribes and residents of the area displayed little sympathy for a young and weak state that, in its first two decades, put very little emphasis on religion. Located in distant centres, the state’s forces had little ability to exert state law and state control elsewhere, particularly in inaccessible and peripheral areas such as the northernmost province. In this context, a prorepublican tribe like Munebbih was entrusted to represent republican state interests locally with regard to several crucial fields. The early post-colonial republican state thus elevated and upgraded the status of several loyal tribes and empowered them to act on its behalf. Among the crucial fields in which this took place were border issues, since the northern and western outskirts of Munebbih tribal territory are identical with the state border, or then, the 1934 cease-fire line with Saudi Arabia. Another crucial field in which the Ibn Awfân was empowered to represent the state and to act on its behalf were smaller police operations outside Munebbih territory. Through this alliance between the old Ibn Awfân and the young republic, the Munebbih chief’s escort sometimes acted as a kind of reserve police force. Operations of this kind were carried out only occasionally, and always in areas that lay at some distance from Munebbih tribal territory. Jibrân experienced such operations as highly sensitive and inherently ambiguous. He recalled times, when the Ibn Awfân asked the escort to intervene in situations where the escort members had hardly any information about what was at stake. Also, although the Ibn Awfân’s escort found at least some minimal acceptance from others whenever Munebbih interests were at stake, there was rarely any acceptance of their intervention when this was not the case. Jibrân explained to me that several of the auxiliary police operations had turned quickly into severe armed confrontations because people outside Munebbih would have accepted them only in cases in which they represented their own tribal, rather than state, interests. From an early record of some serious clashes on behalf of the republic, the Ibn Awfân’s escort had gained some notoriety as ‘republican police mercenaries’ in the western parts of the province. This changed to an extent when, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Munebbih escort assisted regular state forces in their successful blows against communist rebels who operated in the Wâ’ila territory in the east and who had support from the then-communist regime in southern Yemen. That operation, perhaps the largest in the escort’s history although it had played a mere auxiliary role if viewed within the larger context, improved the escort’s reputation among many of the region’s royalists, who were anti-communists themselves.

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During the time of my fieldwork, the regional reputation of the Ibn Awfân’s escort was better than it had been years before (except among the Wâ’ila). In regional terms, Jibrân thus belonged to a feared but respected auxiliary tribal police force. He had participated in minor and major operations all over the province, where he had acquired good standard Yemeni language skills and good contacts with other local leaders and security forces. In the supreme chief’s eyes, this made Jibrân my perfect companion during the early phase of my fieldwork. Jibrân indicated to me later that during this phase he was required to report regularly about my activities. The chief’s escort was thus also acting as a light police force inside their own tribe. Ahmad Driven by a certain logic of necessity, my acquaintance with Jibrân had unfolded during the first weeks of fieldwork. Ahmad, by contrast, I came to know only at a very late stage of my sojourn. Again, as I realize in retrospect, this was no coincidence. By the time we met, I had spent many months in the Munebbih mountain areas and had lived among households of different tribal subsections, most of which were less closely affiliated with Banu Awfân than Jibrân’s section was. My fieldwork activities had become routine, seen from most perspectives, and since my field location had moved to the far north and north-east of the tribal territory, I rarely saw members of Banu Awfân and of Ibn Awfân’s escort. They, for the most part, left me alone. My earlier reputation of being the Ibn Awfân’s scholar had gradually given way to more differentiated perspectives. People knew that I was interested in ‘local knowledge’ such as folk astronomy and customary law. They also knew, and joked about, the fact that I tried to learn their local dialect. For all these reasons it was obvious to them that I listened carefully to what they had to say in their own right, and that I was not defending the Ibn Awfân’s view on each and every occasion. At a time and place without mobile phones and laptop computers, with few transistor radios, no telephone lines and hardly any TV sets, my visits provided an unusual form of entertainment from the outside world for my hosts and meshed nicely with the Munebbih’s tremendous sense of hospitality (Gingrich 1989b). Hospitality, of course, is a key aspect of local values anywhere in Arabia and a central quality of tribal honour, as well. Among the Munebbih, however, it is given even more emphasis through the ethos and provisions of local customary law. This seems to be no recent phenomenon. The north-western Sa’da tribes’ reputation of being both fierce warriors and generous hosts was reported to Carsten Niebuhr (1969: 271), the great Danish explorer of the late eighteenth century. Since good hospitality adds to a host’s tribal honour, a certain friendly rivalry between households may easily ensue whenever a potential guest appears. As a result, the visiting anthropologist can find himself playfully transformed into a

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minor prestige object (of limited quality), circulating from household to household after having been inspected, used and polished in each location. My first acquaintance with Ahmad can be described in terms of this friendly rivalry between potential hosts for a living prestige object that had been in harmless circulation for a while already. Ahmad was a religious person, and therefore one of the very few in the northern parts of Munebbih territory who could read and write and who had some knowledge of Islamic law, science and literature. He was the son of a man, who was one of no more than only ten persons living in the Munebbih area at the time who had performed the Hajj, the (annual) pilgrimage to Mecca. With some justification, Ahmad and his family therefore saw themselves as among the few outposts of engaged Islam in this part of the tribal area: Ahmad described his family as the ‘light of Islam in a night of tribal ignorance’. Ahmad and his family had been watching me for quite a while, he told me later. My early affiliation with the pro-republican supreme chief had not escaped them, and what he subsequently had heard about my fieldwork questions he had found worrisome. My interviews about tribal law and folk astronomy had given my various hosts the impression that this kind of local knowledge was valuable, something with which Ahmad disagreed. In his opinion, Shari’a and Fiqh, Islamic law and jurisprudence, were always better than customary tribal law, which he felt did not conform sufficiently to the standards of the Holy Qurân. Folk astronomy, on the other hand, was relatively harmless, although in his view, in order to avoid ‘superstitious and pagan practices’, it should be tightly integrated into the Muslim calendar of lunar months and ritual occasions, which most Munebbih failed to observe in any detailed manner. These were Ahmad’s worries about my fieldwork and its contents. In addition to his thoughts about the presence of a non-Muslim visitor, a certain jealousy and rivalry contributed to his very sceptical attitude towards my sojourn in his home region. In Ahmad’s local public environment, in which he laid claim to being the only scholar, I too was acting as a person of knowledge – but with orientations very different from his own. In fact, one of my previous hosts had already warned me that Ahmad’s family – ‘those religious activists,’ as he put it – were somewhat irritated by my presence. When I was introduced to Ahmad on a local market day, I therefore knew enough to acknowledge, loudly and publicly, Ahmad’s expertise. This surprised and pleased him, and prompted him to invite me to his house. During the two guest sojourns of one week each that I subsequently spent in Ahmad’s home, he was primarily interested in demonstrating to me that Muslim law and the Islamic calendar were better than what I was researching, and that I myself should convert to Islam. Although I had to disappoint him in his central agenda, these conversations were pleasant, friendly and engaged. They also provided ample occasion to learn where Ahmad had acquired his own expertise. Ahmad’s father, I discovered, had been close to a minor chief of this Munebbih section. During the last decade of royalist rule in northern Yemen, that chief had begun to criticize the Ibn Awfân for not promoting the construction of new mosques enthusiastically enough and for not levying taxes on local farmers on

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behalf of the Imam’s royalist state, which was then still in power. The Banu Awfân version of the same story, with which I sympathize, held that this minor chief had tried to challenge their tribal authority and to promote his own career by pursuing a stronger alliance with the Sâda and the Imam’s authorities instead. At any rate, the minor chief and his Sâda allies from the hijra Qatâbir, to the east of Munebbih territory in Jumâ’a land, had helped to fund religious activities of all sorts, including providing support for the Mecca pilgrimage undertaken by Ahmad’s father. When Ahmad was born a few years before the outbreak of the Civil War, the same circles told his father that they would take care of his son’s education. With about two dozen other boys, most of them from neighbouring tribes, Ahmad thus became a tilmîz (pl. talâmîz), a young religious pupil in the Qatâbir religious school (madrasa). There, one of the elder Sâda specialized in teaching the basic skills of reading and writing classic Arabic through the study of the Holy Qurân. During his three years in Qatâbir, Ahmad pursued a life that must have resembled in some ways that at a British boarding school. He rarely had an opportunity to visit his Munebbih home village or his family, who instead travelled to visit their son in Qatâbir. His peer group of other talâmîz thus became closer to him than his neighbours and relatives from home. Among adults, Ahmad’s Sâda mentors and scholars in Qatâbir became authority figures second only to his father. Interaction with girls and women, which would have been casual and informal among the Munebbih, were distant and formal in Qatâbir. At the time Ahmad had finished his early years of school in the hijra enclave, the Civil War came to an end and brought about the royalists’ gradual demise. At home among the Munebbih, the Banu Awfân, with their more liberal anti-Sâda, Muslim republican orientation, were stronger than ever. Ahmad’s father was desperate to continue the solid religious basis of his son’s education, and his Sâda teachers obviously thought Ahmad was a talented and promising disciple. This was borne out at the time I knew him by his intellectual and rhetorical fluency in all matters of faith, ethics, scholarship, law and politics. A stipend was collected from among Ahmad’s father’s circle of relatives and friends and was supplemented by the minor Munebbih chief from his section, as well as by Sâda families from Qatâbir. As a result, Ahmad was able at the age of ten to move to Hûth, a then famous hijra centre of Zaydi education and learning, south of Sa’da province. Under the strict protection and educational rule of the Sâda, this Munebbih boy thus was able to spend several years living and learning deep inside Hamdân territory – an indication of the continued and radicalized priority which religious convictions and ties took over tribal affiliation at this stage of Ahmad’s biography. Together with other religious students (talibân) of his age from various tribal and Sâda backgrounds, Ahmad spent several years in Hûth. The community of students, Ahmad told me, resembled the ideal of the ‘umma, the community of true believers. Ahmad spoke of those years with enthusiasm and with tears of joy in his eyes. Most of the teachers at Hûth came from the best Sâda families, but they represented different theological orientations. Some of them, mostly from the older generation, followed a narrower Zaydi orientation that held nostalgic

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leanings towards a return of the royalists and the Imam. Other teachers, many of whom belonged to the younger generation, preferred either a reinvigorated ‘republican Shiite’ orientation that was loosely inspired by the example of the Iranian Revolution, or they supported wider pan-Islamic tendencies. Several of these orientations anticipated the Islamic revival in the Arab world, the emergence of Islamism in south-western Arabia, and of the resurgence of Zaydi activism during the years and decades to come. When I came to know him better in the mid-1980s, Ahmad had returned from Hûth to the Munebbih region, where he lived the life of a pious but commercially highly successful textile merchant. His connections during his school years to Sâda and to educated persons from many different tribes and regions had helped a great deal in establishing himself as a businessman. Ahmad’s case thus was a perfect illustration of Ernest Gellner’s famous observation (1992: 14f.) that the spread of Islamism and the expansion of capitalism may become mutually reinforcing processes. Ahmad could instrumentalize his religious connections for economic purposes and could use economic means to promote his religious aspirations. In addition to trading in all kinds of textiles, he put particular emphasis on selling ‘decent’ textiles: he marketed only what he considered to be ‘appropriate’ clothes and dresses, according to urban Islamic standards, for local men and women – the majority of whom, in Munebbih, had until that time worn colourful clothing and decorated their hair with aromatic herbs, flowers and silver ribbons (Gingrich 1989c). Ahmad’s business thus contributed to the gradual spread of dark clothing and headscarves or veils for women, and white headscarves and robes for men. Simultaneously, Ahmad made use of other funds, available to him through his many connections, for other religious purposes. He donated the money for a small new mosque to be built near his village, and he now and then was able to offer to young talâmîz stipends of the kind he had once received himself. In this sense, Ahmad was a religious activist who worked mostly through persuasion and moral threat. He saw himself as leading a jihâd, which usually remained peaceful, against what he perceived as prevailing local forms of infidelity. On certain occasions, however, he felt that his role as a ‘warrior of faith’ obliged him to use violence, or the threat of violence. ‘It is never about myself, it is always about Islam when I fight with force’, he proudly told me. Indeed, Ahmad’s reputation among neighbouring villages confirmed this. On all matters of religion, he would react with extreme sensitivity. For neighbours and opponents, however, Ahmad’s eruptions into fury and feuding often seemed unpredictable and mysterious. For instance, he would be ready to start a feud if someone disturbed his prayers or if someone spoke badly about his selling of veils and headscarves. ‘If they don’t respect Islam properly for themselves, this will at least teach them the lesson of respecting it with me’, was his own rationale for being easily provoked over religious topics. Because of this attitude, Ahmad was notorious for being continually involved in feuds or their settlement. His business and his connections to Sâda elsewhere in the region were necessary to provide him

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with the financial means to pay for his many legal procedures, and to gain some back-up in the wider region’s public opinions. The kind of violence Ahmad did enact resorted to all shades of a limited local repertory, ranging from verbal offence and threats to physical defence and, occasionally, to physical offence. Usually, however, Ahmad was careful to begin with an elaborate verbal accusation, preferably in public in the presence of a few of his supporters, who might later serve as witnesses. His education and talents rarely failed him with this strategy. It also allowed him to publicly mobilize for the religious point he wanted to make and then, by logical deduction, to humiliate and offend his opponent on the grounds that the opponent was unable to understand the religious point. Typical examples of such humiliating deduction would include, for instance, ‘Are you a real man, if you can’t even provide any proper and decent Islamic dress for your wife?’, or ‘Who would not call you an idiot, if you cannot remember the simple fact that at noon, Allah orders us to pray?’ A publicly offended tribal opponent might then react violently himself, in words or in action or both: this in turn would give Ahmad the opportunity to pose as the defender of superior principles while striking back. It was therefore important for Ahmad to display a potential for violence in words and deeds, but it was equally important that the ensuing feuds did not lead to any killings. Ahmad was trying not to alienate too many families, something which would have been unavoidable if killings had occurred. Verbal offences and minor wounds thus were the regular reasons for Ahmad’s many legal procedures. Each of these procedures then provided another public arena for his propagandistic activities. Rarely did a local tribal judge dare to rule against Ahmad’s principles. In a way, Ahmad was engaged in continual campaigning ‘from below’. On some occasions, Ahmad praised the minor chief of his section and criticized the Ibn Awfân’s pro-government orientation, questioning his legitimacy and indicating that the time would come to call for khurûj (lit. ‘departure’), a theological Zaydi term for openly challenging an unjust authority. Over the course of many years, his record of engaging in frequent feuds for religious reasons had earned him a reputation, among his supporters as well as among his opponents, of preparing himself to become a martyr (shahîd), and to ‘sacrifice his life and honour to Islam’. Comparing Role Models from an Earlier Post-Colonial Phase I summarize my findings by first comparing the two cases. Within their shared Munebbih context of the mid-1980s, Ahmad’s and Jibrân’s biographies represent two different sets of skills and forms of specialization: Jibrân was an armed escort and a tribal quasi-policeman, Ahmad a businessman and religious activist. With their respective professional specialization and with their correspondingly different pathways as warriors, they both differed from the tribe’s male majority. The majority of their fellow tribesmen at the time would have lived from their agricultural pursuits, and they would have combined an appreciation for faith with

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a pride in honour. In these two specialized and exceptional professional careers, however, the focus and guiding principle was either one or the other, honour or faith. The two cases we have seen represent in these realms both exceptions and extremes. To what extent, then, were these two biographies significant for Munebbih society at the time? In quantitative terms, the Ibn Awfân’s escort never comprised more than fifteen men like Jibrân, and I never heard of or counted more than six or seven activists like Ahmad during my sojourn among the Munebbih in the 1980s. Their biographies were relatively exceptional, representing merely small sets of other comparable cases. Yet within Munebbih society, both men were regarded as ‘role models’, by themselves as much as by their friends and supporters. Belonging to a small group can bestow distinction if this group is seen, by its members and by others, as representing the high standards of noble and commonly held ideals. In fact, these two cases represent aspiring elites of different sorts, and each man strove to live up to his role model ideal. Jibrân, the tribal warrior, and Ahmad, the warrior of faith, represented alternative ideals of masculinity and virility – not in spite of their respective specializations, which made them different from the others, but because of them. Their specialized skills allowed them to elaborate and to perfect the ideal, and to thereby elevate themselves – albeit in different directions – above the others. For both men, their specialized and elite status also had as its prerequisite a social and symbolic separation and dissociation from their respective tribal backgrounds. Sociologically, Jibrân’s separation from his family was put into effect through long periods of absence from his home village while he acted as a travelling escort or a police force member. In Ahmad’s case, his long sojourns in Qatâbir and Hûth with other students were the key dissociative factor. In addition to sociological dissociation, symbolic modification completed the two men’s elite specialization and elevation of status. Submission of personal honour to collective tribal honour in Jibrân’s case and submission of personal honour to the service of Islam in Ahmad’s case made both life experiences different from the rest: Jibrân and Ahmad permanently served higher causes, while others enacted such commitment only when occasion required it. Occasional rhetorical reference to theological ideals in each of these two cases was not coincidental, although the implied analogies had their clear limitations. References to good escort men as ansâr, and to a good Islamic activist as shahîd, sought to establish claims of exclusive legitimacy by way of explicit allusion to the biographies of the prophet Muhammad, and to Imam Ali and his family respectively. In this sense, both role models sought inspiration and support from the earliest traditions of Islam. Jibrân’s and Ahmad’s higher causes, however, were of different kinds and encompassed different structural components. Jibrân’s activities were usually carried out elsewhere than in his home village, either in the chief’s compound or when he travelled as part of the chief’s escort or on auxiliary police expeditions. Through his marriage as much as through his status in his tribal section Jibrân

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maintained strong roots and family ties to his home village. In this regard, Ahmad’s case was almost the mirror image of Jibrân’s. Ahmad, on the other hand, had feeble social roots in his home village due to his frequent feuding with so many neighbours, but relied instead on his strong regional network of Sâda and Talibân connections. In short, Jibrân’s case combined strong local roots with the pursuit of honourable violence on a regional level, whereas Ahmad combined the pursuit of faithful violence on a local level through strong regional connections. Jibrân was part of a small, highly visible and mobile armed unit at the service of one cluster of political centres. By contrast, Ahmad was the local outpost of a different, wider network of many centres that remained for the most part invisible. The honourable violence represented by Jibrân was mostly visible, predictable, explicitly threatening, and alert; the faithful violence of Ahmad was mostly invisible, dormant and latent (or, perhaps, ‘sleeping’), until it suddenly erupted into a new verbal or legal feud for largely unpredictable religious reasons. Embedded within the same wider socio-cultural and linguistic contexts, Ahmad’s and Jibrân’s different strategies therefore included a permanent potential to activate violence at the service of their respective missions. Their contrasting if not contradictory ways of expressing violence used tribal law and religious references, and they were communicated through body language and material symbols as much as through language and silence. As part-time specialists in two different kinds of warring, both displayed a relatively pragmatic and instrumental attitude to employing violence. In times of relative peace in their region, the potential costs of a minimum of applying violence would always be calculated against the potential gains. As exceptional role models for young tribal men, these two cases of a warrior of honour and a warrior of faith featured very different potentials both within and beyond their local region and time. Inversions of a Globalized Present In the 1970s and early 1980s, most local observers would have agreed that a rather promising future could be expected by young men who, in one way or another, chose to follow a ‘warrior of honour’ role model. A young and apparently secular republic was gradually consolidating in northern Yemen. Although the republic’s leaders remained sceptical towards those tribal chiefs whose own positions were unfriendly to them, they continued to promote the republic’s ties with those chiefs who cooperated, as did most of the Munebbih. Careers like Jibrân’s, through which a young man might combine tribal self-esteem with a degree of loyalty to a secular state, seemed at the time to offer a wealth of future opportunities – in public administration or education as much as in development, military or security sectors. Based on a variety of visions for the establishment of some kind of enduring coalition between changing forms of communal tribalism (Dresch 1989) and a developing secular state, the warrior of honour model indeed appeared to promise

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a wealth of attractive new opportunities in what was envisioned as modern life for young tribal men like Jibrân. By contrast, the warrior of faith model seemed to offer, at best, solutions merely for a small minority of young men from deeply religious families, who were searching for spiritual alternatives to what seemed an otherwise unavoidable future of secular modernity throughout Yemen. In fact, many persons in northern and southern Yemen at the time regarded the ‘warrior of faith’ models as a thing of the past, belonging to the bygone times of the Imam’s rule rather than to any foreseeable future. But by overrating the possibilities of exclusively secular trajectories, they simultaneously underestimated Islam’s deepseated inner potential for reform. The three decades that followed have led to results that in many ways are the inverse of what the future seemed to hold in the 1970s and early 1980s. Transformed role models of ‘warriors of honour’ continue their separate local existence, but in much weaker forms than expected, while, more often, they combine with Salafi and other ideologies. Simultaneously, a growing diversity of role models for warriors of faith has become ubiquitous in Upper Yemen, primarily as multiple varieties of denominational manifestations. What presented itself during that era of early post-colonial transformation as a semi-secular, future-oriented set of role models for young men was transformed into its present, less prominent forms. And what appeared then, even to some of its own adherents, to be the very last expression of intensely religious role models inherited from the past, became transformed instead into their current status of regional dominance in the north. This historic inversion of an asymmetric relationship between these two role models for young men from the tribal zone (Ferguson and Whitehead 1992) can be identified not only for the Munebbih case. With minor modifications, the two models and the inversion of their asymmetric relationship are of exemplary relevance for many other tribal areas in Yemen and southern Arabia at large. In the course of Arabia’s history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ‘inversions’ of relations between partially secularized and predominantly religious values are a recurrent theme. In fact, it can be argued with some justification that ever since the early nineteenth century, Muslim Arab societies have constantly been torn between these two alternatives as they have attempted to cope with the fundamental challenges of increasing colonial and Euro-American dominance. For two hundred years, Arab dealings with these challenges have meant confronting the same basic choice: either drawing inspiration primarily from one’s own tradition of values, which came from Islam, or adopting versions of values from the EuroAmerican ‘other’, who by and large were becoming secular themselves. Secular and Islamic values have constantly gone through turbulent phases of rivalry and cooperation, of inversion and reconfiguration, of decay and re-emergence during these past two centuries of Arab history (Gingrich 1999: 98). In this broader historical sense, the more recent inversion of our two role models’ significance represents a relatively typical episode, playing out inside another chapter of the more protracted drama of modern Arab history.

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What made the first post-colonial transformation of the Cold War era nevertheless unique in terms of ideological history, in Yemen as elsewhere in the Arab world, was the fact that this historical chapter represented the very first moment in which secular values were allowed to actually dominate some Arab states and some segments of Arab society (Asad 2003). At the end of the colonial period in Arabia, popular support for many of the traditional representatives of Islam had reached a low point. This had been brought about by a history of orthodox religious apathy, of ineffective resistance and, most importantly, of intensive collaboration with the colonial powers and their allies. That earlier phase of history prepared the ground in several parts of the Middle East, when for a few decades after the collapse of colonialism secular values and ideologies had a first chance to dominate and shape social life in some parts of Arabia, including the two Yemens (Tuchscherer 1994). For my fieldwork period, the dominant significance of proto-secularized ‘warriors of honour’ and the marginalized status of ‘warriors of faith’ could be contextualized within this first post-colonial transformation. Similarly, the recent inversion of these two role models can be contextualized within a second postcolonial transformation in which local Yemeni events have increasingly become part of wider regional and global changes. The disasters of Pan-Arab nationalism and pro-Soviet experiments in Arabia set the stage, the 1978 Islamic revolution in Iran and continuing desperation about Western support for Israel signalled the turning tide, and the end of the Cold War terminated the transition from the first to the second phase, in which northern and southern Yemen were united in 1990 (Dresch 2000). Secular values and ideologies had their first historical chance, in various manifestations of nationalisms and socialisms, as a result of that first post-colonial phase, but they thoroughly missed and therefore lost that chance. It is tragic but certainly no coincidence that today’s social and political conflicts in Arabia are often carried out in terms of faith and religion. What formerly had been a single global Cold War now has became a plethora of many local hot ‘new wars’ (Kaldor 1999; Nordstrom 2004; Robben in print) often enacted in term of denomination and religious values. It will take some time and a great deal of meticulous and un-biased documentation to analyse the specific events and contexts of armed conflict since 2004 in Sa’da province, between government forces and those whom the government refers to as the ‘al-Hûthi rebels’ – they called themselves initially the Faithful Youth (Shabâb al Mu’minin), and later on changed that into Ansar Allah. Since the late 1990s, this conflict led among the Munebbih to a revival of pro-Republican, and of new proSalafi sympathies among a tribal majority, while a minority (largely based in the north and east of the Munebbih region) went with the activist pro Zaydi orientation of the al-Hûthi movement. One element among local Munebbih ingredients in that conflict may thus be outlined as a transformation of two male role models analysed in this chapter. Peaceful competition was transformed into civil war, with its different logic of explicit confrontation and massacre: it seems evident that

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the two male role models and their supporters from the 1980s no longer co-exist today side by side in what was a relatively peaceful competition. Instead, while being transformed into different new forms of alleged role models, they have been ‘expressing violence’ by taking up arms to fight each other. Years of fighting have resulted in thousands of dead and up to 200.000 ‘internally displaced persons’ in Upper Yemen in 2010. The numerous potentials and aspirations of talented young men have been misled into the disasters of war and fratricide. References Asad, T. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press Bourdieu, P. 1972. Esquisse d’une Théorie de la Pratique. Genéve: Librairie Droz. Dresch, P. 1989. Tribes, Government, and History. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ________ 2000. A History of Modern Yemen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferguson, R. B., Whitehead, Neil L. (eds) 1992. War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Gellner, E. 1992. Postmodernism, Reason, and Religion. London and New York: Routledge. Gilsenan, M. 1996. Lords of the Lebanese Marches: Violence and Narrative in an Arab Society. London: Tauris. Gingrich, A. 1989a. ‘How the Chiefs’ Daughters Marry: Tribes, Marriage Patterns and Hierarchies in Northwest Yemen’, in Kinship, Social Change and Evolution. Proceedings of a Symposium Held in Honour of W. Dostal. Wiener Beiträge zur Ethnologie und Anthropologie Bd. 5. edited by A. Gingrich, S. and S. Haas and G. Paleczek, 75–85. ________ 1989b. ‘The Guest Meal among the Munebbih. Some Considerations on Tradition and Change in Aysh Wa Milh in North-Western Yemen’. Peuples Méditerranéens, 46, 129–49. ________ 1989c. ‘Les Munebbih du Yémen perçus par leurs voisins: Descriptions d’une société par le corps et sa parure’. Téchniques et Culture, 13, 127–39. ________ 1993. ‘Tribes and Rulers in Northern Yemen’, in Studies in Oriental Culture and History. Festschrift for Walter Dostal, edited by A. Gingrich, S. Haas, G. Paleczek and T. Fillitz. Frankfurt/Main–Berlin–Bern–New York– Paris–Vienna: Peter Lang, 253–80. ________ 1997. ‘Inside an Exhausted Community: An essay on case reconstructive research about peripheral moralities’, in The Ethnography of Moralities, edited by S. Howell. London: Routledge, 166–80. ________ 1999. Erkundungen: Themen der ethnologischen Forschung. Vienna: Boehlau.

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________ 2001a. ‘Tribe’, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, edited by N.J. Smelser and P.B. Baltes. Oxford: Pergamon, pp. 15906–9. ________ 2001b. ‘Ehre, Raum und Körper. Zur sozialen Konstruktion der Geschlechter im Nordjemen’, in Körper, Religion und Macht, Sozialanthropologie der Geschlechterbeziehungen, edited by U. DavisSulikowski, H. Diemberger, A. Gingrich and J. Helbling. Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 221–93. ________ i.pr. ‘Connecting and Disconnecting: Intentionality, anonymity, and transnational networks in Upper Yemen’, in Proceedings of the 3rd Stockholm Roundtable in Anthropology, edited by C. Garsten, T.H. Eriksen, S. Randeria. Jamous, R. 1991. ‘From the Death of Men to the Peace of God: Violence and PeaceMaking in the Rif’. Honor and Grace in Anthropology, edited by J.G. Peristiany and J. Pitt-Rivers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 167–92. Kaldor, M. 1999. New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in a Global Era. Cambridge: Polity Press. Korany, Bahgat and Dessouki, Ali E. Hillal (eds) 2008. The Foreign Policies of Arab States: The challenges of globalization. New revised edition, Cairo – New York: American University in Cairo Press. Niebuhr, C. 1969. Beschreibung von Arabien: Aus eigenen Beobachtungen und im Lande selbst gesammelte Nachrichten. Reprint of 1772 original publication. Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt. Nordstrom, C. 2004. Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Philips, S. 2005. ‘Cracks in the Yemeni System’, in Middle East Online; July 28 Robben, A. i.pr. Neue Kriege. In Handbuch Globalisierung: Anthropologische und sozialwissenschaftliche Zugänge zur Praxis, edited by F. Kreff, E.-M. Knoll, A.Gingrich. Frankfurt-Berlin: Edition Suhrkamp Tuchscherer, M. (ed.) 1994. Le Yémen, Passé et Present de l’Unité. Paris: Édisud. Wedeen, L. 2008. Peripheral Visions. Publics, power, and performance in Yemen. Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press.

Chapter 3

Public Events and the Japanese Self-Defense Forces: Aesthetics, Ritual Density and the Normalization of Military Violence Eyal Ben-Ari

Introduction In this chapter, I examine two annual public events held by the Japanese SelfDefense Forces (SDF): an air-show conducted at Hamamatsu Air-Base and an open-day organized by an infantry regiment in a camp in the north of Kyoto Prefecture in Fukuchiyama. A related study with Sabine Fruehstueck (Ben-Ari and Fruehstueck 2003) examined a live fire exercise carried out at the military training ground near Mt Fuji. There we attempted to raise questions about how anthropology may explore the relationship between military violence and its acceptability. Our focus was on such public events as part of the military’s strategic representation of violence and we argued that the armed forces actively seek legitimacy, acceptance and support by aestheticizing violence (i.e. transforming it into something to be contemplated within ‘safe’, theater-like conditions) or domesticating it (by sharing food and drink and thus breaking down the boundaries between civilians and soldiers). Based on this previous analysis, I would like to explicitly problematize here the concept of normalizing military violence through public events. In other words, I would like to explore one facet of how the armed forces’ potential for warmaking is socially and culturally ‘normalized’ and turned into ‘natural’ – albeit important – parts of society. As I will show, this normalization takes place through the ritual density or ritual cycle (Bell 1997) of SDF to which the two events that   I have carried out three significant periods of fieldwork on the Japanese SDF: July–August 1998, July–August 1999 and July 2005–January 2006. Fieldwork included interviews with members of the forces (troops and officers), civil servants in the Ministry of Defense, civilian lecturers at military academies, and a few members of soldier’s families. In addition, I have attended numerous public events, cocktail parties or training exercises all over the country. The two events about which I report here took place in 2005 and I attended them with a Japanese graduate student who was my research assistant. We came early to both events, took down notes, photographed the proceedings and tried to talk to as many people as possible about what was going on.

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are the object of my study belong to. In this regard my analysis should be seen as complementary to most of the chapters in this volume in two senses: while most of these contributions focus on the interpersonal level my analysis is placed on the macro-level. Additionally, my contribution’s starting point centers on the military as the institution charged with the management and use of legitimate (if sometimes contested) and organized violence. Here I link my analysis to Lutz’s (2001) suggestions that anthropologists should develop the concept of militarization that goes beyond discreet events of wars to draw attention to broader processes of war preparation. While violence has been the object of intense anthropological scrutiny in the past decade or so, as Krohn-Hansen (1994: 367) stresses, anthropological studies of violence tend to focus on the victim’s perspective, often overlooking the perpetrators or performers of violent acts. This point is surprising, because if one wants to understand the social and cultural expressions of violence, then the armed forces would seem to be a key research site. It is in this light that my focus on the SDF should be seen: on the groups and people who variously prepare for, perpetrate, perform, or simulate organized violence, and the ways in which this violence, or its potential, have been social and culturally normalized. Anthropology offers one set of tools for exploring these issues by analyzing ‘public events’ (Handelman 1997). These public events are occasions when members of a social group reflect upon and define themselves, dramatize their collective myths and history, and present themselves with alternatives to the social order (for example, a more egalitarian arrangement than the hierarchy of the everyday). Da Matta (1984), Kertzer (1988), and Fernandez (1986) suggest that political rituals in which the armed forces of various states participate are part of the ways in which the legitimacy, acceptance, and support of the state is presented and acknowledged. But just how are these rituals carried out? I will develop a number of points related to the aesthetic portrayal and performance of potential for military violence. Aesthetics apply not only to ‘art’ but to created symbolic genres or dynamic structures, within which human experience and meaning are constituted or emergent. Indeed, it is through performance that the capacities and qualities of what may be described as aesthetic genres, styles, or forms are generated and realized to engage the senses and produce experience. (Kapferer and Hobart 2005: 1). What do the two events I have singled out for analysis express? And how do they articulate their messages in terms of their internal dynamics and composition? While there is an obvious overlap between the two, as will become clear, I argue that while in Hamamatsu the central dynamics are of spectatorship and distance from the military’s violent means, in Fukuchiyama the central processes center on participation and closeness to soldiers and weapons. Before moving on to the events let me place the Japanese SDF in its historical context.

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The Japanese Self-Defense Forces in Context The Japanese Self-Defense Forces (SDF) exist in a context marked by powerful constitutional limits, a strong anti-militaristic culture, and the suspicion constantly voiced by the country’s Asian neighbors about Japan’s potential for remilitarization (Fruehstueck 2008). The legacy of World War II has meant that the country’s defeat was blamed on the ‘generals’ and that the word ‘military’ became synonymous with subjugation and destruction. These attitudes have been intensified by the effects of the atomic bomb which resulted, beyond the sheer misery of hundreds of thousands of people, in a sense of victim-hood attributed both to America’s actions and the aggression of Japan’s wartime military regime. While slowly changing, the experience of World War II still undergirds the strong anti-militaristic ethos set against Japan, acquiring a large military establishment. One of the most important features of these circumstances has been the institution of strict legal limits – Article 9 of the country’s constitution – on Japan’s right to maintain armed forces and to sustain any kind of offensive security policy. Yet despite these rather unfavorable circumstances, Japan does have a substantial military establishment, in terms of a military organization that typically perceives enemy invasion as the primary threat, considers the combat leader the dominant military professional, and enjoys a supportive public attitude towards the military in the wider population (see Fruehstueck and Ben-Ari 2002). The SDF now has about 250,000 volunteer soldiers (about 4 percent of whom are women). Moreover, Japan has either the fifth biggest military expenditure, using the Japanese Defense Agency’s figures, or the third highest, using the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency’s figures. The SDF is thus a fully-fledged military establishment complete with three services (ground, maritime and air), the latest military technology (tanks, ships and planes as well as a variety of stateof-the art weaponry, albeit no nuclear weaponry), and all of the organizational accompaniments common to armed forces (territorial divisions, brigades and training methods). The Air-Show as Spectacle The Hamamatsu Air Show is an annual event that is held on a Sunday in February. According to military estimates, tens of thousands of people attend it and large improvised parking lots are arrayed around the base with a constant stream of local and tour buses. The air-show involves three main elements: a display of about twenty air-craft parked on the ground, some exhibits of the activities of the Air Self-Defense forces in the hangers next to the runway, and the central demonstration of jets flying over the area. During the half-day event, visitors begin by walking along the displays that offer various data about the air-craft (such as their place of manufacture or maximal distance of flight). In two or three of the hangars they may line up and enter one of the SDF’s jets and see the pilot’s seat

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and equipment. There are also food stalls, booths selling military paraphernalia and a few (rather small) photographic displays of previous and ongoing missions of the air-force. But by far the most impressive part of the day is the fly-past. Its ‘logic’ or order is based on the subsequent presentation of planes that are progressively faster and more agile. Thus the first fly-pasts are by relatively heavy planes and a few helicopters which usually simply fly back and forth over the crowd. After these craft come the faster jets that commence with bombers and then fighters that soar in pairs or in formations of four crafts. The culmination of the fly-past, as of the whole day, is the appearance of the SDF’s aerial acrobatic team called the Blue Impulse. This group of eight planes takes off in groups of two, and their performance is accompanied by an announcer explaining the various summersaults, upside down flying, smoke trails and vertical uplifts that they carry out. This part is accompanied by much photography on the viewers’ side and by various cries of ‘oos,’ ‘aahs,’ and ‘sugoi’ (wonderful). In modular form, the Hamamatsu air-show presents a certain version of the order of the Japanese air force: a systematic presentation of ‘flying things’ culminating in the performance of the Blue Impulse team. As stated, the order is based on an interrelated – but not wholly overlapping – order of progression from slower and unwieldy to faster and more agile craft, and from aircraft related to logistics to ones designed to participate in combat. In this sense, the air show presents the social order of the armed forces in its emphasis on the core expertise and high prestige awarded to the combat arms and advanced military technology with lower prestige given to the logistics elements. Yet in its culmination with the aerial acrobatics of the Blue Impulse team the event underscores its character as essentially a spectacle (MacAloon 1984: 244). By spectacle, I mean a dynamic social form that demands movement, action, and change on the part of acting human-machines who take center stage, excitement, thrill and pleasure on the part of the spectators. This emphasis, moreover, is echoed by the neutral, even bland, language used to describe the fly-past. This linguistic usage seems to permit the spectacular aspect of the event to take ‘center-stage’. The excitement accompanying the show primarily involves visual elements buttressed by visceral experience. The performance of the fly-past entails people looking up at enormously powerful – in terms of speed, noise and force – flying machines that (for the duration of the performance) are seemingly disconnected from earthly limitations. That the visual is primary, is evident in the intense gaze of the tens of thousands of visitors at the moving objects that attract and appeal to the eye. Perhaps, like aspects of the Olympics, the stress in the air show is on its epic visual quality in that it does not only involve dramatic movement, but rather pure movement dramatized (MacAloon 1984: 246). Unlike parades with their lineal, unidirectional movement, the planes in the show move in all directions (but always at a distance from the spectators). For example, formations of air-craft fly in circles, diagonally, up and down, do summersaults, and fly towards each other

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only to veer off at the seemingly last moment. In fact, the high-speed maneuvers of the Blue Impulse team entail all of these elements of flying. A prime indicator of the utter absorption of the crowd with the dramatic character of the main part of the fire-exercise was photographic activities. According to my impression, the most popular sites for picture takers were some of the air planes parked on the runway and three young ladies – models – who draped themselves on jets striking various poses. But by far the most widespread occasion was the aerial performance. I saw almost every kind of camera being used with some visitors brandishing more than one photographic machine. Thus it is not surprising that this part of the show features both in various web-sites and commercially available DVDs. The variety of sounds and reverberations heard during the show further amplify the emotional resonance of the event: the noise and reverberations of the airplanes’ engines and especially their afterburners serve as technological enhancements of visual impressions. Here we may follow such scholars as Kapferer and Hobart (2005: 14) who underscore the visceral (essentially unintentional) reactions to such forms as drumming, chants, or oratory that influence the body as independent forces, yet are experienced as welling from within it. One of the principal functions of expressive behavior is to encourage and facilitate bonding within human groups on a large scale. As Beeman (2005: 25) suggests, language may be good at communicating information but is not efficient enough in conveying affective states to others, and even tropic or metaphoric communication lacks immediacy. Thus auditory and visual channels of communication have the advantage of being able to encompass and affect large numbers of individuals at the same time, and it is these channels that are the primary ones in the aerial show. I found fascinating indicators of the effect of such processes. One involves the vocalizations – the ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ – I heard when people witnessed the powerful planes flying low over the crowd. Indeed, to follow Beeman (2005: 27) again, even adult humans have a remarkable repertoire of elementary vocalization forms, all tied to affect. Involuntary shouts of surprise, anger or fear are as penetrating and physically efficiently produced as a baby’s cries and sounds of pleasure or awe (and are as equally affectively involuntary on the part of the producers and hearers). A second indicator is a culturally constructed vocalization. Thus rather than the word ‘umai’ which one hears in theater performance and connotes the acknowledgement of skillful rendition or acting, the most common term heard in the Hamamatsu fly-over was ‘sugoi.’ This term, which literally means amazing or wonderful, can also connote terrifying or awful (just as the English term would have it: full of awe). Finally, and third, I see the clapping (Friedson 2005: 120) that accompanied the show not as intended for the pilots (who unlike actors cannot hear it) but as an important and direct way that a majority of people may participate in the show. Next I will analyze the scripted character of the demonstration. Unlike sports events, the fly-past has no uncertain outcome; there is very little space for improvisation or individual creativity left within the general frame of the event. Rather, because the event is tightly scripted, one central message related to the aerial

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aesthetics is the idea of precision: the extreme synchronization involved attests to the coordination of the air arm and the precise manner by which it works. Indeed, one could suggest that the stress on precision is related to wider understandings of contemporary military action as being based ‘pin-point accuracy’ or ‘surgical strikes.’ Furthermore, throughout the whole show, the emphasis is very much on the dramatic or imposing aspects that present the disciplined might of the SDF and seeks to overwhelm the audience in mass and magnitude (Handelman 1997: 395). Here I turn to recent thinking about performance and aesthetics to suggest the emergence of a sentiment of aesthetic rightness that substitutes for moral rightness in the portrayal of the violent potential of the military. Handelman (2005: 198) suggests that the dominant sentiment of the aesthetic is something like the ‘feel’ that one has for that which one is doing; the feel for that which can only be called the ‘rightness’ of how one is doing what one is doing, or how it is done in concert … This sense of rightness or ‘fitness’ – kinesthetic, sensuous, and interpersonal – indexes the aesthetics of living unselfconsciously … This is the sense of rightness not in moral terms but in the sense of how one does that which one is doing (Handelman 2005: 198).

In a complementary manner, for the audience of an aesthetic performance, it is this rightness that allows a disconnection from the potential or actual moral rightness of actions. Thus in the Hamamatsu air-show the rightness is one of aesthetic delight and pleasure at a performance well carried out. The members of the crowd do not come to see violence so much as the aesthetically pleasing performance of power and strength. The audience seems to be contemplating the aesthetics of technological power as a kind of harmonious and coordinated aerial dance. Instead of just serving as entertainment, the subliminal messages or, more correctly, the experience engendered by the demonstration are that everything presented deserves to be applauded on myriad levels (sensory and visceral). As Handelman observes, for spectators, despite the spectacle’s attraction and possible seduction, there may be a sense that it is distant from oneself: color and image are objectified ‘out there’ by the spectator (Handelman 1997: 394). Hence, newspaper reports about this event all include strong visuals of jet planes maneuvering. We thus move onto the next event which demands a different kind of engaged participation, one leaving little room for dispassionate behavior. The Open Day as Public Festival Another yearly event that takes place on a Sunday in February is the openday at the Fukuchiyama camp. It lasts from around eight in the morning until approximately four in the afternoon. Unlike the Hamamatsu Air Show, the openday at the Fukuchiyama camp only caters to a few thousand spectators, mostly

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from the general region of Osaka and Kyoto. The Fukuchiyama camp is a much smaller base than the air force base at Hamamatsu, and the public is formally welcomed by soldiers staffing a few small reception tents near its entrance. The day offers four main components: a parachute-jump by about twenty soldiers at the edge of the base (which is actually difficult to view given the topography of the area); a large display of weapons and vehicles in the main square; an exhibition of several activities of the regiment’s soldiers in Iraq, and disaster-relief in a building off to the side of the square. In addition there are military bands playing, cheerleaders (from a women’s university in Kyoto) and martial arts performed by soldiers, which only a few hundred people stay on to witness since there is not special interest in this event. The atmosphere is rather casual with much interaction taking place between visitors and soldiers in and around the weapons’ and vehicles’ display. The soldiers staffing this equipment invite visitors to climb onto many of the vehicles and to take short rides in military jeeps, or to hold weapons (such as light machine guns), to try on flak jackets or put on gas masks. Similarly, this stage of the event provides opportunities for people to speak to soldiers who are assigned to stand next to the vehicles or to provide explanations about them. Like in other open-door activities a primary aim of this event is to bring the SDF closer to ‘the people’ and – among other messages – to show them that soldiers are ‘real persons’. The troops and the weapons become objects that are both accessible and open to dialogue with civilian outsiders. For visitors the experience is either an individual or a family experience. According to my impression, almost all the photographs taken are of individuals or small groups with military equipment or on armed vehicles. Hence the ‘stylistic choices’ governing the photographs taken at this stage: almost all of the pictures include composites of family, relatives or friends placed in, on, or near the vehicles, or handling, gripping or holding weapons. In the display held on two floors of a medium-sized building, one finds a plethora of photographs, short documents and slides and a short fifteen minute video. The exhibit, although a one-off occurrence, is very similar to some of the SDF museums I have visited, both in its presentation and in its content. While many of the photographs etc. portray scenes of SDF participation in disaster relief (in earthquakes, snow drifts or floods) or rescue efforts (of wounded or stranded civilians), by far the greater part of the exhibit is devoted to the SDF’s Iraq mission to Samawah (2003–2008). The regiment based in Fukuchiyama provided one of the first contingents to go to Iraq and much is made of the pride its troops feel at a job that is widely considered as well done. Just outside of this building is a life sized cardboard mounted picture of the regimental commander sporting his characteristic moustache and who has become somewhat of a national hero. Visitors have their pictures taken next to this image, and later, when the commander appears, many ask to be photographed with this national celebrity. In ways similar to open-day festivals held throughout the year in many Japanese military bases or organized tours to such camps (Wijers-Hasegawa 2006) in Fukuchiyama the public is invited into a military ‘home’ and the governing

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tenor is that of seemingly unmediated interaction with soldiers. In this respect, the opening of the base can be seen as part of the well-controlled boundaries between society and the SDF. This point is expressed literally in the soldiers welcoming the public in the reception areas and the streaming of thousands of people into normally restricted bases and camps (see also Ben-Ari and Fruehstueck 2003). This is however not a back-stage that the general public is invited to, because the soldiers do not remove their masks hiding their faces: they are there as soldiers and not as individuals, and the armor and the uniforms are authentic. Thus it is as members of the armed forces that they interact with the wider public. This kind of opportunity allows for tactile experiences: people can touch the vehicles, climb up on them, feel the relationship between their bodies and the bulk of the trucks and tanks, pick up and handle weaponry, aim rifles and machine guns, and smell the peculiar military odors of gas fumes and oil. To follow Beeman’s (2005: 25) suggestions again, it could be suggested that because the deepest emotional expressions between people are usually tactile (perhaps even olfactory and gustatory) rather than linguistic, by touching and handling war machines – guns, artillery pieces, tanks and binoculars – outsiders become privy to and feel the power evinced by the metal, and the sleekness of the weapons. Indeed, the fascination with the missile-projectiles is complemented by the touching of the armor of the vehicles as one would stroke metal muscles. While here one finds no ‘oos’, ‘aahs’ or ‘sugoi’ as in the Hamamatsu Air Show, the physical reaction is one of more intimate curiosity, relatively little distance and a more personal gauging of the power of military equipment. To follow MacAloon (1984: 246) the event partakes of the character of a festival rather than a spectacle because in festival, the roles of actors and spectators are less distinguishable. The overall mood of a festival is heightened by the fact that except for the troops at the reception, and in contrast to the Hamamatsu Air Show, all the soldiers wear fatigues. The governing logic or order of this event is that of simultaneity rather than linear presentation. To be sure, the event is highly organized but within its frame there is much more leeway for visitors to selforganize: they can and do choose where to go, what to look at, and when to leave one site for another. In addition, the many food stalls, several of which are staffed by soldiers, turn the event into a sort of mass picnic. Finally, the move from the public formal language to an informal and more familiar linguistic usage further underscores the appeal of the open-day as a local festival. Throughout the day tactile experiences, shared food and drink and the breakdown of the boundaries between civilians and soldiers work towards domesticating and personalizing the event. The overall process of the Fukuchiyama open-day is one of naturalization through domestication. My point is that in this process subjective and objective dualisms are dissolved, and as the visitors and troops gradually mingle, they come to embody the experience as ‘natural.’ This contention may be understood by way of two indicators: the first is the gradual breaking down of the hesitancy that characterizes initial interactions between the two sides and the gradual appearance of smiles, closing

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of physical distance and even joking between the two sides. The second is the simultaneity that characterizes the event and that is experienced by individuals as voluntariness. To be sure, while this voluntariness is socially constructed, it is nevertheless important, for it provides participants with the feeling that they have some sort of self-directed agency over the event. Late Modern Societies and the Management of Violence The use of force is still a major characteristic of contemporary industrialized states as attested to by the recent invasions of Afghanistan or Iraq, or the participation of their forces in peace-support missions across the globe from the Congo to East Timor. Yet, in many societies such as those of Western Europe, using organized violence had become increasingly contested since the end of the Cold War. The militaries of today’s industrialized democracies have undergone sweeping shifts in their domestic status, structure, missions, and, most importantly, the ways they use the violent means at their disposal. Indeed, their greater participation in peace support operations is one indicator of problems centered on justifying the use of state violence in situations external to any one state (Ignatieff 1998). Similarly, the greater sensitivity of military leaders to the political repercussions of their actions (both domestically and externally) demonstrates the importance of new criteria for assessing military exploits (Boene 2000: 75). Finally, cultural transformations in the advanced democracies have led to a heavy stress on keeping casualties to a minimum and to a questioning, both within the military and especially outside of it, of the morality of and justification for using military power (Burk 1998: 12; Moskos et al. 2000: 5–6). Sociologists and political scientists have long explored the political means and mechanisms – gathering support, lobbying for funds, or handling the media, for example – by which the armed forces manage their place in society. But given their emphasis on political arrangements, these studies have done little to explore the cultural imagery and practices by which the militaries of the technologically advanced democracies handle their problematic relation to violence. Given anthropology’s long-term preoccupation with the broadly ‘cultural’ aspects of social life, it provides a complementary perspective to the one provided by these disciplines. More concretely, anthropology provides the analytical tools and frames for examining the means by which violence is concealed, naturalized, or blurred (Ben-Ari and Fruehstueck 2003). While the two events I have analyzed involve the SDF’s management of its contested nature as an armed force, they are predicated on different relations between violence and aesthetics: the first on a distanced spectacle of power aimed at eliciting awe, and the second on ‘house-breaking’ the violent potential of the SDF by domesticating it. Both events handle potentially critical expressions about the SDF as a military, but in different ways. As a spectacle, the Hamamatsu Air Show diverts attention away from the air force’s expertise in effecting violence

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by offering an alluring, colorful, intricate and complicated aerial demonstration. The Fukuchiyama open-day neutralizes the violent dimension of the military organization both by exposing visitors to weaponry and providing interactions with soldiers-as-humans within a military ‘home’ and by contextualizing the missions of the SDF as centered on peace keeping, humanitarian aid or disaster relief. The gendered aspect of the two events echoes this distinction. While the air-show was attended by relatively few women (perhaps five percent), they comprised about a quarter of the participants in the open-day. While both events were gendered as male, the higher proportion of women in the latter one resonates strongly with its more familiar, intimate character as a local festival. Here, however, I take a different approach from Girard (1977) who argues that ritual controls, channels, and represses human violence so as to allow for ordered social life. Essential to this point of view is the idea that rites and ceremonies allow the controlled displacement of aggressive impulses (Bouroncle 2000: 55, Schechner 1994). In most scholarly studies marked by this kind of functionalist perspective, violence is seen as something that has to be constantly controlled and suppressed because it is anomalous, irrational, senseless, or disruptive (Blok 2000: 23). Such studies are often rooted either in a psychological approach that sees the problem as one of how to handle the destructive sources of violence, or in a sociological perspective that assumes that violence is related to potential disorder and dysfunction. Such investigations do not tackle the aesthetic and performative dimensions of the expression of violence and how it can be experienced ‘enjoyable’. In a recent volume, Ohnuki-Tierney (2002) tackles these themes by arguing that the violence perpetrated by states is aestheticized so that it can be willingly accepted by individuals. This aestheticization – the process of making cultural practices and symbols appear visually and conceptually beautiful – is central to its acceptance through turning military ‘things’ into objects to be contemplated, felt and cognized without regard to their violent meanings or potentials. Her insight allows us to understand the seductiveness of national and military symbols and the readiness of individuals and the public to be seduced. Indeed, her insight is especially pertinent in regard to the air-show where violent potential turned into man-machine power can be understood as an object of fascination, enjoyment, and celebration. Along similar lines, Schroder and Schmidt (2001) suggest that the performative aspect of violence is crucial to an understanding of what it can achieve. It appears that in many societies whose members do not directly experience violent acts, this ‘performative quality makes violence an everyday experience… without anybody actually experiencing physical hurt every day’ (Schroder and Schmidt 2001: 5–6). A focus on aesthetics and performance, therefore, should caution us against too cognitive a bias in our analysis. Apart from being designed to convey or express certain messages, the two events are predicated on different emotional resonances and different sentiments that ‘move’ (motivate and resonate). It is only through a focus on the interrelationships between emotionality, the body and aesthetic

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appeal that we can understand how these events attempt to normalize the SDF within current-day Japan. Conclusion: Ritual Density and Normalization By way of conclusion let me turn to the way in which the two events are related to the ‘ritual cycle’ of the SDF. This issue touches upon what Bell (1997) calls ‘ritual density’ and to questions that have received relatively little attention in scholarly work: Why do some societies (or historical periods) have more ritual than others? And, how are particular rites related to wider ritual structures? To begin with, the air-show and open-day are but elements of a much wider cycle of rites, ceremonies and public events that the SDF holds. These include internal events (for example, for the induction of new unit commanders or promotion up the ranks) and public ones such as annual parades, flotillas, flypasts, open-days, graduation ceremonies of the National Military Academy or appearances of military bands. In addition, occasional ceremonies are held for units departing or returning from international missions or rites held to mark the end of SDF participation in relief efforts following natural disasters (say after the Kobe earthquake). These events are often hierarchized or nested with ceremonies conducted by lower-level units (say as regiments), then by larger formations (such as divisions), and all the way to national SDF ceremonies. These ceremonies may then be seen as further embedded within even wider occasions which members of the SDF hold with troops from the American forces stationed in Japan or the occasional parades held in international mission such as the Golan Heights. The significance of this dense array of occasions should be seen against the background of the problematic normalization of the SDF. Broadly, normalization is a process that makes something conform to some regularity, standard or rule. Yet the normalization of the SDF, as of any armed force, is unlike that of any other social institution or organization for it centers on what Boene (1990) calls the uniqueness of the military: its expertise in the legitimate management of organized violence. Unlike other public institutions (including the police), military work – involving as it does the violent encounter of two or more opposing forces – requires the potential taking of human lives and asks its members to put their lives at risk. This uniqueness implies first, that the internal organization of the military – especially its combat arms – continues to be different from that of other organizations. The military is inherently hierarchical, non-democratic and necessitates an emotional commitment on the part of its members that one rarely finds in other institutions. Second, in holding an expertise in the management of violence, the military has a huge destructive potential that can be used against others, but also against a part of the population of the own country. This is the reason why the control and accountability mechanisms over the military are both much more intense and different from those found in regard to other public institutions. The problems of

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normalization, as outlined earlier, are intensified in the case of the SDF because of its precarious historical and political position. More concretely, there are three problems centered on normalization that the SDF addresses in different manners. First, normalization involves a state of absence of pathology or a process of returning from some state of abnormality. In my work with Sabine Fruehstueck (Fruehstueck and Ben-Ari 2002) we dealt with this dimension of normalization by analyzing how the SDF distances itself from Japan’s Imperial forces of World War II that are often broadly (but not uncontestedly) defined as an aberration, a deviation from normal modes of civil-military relations and the political control of the military. The SDF creates this distance through the use of such means as a different scheme for designating military ranks that was previously used, introducing a distinct language for talking about weaponry, and that dearth of references to the war in the SDF’s educational institutions. This might be one of the reasons why there is no explicit mention in the two events of the annual commemoration ceremonies held in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Such declarations would create an unwanted connection between the SDF and the dark period of that war. Second, normalization means conforming to a socially constructed standard which in our case era corresponds to what has become an internationally accepted model of the military. Given the historical situation of the SDF, this process implies becoming like the armed forces of ‘any’ late-modern state (with Western Europe being very much the model here). This process refers to more than the cross-national borrowings that led to the establishment of the Japanese forces after World War II. In the Japanese case, this process implies that, like the militaries of Western Europe after the end of the Cold War, the SDF must also constantly justify their existence when there is no real threat facing them, most significantly in terms of ‘just” wars, peace-keeping and nation-building. Third, and finally, normalization refers to a process whereby behaviors and ideas are made to appear natural and taken for granted through repetition, ideology, or other means. Thus the dense array of internal and public ceremonies of the SDF hold should be seen in this light: as working on multiple planes to turn themselves into a taken-for-granted, accepted institution. While we see how two of such public events work as individual occasions, all these occurrences taken together work towards creating a past, a legacy, indeed a tradition for the SDF. As the years go by and the Japanese forces participate in more missions, this task becomes much easier. This is one way to understand the exhibition on the Iraq mission in Fukuchiyama: the exhibit not only justifies and explains the ‘do-good’ missions of the SDF, but it creates a significant and publicly accepted past for this unit at the same time as it reverberates with many other such displays or retrospectives. In fact, this kind of emphasis is heightened by constant references to the number of times a specific event has taken place: such labels as the 17th Hamamatsu AirShow, the twenty-third appearance of military bands, or the 14th mission to the Golan Heights place a specific occasion or mission within a wider historical chain of events.

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Smith (in Bell 1997: 174) proposes that any one ritual within a system is incomplete and meaningless by itself because its significance lies in its place in the complete sequence. The ritual density of SDF activities, then both stretches vertically back to the past (and by implication to the future) and resonates laterally among a host of annual and occasional events that, together, traditionalize this military institution. It is the rather unique historical position of Japan’s armed forces that has led to their participation in peculiarly dense ritual cycles. The ‘normalization’ of the SDF, as part of the ‘normalization’ of Japanese society (in the sense of being similar to the countries of the Euro-American world) does not mean, however, that it becomes ‘just like’ any other organization. It will continue, especially in our context, to be related to questions of life and death, and of the legitimate and organized use of violence. To echo and develop the words of the editors of this volume, violence may be reproduced and expressed not only in words, or in the silences and rumours of victims, but also in aesthetic performances or local and intimate festivals. References Beeman, W.O. 2005. ‘Making Grown Men Weep’, in Aesthetics and Performance: Formations of Symbolic Construction and Experience, edited by A. Hobart and B. Kapferer. New York: Berghahn Books, 23–42. Bell, C. 1997. Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ben-Ari, E. and Fruehstueck, S. 2003. ‘The Celebration of Violence: A Live-fire Demonstration Carried Out by Japan’s Contemporary Military’. American Ethnologist 30(4), 540–55. Boene, B. 1990. ‘How Unique Should the Military Be? A Review of Representative Literature and Outline of Synthetic Formulation’. European Journal of Sociology 31(1), 3–59. ________ ‘Trends in the Political Control of Post-Cold War Armed Forces’, in Democratic Societies and their Armed Forces: Israel in a Comparative Perspective, edited by S.A. Cohen. London: Frank Cass, 73–88. Bouroncle, A. 2000. ‘Ritual, Violence and Social Order: An Approach to Spanish Bullfighting’, in Meanings of Violence: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, edited by G. Aijmer and J. Abbink. Oxford: Berg, 55–76. Burk, J. 1998. ‘Introduction, 1998: Ten Years of New Times’, in The Adaptive Military: Armed Forces in a Turbulent World, edited by J. Burk. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1–24. Da Matta, R. 1984. ‘Carnival in Multiple Planes’, in Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Toward a Theory of Cultural Performance, edited by J.J. MacAloon. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 208–40. Fernandez, J. 1986. Persuasions and Performances: The Play of Tropes in Culture. Indiana: Indiana University Press.

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Friedson, S. M. 2005. ‘Where Divine Horsemen Ride: Trance Dancing in West Africa’, in Aesthetics and Performance: Formations of Symbolic Construction and Experience, edited by A. Hobart and B. Kapferer. New York: Berghahn Books, 109–28. Fruehstueck, S. 2008. Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fruehstueck, S. and Ben-Ari, E. 2002. ‘“Now We Show It All!” Normalization and the Management of Violence in Japan’s Armed Forces’. Journal of Japanese Studies 28, 1–39. Girard, R. 1977. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Handelman, D. 1997. ‘Rituals/Spectacles’. International Social Science Journal 153, 387–99. ________ 2005. ‘Bureaucratic Logic, Bureaucratic Aesthetics: The Opening Event of the Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day in Israel’, in Aesthetics and Performance: Formations of Symbolic Construction and Experience, edited by A. Hobart and B. Kapferer. New York: Berghahn Books, 196–215. Hobart, A. 2005. ‘Transformation and Aesthetics in Balinese Masked Performances: Ragonda and Barong’, in Aesthetics and Performance: Formations of Symbolic Construction and Experience, edited by A. Hobart and B. Kapferer. New York: Berghahn Books, 161–82. Hurst, G.C. 1998. Armed Martial Arts of Japan: Swordsmanship and Archery. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ignatieff, M. 1998. The Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience. London: Chatto and Windus. Kapferer, B. and Hobart, A. 2005. ‘Introduction: The Aesthetics of Symbolic Construction’, in Aesthetics and Performance: Formations of Symbolic Construction and Experience, edited by A. Hobart and B. Kapferer. New York: Berghahn Books, 1–22. Kertzer, D.I. 1988. Ritual, Politics and Power. New Haven: Yale University Press. Krohn-Hansen, C. 1994. ‘The Anthropology of Violent Interaction’. Journal of Anthropological Research 50, 367–81. Lutz, C. 2001. Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century. Boston: Beacon Press. MacAloon, J.J. 1984. ‘Olympic Games and the Theory of Spectacle in Modern Societies’, in Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Toward a Theory of Cultural Performance, edited by J.J. MacAloon. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 241–80. Moskos, C.C., Williams, J.A. and Segal, D.R. 2000. ‘Armed Forces after the Cold War’, in The Postmodern Military: Armed Forces After the Cold War, edited by C.C. Moskos, J.A. Williams and D.R. Segal. New York: Oxford University Press, 1–13.

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Ohnuki-Tierney, E. 2002. Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Schechner, R. 1994. ‘Ritual and Performance’, in Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by T. Ingold. London: Routledge, 613–45. Schröder, I.W. and Schmidt, B.E. 2001. ‘Introduction: Violent Imaginaries and Violent Practices’, in Anthropology of Violence and Conflict, edited by B.E. Schmidt and I.W. Schröder. London: Routledge, 1–24. Wijers-Hasegawa, Y. 2006. ‘New Tours with Military Theme Score Direct Hit for Hato Bus’. Japan Times. [Online: 31 August]. Available at: http://search. japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/20060831-all.html [accessed: 7 July 2007].

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Chapter 4

Aesthetics of Martyrdom: The Celebration of Violent Death among the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam Øivind Fuglerud

Introduction This chapter explores hero-worshipping as initiated and practiced by the most prominent armed Tamil group in Sri Lanka, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The extent to which a relatively small militant organization developed ideological, material, and ritual materializations of its revolutionary ideas, in spite of being consistently engaged in war, is truly remarkable and deserves attention. The semantics and rituals developed by the organization’s leadership, the architectural designs and visual expressions used to form its surroundings, and the poetic works coming from the cadres of the organization, provided the LTTE, and the society under its control, a definite aesthetic quality worth reflecting on. The civil war between the Sri Lankan government and the armed liberation movement called the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) played out in a 30 year period, starting with the implementation of emergency laws in Jaffna in 1979. The war found a brutal and bloody ending on the beaches outside the town of Mullaithivu in May 2009. Here, among tens of thousands Tamil civilians, most of them held as human shields against their will, the LTTE’s soldiers and commanders made their last stand against government forces ten times their strength. The total loss of lives in the final days was estimated in the range of an apocalyptic 1,000 a day. When this is being written, people on both sides of the conflict-line and outside observers are still trying to absorb the fact that the entire leadership of the LTTE, including the organization’s founder and enigmatic   The author has monitored the conflict in Sri Lanka since 1984, when he did his first research on political Buddhism. Later, in 1994, he did fieldwork among Tamil refugees in Norway, and in 1998 in the Muslim village of Eravur in an Eastern Province of Sri Lanka. In 2007 he conducted interviews with leaders of the LTTE in Kilinochhci. At present he is doing research in the Panama area, the southernmost part of the Eastern Province. In this chapter he is analyzing to a large extent published material and internet sources.   The estimate was made by John Holmes, UN Chief of Humanitarian Affairs (Charbonneau 2009).

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leader Vellupillai Prabakaran, was killed within few days. After decades of war, and after more than two and a half years of continuous close-quarter fighting in the last government offensive against LTTE-controlled territory, the most violent and one of the most long-drawn military conflicts in Asia suddenly had stopped, leaving 300,000 displaced civilians interned in camps and under military control of government forces. In substance the national question in Sri Lanka is about demographic politics, access to resources, and political influence. In the period before and after independence in 1948, politicians from the majority Sinhalese-speaking community played upon the image of the Tamil-speaking minority as having been privileged under the British colonial regime. They thus dished out a diet of Sinhala ethnic nationalism in order to mobilize voters. Under slogans expressing the need for Sinhalese and Buddhists to regain a position in society reflecting their numerical majority of two thirds of the population, a series of laws, regulations, and policies were adopted favoring Buddhism and the Sinhala-speaking public. As might have been expected, this led to organized resistance on the side of the minorities in the country, in particular from the 12 per cent so-called Sri LankaTamils, the country’s largest and best educated minority. An historic landmark in the history of Sri Lanka-Tamil nationalism is the Vaddukodai Resolution adopted by the party Tamil United Front at its national convention in 1976, a convention where the party also decided to change its name into Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF). In the resolution it is stated that: This convention resolves that the restoration and reconstitution of the Free, Sovereign, Secular, Socialist State of Tamil Eelam based on the right to selfdetermination inherent in every nation has become inevitable in order to safeguard the very existence of the Tamil nation in this country. (Vaddukoddai Resolution 1976)

The Vaddukoddai resolution and the new name of the party adopting it, reflect the increasing desperation felt by many Tamils. Among the reasons for adopting the resolution listed in the text itself are Sinhalese colonization of Tamil areas, the institution of Sinhala as the official language, the giving of Buddhism the foremost place among the religions of the country, and the denial of equality to Tamils in the spheres of employment, education, and economic life. The political chauvinism on the part of the politicians representing the majority was accompanied by the recurrent flaring up of ethnic violence of which members of the Tamil-speaking community were the main victims, and which governments and their institutions did little to prevent. This post-independence, pre-war historical phase culminated in the massacres on Tamils in July 1983, when more than 2,000 people were killed   A majority of the Sri Lanka-Tamil population is Hindu, a minority Catholic. Among the Tamil-speaking people in Sri Lanka there is also a community of Muslims, comprising around six per cent of the country’s total population.

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(Meyer 1984). The event sidelined TULF and made Tamils, young Tamils in particular, flock to the then small armed Tamil groups. The Vaddukodai resolution was lifted as a banner by the emerging Tamil militant groups. Thus, in 1983 the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) submitted a memorandum to the Seventh Summit meeting of the Non-Aligned nations in Delhi, where it says that: The struggle for national freedom having failed in its democratic popular agitations, having exhausted its moral power to mobilize the masses for peaceful campaigns, gave rise to the emergence of armed resistance movement in Tamil Eelam in the early seventies … The armed struggle therefore is the historical product of intolerable national oppression; it is an extension, continuation and advancement of the political struggle of our oppressed people (Balasingham 2004: 36).

The understanding, that the organization had inherited a popular mandate that was not possible to implement through democratic means, was a recurrent theme in LTTE’s self-presentations. After some years of rivalry and internecine fighting among the different Tamil militant groups, the LTTE came out on top. From 1990, after the Indian Peace-Keeping Forces withdrew, the LTTE established territorial control in the north and east of the country. After being forced out of Jaffna by the Sri Lankan Army in 1995, they moved south of Jaffna lagoon and established a provisional capital in Kilinochchi, where they remained until January 2009. Cultural Re-interpretation My focus here is on the fact that parallel to its development as a military organization, the LTTE systematically re-interpreted central tenets of Tamil culture and gave these a tangible expression, embedding their exercise of military authority over people in wider, symbolic structures. To provide an introductory illustration, the LTTE can be said to have opened a new position for women in society equal to that of men through their use of female frontline- and suicide-soldiers. This involved a decisive break with tradition. In the words of Adele Ann, a prominent figure within the organization and married to LTTE’s late political advisor Anton Balasingham, in Jaffna society to be ‘morally pure, virtuous and obedient are considered the highest form of ethical ideal prescribed for women. Shyness, timidity, ignorance, passiveness and obedience are regarded as ideal patterns of behavior, or rather, the essential qualities of “femininity” ascribed to virtuous women’ (Ann 1994: 56). The Tamil concept, which sums up these qualities, is karpu, literally meaning ‘chastity’ or ‘conjugal fidelity’, but carrying wider references to a code of conduct involving the segregation of sexes and a restricted, prudish public performance on the part of women. In traditional thinking a chaste woman whose sexual power has been ‘tamed’ through proper marriage and gifts of jewelry becomes a cumankali, a real or potential mother and the most auspicious being in the Tamil universe (Fuglerud 1999: 110).

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The transformation of such publicly timid women into trained soldiers is, of course, a feat in itself. Women, who before the war were not supposed to walk the streets without male company, or to ride bicycles, and whose only available social role of importance was that of wife and mother, now fought and died in armed struggle side by side with men. However, the genius of the LTTE as producers of ideology in general and ideological form in particular, lies in doing this while retaining the familiar concepts and putting them to work in new ways. In this particular case one can observe two lines of re-formulation: On the one hand the Motherland – Tamiltay – was projected as the mother of all Tamils; a cumankali in danger of being (sexually) violated: In the golden jeweled Country of Tamil Eelam Head held high Our enemy made to dust You rose up Tiger! … As dogs with contempt We existed oh Tiger Only yesterday we forgot to guard The soil that was our mother… As deed you came You died We surged up (‘We Were Mouth, You Came as Deed!’ in Hellmann-Rajanayagam 2005: 134)

On the other hand, the public image of the female soldier took the form of what we may call ‘the armed virgin’; the chaste young woman married not to a man but to the cause: Her forehead shall be adorned not with kunkumam But with red blood What is seen in her eyes is not the sweetness of youth But the graves of the dead… On her neck will hang no thali But a cyanide capsule She has embraced not men But weapons! (‘She, the woman of Tamililam’ in Schalk 1997b)    Kunkumam is saffron put on the forehead as part of the funeral ceremony.   Thali is the marriage necklace in gold given by the groom to the bride to be worn until one of them dies.   This is what Schalk says about the author: ‘A famous female poet called Vanati, a captain in the armed wing of the LTTE, was killed in the “historic” battle of Anaiyiravu

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My argument in this chapter is that we may learn something about the importance of the form in which political ideas like those of the LTTE are materialized by drawing on perspectives from fields of research often considered far from that of war and violence, in particular the fields of aesthetics and cognitive science. Svasek (2007: 10) in her discussion of art, for example, uses the term ‘aestheticization’ to describe the process whereby the sensory experience of objects, ‘often already influenced by additional knowledge about the object and its related status, and by the spatial setting in which it is used or displayed’, reinforce abstract ideas or beliefs. I will go further and argue that the importance of aesthetics can justifiably be understood within a theoretical perspective of ‘extended cognition’. This perspective, which is far from unitary or homogeneous, tends to see what surrounds a human as not only influencing or affecting his or her cognition, but as part of the cognitive process itself. The general idea is that, while the physical brain, obviously, is separated from the outside world by the cranium, there is no inherent reason to assume that all the relevant computational machinery of human thought is separated in the same way (Day 2004: 105). A central term in this respect is the concept of ‘scaffolding’; the conception that it is in the nature of the human mind to make use of external resources for its own computation, and that without such resources the problem-solving ability of the biological brain would be radically impoverished. In the particular case discussed here, I argue that to many people living in Sri Lanka’s war-afflicted areas and struggling to make sense of their own violent experiences, the material manifestations manufactured by the LTTE constituted, in the words of Gell (1998: 232), ‘a whole form of cognition, which takes place outside the body, which is diffused in space and time, and which is carried on through the medium of physical indexes and transactions between them’ (emphasis in original). While Gell’s seminal theory of art will not be a topic of further discussion here, it is important to note that the basic claim of extended cognition provides an understanding of aesthetics as more than icing on the social cake. In other words, while we may draw inspiration from the field of art studies, we also need to recognize that aesthetics is more than art. People’s everyday world as such, seen as specific, emerging symbolic form, is aesthetic in the sense that it manifests or objectifies – and through this make available for reflection and contemplation – the forces engaged in the composition of these forms (Hobart and Kapferer 2007). Although it may be argued that the empirical subject of my (Elephant Pass) in 1991 at the age of 27. Vanati is a LTTE poet, with a martial language that reflects experiences from the battlefield and its blood, death and destruction, but there is also the recurrent theme that the dead are suffering representatives for a new generation that has obtained freedom from Sinhala occupation of Tamil homelands. Her manuscript of poems which she left behind was edited and published by Jeya, who signed the pre­face as poruppalar, ‘responsible person’, for the Women’s Front of Liberation Tigers. Her freedom was and still is exemplary for about 3,000 female fighters in the military wing of the LTTE.’ (Schalk 1997 b)

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discussion in this chapter is now mainly a matter of the past, it is not necessarily so. The aesthetic of the LTTE may survive and re-emerge to provide legitimacy to the organization’s successors. It may take on the form of symbolic capital to those who will now carry the inheritance of the LTTE and the memory of their martyrs into the future – either in Sri Lanka itself or in the Diaspora. Martial Ideology and Hero Worship The civil war, being fought mainly in the parts of Sri Lanka where Tamil-speaking people live, has made approximately one million people, more than one third of the Tamil population, flee the country. In Toronto, London, Geneva, Oslo, and in almost every other town where Tamil refugees live, the section of these refugees that supported the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam’s (LTTE’s) military fight for separation from Sri Lanka have since 1989 gathered on 27 November every year to celebrate Maveerar Nal, the ‘Day of Great Heroes’, commemorating the soldiers of the LTTE who have died in the struggle. In the main cities of Tamil settlement the gatherings have drawn crowds of thousands, and sometimes even tens of thousands of people. Through this, and through a number of minor ceremonies in the same manner celebrated simultaneously in LTTE-controlled parts of Sri Lanka and in the Diaspora, life in exile has been ‘calibrated’ to life in Eelam. The particular day of 27 November, regarded as a national day for Tamil Eelam, the future liberated nation-state of Eelam-Tamils, was selected to mark the death of Shankar, a personal friend of LTTE’s leader Velupillai Prabakaran and the first member of the organization to sacrifice his life for Eelam. According to official LTTE sources, reflecting the way stories from the ‘early days’ are used for mythologizing the organization and its leadership, 22 years old Shankar succumbed to his wounds on this day in 1982 after being shot during an effort to arrest him seven days earlier. Managing to flee from the shoot-out and escape to India with the help of his comrades, Shankar died in the town of Madurai with his head in Prabakaran’s lap. At that time the LTTE had no more than 30 cadres. Seven years later, in 1989, Prabakaran assembled his then 600 fighters in the jungles of Mullaithivu to pay homage to the 1,307 militants of his organization who had died in the preceding years, and declared the day as an official day of commemoration. At the center of this ceremony are the maveerar, the Great Heroes, fighters who died in battle. While there is room for optional elements, this worldwide event of commemoration is organized around the same ritual core: saluting in silence the memory of the Great Heroes lighting the flame of tiyakam (‘abandonment of life’), hoisting of the national flag by the mother of a Great Hero, saluting garlanded pictures of the Great Heroes with lights, and recital of the Tiger motto: pulikalin takam tamililat tayakam – ‘The thirst of the Tigers is the Motherland Tamil Eelam’ (cf. Schalk 2003). In the territory under the control of the LTTE, the war cemeteries,   http://www.tamilcanadian.ca/maveerar/shankar/ accessed 16 November 2009

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where fighters of the organization have been buried (see below) were important arenas for the ceremony. In exile, a model of a war cemetery with a few graves and memory stones is often built out of papier-mâché and centrally placed on the ceremonial premises. Where possible, the annual speech that used to be held by the leader of the LTTE on this day was produced via satellite connection. The celebration of the Maveerar Nal is another illustration of the extraordinary skill of the LTTE in embedding its military struggle in semantic categories, ceremonies, and artifacts, which provide material form to their ideology. This is by no means accidental or haphazard, but it is the result of a systematic work led by the organization’s propaganda office, the ‘Office of the Great Heroes belonging to Tamil Eelam’ (tamililamavirar panimanai), which was established in 1995. The main responsibility of this office, as the name indicates, were issues relating to the martial ideology of the LTTE and the commemoration of their war heroes. These issues were, and are still, at the centre of the Eelam-Tamil national project. While, until recently, national liberation – cutantiram – was the ultimate goal of the armed struggle, it is through the veneration of the sacrifice of the soldiers on behalf of the national community that the struggle for freedom is made operational. Schalk has discussed in detail the semantic field wherein the organization’s concept of martyrdom is located (Schalk 1997a). He points out that even though the term ‘martyr’ is often used by the LTTE, the application of the concept should not be seen as a western borrowing, but should be understood with reference to a local, that is Indian, interpretative pattern. Central to such a pattern are the concepts of tiyakam (‘abandonment’) and tiyaki (‘one who abandons’), which Schalk renders as ‘the voluntary abandonment of life in the very act of taking life, in the act of killing’ (1997a). As such, this martyr-concept has a somewhat different connotation than the parallel concept within the Jewish-Christian tradition, with its connotations of non-violence and victimization. The tiyaki-concept must be located among – and alongside – concepts like arpanippu, ‘sacrifice’ or ‘dedication’, ‘sacrifice dedicated to a god’; pali, ‘victim of sacrifice’; maram, meaning ‘valor’, ‘bravery’ and strength’ but also ‘anger’, ‘wrath’, and ‘war’; and viram, ‘bravery’, ‘heroism’, and ‘fortitude’. The term viram is the basis for virar, ‘hero’ and maveerar, ‘Great Hero’, as celebrated at Maveerar Nal – the Day of Great Heroes. In the semantic references to sacrifice in LTTE’s rhetoric the pali is, of course, the fighter him/herself – that is, the soldier is at the same time the sacrificer and the sacrifice. The two most obvious signs of LTTE’s devotion to the cause of liberation was the cyanide capsule – the kippu –worn by all LTTE fighters around their neck to be bitten if captured, and the existence of an elite unit of ‘Black Tigers’  It is relevant to note that Peter Schalk, professor of religious studies at the University of Uppsala in Sweden has accepted to sit on the advisory committee of the recently established Provisional Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam, the successor organization formed to carry the aims and ideals of LTTE forward, cf. (http://www.tamilnation.org/ltte/international_ relations/090616rudra_transnational_en.pdf). This fact and the nature of his writings in general, justifies a reading of his works as expressing LTTE’s own understanding.

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(karumpulikal) dedicated specifically for suicide missions. As Schalk (1997b) points out, the cyanide vial was consciously exposed by soldiers, hanging on a chord around the neck in processions and in daily encounters between LTTE cadres and civilians. Of all dead fighters up to 1992 approximately one third died from biting the kuppi (Schalk 2003). According to the internet site eelamweb.com, in the period 1982–2004, 264 Black Tigers gave their lives, 194 men and 69 women, out of a total of 18,043 fighters who died. It should be noted, however, that heroic self-sacrifice was deemed possible without taking up arms at all. Indeed, two of the most celebrated persona of the liberation movement are Thileepan and Annai Poopathi, both of whom fasted themselves to death as protests against the Indian Peace-Keeping Force’s presence in Eelam between 1987 and 1990. It is noteworthy that the organization’s ideology of revolutionary change is couched in concepts drawn from religious and ritual language. This provides a form to the aims of the organization which is recognizable to most people. However, semantics is not the only way in which this ideology is materialized. In the territories controlled by the LTTE, like in Jaffna from 1990–1995, and between 2000 and 2009 in Vanni, one found as frequently encountered parts of the manmade landscape memorials, ninaivuccinnam (‘tokens of commemoration’, cf. Schalk 1997a), dedicated to one or several dead fighters of the organization. These tokens ranged from relatively simple structures with a picture of the deceased to life-size or more statues and/or elaborate constructions with platforms, pillars and surrounding ponds or parks (see Figure 4.1, Figure 4.2). They were established by LTTE as an organization, as opposed to by the kin of the dead, and served to venerate the sacrifice made by the cadres in question for the sake of the nation. The ninaivuccinnam were constant reminders of what all Tamils knew already, namely that only dead fighters are Heroes. No living fighter was named a virar or celebrated for service in the way a dead is. As I have pointed out elsewhere, it was through the willingness to die, and through actual dying in the fight for freedom that cadres of the LTTE commanded respect (Fuglerud 1999: 170, 174). To the soldiers in the LTTE death was not accidental, a result of carelessness, lack of intelligence, or surprise attacks, like the case is for western soldiers in Iraq of Afghanistan – dying was what being a soldier was about; only as a dead did fighters realize their own potential. As put by HellmannRajanayagam (2005: 122): ‘Heroes in LTTE culture are honored not for killing the Tigers’ enemies but for their own deaths’. Further, this embracement of death and veneration of the dead also made those soldiers, who were not yet dead, into living representations of sacrifice. The fighters still alive and present among people, were ‘living dead’, dead but not yet died, a conception underlined by the kippu. This must, however, not be construed as making these soldiers in any sense marginal – quite the opposite. The sacrifice they had accepted made them into harbingers of life. The reason for this is that the death of the fighters was seen to have potent consequences; it was the deaths that brought life to the nation. In fact, in the   http://www.tamilcanadian.ca/maveerar/statistics/

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Figure 4.1

Children’s playground, LTTE-controlled Jaffna 1995. Source: Fuglerud

Figure 4.2

LTTE cemetery, Kopai 1995. Source: Fuglerud.

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semantics of the LTTE dead fighters were not buried, they were ‘planted’ as seeds, to be reborn. Thus, LTTE posters on Black Tigers’ Day (July 5) state that: ‘We are not dead; we have been sown’ (Roberts 2007, Schalk 1997a)10. On a poster widely spread by the LTTE, depicting a mother giving her dead husband’s assault rifle to her son, we can read the following text: For the dawn of our soil the fighting Great Heroes are those who have been sown here. For the birth of our Motherland the deaths of the Tigers succeed each other. The thirst of the Tigers is the Motherland Tamil Eelam

In a speech by Prabakaran on Maveerar Naal 1992, he states: These great heroes do not die in [normal] time; (they are) artisans of independence (cutantiram), heroic maravar who have sown the seeds for the rise of a very great liberation (struggle) on our soil. These magnificent individuals who give themselves (tarkotai yalarkal), who are those who abandon [life] (tiyakkal), who have given up their sweet life for the independence, for the honor and the security of our community (inam) are those who should be worshipped in the temples of our hearts throughout the ages. (Schalk 2003: 30)

It is significant that this conception that new life grows from the battlefield is not new in Tamil culture, it can be found in the Purananuru, the classical work of Tamil poetry, and underlies the symbolism found in the general conceptualization of Hindu ritual (see below); the sacrificial victim surrendering himself in order for new life to emerge from the blood-soaked soil (cf. Hellmann-Rajanayagam 2005). ‘Sleeping Houses’ and ‘Planted Stones’ One of the most important, and most remarkable, innovations in material culture initiated by the LTTE is the organization’s change of funerary practices. Sometime around 1990 the LTTE started burying their dead fighters. While until then soldiers had been cremated in accordance with Hindu tradition and their ashes handed over to the parents, the organization now established war cemeteries – tuillum illam (literally ‘sleeping houses’) – where the Great Heroes (maveerar) were given ‘planted stones’ (natukal), i.e. gravestones – with their individual identity inscribed. These cemeteries were kept in meticulous order by a special Maveerar-department (set up by the LTTE administration for the purpose), and so differed significantly from most burial grounds found within Christian and Muslim communities in the north-east of Sri Lanka. In addition to being sites of 10 See also coverage in TamilNet, e.g.: http://www.tamilnet.com/art.html?catid=13 &artid=26268

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commemoration by family and friends of the dead the tuillum illam were also arenas of public remembrance and celebration, in particular celebrations of the Maveerar Nal, the Day of Great Heroes. Based on interviews with an official from the Maveerar-office in Puthukudiyuruppu Natali (2008) renders the ‘official explanation’ for the shift from cremation to burial as being the wish by the organization to adopt practices followed in countries like America and England with respect to dead soldiers, in order to project itself as a conventional army of the Eelam state. While the LTTE certainly wished to be perceived as a conventional army, as opposed to a group of terrorists, and it is plausible that conforming to western military traditions may have been seen by the leadership as one step in this direction, the particular official’s explanation is not the whole picture. For one thing, there are other explanations floating around. For example, I have been given the reason by officials in LTTE’s administrative headquarter in Kilinochchi that the organization at some point realized that there was not going to be enough wood in the north-east to cremate all soldiers giving their life for freedom in the future. Others have suggested that after the mounting losses of cadres in the fight against the Indian Peace-Keeping Force towards the end of the 1980s, the leadership realized the need for more pomp and ceremonial to attract new recruits. Rather than looking for definitive answers to why the practices were changed, it seems more fruitful to record these practices as another form in which the ideational basis of the organization is materialized. With this in mind three aspects in particular are worth mentioning. The first is that the funeral practices, and the ceremonial taking place in the tuillum illam on days like the Day of Great Heroes, is a most powerful expression of what Verdery (1999) with a focus on Eastern Europe has called ‘the political life of dead bodies’ – the value of the dead as symbols of the nation. Standing among the elevated caskets in a war cemetery in a country at war, among the dead, among their weeping relatives and uniformed soldiers provides a particular setting for the hoisting of the national flag11. It is significant in this respect that Maveerar Nal is also referred to as elucci nal, ‘Day of Edification’ or ‘Day of Rising’ (Roberts 2007, Schalk 2003). As Roberts (2007: 37) points out, the term elucci carries a multivalent richness in Tamil-speak, dictionary translations including ‘ascent, elevation, origin, beginning’, derivatively ‘song sung at dawn to raise the God, king or VIP from sleep’ (Tamil Lexicon 1982). The Day of Great Heroes is not a day of mourning, at least not only a day of mourning. It is a day of growth, a celebration of what is coming and becoming. The second aspect has to do with burial, as opposed to cremation, projecting a particular understanding of LTTE cadres. As pointed out by Natali (2008), in the Hindu tradition there are certain recognized exceptions to the practice of cremation, one of the most important being ascetic sannyasis (renouncers), who are regarded 11 See the news coverage in TamilNet 26.11.2003 for a sense of the way this day was celebrated in the areas under LTTE control: http://www.tamilnet.com/art.html?catid=13& artid=10538

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as having annihilated the Self before death and are, therefore, not in need of fire after having completed physical existence (Malamoud 1989). The ascetic image of its cadres nurtured by the LTTE makes it natural to ask if the change in funerary practice was a way of connecting to the sannyasi-tradition. Rank and file LTTE fighters were segregated according to gender. They were not allowed to have sexual relations, they were not allowed to marry, not allowed to use tobacco or alcohol, and not allowed to socialize freely with family or friends outside the unit. As we have already seen above, many poems written by soldiers emphasize the frugal life of soldiers and the single-minded dedication to the cause. This link with – or connotation to – the Hindu tradition has been recognized by people close to the movement. For example, Chandrakanthan, a Catholic priest, former lecturer at the University of Jaffna and a staunch LTTE supporter observes that: (Prabhakaran) … requests the people to venerate those who died in the battle for Eelam as sannyasis (ascetics) who renounced their personal desires and transcended egoistic existence for a common cause of higher virtue. … the rituals performed with offering of flowers and lighting of oil lamps are those normally reserved to Saivite deities and saints (in Wilson 2000: 164–5).

The third aspect worth mentioning is that the new burial practice, and in particular the notion of the individual natukal (gravestone, planted stone) helps to connect the LTTE with its roots in pre-colonial South-Indian history – these roots being real or imagined. The notion of natukal, while now mostly unknown in Sri Lanka, goes far back into South-Indian history, where such stones were erected to commemorate local heroes protecting their communities from outside attacks or harassment (Settar and Sontheimer 1982). Such heroes included men who suffered ‘voluntary death when some irretrievable disgrace or insult befell them’, and who after their death ‘often became tutelary divinities or demons and were worshipped with offerings of food and flowers’ (Kailasapathy 1968: 76). The change in funerary practices must be regarded as part of what I have elsewhere called an effort on the part of the LTTE to homologize the pre- and postcolonial situation, of linking the present claim for statehood with the restoration of authentic Tamil culture (Fuglerud 1999, chapter 9). There are several aspects to this effort, some of which will be touched upon below, but the main thing is that part of the mandate that LTTE has defined for itself is a mandate to set history straight; to retrieve and resurrect individual and national pride through correcting wrongs wrought by colonial forces, mainly Sinhalese colonial forces, in the Tamil homeland. It would be a mistake, therefore, to see e.g. the use of female soldiers as a result of ‘modern’ or ‘western’ ideas about gender equality, or the abolition of caste practices within their territory as a consequence of respecting the rights of the individual. In its propaganda – I here make the distinction between propaganda and the strategic thinking behind it – LTTE is not a ‘modern’ but, rather, a ‘millenarist’ organization, aiming to bring, through its leader and its cadres, a time of glory and prosperity, in this case

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modeled on a mythical era of the past. That the Sri Lankan government and its forces are aware of the natukal’s particular historical connotations of resistance and local autonomy, is indicated by the fact that the complete destruction of the war cemeteries was always one of the first actions taken by government forces, when territory was re-taken from the LTTE. Rational Politics vs Religion LTTE projects itself as a secular movement. In spite of his own description of their aim of attaining liberation as ‘holy’ and their social organization as ‘cultic’, this is a view brought forward also by Schalk, who states that: ‘The movement is secular and is eager to maintain its secular status’ (Schalk 1997a, also 2003: 393). In a series of articles the Sri Lankan historian Roberts has recently challenged this understanding (Roberts 2005a, 2005b, 2007). He points out that their own declaration of secularism notwithstanding, LTTE’s use of concepts, images, color schemes, and rituals consistently employ more or less subtle references to Hinduism. Indeed, the whole ‘plot’ enacted by the LTTE is in line with a basic proposition in Hindu thought, that ‘life is born out of darkness; death itself is the creator’ (Roberts 2007, cf. Shulman 1981). This argument is plausible. To quote Chandrakanthan again: Heroic death founded within the fire of Tamil nationalism has given birth to a new set of terms, almost all derived from the ancient Tamil religion of Saivism; indeed, within the North and East Tamil nationalism has the appeal of a new religious movement. … I have seen hundreds of shrines erected in Jaffna by the friends and relatives of those LTTE cadres who have died in various actions… (in Wilson 2000: 164).

Probably Schalk’s emphasis on the secular nature of the movement, which should be read as an intervention on behalf of the organization, is a defensive move against potential accusations against the LTTE of religious extremism and political mysticism; that is, against the kind of arguments often directed by governments against militant movements employing suicide bombings. Personally, I believe that there is no inherent contradiction between Schalk’s understanding of LTTE as an organization with secular goals, and Roberts’ (2007) exposition of the way the organization draws on religious, particularly Hindu, symbolism. It seems clear that every move made by the LTTE during the period when its apparatus was working at full capacity, was carefully planned and directed by the leadership of the organization, including the embedding of its political project in cultural constructions which were new and innovative, but which nevertheless were historically rooted and resonated with the people’s, especially the poor and uneducated people’s, world. More than anything else, the LTTE has been a systematic and calculating organization, characterized by a divide between its

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leadership constituted by a small circle of men in their 40s and 50s, most of which had some education, and the rank and file soldiers, most of which were younger than 20 and coming from poor families. These teenagers were without schooling as a result of the war. There is reason to believe that the ambiguity on secularism was strategic, the tapping of religious sources conscious, designed to enhance the emotional value of symbols and to make the ideology of sacrifice more palatable both to the fighters themselves and to people not directly taking part in the armed struggle. The idea and phenomenon of sacrifice, so much stressed by LTTE in its celebration of heroism, touches a deep cord in South-Indian spirituality, as can be seen e.g. in the recurrent phenomenon of self-immolation during public protests.12 As noted by Bastin (2002: 68) the standard devotional act of breaking a coconut when visiting a Hindu kovil is commonly recognized as a sublimated form of selfsacrifice, the nut representing the devotee’s own head. It seems reasonable to argue that the location of self-sacrifice within this semantic context helped to structure a religio-cosmological understanding of a better afterlife, if not for the soldiers themselves, so for the Tamil nation. External Cognition – What is Communicated? Concluding, there are two questions: How may we conceive of the phenomenon of ‘external cognition’, and if we accept in broad terms that the subject of discussion can be approached in this way, what did (or does) the aesthetics of the LTTE communicate? As an answer to the first of these two questions I will here limit myself to agreeing with Pedersen (2007) that material culture, or as I would prefer, aesthetic materializations, seem to work like a calculator of social relations under certain circumstances. Pedersen draws on Strathern’s discussion of the ‘functionally isomorphic’ objectifications of social relations in Melanesia, whereby certain otherwise implicit aspects of social life are revealed to them through ceremonial gift exchange (Strathern 1988). He argues: Just as certain purely abstract computations … are difficult – if not impossible – to carry out without the aid of cognitive technologies, the thinking of certain altogether more messy social relationships also is dependent upon the strategic use of different artifacts by virtue of which the conceptualization of this social knowledge is rendered into an ‘on-line’ cognitive task’13 (Pedersen 2007: 146–7). 12  For example, during the protests in the Tamil Diaspora against the military offensive against LTTE in early 2009 at least five incidents of self-immolation occurred in different countries. 13  ‘On-line cognition’ can be defined as involving ‘computations carried out only in terms of neural responses elicited by the presence of external objects…the ingredients of

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Put differently, the simple point is that cultural materializations may allow people ‘to think things that [they] could not otherwise contemplate’ (Day 2004: 114). With respect to the communicative content, what is manifested in the discussed aesthetic involves a hierarchical subtext underlying a seemingly equal social form. The understanding of Tamil culture propagated by the LTTE, that I have called the ‘revolutionary’ as opposed to the ‘traditional’ model of culture, rests upon an abolishment of caste and gender as principles of hierarchy in the Tamil social order (Fuglerud 2001). In the revolutionary model, membership in the Tamil nation is in principle open on equal terms to Tamils of all castes and both genders; it is open to all, that is, who accept the rule of the LTTE. However, as indicated above, the organization’s position in this respect is not based on the idea of universal rights in the western sense of the word but is part of an effort to reach back to a time and a situation that existed before the arrival of colonial powers in the Tamil homeland. As expressed by one female sympathizer, ‘the LTTE’s social justice movement is based on matriarchal principles of ancient Tamil culture, and the wisdom of more than 3,500 years of hard learned lessons in fighting patriarchal Aryan conquerors’ (Kothai 1997: 17). In the understanding of the LTTE, which is an organization grown from the karayar fishing caste that historically provided soldiers to the Tamil king, and which for the last few hundreds years seems to have had a somewhat independent position within the Jaffna social formation, the hierarchical ordering of society, centering on the rule of the vellalar agricultural caste, represents a distortion of the true national ethos brought about by colonial intervention. The ideological project of the LTTE has been directed toward reestablishing a postcolonial situation, of linking the present claim for statehood with the restoration of authentic Tamil culture. In an article in the official LTTE newspaper on the making of the Tiger insignia into the ‘national flag’ of Tamil Eelam, we may read: The Tiger insignia is an image rooted in Dravidian civilisation. It is a symbol that illustrates the martial history and national upheaval of the Tamils. Our national flag is the symbol of the independent state of Tamil Eelam to be created, rooted in the martial traditions of the Tamils (Viduthalai Pulikal, February 1991)

In fact, as I have noted before, ‘one may argue that the liberation struggle of the LTTE plays upon a cultural ambiguity: while to the outside audience one goal of this struggle is presented as eradicating external and internal oppression, in reading their Tamil propaganda, meant for internal consumption, one is left to wonder if the real aim is not to restore the karayars to their rightful place in society’ (Fuglerud 2001: 203). This has also been observed by others. Hellmannthe problem … are all present’ (Bickerton 1995: 90–91). ‘Off-line cognition’ on the other hand, ‘involves computations carried out on more lasting internal representations of those [external] objects. Such computations need not be initiated by external causes, nor need they initiate an immediate motor response’ (Bickerton 1995: 90).

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Rajanayagam (2005, also Sivaram 1992) observes that the success of the LTTE is founded in components of collective memory, among them the Tamil military tradition. This mobilization of beliefs ‘only succeeds, because tradition has been redefined within a framework that accepts the Karyars as guardians of the culture’ (Hellmann-Rajanayagam 2005: 152). In terms of operational ideology the LTTE’s politico-military project revolved around three relationships involving the LTTE warriors and potential martyrs: their relationship to territory, their relationship to their leader, and their relationship to non-combatants or the Tamil people in general (cf. Fuglerud 2009). The central element in the first is the conceptualization of territory as Motherland (Tamiltay) or, rather, the land as a Mother. The relationship is portrayed as a mutual one, where the life of a soldier (through birth) is a debt to be repaid through individual sacrifice, securing the continued fertility of the Mother. This debt to the land, however, is often conflated with loyalty to the talaivar, the leader. It is a well-known fact that LTTE’s leader Prabakaran among followers is revered as Suriya Devi, the Sun God. It was to Prabakaran that LTTE soldiers pledged loyalty. It was for him they died. Regarding the last of the relationships mentioned it was through willingness to die, and through actual dying in battle, that LTTE cadres became connected to the unfolding of history, and subsequently became part of Tamil destiny (Fuglerud 1999: 170). Non-combatants have, in principle, no other role than to support the struggle of the fighters, which establishes an asymmetrical relationship between the LTTE and its political constituency. These three relationships, I suggest, are the ones which the aesthetic in question laid bare to the people under LTTE control. Bibiography Ann, A. 1994. Unbroken Chains: Exploration into the Jaffna Dowry System. Jaffna: Malathi Press. Balasingham, A. 2004. War and Peace. Armed Struggle and Peace Efforts of Liberation Tigers. Mitcham: Fairmax Publishing. Bastin, R. 2002. The Domain of Constant Excess: Plural Worship at the Munnesvaram Temples in Sri Lanka. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Bickerton, D. 1995. Language and Human Behaviour. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Charbonneau, L. 2009. Ban Denies U.N. Covered Up Death Toll in Sri Lanka [Online]. Available at: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5507PG20090601 [accessed: 2 June 2009]. Clark, A. and Chalmers, D.J. 1998. ‘The Extended Mind’. Analysis, 58, 10–23. Day, M. 2004. ‘Religion, Off-line Cognition and the Extended Mind’. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 4(1), 101–21. Eelamweb, 1989. National Heroes Day. [Online]. Available at: http://www. tamilcanadian.ca/maveerar/shankar/ [accessed: 6 June 2009].

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________, 1999. Life on the Outside. The Tamil Diaspora and Long-Distance nationalism. London: Pluto Press. ________, 2001. ‘Time and Space in the Sri Lanka-Tamil Diaspora’. Nations and Nationalism, 7(2), 195–214. ________, 2009. ‘Fractured Sovereignty: The LTTE’s State-building in an Interconnected World’, in Spatialising Politics. Culture and Geography in Postcolonial Sri Lanka, edited by C. Brun and T. Jazeel. Los Angeles, London, New Delhi: Sage, 194–215 Gell, A. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hellmann-Rajanayagam, D. 2005. ‘And Heroes Die: Poetry of the Tamil Liberation Movement in Northern Sri Lanka’. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 28(1), 112–53. Hobart, A. and Kapferer, B. (eds) 2005. Aestetics in Performance. Formations of Symbolic Construction and Experience. New York: Berghahn Books. Kailasapaty, K. 1968. Tamil Heroic Poetry. Oxford University Press: Oxford. ‘Kothai’. 1997. ‘Social Justice’. Hot Spring. A Journal of Commitment, 2(5), 15–19. Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam / Department of International Relations: Committee for the formation of a Provisional Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam (Press Statement) 16. June 2009. [Online]. Available at: http:// www.tamilnation.org/ltte/international_relations/090616rudra_transnational_ en.pdf [Accessed: 1 July 2009]. Malamoud, C. 1989. Cuire lemonde. Rite et pensée dans l’Inde ancienne. Paris: La Découverte. Meyer, E. 1984. ‘Seeking the Roots of the Tragedy’, in Sri Lanka in Change and Crisis, edited by J. Manor. London: Croom Helm, 137–52. Natali, C. 2008. ‘Building Cemeteries, Constructing Identities: Funerary Practices and Nationalist Discourse among the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka’. Contemporary South Asia, 16(3), 287–301. Pedersen, M.A. 2007. ‘Talismans of Thought: Shamanist Ontologies and Extended Cognition in Northern Mongolia’, in Thinking Through Things. Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically, edited by A. Henare, M. Holbraad and S. Wastell. London: Routledge, 141–66. Roberts, M. 2005a. ‘Saivite Symbols, Sacrifice, and Tamil Tiger Rites’. Social Analysis, 49(1), 67–93. ________ 2005b. ‘Tamil Tiger “Martyrs”: Regenerating Divine potency?’. Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 28, 493–514. ________ 2007. Blunders in Tigerland: Pape’s Muddels on ‘Suicide Bombers’ in Sri Lanka. Heidelberg: Heidelberg Papers in South Asian and Comparative Politics, Working paper No. 32, November. Schalk, P. 1997a. ‘The Revival of Martyr Cults among Ilavar’, Temenos, 33, 150–90. [Online]. Available at: www.tamilcanadian.com [accessed: 18 November 2009]. ________ 1997b. ‘Resistance and Martyrdom in the Process of State-Formation of Tamililam’, in Martyrdom and Political Resistance. Essays from Asia and

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Europe (Comparative Asian Studies, 18), edited by J. Pettigrew. VU Press: Amsterdam, 61–82. [Online]. Available at: http://www.tamilnation.org/ ideology/schalkthiyagam.htm [accessed: 28 December 2006]. ________ 2003. ‘Beyond Hindu Festivals: The Celebration of Great Heroes’ Day by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam (LTTE) in Europe’, in Tempel und Tamilen in zweiter Heimat. Hindus aus Sri Lanka im deutschsprachigen und skandinavischen Raum, edited by M. Bauman, B. Luchhesi and A. Wilke. Würzburg: Ergon Verlag. 391–421. Settar, S. and Sontheimer, G.D. (eds) 1982: Memorial Stones. Dharwad: Institute of Indian Art History. Shulman, D. 1981. Tamil Temple Myths. Sacrifice and Divine Marriage in the South Indian Saiva Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sivaram, D.P. 1992. ‘Tamil Militarism’. Lanka Guardian, 1 May–1 November. Strathern, M. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Svasek, M. 2007. Anthropology, Art and Cultural Production. London: Pluto Press. TamilNet, 2003. Great Heroes’ Day Celebrations Begin in Trincomalee [Online]. Available at: http://www.tamilnet.com/art.html?catid=13&artid=10538 [accessed: 1 July 2009]. ________, 2008. LTTE leader Pays Homage to Black Tigers [Online]. Available at: http://www.tamilnet.com/art.html?catid=13&artid=26268 [accessed: 1 July 2009] Tamil United Liberation Front. 1976. Vaddukoddai Resolution [Online]. Available at: http://www.eelamweb.com/history/document/vaddu/ [accessed: 18 November 2009]. University of Madras, 1982. Tamil Lexicon, 6 vols [1924–1936] published under the authority of the University of Madras. Madras: Macmillan India Press. Verdery, K. 1999. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press. Vaddukoddai Resolution. 1976. [Online]. Available at: http://www.eelamweb. com/maveerar/shankar/ [accessed: 16 November 2009]. Viduthalai Pulikal. 1991. [Online]. Available at: http://eelaminexile.com/may1976-to-2009/viduthalai-pulikal-paper.html [accessed: 21 November 2009]. Wilson, A.J. 2000. Sri Lankan Tamil Nationalism. Its Origins and Development in the 19th and 20th Centuries. London: Hurst and Company.

Part II Discursive Strategies – Muted Language

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Chapter 5

When Soldiers Explain: Discursive Strategies Used by Israeli Conscripts When Recounting Their Experiences in the Field Erella Grassiani

‘It’s not nice … but what can I do about it?’ the soldier rhetorically asked when telling me about a crying Palestinian mother he encountered during the arrest of her son. His question showed a certain realization of the suffering of Palestinians under the Israeli occupation on one side, but also a profound passive attitude towards it on the other. We can hear such utterances frequently when listening to soldiers talk about their experiences in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). In this chapter I will analyze such statements as elements of discursive strategies used by Israeli soldiers when giving account of their often violent encounters with Palestinians. I will discuss several of such dominant strategies in order to gain a deeper insight into the way these soldiers experience and express these encounters. Introduction For more than 42 years Israel has occupied the West Bank, and until 2005 the Gaza Strip as well. This occupation requires numerous young Israeli men to carry out nightly arrests, man checkpoints, and patrol Palestinian towns and villages as part of their compulsory military service. Most of these combat soldiers, both regular soldiers and (junior) commanders, who make out about ten percent of all Israeli conscripts, are stationed in the OPT. Through my study I realized that, in general, Israeli soldiers take a passive stance towards their roles as soldiers serving in the OPT and as controllers of another people. As we shall see later, utterances such as ‘There is nothing I can do’, ‘You have to do it’ and ‘You have to do your job’ are abundant in their   When speaking about violence, both physical and verbal violence is meant.  In the summer of 2005 Israel unilaterally disengaged from the Gaza strip. However, Israel still controls practically all Gazan borders and the flow of people and goods and Israeli soldiers still perform operations in the strip.   Although a shift is occurring, still very little Israeli women serve as operational combatants.

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language. The soldiers usually do not question the occupation of the territories by the Israeli military, and most take it as a given fact; a situation they cannot change, and within which they need to work due to factors beyond their control. Furthermore, most soldiers see their work, consisting of many constabulary tasks, as tedious, boring, and not very prestigious, and many would rather carry out more ‘heroic’ operations. Notwithstanding, the occupation and the presence of the Israeli soldiers within the OPT bring along certain practices with consequences on several levels; for the Palestinian civilians, as well as for the soldiers. The soldiers have to deal with the manifold consequences the practice of occupation entails for all parties involved, such as the daily hardship for the Palestinians, and also unsafe situations for the combatants themselves. They have to take decisions and carry out actions. The situations the soldiers find themselves in can cause dilemmas of a moral nature, if they do not leave them indifferent. From observations, human rights reports, and soldiers’ testimonies, it becomes clear that the behaviour of soldiers is often violent, either verbally, physically or both. Sometimes this violence is inherent to the activities they perform, but often it is random and motivated by frustration, fear or anger. Soldiers then need strategies to explain, justify, and legitimize the suffering they witness and/or cause. When telling about their experiences in the Palestinian Territories, Israeli soldiers give account of their behaviour and decision-making by explaining, legitimizing, justifying or even denying their actions and reactions. In this chapter such accounts will be de-constructed in order to filter out the different and often ambivalent strategies Israeli soldiers use to make sense of their experiences. I will use the work of Cohen (2001) on denial, and of Bandura (1999, 2002) on moral disengagement to discuss and clarify these strategies that emerged from the empirical data I collected. Both these authors are concerned with the ways we deal or do not deal (for example denial) with witnessing or perpetrating violent acts and subsequent suffering. It is important to note that the themes and strategies I will discuss here are the dominant themes that I found in the soldiers’ discourses. Since the wide range of discursive strategies that exists, can impossibly be covered here. I only chose the most important themes and strategies in the interviews for further exploration.   This is not to say that the consequences for both parties should be perceived as equal. It is taken as a given that the position of the Israeli soldier is one of power on which the Palestinian citizen is dependent. My position as a researcher on the Israeli military is a critical one. While not feeling the need to explicitly state my political opinions during my research I, however, deeply appreciate the way these opinions have shaped the direction of my research. While some would find having a critical political position problematic within research, I believe any researcher of conflict situations implicitly or explicitly will have her beliefs and opinions about the situation she is scrutinizing. Instead of ignoring such beliefs one should recognize them and appreciate the way they influence our research and the way we write about it.

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Such strategies are often interconnected and ambivalent. The speakers combine them and sometimes use them simultaneously in one and the same speech act. Before going into these discursive strategies, however, I will briefly elaborate on the methods I have used and discuss some ideas concerning the construction of accounts by perpetrators and bystanders of violence and suffering. Methods In order to gain insight into the daily lives and discursive strategies of Israeli conscripts, I conducted interviews with these young men after their discharge from the military. I interviewed both soldiers and commanders in order to gain insights into the broad field of soldiering. Because commanders and officers are recruited from the ranks in the Israeli military, everyone had similar experiences at some point in time. The commanders I interviewed, however, had additional, different experiences and views, which gave me insights into an extra dimension of the experience of soldiers. Interviewing former soldiers after their release enabled them to speak more freely about their experiences in a system they had been part of for three or more years. The interviews were conducted in Hebrew and the informants were found through the so-called ‘snowball method’. Surprisingly perhaps, most of my informants were very happy to be interviewed and to share their stories. In addition to these interviews, I also analyzed dozens of soldiers’ testimonies collected by the Israeli organization Breaking the Silence. This organization was founded in 2004 by ex-combatants and wants to ‘place a mirror in front of society and compel it to look and ask itself true moral questions’ (Breaking the Silence 2005: 4). In order to do this, they collect testimonies from Israeli combatants about their experiences in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. These testimonies are then published and presented in Israel and abroad. Within the military context in which this research took place, it was fairly impossible to conduct participant observation. In order to enhance the understanding of soldiers’ experiences, however, I undertook numerous fieldtrips to the Occupied Palestinian Territories and carried out observations there.

 Israeli Jews, men and women, are called up for service at the age of 18 (Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and orthodox Jews are exempted). Men serve three years, women two. Officers mostly serve longer than regular soldiers. Officially, men are expected to report for reservist duty for about 20 years after their release, serving approximately 30 days a year. They can also be called up during emergencies, such as an outbreak of war. The amount of people who actually perform reservist duty is, however, quite low as many are exempted for various reasons.

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Perpetrators’ Accounts Speech acts can be seen and analyzed as accounts. Perpetrators of violence or bystanders often give accountability for the actions perpetrated or witnessed. This then becomes, in Cohen words, a form of moral accounting (2001: 59). These accounts are products of the social environment in which they are formed, which means that they are not private and particular, but part of a shared experience. In different social settings, different accounts of the same event can be given due to their social character. As I deal with soldiers’ explanations about their behaviour and related motivations, the realization that their accounts are social and influenced by their surroundings is very important. Because accounts are ‘embedded in popular culture, banal language codes and state-encouraged legitimations’ (Cohen 2001: 76), keeping the background of each Israeli soldier in mind is imperative. What we, furthermore, cannot forget is the influence the military system has on the formation of soldiers’ discourse. Goffman’s work on ‘total institutions’ (1961) reminds us how influential the military system is on the way soldiers explain their experiences and behaviour. Within the Israeli military a clear expectation is present which prevents soldiers to act on their individual initiative, and this expectation is highly internalized. The strategies discussed are thus in part also a product of this systemic influence on soldiers and it contributes to their dominancy within soldiers’ discourse. Cohen divides accounts in two categories: justifications and excuses. Users of the first category would admit that they committed an act of violence, but they would refuse to see it as wrong. Such accounts are often ideological, aggressive and unapologetic (2001: 59). The second category, the excuses, try to neutralize and normalize the acts committed. When a soldier uses excuses, he would often admit that the act was wrong, but he would add a phrase like ‘I had to do it’ or ‘I didn’t have a choice’ (Cohen 2001: 59). As we shall see here, both categories can be found in the discourse of Israeli soldiers serving within the OPT. Soldiers’ Talk Seu (2003) argues that the (psychological) explanations given by people, and the discourse they use when confronted with the suffering of others, can be seen as constructions of accounts and justifications. The ‘talk’ of people should be seen as a form of social action. Thus, explanations given by people are significant when trying to understand human behavior. Seu’s ideas about how to look at people’s daily explanations and her use of psychological theories are important when looking at the discourse of Israeli soldiers in the field. The ‘talk’ of the soldiers should indeed be seen as a site for constructing accounts and this shows the importance of investigating the way they talk, explain and justify their actions and behaviour. It is important to address the message the speaker wants to convey, but it is also important to look at the way the discourse is constructed. Thus, one

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has to focus on the exact words that are used, the intonation of the speaker, and his/her body language. As we shall see shortly, many Israeli soldiers do not use the ‘I’ form but the passive ‘you’ when they are talking about their own personal experiences. For instance, a soldier will say ‘and then you go into that house’ instead of ‘and then I went into that house’. The use of a passive agent is important since it creates a distance between the action and the agent himself. Bandura warns against the use of the ‘agentless passive voice’ (2002: 105) within which acts are carried out by nameless forces such as when ‘The truck drove into the crowd’. The driver of the truck remains absent and thus innocent here. Minimization of Moral Agency From initial conversations with soldiers I noticed a sense of ‘accepting passivity’ or a lack of agency when they spoke about their presence and activities in the OPT. Even when they recognized the suffering and hardship of Palestinians that they witnessed, they did not come into any kind of action. This passive stance could be called a minimization of their agentive role (Bandura 2002: 106), and it is the first strategy I will discuss. It means that distance is taken from the suffering that is witnessed and responsibility is evaded or displaced (Bandura 2002: 106). The themes related to such a position are: inaction, apathy, indifference and feelings of helplessness that feature in the discourse of the soldiers. Besides being insensitive or indifferent to the suffering of others, a lack of agency could also mean ‘a sense’ of inability to do anything while acknowledging pain of others. Let’s take a look at some examples. ‘Ma la’asot’ (What Can You Do?) or ‘Ein ma la’asot’ (There Is Nothing You Can Do) One soldier I interviewed had worked on a D9 bulldozer, which is used to destroy houses and groves wherever the military deems it necessary. In the [Gaza] strip it’s also intense … we were in the area of Netzarim, at the entrance of Netzarim. There were shootings and explosives on buses; 200 m from the road they cleared everything: houses, groves, everything. Except for one mosque, they didn’t touch it. It was like a flat plate. So we took down houses and olive trees. (Q: How did you feel?) You know for an Arab what is important is first of all his olive trees. After that come his wife and the house. It’s not nice, I started to work with gardening, so it’s not nice, but we had to do it;   With thanks to Avichay Sharon of Breaking the Silence who pointed this out to me.   This soldier explained in this interview how he had taken up gardening as a hobby, which, he claimed, made him understand the connection of the Palestinians to their groves

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Violence Expressed what can you do? It would happen anyway. (Q: Did you meet with the civilians who owned the lands?) Yes for sure, there were families hanging from the trees. Children in the trees, they wouldn’t come down. Then infantry soldiers would come and shoot teargas at them, they would get them out of there and then you take down the trees. Or also in buildings, you give the house a blow with the tractor, you shake the house, they come outside and then you destroy the house. [Emphasis added].

In the language Israeli soldiers use, ‘Ein ma la’asot’ or ‘Ma la’asot’ (‘There is nothing you can do or What can you do?’) is a frequently recurring theme, which soldiers use when confronted with situations they see as problematic or painful, such as the suffering of Palestinian civilians whose house they invade or whose groves they destroy. Often such utterances are added to a description of an operation within which civilians were involved. The soldier then typically tells about the operation he participated in, in an unemotional manner, adds information about the civilians that were present, for example a family in a house that was entered at night for a search, and finishes with the sentence ‘There is nothing you can do’ or ‘What can you do’. The speaker would give attention to the factual details of the operation and much less to its meaning and actual consequences, which is in line with Bandura’s concept of moral disengagement (2002: 107). Furthermore, when activities are carried out in groups, the division of tasks diffuses responsibility. When we look more closely at the discursive strategy that is used here, we see that the soldier acknowledges the suffering and discomfort of the others. But he goes on to state that this is out of his hands; the work has to be done, and as such it is morally justified (Bandura 2002). That there is some suffering involved seems unavoidable, or in the words of the soldier quoted above: ‘It would happen anyway’. This strategy is a typical example of what Cohen (2001) calls ‘implicatory denial’, by which he means that the speaker acknowledges the general interpretation of an act, but he would not take the responsibility for it. Its moral implications are interpreted as unimportant, untrue or exaggerated. In the following example, a soldier tells about his experiences at checkpoints in the OPT. From this quotation we can conclude he feels strongly that checkpoints exist for a good reason, even though the work linked to them was not always easy: (…) you really feel you have to be there. You check trucks and cars and what can you do, they are all potentials. So we check the car, we don’t turn everything up side down, check it like we are supposed to, I really don’t remember something happened in instances like that. It’s not like you take this guy into an alley and and trees more deeply.  By potentials this soldier means possible terrorists, the passersby could all potentially be suicide bombers or they could be aiding a terrorist attack.

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beat him up. You don’t do things like that, there is always a reason (…) you do what you have to and let the guy go. In Bethlehem and Hebron, sometimes there were sudden checkpoints that we put up and we had to stop people, also in the entrance to Jerusalem. There was a taxi that passed and there was a woman who had had a miscarriage and they took the foetus with them to burry in the village, and one of my friends had to check the box. These are cases (…) where there is nothing you can do.

The soldier emphasizes that he and his comrades were never brutal ‘for no reason’. If they were brutal it meant they had a reason to be. He senses the difficulty of the situation when a soldier has to stop a woman at the checkpoint with her lifeless child and check her. However, it is clear from his words that he feels the inspections are justified, difficult as they may be for the Palestinians and for the soldiers themselves. Once more we come upon a form of moral disengagement as Bandura calls it, in the form of moral justification within which the role of the perpetrator in the harm caused is minimized and ‘pernicious conduct is made personally and socially acceptable’ (Bandura 2002: 103). The type of discourse used here indicates that soldiers feel a loss of control and a lack of power, either real or imagined in an effort to distance themselves from any responsibility. They acknowledge the situation, and they do not deny the suffering or hardship involved. The situation comes from a necessity, or so they assert, like security considerations, and as such their actions within it are perceived as justified within the system they belong to. The theme of self defence is also used here: ‘It’s either them or us’, which enhances the feeling of the soldiers having no other choice than to act as they do. It is very clear that the soldiers take no responsibility whatsoever for their actions or the situations they find themselves in. Again a case of implicatory denial (Cohen 2001) is at play here. A clear lack of agency from the soldiers is present. In both quotations it becomes clear that, while acknowledging the suffering or the difficult situation the Palestinians are in, the real difficulty the soldiers speak of is the difficulty for themselves as witnesses or as reluctant inflictors of this suffering. Here, part of the blame for having to perpetrate harmful activities is, surprisingly enough, placed with the victims. Because of their presence as a generalized entity, as Palestinians, as ‘the other’, the soldiers have to do what they do (Bandura 2002: 110). Lo na’im’ (Not Nice) As I showed in the beginning of this chapter, the expression ‘Lo na’im’ or ‘It’s not nice’ is often added to a phrase like ‘There is nothing you can do’. The theme of ‘Lo na’im’ shows an acknowledgement of the soldier for the suffering or hardship he has caused or witnessed. However, followed by ‘Ein ma la’asot’ (What can you do) this acknowledgment stands on its own, and the soldier using the expression takes no responsibility for the situation. Furthermore, we cannot confuse this

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with a sign of guilt or remorse. It is more a statement of acknowledgment and a subsequent acceptance of the situation as it is. The concept of ‘Lo na’im’ also conveys a reluctance of soldiers to do the work they have to do. They are not proud of their work, which can be labelled as ‘dirty work’ (Hughes 1958), work that society and often the workers themselves identify as being less worthy than other work, because it literally involves dirt or because of its moral taint. However, the hardship or suffering witnessed or caused, seems merely a necessary evil in this dirty work the soldiers have to carry out. In the following quote a soldier from a naval commando unit expresses his opinion on the humaneness of the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces). He acknowledges that the operations carried out by the Israeli military are hard for the Palestinian population (or ‘not nice’ as he phrases it), but all in all he wants to make clear that the Israeli military is a very humane military, too humane even, a clear case of implicatory denial (Cohen 2001): We, I don’t know about other units, we are humane, and even too humane (…) no one comes and shoots at children, and not at women and old people and also men that (…) like you don’t like a guy and you shoot his foot to shut him up. There is no such thing. Women and children, we even don’t bind their hands or eyes. We give a chair to the old people, so they can sit outside. Of course it’s not a nice thing, imagine someone coming to your house and saying go outside and they search your house. I understand the population that doesn’t like it (lo na’im la), and of course they don’t understand me that I don’t want a terrorist to blow himself up in my house tomorrow or in Tel Aviv. But that is the ‘best of two evils’ I have to do it. So we tell them to get out outside, we tell them to take their shirt up, to lower their pants, not like in a humiliating way, but because there were instances of suicide bombers. (…) So on one side it’s not nice (lo jafe) and I think we are humane anyway, we could also say ‘take down your pants and underwear’ and also to women and humiliate them completely. But we don’t do such a thing.

Apparent from this example is a feeling that ‘It could be worse’, in the sense that the soldiers acknowledge the fact that their actions are harmful to others but not nearly as harmful as others’ actions are. This strategy is called an ‘advantageous comparison’ by Bandura where the way ‘behaviour is viewed is coloured by what it is compared against’ (2002: 105). When you contrast your actions with other, much more severe actions, your actions won’t look as bad. Indifference Until now, most examples given concerned soldiers who in some way or another were troubled by the suffering they witnessed, when at the same time legitimizing it. However, we also find soldiers who are indifferent to any hardship or distress

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they encounter. In the following example from a testimony collected by Breaking the Silence, a soldier explains how his service in Hebron was marked by orders, which he would execute without questions: I admit that Hebron is not divisible into periods, for me, it’s like one long line. As far as I was concerned, I wasn’t sensitive enough to it at the time, to when curfews were imposed, when curfews were lifted. It only affected me when I would go on guard duty. All I knew was that before going on guard duty (…) I’d ask: ‘is there a curfew?’ ‘Is there no curfew?’ ‘There’s a curfew?’ ‘Cool, I’ll enforce it.’ ‘No curfew?’ ‘Cool, be on your way.’ Most of the time there was a curfew.

This indifference does not mean the soldier was not sensitive in any way to the situation of the Palestinians who were affected by the curfews he mentioned, but he chose not to be concerned with it and to just literally follow the rules. Here we see a form of numbing of the senses that results in sheer detachment and indifference. The description Cohen adds to the notion of indifference can also be applied here; namely when one does not fully realize the immorality of his or her actions. The acts someone performs are then neutralized and normalized because everyone is doing it, without having any other (ideological) motives (2001: 100). On another level, a sense of indifference can also come from a bigger entity than one soldier or a unit. As Cohen shows us, when an entire society uses collective denial, and activities are thus performed within a moral vacuum, there is no possibility to see that one’s actions are morally wrong (2001: 10–11). In the case of the Israeli military this is an important point, as many activities of the soldiers are legitimized under the cover of ‘security’. By a (self chosen) lack of deep knowledge of the situation they are, furthermore, often approved by the Israeli public. Israeli soldiers then find themselves in a situation within which, because of normalization, they cannot, or only with difficulty, make out if their actions are morally wrong or not. The strategies covered by the theme of the minimization of moral agency such as implicatory denial, moral justification, advantageous comparison and displacement of responsibility are thus on one side characterized by acknowledgement of the difficulties Palestinian civilians go through on a daily basis as a result of the Israeli occupation of the OPT and the operations of the IDF. On the other side there is a deep passive acceptance of the situation as it is, no responsibility is taken, and no change is pursued. This acceptance, combined with a feeling of inability to change the situation can be based on the positioning of the soldiers within a hierarchical situation with not much room to manoeuvre. However, it is also used by soldiers to divert responsibility away from them. For when you are in a situation you are   The concept of numbing is the main focus of my PhD dissertation (2009) Morality and Normalcy in A-symmetrical Conflict: Distancing, Denial and Moral Numbing among Israeli Conscripts in Everyday Practices of Occupation, VU University.

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unable to change, as they argue they are, even if you would want to, you can hardly be seen as responsible for it. Furthermore, the perception of the soldiers and often the whole society of their activities as legitimate and necessary for the greater good (security of the state) also contribute to the diversion of responsibility elsewhere. Professionalism (Miktsoayut) … there are different [political] opinions, that’s obvious, but the moment the operation starts everyone forgets everything, everyone knows that you have to do exactly what is needed, you don’t take it into the operations, you try not to deal with it, you know that you will do what you need to do. Also when it goes against your beliefs.

The second discursive strategy I will discuss is professionalism, one of the most central themes in the discourse of soldiers. Within this theme, many sub-themes used to explain behaviour or make sense of it can be grouped. Besides using the actual term of professionalism ‘miktsoayut’, soldiers use many related terms while explaining their actions and decision-making in the field.10 It’s a Job /Doing it Right /Doing a Good Job In the discourse of soldiers, the perception of their activities as ‘a job’ is striking. It firstly tells us a lot about the status they give their work and secondly it naturalizes their military activities. The activities of the soldiers become ordinary performances without extra ordinary meanings. Furthermore, perceiving military work as just a job can point to the use of a discourse of professionalism as a legitimizing factor. Within this frame of mind, the work the soldier performs is a job he has to do without having a real say in the matter. Referring to Cohen’s work again, such a strategy could be called a form of interpretative denial, where facts are acknowledged but their meaning is neutralized, a strategy also seen before under the notion of indifference. In addition, a clear displacement of responsibility is at play, as the job is usually done to obey an order given by someone else, someone who then should take responsibility for its consequences.

10 Commanders and soldiers use this theme of professionalism in several ways. While both use it to indicate the banality of their activities and the importance to do their work well and according to the rules, commanders also employ this theme from a more strategic point of view. This view is related to the leadership trainings they receive and the way they learn to look at situations from a different, more encompassing perspective. This latter use will not be discussed here, but I have elaborated on it elsewhere (Grassiani 2009).

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I’m a person who wants to be professional, I’m not there to make peace, I’m there to do my job. So if someone wants to pass the checkpoint and he’s not supposed to pass there, and he has three boxes of cigarettes, I could professionally say I won’t check all the boxes one by one. But I want to make a statement [to the Palestinians], so I let this guy sit for an hour and a half and I check every box, because explosives can be found in anything and show him I’m not playing games. We check everything [to make sure] that no terrorist will go through this checkpoint, here there will be no mistakes. They can go through another section but here it won’t happen. So people come with vegetables and we search all the coconuts and through all the lettuce, to make sure a tomato is a tomato.

The soldier in the example above explicitly uses the term ‘professional’. As a commander in the artillery, he sees himself as such and speaks in terms of ‘doing his job’ and ‘not making peace’, making clear he is there to carry out his mission as given to him by decision makers above him. He aimed to be a professional and this meant to aim at his mission; making sure that his checkpoint would deter terrorists from attempting to cross it, while simultaneously setting an example for his soldiers. Another soldier tells how his commanders explained the situation in the territories during the beginning of the second Intifada. 11 ‘This is the situation’ he said ‘this is what we have to do, and there is no political explanation. A platoon commander comes and does his job and the soldiers the same.’ In short, the reasoning used by this soldier’s supervisors was geared towards having a job to do and this is all one needs to know. Their message was that the soldiers shouldn’t look at the political side of what they are doing; as soldiers they should only follow orders, do their work. This clearly facilitates a distances between the soldier and the consequences his activities have. The situation is simplified for the soldiers and diminished to ‘just perform the job’, diffusing responsibility for the consequences and decision-making concerning this job to the upper echelons. It is yet another example of implicatory denial as defined by Cohen (2001). Thus, when using phrases such as ‘I’m just doing my job’ or ‘It’s a job’, Israeli soldiers use a professional discourse that in fact makes their military activities ‘normal’ jobs. This normalization gives them the opportunity to distance themselves from the activities they carry out. When one is ‘just doing his job’, the performer does not take responsibility for this work and the way it is carried out; people higher up in the hierarchy gave him the orders, and hence he is not the one to be held responsible or even obliged to explain his actions. Using such a professionalized discourse, as we shall see further on, makes military activities more detached and less personal. Responsibility for one’s action 11  Intifada is the Arabic word for uprising, which is used for the Palestinian struggle against the Israeli occupation, the first that broke out in 1987 and the current one, which started in 2000.

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and its consequences is displaced, and its meanings are neutralized. A job has to be carried out and factors around it, such as the suffering or hardship of people involved, for example a family that is woken up in the middle of the night, or a truck driver who has to wait hours with his truck at a checkpoint, cannot be considered. Their suffering is, at most, a ‘necessary evil’. Following Orders Not surprisingly, in the interviews with soldiers the following of orders was an often-recurring theme. Everywhere and at all times in history, soldiers have learned that one of the most important traits to master is to be able to follow orders, and not to ask questions. Again and again soldiers point to the fact that they were ordered to perform the tasks they characterize as ‘a job’, and they can therefore not be expected to take responsibility. Responsibility is very clearly displaced to different parties, mostly up to (senior) commanders or even the state. Important here is the location of agency, who does what, and who takes responsibility for actions carried out. Trust is put on the commanders for giving the right orders to their soldiers, as the latter don’t see the situation from a ‘system’s point of view’ and thus have to rely on the knowledge of their superiors.12 Following orders then, is for many soldiers closely related to their lack of ability to deliberate on their activities and their very limited decision-making opportunities. One soldier from the engineering corps, illustrated this in short and simple terms when he said ‘You don’t have so much freedom to choose what you do, you have orders and you do that, afterwards you might come to think whether it was good or not. It makes no difference if you agree or not.’ From the following example we see that while the soldier believes it is his job to trust his superiors and not to deliberate about the operations, he and his comrades make a conscious choice not to dig too deep into the reasons behind the operations they performed. In order to do the job, this soldier seems to say, it is better not to know too much, because personal doubts or refusing an order are not viable options. We wanted to know, it wasn’t like we really didn’t know why we were doing this, we know what this guy did, and why we had to take him outside this night, we didn’t get too much inside it (…) we knew that if they say we have to do it, it comes from above, and they probably know what they are doing. It’s not our task to say no, we won’t do it.

12  A ‘system point of view’ is used mostly by commanders to explain situations or operations that correspond with the view of the military system itself. Commanders who have gone through leadership trainings learn how to take a step back and look at a situation in a more abstract way.

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In conclusion we can say that performing their job as they are ordered without hurting others or themselves is very central to the way these Israeli soldiers look at their activities. Seeing their work as a job and not much more than that, a job that has to be done with no questions asked, makes their position regarding the implications of the work more distant. Such strategies then entail implicatory denial (Cohen 2001) and a great amount of displacement of responsibility (Bandura 2002). Ideology Within the third strategy to be discussed, I will group expressions of patriotism, nationalism and emotions of defending the state of Israel as ideological strategies. The cultural schemes that are invoked here to explain and justify behaviour by soldiers are principled by nature and hence, often involve strong convictions on the side of the soldier. A Sense of Mission When giving accounts of their experiences, many soldiers and commanders described a feeling they called a sense of mission, or ‘shlihkut’ that was especially evoked during bigger operations, which they felt were important for the IDF and Israel as a whole. With this term, they highlighted a sense of connectedness to the nation, to the aims of the state and the military. They felt that their presence in the OPT had a real and important reason. In Bandura’s terms this is a clear moral justification in which ‘pernicious conduct is made personally and socially acceptable, by portraying it as serving socially worthy or moral purposes’ (2002: 103). The following quotation, a commander, who stayed in the IDF as a professional for several years after his mandatory conscription, says the following about this feeling: That’s the base for everything, I wouldn’t have stayed in the military if (…) I hadn’t felt I was in ‘keva’ (professional service). I just did a longer service. I’m living in a country were you have to serve three years, and after three years I felt it shouldn’t end here. That I hadn’t given what I wanted, and that I could give more. I said that on the day that it doesn’t feel like a mission but becomes a job, I would quit. And I did, even though the temptations were great, I got out at that point, the next phase would be a job, that wasn’t a mission, that wasn’t living the military.

Interestingly, this commander even states that from the moment he felt that his military service did not feel as a mission anymore but started to be more like a normal job, he quit. This is to say that from the moment his service became normal and not ideological, he felt he did not have anything to give to the IDF. He refers here to the republican notion of citizenship Israel knows and which

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means that in order to be a full citizen of the state one should ‘give’ something, contribute to the state. In Israel this contribution is almost exclusively seen in terms of military service. Also this commander has a clear ideological motivation for serving and traces this back to his upbringing in a patriotic home: I wanted to be a pilot; I grew up in a ‘militant’ house. My father is very militant. There were a lot of stories about the army in the house, stories with values. (Q: What values?) Comradeship, and to be brave of heart and feeling love for the country. (Q: Did you feel connected to the state?) Of course, I came from there. I feel a sense of mission. In difficult times it keeps your spirits up. You know that if you don’t do it, and if he won’t, then no one will. I wanted to give as much as I possibly could. I joined the paratroopers. I wanted a military career, to be a platoon commander, and I knew that if not that, then at least an officer, a company commander.

Both commanders demonstrate a highly ideologically motivated attitude towards their service. They did not join the military because they had to, but because they really wanted to serve, and because they wanted to give whatever they could to the state. This discourse is clearly different from some of the examples given before. It is, however, important to keep in mind that such an ideologically motivated way of speaking is also at times used by Israeli soldiers. It can, furthermore, easily be used as a justifying or legitimizing discourse. In the next paragraph I will clarify this point by taking a bit further this feeling of mission. Invoking the Security Theme: Avenging Attacks Israel or Protecting Israeli Civilians One notion that fits in with this ideological strategy within soldiers’ discourse is the idea that attacks on Israel have to be avenged. Terrorist attacks on buses, hotels or restaurants, for example, would constitute attacks on Israel. Such events within Israeli society can have a far-reaching impact on how soldiers in the field feel and behave. A certain ‘sense of mission’ was said to overcome soldiers when they associated their duty within the Occupied Palestinian Territories with the attacks on Israeli civilian centres. Military activities then became morally justified to them. Suddenly the boring work at the checkpoints or the routine of arrests became more meaningful as the soldiers realized the impact their work could have; they could be stopping or arresting potential terrorists at that very moment. With the chain of bombings, I think it started with Hotel Park, I don’t remember there was this week of another 4–5 bombings, that’s it, the IDF now has to take everything down. It’s something that you felt. People said, ‘come on let’s do something, we have to!’ (…) and things like that.

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In the above quote a soldier who participated in operations under fire during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, 13 recalls the mood of the soldiers around him and the language of avenging that was present. However, not only during such extreme operations this rhetoric can be found. This soldier recalls how soldiers in his unit reacted to talks about morality and proper behaviour by their superiors: And there were soldiers who said ‘what, no way, if he has a bomb, I would beat him up completely. Tomorrow he blows up my mother in Tel Aviv’ so there would be the commanders that talked about the need to keep up ethics and the purity of arms, and the soldiers talked straight from their emotion and their heart.

A clear association is made between the behaviour of the quoted soldiers towards Palestinian suspects or terrorists, and the safety of their own families within Israeli civil society. Also the discrepancy between the ‘official’ discourse of the moral code and the emotions of the soldiers is touched upon; soldiers speak ‘from their hearts’ as opposed to using the military code of ethics the IDF knows. In the following I quote a soldier who served during Operation Defensive Shield, and who remembers how he and his comrades felt that their work was directly linked to the security of Israel: It was obvious; everyday there were explosions in Israel; two days after we went there [Jenin], there was a bomb in Megiddo.14 The soldiers feel it. It’s really not a cliché, ‘our soldiers secure the borders of the north so that Kiyriat Shemona wouldn’t be bombed’.15 (…) If you don’t chase this guy within the few 100 m you are in charge of (…) there could be a bomb in Megiddo, just like that.

Interestingly, a much greater amount of responsibility is taken by these soldiers and commanders for their own actions. As they consider their activities as morally and ideologically justified, they seem to have no problem in taking responsibility. They legitimize the suffering caused by their actions through the justified cause they are serving. Critical Voices: Moral Re-sensitizing The final strategy I would like to discuss contradicts many of the former themes that were explored. It is, however, an important one as it shows us a different side of the soldiers’ discourse. It cannot be ignored and it highlights the ambivalent 13 During this operation the IDF entered almost all major Palestinian cities as a reaction to suicide bombings within Israel, in order to stop terrorist activity. 14  Megiddo is the name of a big junction in the north of Israel. 15  Kiyriat Shemona is one of the northern cities in Israel that was often under fire from Hezbollah forces situated in South Lebanon.

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nature of the strategies used by soldiers within different contexts. The strategy I’m referring to is that of re-sensitizing, of finding some kind of connection with the victim, of acknowledging the suffering and pain of the other, and of truly sympathizing with them. Whereas most soldiers quoted above had some reserves, the ones discussed here had clear doubts about the violence used within the OPT against Palestinians. You could say that soldiers who use this strategy see the others, their victims, as human beings, as individuals. They do this, for example, by comparing their situation to their own in order to realise how the other must feel. ‘If It Was My Home’ In his work on Vietnam veterans, Lifton (1973) speaks of re-sensitization when he explains how soldiers in situations of war and with clear definitions of who was their enemy, could still feel sympathy for the members of the other side. In my interviews with Israeli soldiers such identification was sometimes present. Some soldiers compared the situation they were in, for example a Palestinian house in the middle of the night, with their own situation back home. How would they react, they asked themselves, if soldiers would suddenly barge into their home and would scare their little brother and sister? How would they react if they saw their elderly father being told to pull up his shirt and pull down his pants at a checkpoint? When such questions are asked, the soldier in question is identifying with ‘the other’ or the victims of his actions by putting himself in their place. The soldiers who made such comparisons did so only after their service was over, when they had the opportunity to reflect on their experiences in the field from a physical and mental distance. Looking back, most soldiers felt that during their presence in the OPT such reflection was almost impossible due to a lack of time to think things through, or due to being too tired and numbed by the workload. Below, an example of such identification with one’s victims can be found: It was bad (…) also if you checked and everything was ok, and you didn’t hold them up for a minute [at the checkpoint]. (…) It’s not nice when a boy – I would always think of my father – a boy of my age would come to him. I would imagine my father (…). Who is he to tell the man to get his hands up, to put up his shirt till his armpits and turn around (…)? Where is the respect? And if he looks suspicious, and I would put him on the side in front of all his children, and I would check with that device and I would have someone else check him and stand in front of him with a weapon just because he grew a beard because his father just died. I think he is suspicious, but he is dirty just because he didn’t have water to wash (…). These are things I know now because I matured and saw other things. (…) You are catching terrorists without respect so that there won’t be [a terror attack].

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Also this soldier makes the connection with the people he controls and his own family: I’m radical, also with the orthodox and also with the Arabs and Palestinians. But still, they are all human beings. [The other] has to get a minimum of respect, even though you don’t like him. (…) You show respect because in the end you have to understand that it is a human being that stands in front of you. It might be an 80-year-old man. It could be your grandfather. And I would see the people that would come and slap him. As a soldier I would stand aside and laugh, but as a commander a thing like that would never be done with me!

Conclusion In this chapter several central discursive strategies were discussed that were used by Israeli soldiers when giving account of their experiences. Strategies of passivity, professionalism and ideology were used in some way or another to explain, justify and legitimize actions and decision-making in the field. While most strategies involved acknowledgment of the suffering of the other, in certain instances the victims of actions by soldiers were not recognized as such. Strategies that were uncovered showed aspects of moral disengagement, such as moral justification, euphemistic labelling, advantageous comparison and displacement of responsibility (Bandura 2002). Furthermore, I also found two types of denial that Cohen distinguishes: implicatory and interpretative denial (2001). In most cases, the soldiers realized that their activities and presence within the Occupied Palestinian Territories caused harm to Palestinian civilians. This realization, nevertheless, almost never spurred the soldiers into action to change the situation they and the Palestinians were in. A sense of acceptance of the situation as it was, was very persistant, and the soldiers seemed to not to be motivated enough or willing to change it. References Bandura, A. 1999. ‘Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities’. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193–209. ________ 2002. ‘Selective Moral Disengagement in the Exercise of Moral Agency’. Journal of Moral Education, 31(2), 101–19. Breaking the Silence, 2005. Annual Report 2005. [Online] Available at: www. breakingthesilence.org.il [accessed: 7 March 2009]. Cohen, S. 2001. States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Inc. Furnham, A. 1988. Lay Theories: Everyday Understanding of Problems in the Social Sciences. Oxford: Pergamon Press.

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Goffman, E. 1961. The Prison. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. Grassiani, E. 2009. Morality and Normalcy in A-symmetrical Conflict: Distancing, Denial and Moral Numbing among Israeli Conscripts in Everyday Practices of Occupation. Unpublished dissertation, VU University, Amsterdam. Hughes, E. 1958. Men and Their Work. Glencoe: Free Press. Lifton, R. 1973. Home from the War. New York: Touchstone Books. Seu, B. 2003. “‘Your Stomach Makes You Feel that You Don’t Want to Know Anything About It”: Desensitization, Defence Mechanisms and Rhetoric in Response to Human Rights Abuses’. Journal of Human Rights, 2(2), 183–96.

Chapter 6

Tense Relations: Dealing with Narratives of Violence in Eastern Turkey 

Nerina Weiss

An autumn night in 2001 Turkish Special Forces launched military operations in a Kurdish border town and the surrounding villages in Eastern Turkey. They arrested a number of Kurdish men accused of collaborating with the Kurdish guerrilla. During this manoeuvre one man was – allegedly accidentally – shot. Two years later, in 2003, two villagers were shot in the centre of that same Kurdish border town in broad daylight. A former guerrilla fighter was later arrested and accused of the first murder. The other perpetrator has not been found yet (my fieldnotes, 2005).

Introduction In my research on these two politically motivated assassinations, I was presented with very different forms of narratives of violence – testimonies, ‘mythicohistories’ (Malkki 1995) and silences. In order to understand the meaning of these narratives, I suggest looking at the larger processes through which these narratives are formed. I argue that these narratives are part of a larger nationalist discourse of victimhood, which dominates much of the social and political life in the Kurdish community. As Alexander (2004) has pointed out, master narratives of social suffering are created by political and historical processes, and used to legitimize exactly these processes and discourses (Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997, Zarowsky 2004). I had come to Eastern Turkey, to a remote Kurdish border town, to understand how people dealt with more than 20 years of conflict between the Kurdish Worker’s Party PKK and the Turkish State forces. How did my interlocutors relate to and make sense of violence, and how did they talk about the violent events they were confronted with?

 I am grateful to Antonius Robben, Maria Six-Hohenbalken and Halvard Vike for their comments.

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It is a common problem in studying conflicts, that the researcher does not have equal access to all parties involved. Also this study clearly focuses on pro-Kurdish activists and their perception of violent events. The political situation in the border regions was still tense, and researchers unwelcome. I had been lucky to be hosted by the Kurdish mayoress and could rely on my host’s social and political network for protection and security. Through her network of pro-Kurdish activists I gained access to new research participants. My interlocutors soon became friends and introduced me to their wide familiar networks, serving as guarantors for my reliability and trustworthiness during our many visits to the surrounding villages. This arrangement had of course its limitations. As guest of a pro-Kurdish mayor, I was immediately associated as sympathizing with the pro-Kurdish population. Most of my informants were more or less involved with the pro-Kurdish Party and many are sympathizing or supporting the Kurdish guerrilla movement. Most of my interlocutors seemed to identify with the victims of state violence and they supported pro-Kurdish perpetrators of violence at least morally. They thus also had a political agenda when sharing their knowledge and experience with. For more than 20 years, Eastern Turkey has been an area of a fierce struggle between the Turkish military and the Kurdish Workers Party PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan). The Kurdish nationalist movement and especially the Kurdish Workers Party PKK was perceived as a real threat to the national unity of the Turkish state. The Kurdish claim for an own nation state, and in the last years for autonomy within Turkey, was until recently suppressed with all means (Behrendt 1993). During two decades of war, hundreds of villages were destroyed, forests burned down and pastures turned into military areas. Estimates of the number of internally displaced people (IDP) vary and range from 400,000 (Human Rights Watch 2005) to over one million (The World Factbook 2007). During the 1980s and early 1990s the Turkish state successfully managed to keep the international community ignorant of the extent of violence in the Eastern regions. Most Eastern provinces were under the State of Exception law, and constituted restricted area for foreign journalists. Critical voices were suppressed, and numerous journalists and activists were assassinated by unknown assailants with the silent approval of the Turkish security forces (Berger 1992, Bruinessen 1996). By depicting the Kurdish movement as a terrorist network, the Turkish state tried to legitimize its continuous militarization in the region. The Kurdish diaspora communities in Europe have been central in disseminating information on the conflict and mobilizing international support for the Kurdish case (Eccarius-Kelly 2002, Sirkeci 2009). Kurdish nationalist ideology spread   During my fieldwork period at least two other researchers from Europe were detained and deported (cf. Human Rights Watch 2006, Kurdnet 2006).   The PKK has repeatedly changed its name, albeit without changing its structures. As the Kurdish Workers Party is internationally better known by its old name, namely PKK, and also most of my interlocutors still referred to it as the PKK, I will use this term throughout this chapter.

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in exile, and the Kurdish diaspora has been actively involved in strengthening nationalist ideology in the Kurdish regions by financing a great part of the resistance movement (Bruinessen 2000). The nationalist discourse on victimhood and suffering has thus become an important political tool and effective instrument to mobilize followers and obtain the spirit of resistance. Last but not least, presenting the Kurdish population as victims of the Turkish state, the Kurdish nationalist movement tries to internationally legitimize their continuous involvement in the armed conflict against the Turkish security forces. In the eyes of my interlocutors I, a foreign researcher, represented the international community. I was to become a witness of the suffering of the Kurdish people. My interlocutors took an active part in influencing the knowledge I gained, as my work was to support the narrative of Kurdish suffering. The Conflict In 1999, after the capture of Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the Kurdish Workers Party PKK, the situation changed. Although armed struggles have become rare and are mostly limited to military operations in the mountains and along the border to Iraq, the Eastern regions of Turkey are still being strictly controlled by both the PKK and the Turkish military. The entire area is thus highly militarized. The community where I did fieldwork is rather small, poor and homogeneous, with 98 per cent of the community’s inhabitants being Sunni Muslim Kurds. The town is located far away from any political centre, but its strategic location along the Turkish-Iranian border partly explains the heavy militarization, which I estimate to be one soldier per capita. The community was and still is relatively marginal for current political events. Contrary to several other towns in Eastern Turkey, life had returned to a sort of post-war normality with hardly any violent incidents between the once warring parties. The conflict over influence and power in the region continues, however, and the formerly openly warring parties try to enforce social control and strict obedience to their authority. Like other revolutionary movements, the PKK has a firm organization and operates with strict rules and tight surveillance. It is common knowledge that anyone accused of collaborating with the state or other organizations hostile to the national aims of the PKK, runs the risk of severe punishment, either by detention, expulsion or in the worst case by execution (Marcus 2007). The PKK is said to have been killing dissidents and punishing entire villages whose inhabitants had become village guards, which means, they collaborated as paid militia with the Turkish government. Entire villages have thus been destroyed, and children, women and old people massacred. Both parts of the conflict have been blaming each other to have executed similar deeds (McDowall 2004). The Turkish state operates with tight surveillance through the Turkish secret service MIT (Milli İstihbarat Teşkilatı). Any movement in the region is registered at road blocks and checkpoints, and houses are frequently searched. Although the situation in the prisons has improved, torture is still common there (Insan Haklari

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Derneği 2007). Several of my interlocutors reported ill-treatment and tortured in detention also in the last years. As late as 2007 political murder still occurred in Turkey, as the Şemdinli affair (Keetman 2007) and the murder on the Armenian Editor-in-Chief Hrant Dink indicate (BBC News 2007). People were so often caught in between, as they were, and still are, forced to take sides. Thousands of people left their villages during the war to evade the impossible choice of taking sides. No matter which side they would support, the other one, either the PKK or the Turkish military, would severely punish them as traitors. Until today, shop-owners are expected to close their shops during proKurdish demonstrations in order to show their support of the Kurdish case. If they do not, they risk that demonstrators throw stones and destroy the shop. If they obey, they risk to be accused of collaborating and supporting terrorists. Testimony One of the first events that I learned about during my fieldwork was the assassination of a local man, and the arrest of several Kurdish activists in 2001. This event was frequently used as an example of the blind and senseless violence the Turkish military and its allies were capable of. I have interviewed bystanders, eyewitnesses, including several of the men that had been arrested that very night. Although the event was told to me from different people and angles, all emphasizing different details and dwelling on different aspects, the facts were coherent and detailed, and there was hardly any deviation between the stories told. The narratives seemed standardized and collectivized ‘as they more or less told the same story or emphasized experiences shared by many’ (Coulter 2006). In her research on bush-wives in Sierra Leone, Coulter noticed how several narratives were ‘influenced by the almost hegemonic humanitarian discourse on victimhood and suffering’ (2006: 43). In Eastern Turkey, the narratives I collected on this event also resembled testimonies at truth commissions (Ross 2003, Wilkinson 2002). This might not come as a big surprise as Kurdish activists in exile as well as in Turkey had adopted a Human Rights discourse. Human rights violations by the Turkish security forces had actively been made public, and the case described here was immediately published in several Human Rights newsletters. The widow of the killed and some of the villagers also took their case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Despite this collectivization and standardization, there was, however, a striking gender difference: It was only men that had been suspected and arrested that day.   While the Şemdinli affair revealed links to the high military and government circles, rightwing extremists allegedly stood behind the murder of Hrant Dink.  Seeking justice at international courts has been only possible since the late 1990s. Earlier attempts had been violently silenced, witnesses and claimants murdered, threatened or disappeared.

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They had thus become targets of police violence and seemed to take pride in this. The violent act of being captured occupied only a small part of their account, whereas the torture and their prison experience dominated the narrative. All of them presented themselves as the hero of that night, the person the military actually had wanted, the main reason for the entire military operation. These men boasted of their heroic resistance and pertinacity while being searched and arrested by the Turkish forces, and of how they refused all allegations in spite of severe torture. The women, wives of these men, and eye-witnesses to house searches, murders and arrests, recounted the events in a very different form. In their narratives, their bodies and the violence done to them played an important role. They passed from room to room in their houses, gave details on time and place and situated themselves, their bodies in this narrative landscape. They also vividly described sounds, shadows and their own feelings, which made their accounts having an emotional and stirring effect. The way the interviewed women talked about their experiences reminds of the narratives Malkki (1995) gathered from Hutu refugees in Tanzania: ‘Accounts of this kind appeared to be part of a process of precise documentation and historical recording for preservation; each detail was reflectively presented as essential and significant. The process of telling was often accompanied with body gestures which gave the accounts a hard visual commentary likewise demanding witness’ (Malkki 1995: 90). Handan, the widow of the assassinated man told me her story during a dinner at her place. In a theatrical mode she performed her part as if staged on a scene. Her acting made it difficult to keep the analytical distance I had wanted to apply when hearing stories of violence and torture. I had not only become a listener, but by taking my hand and leading me through her memory, I was forced to relive this traumatic night with her. I had become her ‘witness’. What follows is a lengthy extract of my field notes, including an interview with Handan: ‘We had been eating until late that night, since the fasting of Ramadan would begin the next day. Our nine-months-old son had fallen asleep here, right were you are sitting now, Nerina. We just prepared to go to bed, when we heard loud noise in the hall, and hard knocking at our door. I wanted to open, but my husband held me back and went himself. He thought his brother had been drinking again and come to the wrong door. Suddenly I heard shots. I, too, went to the front door.’ [Handan gets up, takes my hand and leads me to the entrance hall.] ‘It was too dark in the hall to see anything. I still thought it had been my brother-in-law, drunk and shooting around as he had done before. When I recognized my husband lying on the floor I assumed that my husband had fainted in fear. But all of a sudden I heard a stranger ordering me to sit down. I realized that the door was actually open, and the entire staircase crowded with police. Again I was ordered to sit down. Masked men stood in the entrance,   All names in this chapter are fictive in order to protect my interlocutors.

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Violence Expressed their guns pointing at me. I cowered down next to my husband, still wondering why he did not say a word. Then one of the soldiers shone in his face and I saw that his pyjama was covered in blood. He was lying in his own blood.’ [Handan looks down on the floor and points at still visible bullet holes in the walls and entrance door.] ‘I lost control of myself. It was horrible! I heard voices, mobile-phones ringing and cries. I was confused with all these noises. By that time, they had already arrested my brother-in-law. My mother-in-law cried: “Why are you taking my son?” I cried out to her: “They shot Ibo! He is injured. He lies covered in blood on the floor.” I must have cried out loud – loud enough to be heard all over the neighbourhood, but I do not remember anything. My mother-in-law tried to reach me, but a soldier prevented her from coming my way. “Stay calm, she is lying, nothing happened” he said to her. “Wallahi, mother, he is the one lying. They have hit Ibo. He lies in his own blood.” I screamed at the soldiers, asking them why they had shot my husband. Can you believe, they did not even find a gun, not even a [forbidden] newspaper at our house!’ [She gets up and we return to the dining-room, where our food had become cold.] ‘I finally came back to our dining room. My baby was crying. I was half unconscious. He spent that night without milk, without having his diapers changed. I wanted to return to my husband, but they did not let me. “Stay calm, nothing happened.” Men with machine-guns guarded the door and my dying husband.’ [We sit down again. Handan explains that the soldiers had forced a gun into her husband’s hand, in order to camouflage the assassination as an act of selfdefence.] ‘Ibo was already dead, how should the gun stay in his hand? Finally they put the gun on the floor and took a hundred pictures.’ Only in the morning following the assassination was Ibo’s dead body brought to hospital. By daylight she saw the blood on the floor and walls and the bullet holes in the carpet. While she talks now – we are standing in the hallway again – she touches the wall where there had been the blood, and she forms her fingers to a circle in order to indicate the size of the bullet holes in the carpet that she had replaced by a new one. Also her family-in-law let her believe that her husband was only heavily wounded, but still alive. First after several hours she was allowed to follow the rest of the family to the hospital. There she finally realized what had happened and fainted. After finishing her story Handan becomes silent and tears start running down her cheeks. It takes several minutes until she finds her composure again. (my fieldnotes, 2005)

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The narrative of Handan’s brother-in-law, Murat, is as detailed. He recalls his arrest, how he woke up by gunshots, how the soldiers made their way into his apartment and how they pointed their guns at him, obviously ready to also kill him. He recalls how he used his three-year-old son as a shield. He remembers to have been blindfolded, driven away in a van and taken to prison, from where he would be released after three years. Murat’s story completes Handan’s tale. However, his focus is not on the night of the arrest but rather dwells on his time in prison. This arrest has been one of many, and Murat lists the many times he had been severely tortured. Still he has continued to be politically active. Murat learns about his brother’s death only after several weeks in prison. Most of the questions he has to answer during his arrest concern his brother, not himself. In prison he is told that he is the lucky one – but nobody tells him why. Like all the other prisoners he is tortured by electroshocks, cold water and falanga (foot whipping). Still in prison he learns from the radio about a şehid (a martyr) in his town. Murat adds one plus one: the gun shots, his mother’s worries, the talk about him being the lucky one, the news on the radio, and the fact that the martyr had been killed the same night he had been arrested. When he asks the prison guards, they respond by beating him. During the trial he is the only one in chains. The judge does not question him on his case, but in an attempt to reconstruct the events preceding Murat’s arrest, inquires on the details of his house. The colour on the walls, light in the halls, the number of floors, etc. For several days after this ‘trial’ Murat stays in prison without any visitor. On the tenth day, his uncle dares to bring the news of his brother’s death. Mythico-History Two years later, in 2003, two other politically motivated murders occurred in that same town. Unlike the detailed testimonies I had collected for the earlier event, the stories told about this second event were neither standardized nor coherent. Although the same informants told me about this event several times, they never told me the same story. Places and even people in the story would change. What stayed the same, however, was a focus on morality or rather the lack of morality as the justification of the murders. Everybody agreed that the two murdered men had ‘lived like dogs and they died like dogs.’ The two murdered men were Kurds who had worked as ‘village-guards’, militia who were paid by the Turkish military to take up arms against the Kurdish guerrilla. Both, the PKK and the Turkish state, were (and are still) steadily trying to increase their influence on the Kurdish society and to mobilize the population for their case. The Turkish militia system, the ‘village-guards’ (in Turkish köy korucuları) emerged because the Turkish military exploited existing animosities between local Kurdish groups. The Turkish military supplied one part of the Kurdish population with weapons, money, and impunity in order to split the Kurdish guerrilla and thus to weaken Kurdish resistance (Bruinnessen 2002). During the 1980s and

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1990s many villagers were forced to either become ‘village guards’ or emigrate to the bigger cities. After the capture of the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, in 1999 the situation improved, and several villagers returned their arms and ended their employment with the state. The two murdered men, however, had continued to work for the Turkish military even after 1999. Not only was this activity linked to easily earned money (a common justification, why certain villagers still worked for the state). The possession of arms, and the immunity these village-guards enjoyed, also provided power and influence. The two men had held the rank of villageguard commanders in their respective villages. Their employment by the Turkish state was seen as a clear sign of their ideological closeness to the Turkish state and their moral decadence as Kurds. In the eyes of my pro-Kurdish interlocutors, these Kurdish villagers had betrayed the Kurdish cause, which in itself was reason enough to be severely punished by the Kurdish guerrilla. The first event of 2001, the assassination of Handan’s husband and imprisonment of his brother, was brought to me. Buf I had to investigate and search actively regarding the murder of the two militia men that had happened two years later. My Kurdish interlocutors were very reluctant to answer to my inquiries about events, where the pro-Kurdish community had acted as perpetrators. One day, a friend of mine mentioned the murders of two village-guards in passing. When I inquired further, she was initially surprised by my curiosity. She was convinced that the assassination of two traitors for sure had nothing to do with my research interest, which was on violence and conflict in Eastern Turkey. She finally told me the story of two ‘evil men, who had stolen and who had raped’. One of the two Kurds had even killed a Kurdish guerrilla fighter. The fact that the village-guard had invited the guerrilla fighter to his home, offered him food, and then killed him during the meal, posed a clear and heavy violation of hospitality. I collected several versions of this story. In some versions, one village-guard was said to have killed people, the other one had raped a girl from his village. In other versions, one had killed and raped, while the other had not been exceptionally evil. The latter had become village-guard because he had been in blood feud with parts of his family and thus needed weapons and protection. In a third version of the story, the man who had killed the guerrilla fighter while dining at his table, was yet another village-guard, who had nothing to do with the two assassinations described here. This third village-guard was said to have been killed together with his entire family, when a snow-avalanche destroyed his house. Rather confused and not familiar with journalistic or criminalistic work, I tried to get a balanced view on this event by talking to the people involved. Being associated with the pro-Kurdish and pro-guerrilla population due to my landlady and my friends, I was afraid to talk about any of these events with members of the military, the police or other village-guards. I did, however, visit the village of Hano, one of the ‘bad guys’, and I talked to some of his female relatives. We both did not feel comfortable to discuss the event at length, though. I came back some weeks later to meet the current village-guard commander with the pretext of another, harmless topic and hoping to get his version of the events at some

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point in our conversation. The village-guard, however, refused to talk to me at all and started to escort my friend who had accompanied me and me to the local police station, where we could expect to be interrogated and strip-searched. He fortunately changed his mind on the way, and left us on the main road. Some villagers spoke very openly, albeit fearful, about the assassinated villageguard. My interlocutors had returned their weapons some years ago, and felt now threatened by the new village-guard commander and his followers, whom they described as morally corrupt and evil. The features and bad deeds (killing and violations) that had been attributed to the murdered Hano were also attributed to his successors. Especially one villager and his wife gave a detailed account of all the evil Hano and his successors had committed. He was distantly related to some Kurdish friends of mine who had brought me to his house on my third visit to the village. His house was situated at the entrance of the village, which made it easy to reach without everybody immediately noticing. To avoid any unwanted attention, the villager’s wife had carefully announced my friend and me as marriage brokers. Her daughter was in marriageable age, and matchmaking was a liable reason to host foreigners. I had told the family before why I wanted to come – to learn more about the murder on the killed village-guard. I repeated what I had heard in town, the rumours and allegations of rape and murder. My interlocutor nodded. He would be frank to me and honest, but made it clear that if the current commander ever found out about this meeting, he risked being killed. The risk of being murdered in a korucu village was high, and the aggressor could always blame a Kurdish guerrilla attack for the murder. In spite of the announced frankness and my interlocutor’s familial closeness to the assassinated guard, his detailed account only added to the stories I already new: There was no question, that Hano had been a bad person without morals, and that he had deserved to die. Unlike my interlocutors in town, the villager and his wife were however more careful in confirming the rumours of rape and murder. Yes, they had heard gossip of several cases of sexual harassment, and the villager’s wife assumed that several women in the village must have been raped. But of course rape and sexual harassment was a topic not spoken of in public, and at least his family had not seen Hano actually committing such crimes. They had had their bad experiences with Hano though, and the current commander was as bad and morally corrupt. The villager’s wife therefore always immediately returned to her house, as soon as she saw the village-guard commander approaching. Concerning the killing of the guerrilla-fighter that had been invited for dinner, the villager was more nuanced. Hano hated the guerrilla, and he had repeatedly forbidden the villagers to grant passing guerrilla fighters their hospitality or even

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to give them food along their way. According to this family, the murder of the guerrilla fighter had, however, been committed by another visiting village-guard. Still, Hano had been a bad man. Hano was a dog. He had lived like a dog, and he died like a dog. When we heard about his death we could not believe it. Then we went down on our knees and thanked God! We had not been that happy in a long time. […] Hano’s corpse was buried outside the village, but he had no peace. His daughter had seen a fox – with blood on his snout – on her father’s grave. She called her mother, and they went to see the grave: the fox had unearthed the body and eaten parts of the face. After that, Hano’s wife and daughters guarded the grave for several weeks.

Although the villager had presented the most balanced account that I had heard so far of the village-guard, his narrative clearly follows a style I had come to know from previous stories of this 2003 murder. The narratives presented ‘not only a description of the past, nor even merely an evaluation of the past, but a subversive recasting and reinterpretation of it in fundamentally moral terms. In this sense, it cannot be accurately described as either history or myth. It was what could be called a ‘mythico-history’ (Malkki 1995). This set of narratives is full of symbols and resembles a myth in Jackson’s terms: ‘giving legitimacy to the existing social order’ (2002: 26). The narratives were not only a justification of violence, but the events were put in a web of moral and divine rules and values. Not only were those two village-guards considered as traitors by the Kurdish population because they were working for the Turkish military and killing their Kurdish neighbours; these men had acted against Islam, against the codes of honour and the rules of tradition. They were called dogs – the worst offence for a human. Being called a dog, or the son of a dog, indicates promiscuity as well as dirt according to the Islamic law. Killing the two village-guards was thus justified as a reconstitution of the social and divine order. The avalanche and the fox indicate a divine aspect, and it seemed that even Allah had refused to be on the side of the village-guards. The fox that mutilates the corpse might also be a way of expressing violence perpetrated by the Turkish military. The latter has until today been accused of mutilating and hastily burying the corpses of Kurdish guerrilla fighters, and thus withholding the divine rule of a decent funeral according to Islamic rites. Everyday violence by the Turkish military is thus integrated in this ‘mythico-history’, even if is twisted and changed. The perpetrators become the victims; and nature or Allah himself reconstitutes justice by denying the village-guard his rest in peace.

  Assisting the Kurdish guerrilla and being a village guard working for the Turkish government at the same time was not as contradicting as I had initially assumed. As many villagers had been forced by the Turkish state to taken up arms, or had accepted to be paid militias due to economic reasons, their sympathies were still with the pro-Kurdish cause.

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Secret Narratives After finishing the story about Hano the villager asked, my friend, if he knew who had killed Hano and the other village-guard. My friend just shook his head. ‘Kim bilir? Who knows? There were many people in the local Kurdish party who wanted the guard dead. When he finally showed up in that Kurdish village, I guess somebody just shot him.’ Parallel to the ‘mythico-history’, there exists a second discourse. It is hidden and disguised, and therefore much harder to grasp and to deal with. Several people had obviously detailed knowledge of this event; much more than they would publicly admit. My friend, who had pretended ignorance in front of his relatives, was one of them. He did not only have detailed knowledge of what had happened and who the perpetrators were. He also knew who would know, and arranged several interviews for me. I was told some details in secret – with windows and doors shut tightly – but I was never given any names. As soon as I mentioned the guerrilla’s role in the assassinations, my interlocutors felt uncomfortable and switched to the –miş-form, a Turkish grammatical form indicating second-hand knowledge. Several times they also pointed out, that they themselves had not been in town when the murders had taken place. Initially it was impossible to make sense of the secrecy and their fear of speaking openly about the murder of the two village-guards. Methodologically I was reflecting about how to write about knowledge, that should not exist, and information, which has been given as if it had not. Contrary to the first event presented in this chapter, where I had been shown the bullet-holes in the door and the scars on bodies, I had no such data on the second event. It was not even clear who the two murdered village-guards were, and I had no ‘real facts’ to verify the guerrilla’s involvement in the two assassinations. Obtaining such ‘verifiable’ data would be extremely dangerous and probably also impossible. Comparing my findings with other research on Kurdish narratives of violence, a guerrilla involvement in the assassination of the two became very plausible and realistic. However, the only thing I had to reconstruct the events on, were mythical narratives and rumours. For Waterson (2009) writing against silence is a political act, a humanitarian responsibility, and an imperative for anthropologists. ‘The anthropological account is [the informant’s] story, told so that the rest of us can begin to understand, to see. … Silencing and blinding are political projects, weapons of the dominant. Speaking and writing are tools of resistance. Seeing is a power that might help us off our current destructive course.’ (Waterston 2009: 18) Her understanding of silence in conflict societies is based on a well established analytical link between fear and silence. Taussig (1984) has pointed to the impact of a ‘cultural elaboration of fear’ (1984: 469). As we have seen with too many examples around the globe, entire populations have been and are controlled through terror and violence (Feldman 1991, Green 1998, Taussig 1987). In war- and terror-torn societies, mistrust and fear of a renewed violence often prompts people to stop talking about facts and to commit to rumours, fantasy and silence. If ‘cultures of

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terror are based on and nourished by silence and myth’ (Taussig 1984: 469), then writing about the silenced facts gives a voice to those, whose stories have been silenced (Nordstrom 1997). I could see that the people’s fear was an influencing factor during my fieldwork. However, the fear and silence that I had seen in the Kurdish context did not correlate with the way these emotions have been described in the above mentioned studies. The Turkish military, the enemy, had tortured, jailed and eventually also killed extensively during the years of the conflict. As the first event presented in this chapter had indicated, the military had also killed in times of peace and ceasefire. Still, people had forced me to become their witness and told me their story of violence committed by the Turkish state and military openly and in detail. In talking about the military and the atrocities committed by the state, people openly defied the threats of renewed violence. Asked about her present situation, the mother of a guerrilla fighter answered: ‘The state still tries to control me and puts a lot of pressure on me.’ Although her son has been killed ten years ago, the military still controls her movements and interrogates her occasionally. ‘But I do not grovel before anybody. I do not fear anybody.’ I always sensed fear when I asked my interlocutors to connect the guerrilla with these murders. Even if those murdered had broken all rules and taboos that existed in the Kurdish society and even Allah himself had punished them. I sensed fear in the villager, who had made clear that if the new village-guard commander ever learned of our meeting, he was as good as dead. Fear was among my befriended pro-Kurdish activists in the town I lived during my fieldwork. People were nervous when talking about the guerrilla in detail – in spite or rather because of the fact, that they called the guerrilla their sons, daughters and brothers. Most of my interlocutors were supporters or sympathizers of the Kurdish guerrilla movement and several had relatives ‘in the mountains’ as they would describe the guerrilla. They expressed a sense of loyalty to and accountability for the movement. Of course, publicly admitting detailed knowledge of events that had involved the guerrilla could lead to harassment, jail, and torture by the Turkish police and military. Giving away secret information on the guerrilla could also lead to reprisals by the PKK. As I have mentioned above, the PKK is well-known for its strict rules of loyalty and its harsh punishment of traitors. The silence and secrecy around crimes permitted by the PKK thus show parallels to the code of silence, or omertá, known from analysis of the Mafia and resistance movements in the Mediterranean (Blok 2008, Schneider and Schneider 2005). Secrecy is based on a complex relation of loyalty and dependence, admiration as well as the constant threat of reprisals against those who speak. People have formed a protective ‘wall of silence’ around those involved. Silence can thus be understood as an adaptation to unequal power relations (Sheriff 2000). Contrary to Sheriff, however, who argues that silence might represent a mode of ideological defence within subaltern groups and might have solidarity maintaining functions, I argue that the secrecy and silence emerging in the Kurdish context is based as much on mistrust as on tense relations within the Kurdish community.

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Global Discourse on Victimhood Ross (2001) has pointed to the important relationship between words, silences and meaning. Referring to women’s testimonies at the Truth Commission in South Africa she argues: What is taken for silence in women’s speech is itself meaningful, a language. We need to take note of what it is that women say and also to recognize what they keep silent. I suggest not that we excise and excavate words in order to reveal women’s experiences but that we reformulate a context, in which the silences give meaning. (Ross 2001: 271)

In order to give meaning to the narratives presented in this chapter we need to understand the processes in which narratives and silences are formed within local communities (Das and Kleinman 2001). This last section of this chapter will therefore present the political and social context that formed expressions of violence in the Kurdish community. The Kurdish society has a long tradition of silence and secrecy. Important information like death or illnesses within the family is often concealed for relatives and friends. Handan, whose testimony I presented in the beginning of this chapter, was long left in ignorance of her husband’s death. Murat tried to find out about his brother, but was answered with beatings from the prison guards and silence from his family. Both were not considered by their families to be in the position to cope with such terrible news. Handan’s experiences during the night of the murder had made her weak and vulnerable, the news of the death could be dangerous for her. Murat on the other hand was separated from his family, thus lacking the emotional and social support necessary for coping with the death of a close relative. Political activism and violence add multiple levels of silences within family life (Ross 2001, Yalçın-Heckmann 1991). Thus, most of the wives of former prisoners I talked to, had expressed pride of their husbands’ ability to withstand the torture and political harassment. The arrest had however taken most of the women by surprise, and they had been ignorant to why their husbands had ended up in prison in the first place. Silence does not only dominate close family-relations. Most social relations among my pro-Kurdish activists were tense and frequently changing. The narratives I have collected have evolved in a society full of suspicion and mistrust. Before I arrived in Turkey for my first fieldwork in 2005, a Turkish researcher, whom I had contacted beforehand, sent me the following advice: ‘The mayor is very openminded and I like her a lot. She will care for you, I am sure. Please, try to help her, because she is surrounded by iki yüzlü, double-faced, people.’ Also during my fieldwork I was constantly advised not to meet certain people, as they were to be mistrusted. Iki yüzlü is normally translated as double morality, and among my proKurdish activists equated with disloyalty regarding the Kurdish cause. The literal

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meaning of the term is double-faced and implies that a person has two ‘faces’: one to turn to the pro-Kurdish case, and another one to turn to the Turkish state. Several families have taken advantage of the power struggle between the PKK and the state, and benefitted from their rivalries by a cunning game of alliances and networks. Thus, a split between pro-state and pro-PKK fractions within a family not always reflected a serious conflict dividing the family (Bruinnessen 2002). To consolidate and secure their power, many families had members both in government positions and among the guerrilla. Some Kurdish politicians have economic joint-ventures with Turkish nationalists, and Kurdish businessmen have alliances and good connections to state authorities. Networks and alliances cross ethnic, political, and even national boundaries. Such networks and alliances are covered in secrecy and rumours, and it is extremely difficult to know on which side a person is. Secrecy seems to be the essence of being iki yüzlü. In order to be successful in this tactical game, all partners involved, and the society at large, have to be left in ignorance about the different networks and alliances. This became also clear during my research on the autumn night in 2001, when Handan’s husband was killed, and several villagers arrested. Villagers told me that their muhtar, their village chief had averted another murder that night. His nephew had allegedly been blacklisted as collaborator with the Kurdish guerrilla, and should have been killed. The muhtar had been a friend and party-fellow with the local military commander, who had informed him of this threat. When the military arrived that night, the village chief insisted to lead the soldiers to his nephew’s house. At the same time sent notice to other villagers as well. The presence of so many witnesses prevented another assassination. The nephew was arrested, but thanks to his uncle’s connections he was released after a short period of time. In one of my conversations with this nephew, I mentioned his uncle, and what other villagers had said about his uncle’s close connections to the local military commander. The nephew became angry, and demanded to know if I had recorded such ‘nonsense’. I honestly told him that I hardly ever recorded my conversations, and this seemed to calm him down. Alliances would constantly change depending on personal choice, tactical calculations and the current political situation. The difficulty to follow these changes in networks, and to know the exact political positions of all, was expressed by a Kurdish acquaintance. She lived in Western Turkey but visited the Kurdish area where I did my fieldwork regularly since he had family there: ‘Each time I return home, I wonder who will be friends with whom, and who will be enemy of whom.’ As society is full of ambivalence, of changing networks and relations, of divisions without visible or real boundaries, people are careful to base their life and future on relations of trust. Secrecy provides the means ‘to shield illicit strategies, create uncertainty about political alignments and to fabricate deniability against accusations of political disloyalty’ (Murphy 1990: 35). Secrecy is thus used to maintain powerful relations, while at the same time undermining other people’s credibility and prestige.

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Late, I realized that my entire fieldwork was influenced by these tense intraKurdish relations. Secrecy and the hidden power relations had an immense impact on the way my fieldwork developed. As Holstein and Gubrium (2004) have pointed to, power in interview settings is not necessarily based at the researcher’s side, and research participants take an active part in forming conversations and influencing the outcome of interviews (see also Ingold 2008). In a similar way, Robben (1996) has pointed to the pitfalls of ethnographic seduction. ‘We may become engulfed in seductive strategies or defences that convince us of the thinness of social discourse. We believe to be seeing the world through our interlocutor’s eyes. Yet these eyes are looking away from that which we think they are seeing. We have been led away from the depths of culture to its surface in an opaque intersubjective negotiation of cultural understanding.’ (1996: 85) Especially during research on violent conflict, our interlocutors have personal and political interest in making us take on their interpretations. In this fieldwork my research participants did not only lead me astray during our conversations. Their engagement in the outcome of my research influenced the entire implementation of my research. Towards my hosts and interlocutors, I had been clear in my critique of the Turkish state, but had as clearly criticized the PKK. I also had repeatedly voiced my interest in violence perpetrated by the guerrilla. Still, my interlocutors had decided my interest and research to be focused on the pro-Kurdish community as victims of the Turkish state and only reacting to military aggression. Conversations which I had considered to be backstage, an intimate conversation among friends, had in retrospect been on stage discourses (Goffman 1969). Well meant warnings, suggestions, and the ‘off stage’ gossip about certain persons seemed rather a way to lead my fieldwork in specific directions, to control whom I talked to and what kind of information I gained. I had followed my hosts’ suggestions, as they ‘knew the dangers and the double faced people in their society’. In order to successfully conduct my fieldwork I had to trust them, as they trusted me. In hindsight, I wondered why my hosts and friends did not want me to talk to certain persons. What did the latter’s disloyalty actually mean? Did the information they could provide threaten my narrative of their victimhood? Thus the final question would be: were my interlocutors concerned with my physical security or did they protect their own political interests by leading my fieldwork in specific directions? By avoiding to give certain information, information that did not fit into the overall idea of victimhood (Kleinman, Das and Lock 1997), my surrounding seemed keen to provide me with enough information in order to see the suffering of the Kurdish people, without easily divulging information on their active participation in the conflict. Violent clashes between the local population and the Turkish military, where my research participants clearly had taken up an aggressive role, were never openly mentioned. Most of the time, I learned of such events by accident. When I then confronted my friends and asked them why they had not told me, they excused themselves with ‘I did not think that this was of interest for you?’

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With this social and political context in mind, the three narratives, the testimonies, the mythico-histories, and the secret narratives, suddenly feed into one and the same overall discourse, the nationalist discourse of victimhood. I was to be a witness not only to the assassination of Handan’s husband and the arrest of several villagers during that autumn night in 2001, but also to what happened throughout the KurdishTurkish conflict in that region then and today. I was to ‘tell the people outside Turkey of what happens here’. I was to represent the Kurdish community as victims. To name, that is to label person or an entire community as a certain type and then to elaborate a theory of their essential social identity is to create a symbolic representation of those persons or that community. If this representation then becomes naturalized, that is accepted as the ‘obvious’ depiction of its referent, it becomes a mold that shapes the second sense of representation – the political. (Kearney 1996: 171)

As I have argued initially, the display of suffering justifies the status of the Kurdish population as victims of the Turkish state. My testimony would become part of a global and transnational human rights discourse (Kearney 1996), and my representation of the Kurds as the suffering people would be another testimony, another political voice to feed into the global political economy (Kleinman, Das and Lock 1997) and commodify the nationalist discourse on victimhood. Conclusion I started this chapter with the question: how do people make sense of violence? I ended it by asking: how can we as anthropologists make sense of peoples narratives? What do silence, myths and testimonies have in common? What do narratives on violence tell us about the society in which they develop? There is a clear connection between these three narratives, as they all are part of a political strategy. As the Turkish state sees the Kurds as aggressors and the Kurdish Nationalist movement as a movement of terrorists, it tries to legitimize the Turkish government’s use of force in Eastern Turkey. The narratives that I have described form, however, part of a counter-discourse: it is the Kurdish nationalist representation of the Kurdish community as victims of the Turkish state. I, as an outsider and researcher, whose findings would be published abroad, was to represent such an image of the society I worked with. Such expectations had not only implications for the results of my fieldwork, but even more for the way I could conduct my research. My interlocutors had taken an active part in forming the outcome of my research, and heavily influenced my representations of the community. The three narratives presented here, are a good illustration of this. The narratives on the killing of Handan’s husband in the middle of the night by Turkish soldiers in 2001 and the subsequent imprisonment of his brother clearly positioned the Turkish military as perpetrator of violence. The stories recounting these happenings resembled testimonies (Ross

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2003). They were told in great details and were positioned in space and time, thus proving the accuracy of the tale. Violence supposedly conducted by the guerrilla, on the other hand, was mystified, retold and reinterpreted. Such narratives adopted the form of folk tales in public discourse and were covered with an aura of myth. The two village-guards were called evil ‘dogs’ who deserved to die, and the murder was justified as necessary. Detailed knowledge of this second event was only secretly passed on, highly restricted and disguised and silenced in public. I have argued that in order to understand these three narratives, a broader look at social alliances and networks is necessary to make sense of the silence and fear. In a Kurdish community, being iki yüzlü, i.e. being disloyal, is a common strategy to secure power positions and to enhance personal profit or that of the family, kin- group and village. Alliances and networks are constantly shifting, and people are therefore very conscious not to divulge sensitive information. Silence in Eastern Turkey is thus used consciously and actively, to play off different actors against each other, to resist power, to survive, to manipulate social relations and to produce a political discourse. I ascribed the different narratives to the tense inner-Kurdish relations. These relations had, in fact, influenced my own fieldwork as well: I had taken for granted, that the accusations of being iki yüzlü automatically meant being a spy, a collaborator with the state, and that people that my friends labelled this way would pose a severe security risk for me and also the befriended people I interacted with. I had therefore followed my interlocutors’ advice to not involve such people more then necessary in my research. Later I understood that these (iki yüzlü) people were not necessarily Turkish spies and a security risk, but probably might have given information that would threaten the political discourse of victimhood. In a seductive manner I had been led astray from my initial interest in presenting both state and guerrilla violence. I had excluded certain people from my research. In accordance with the Kurdish political discourse, I was thus in the act of representing the Kurdish community mainly as victims. References Alexander, J.C. 2004. ‘Towards a Theory of Cultural Trauma’, in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, edited by J.C. Alexander, R. Eyerman, B. Giesen and N.J. Smelser. Berkley: University of California Press, 1–30. BBC News. 2007. Obituary: Hrant Dink. [Online]. Available at: http://news.bbc. co.uk/2/hi/europe/6279907.stm [accessed: 20 June 2008]. Behrendt, G. 1993. Nationalismus in Kurdistan: Vorgeschichte, Entstehungsbedingungen und erste Manifestationen bis 1925. Hamburg: Deutsches OrientInstitut. Berger, H. 1992. Freiheit für das kurdische Volk. Internationale Konferenz, Vienna, 1992.

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Blok, A. 2008. ‘Reflections on the Sicilian Mafia: Peripheries and their Impact on Centres’, in Organized Crime: Culture, Markets and Policies, edited by D. Siegel and H. Nelen. New York: Springer, 7–13. Bruinessen, M.v. 1996. ‘Turkey’s Death Squads’. Middle East Report, 20–23. ________ 2000. ‘Transnational Aspects of the Kurdish Question’. Florence: European University Institute. ________ 2002. ‘Kurds, States, and Tribes’, in Tribes and Power: Nationalism and Ethnicity in the Middle East, edited by F.A. Jabar and H. Daod. London: Saqi, 165–83. Coulter, C.C. 2006. Being a Bush Wife: Women’s Lives Through War and Peace in Northern Sierra Leone, Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, Uppsala University. Das, V. and Kleinman A. (eds) 2001. Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press. Eccarius-Kelly, V. 2002. ‘Political Movements and Leverage Points: Kurdish Activism in the European Diaspora’. Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 22(1), 91–118. Feldman, A. 1991. Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goffman, E. 1969. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin. Green, L. 1998. ‘Lived Lives and Social Suffering: Problems and Concerns in Medical Anthropology’. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 12(1), 3–7. Holstein, J.A. and Gubrium J.F. 2004. ‘The Active Interview’, in Qualitative Research: Theory, Method and Practice, edited by D. Silverman. London: Sage, 140–61. Human Rights Watch. 2005. ‘Still Critical’ Prospects in 2005 for Internally Displaced Kurds in Turkey. [Online]. Available at: http://www.hrw.org/ reports/2005/turkey0305/turkey0305text.pdf [accessed: 10 October 2009]. ________ 2006. Turkey: Human Rights Watch Researcher Detained in Southeast. [Online]. Available at: http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2006/04/11/turkey-humanrights-watch-researcher-detained-southeast [accessed: 10 December 2009]. Ingold, T. 2008. ‘Anthropology is not Ethnography’. Proceedings of the British Academy, 154, 69–92. Insan Haklari Derneği. 2007. 2007 Türkiye Insan Hakları Ihlalleri Raporu. Ankara: Insan Haklari Derneği. Jackson, M. 2002. Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression and Intersubjectivity. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Kearney, M. 1996. Reconceptualizing the Peasantry: Anthropology in Global Perspective. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Keetman, J. 2007. Der lange Arm der türkischen Generäle. [Online]. Available at: http://diepresse.com/home/politik/aussenpolitik/304698/index.do [accessed: 20 June 2008]. Kleinman, A., Das, V. and Lock, M. (eds) 1997. Social Suffering. Berkley: University of California Press.

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Kurdnet. 2006. Turkey Deports Finnish Kurd Scholar Dr Kristiina Koivunen [Online]. Available at: http://www.ekurd.net/mismas/articles/misc2006/12/ turkeykurdistan999.htm [accessed: 10 December 2009]. Malkki, L.H. 1995. Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press. Marcus, A. 2007. Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence. New York: New York University Press. McDowall, D. 2004. A Modern History of the Kurds. New York: I.B. Tauris. Nordstrom, C. 1997. A Different Kind of War Story. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Robben, A.C.G.M. 1996. ‘Ethnographic Seduction, Transference, and Resistance in Dialogues about Terror and Violence in Argentina’. Ethos, 24(1), 71–106. Ross, F.C. 2001. ‘Speech and Silence: Women’s Testimony in the First Five Weeks of Public Hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, in Remaking the World. Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery, edited by V. Das, A. Kleinman, M. Lock, M. Ramphele and P. Reynolds. Berkley: University of California Press, 250–80. ________ 2003. Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth and Reconcilation Commission in South Africa. London: Pluto Press. Schneider, J. and Schneider P. 2005. ‘Eric R. Wolf Lecture for 2004: Mafia, Antimafia, and the plural cultures of Sicily’. Current Anthropology, 46(4), 501–20. Sheriff, R.E. 2000. ‘Exposing Silence as Cultural Censorship: A Brazilian Case’. American Anthropologist, 102(1), 114–32. Sirkeci, I. 2009. ‘Transnational Mobility and Conflict’. Migration Letters, 6(1), 3–14. Taussig, M. 1984. ‘Culture of Terror – Space of Death: Roger Casement’s Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture’. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26(3), 467–97. ________ 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. The World Factbook. 2007. Turkey. [Online]. Available at: https://www.cia.gov/ library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/tu.html [accessed: 8 October 2007]. Waterson, A. 2009. ‘Introduction: On War and Accountability’, in An Anthropology of War. Views from the Frontline, edited by A. Waterson. New York: Berghahn Books. Wilkinson, D. 2002. Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. Yalçın-Heckmann, L. 1991. Tribe and Kinship among the Kurds. Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang. Zarowsky, C. 2004. ‘Writing Trauma: Emotions, Ethnography, and the Politics of Suffering among Somali Returnees in Ethiopia’. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 28, 189–209.

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Chapter 7

Speaking Blood: Metaphoric Expressions of Sexual Violence in a Guadeloupian Family Janine Klungel

Introduction This chapter focuses on the metaphorical power of the substance of blood to express sexual violence in the French Antillean island of Guadeloupe. From the times of colonialism and slavery, sexual violence, rape and incest have been a matter to Caribbean women’s lives, or as the female protagonist Mary-Mathilda from the West Indian island of Bimshire [i.e. Barbados] asserts in Clarke’s novel The Polished Hoe (2004): ‘But blood was always in our lives. Blood, and more blood … and that is why I did what I did’ (2004: 39). Mary-Mathilda has just killed her father and the father of her children, Mr. Bellfeels, the plantation manager. After the murder, she wants to confess the homicide and asks the Sergeant to come over to record her testimony. In the 24 hours and more than 400 pages that cover their dialogue Mary-Mathilda is determined to tell the police officer the violent events that led to the homicide. Instead of a straightforward statement of the murder, though, she insists on telling her story in her own voice that requires a narrative form that owes nothing to and directly counters the terms of conventional legal discourse (Carby 2007: 223). Unlike women before her and who ‘knew how to carry burdens. And how to bury them. Inside their hearts. Concealed in their blood’ (Clarke 2004: 37), Mary-Mathilda attempts to put into words that which had to remain silent to reclaim the past through the telling of her painful family story and the secret of sexual violence. It is only at the end of the book that the reader learns that the history of women from Bimshire is a ‘pageantry of blood’ (Clarke 2004: 342). Throughout fieldwork in Guadeloupe – an island that was colonized by the French in 1635, where slavery persisted until 1848, and which has been an overseas department of France since 1946 – I was made a witness of this ‘pageantry of blood’ too. Guadeloupian women frequently narrated their experience of sexual violence by explaining that they could not verbalize their painful rape experience at first, but that they ‘spoke blood’ instead. They would spit blood and ‘throw it up like big balls’ or they talked about blood that ‘trickled down like a narrating voice from the corners of their mouths’. I aimed at listening attentively to this ‘language of blood’ that Guadeloupian women use in order to express sexual violence. The central question is: How can the blood metaphor by which Guadeloupian women express sexual violence be interpreted?

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In trying to answer this question, I want to offer some counterbalance to anthropological studies which argue that violence can hardly be expressed in language and therefore stress informants’ silence. Das (1997), for example, calls the metaphorical expressions of abduction and rape by Indian and Pakistani women during the Partition – such as ‘rivers of blood flowing and the earth covered with white shrouds right into the horizon’, ‘poison that makes the inside of the woman dissolve’ and ‘growing two stomachs, a normal one and another to bear the fruits of violence’ – ‘a zone’ or ‘a code of silence’ to protect women (1997: 84). She considers the language that women use to describe their experience too general and metaphoric to describe the actual experience (1997: 84). ‘What “right” words could be spoken against the wrong that had been done them’ (1997: 87), she wonders. In reply, I focus on the metaphorical language informants used to express sexual violence. Instead of arguing that persons, who have been sexually violated, are unable to express themselves adequately, I suggest that anthropologists merely lack adequate methodological means and theoretical approaches to investigate these metaphorical expressions and to interpret them. Driessen (2002: 42) maintains that these metaphorical expressions have a clear function, that is, making the invisible and ungraspable experience that pain often is, communicable. Persons suffering from rape find it sometimes hard, if not impossible, to communicate their painful experience to others. Herman (2001: 28) demonstrates that to speak of sexual violence often means inviting public humiliation, ridicule, and disbelief. Consequently, sexual violence remains hidden in private life consistently. According to Fernandez (1974), that which cannot be transmitted remains formless and unreal and therefore may seem to not really exist. By packing these experiences up in images, by comparing it with qualities from other life domains – especially nature and technology – which are comprehensible and therefore communicable, people make the formless into something concrete. Kirmayer (1992) shows that metaphors are often products of bodily action and emotion. Talking of ‘blood makes people’s words immediate’ (1992: 335), as ‘the psychophysiology of metaphor mediates the immediate – closing the gap between the body and society’ (1992: 336). I am therefore particularly interested in the metaphoric use of blood with which women in Guadeloupe express their experience of sexual violence. In the following pages, I will focus on an extended Guadeloupian family, the Sangely, in which I collected the metaphoric blood expressions of sexual violence. I will describe the context in which to situate the living conditions of the Sangely, which is the family yard. I will make evident that due to virilocal residence patterns the Sangely women’s livelihood within the yard is rather instable, as they can only gain some authority and status for themselves by giving birth to sons, who, at adult age, will eventually inherit the yard. This causes a lot of generational rivalry between the oldest woman and her daughters-in-law, as they all depend on the same men for survival, and it also makes them and their children particularly vulnerable to any form of abuse. Next, I will dilate upon the metaphoric significance of blood within this family context by taking into

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consideration the meaning of menstrual blood that is in itself valued positively as it represents the power of life and the establishment of relations within the family. However, this bodily substance looses its life’s connotations as soon as it exceeds the boundaries of the blood line that women try to create for themselves and falls into the hands of another woman who aims to enter into or to acquire a better position for herself within the family by breaking the relations of another woman with the men in the yard. It is through broken family relations and abandonment that women become particularly vulnerable to rape. This becomes clear in the ways that Isabelle and Dolores Sangely express their experience with sexual violence. Blood vomiting is associated with acts of witchcraft. The soukougnan (witches) are accused of sucking the life blood out of other women in the yard and of making them an easy target of a rape and sexual violence. By accusing other women in the yard as soukougnan, experiences of sexual violence become speakable, without directly accusing the male perpetrators. Finally, I will analyze the metaphoric blood language as a ‘hidden transcript’ (Scott 1990). It is an important means for women to express their privatized suffering caused by rape, frequently in the intimate circle of consanguines, and to make it public. Amidst the Sangely Family This study is based on longitudinal multi-sited fieldwork (1993, 1994, 1999–2000, 2001) in an extended Guadeloupian family, the Sangely. Most of its members live on the island and a few in France. The family, it has been argued, is an important level to examine expressions of violence, because according to Carsten (2007) family stories do not only tell something about the life of the family itself, but also about each single person and about developments on national or political level. The notion of family is very precious and valued in Caribbean islands like Guadeloupe. Most of the forebears of the inhabitants were brought by force from Africa and most did not have any relatives when they first set foot on Guadeloupian soil (Wekker 2006: 76). During slavery many were also continually severed from their families. Because of migration family relations today are frequently under pressure as well, even though attachments have remained relatively strong (Chamberlain 2009: 5). I met the first member of the Sangely family – Rosalie – not in Guadeloupe, but in a university residence in Paris in 1989. The following years I encountered her sister Moïse and her niece Madison, and stayed in their apartment in a HLM building (habitation à loyer modéré, a form of subsidized housing in France) in a Parisian suburb. During these years I got also acquainted with some Guadeloupian based Sangely as they travelled to Paris for the summer holidays. It was only when I joined Rosalie on a return trip home in 1993 that I was further immersed in the lives of the Sangely, who reside in the north-east of the eastern Guadeloupian island wing Grande-Terre – ‘land of sugar’ and the driest zone of the island (Lasserre 1961). There the family lives in a residential unit which in Caribbean terms is called ‘a yard’ and whose origins lie in the plantation past (Mintz 1989).

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The Sangely yard consists of five houses. In the main house that oversees all others Isabelle and Maximilien Sangely live. The other four houses are inhabited by three of their sons and one daughter. Isabelle is the pivot of the family. In 1954, she married Maximilien Sangely. His father ensured that they received a piece of land to build their house on. By marrying Maximilien, Isabelle thus became mistress of the first house in the Sangely yard, and she still takes a great deal of pride in this, as the house provides her with a place to live. She got seven children of which Isabelle is also enormously proud, and she often touches her belly with affection. Throughout the day, she frequently exclaims to her children: ‘know that you are a Sangely.’ In effect, it is Maximilien who formally recognized the children as his, gave them his name, and transmitted his right on legal entitlement on to them. Isabelle, on the other hand, says that she as the mother is the one who gave her blood to their children. Therefore she frequently calls them ‘mon sang’ (my blood) to express the closeness of their bond. She finds it extremely important that the ties between them be maintained strong. It is the strength of her relation with her children, especially with her sons, who are expected to provide for her when she is old and needs help, that defines her authority and livelihood within the yard. Sons continue to live in the yard during adulthood, and eventually inherit it. This makes Isabelle not only dependent on Maximilien for survival, but also on her sons. Therefore she continually repeats that she is the source of their blood. Everyday Isabelle cooks the food for all the people in the yard on the coal cooker in her old kitchen, because food is the prime source of blood and carries properties of the mother. She expects her family to come along and eat with her, because those who eat her food also come to share her blood. Through the shared consumption of food, people’s blood becomes progressively more similar (Carsten 2004: 40). Eating the meals prepared by Isabelle together not only maintains and strengthens relationships between blood kin, but also creates such bonds with those who have recently come to share residence in the yard, such as daughters-inlaw. She cuts breadfruit slices for the midday meal and throws them in her shining aluminum pots that get heavily blackened on the fire, cherishes and comments on the piles of fruits that fell like rain from the trees, yells at her grandchildren that they must be kind to each other and wipes their noses. The place is usually full of laughter and teasing, but to a certain height. As soon as emotions run high, she immediately calls her children to order. She does not want any open disputes in the family. Conflicts are absolutely forbidden and she would not accept any swearing, as a crisis in family relations frequently threatens the security and subsistence base of the women and children in the yard (cf. Klungel 2009). Family relations often embody ‘intense, often too intense, emotional experiences’ (Carsten 2004: 6). In the Sangely yard, many conflicts are caused due to virilocal residence patterns. Women move out of their parents’ home as soon as they start living with their Sangely companions. Although the Sangely men are the legal owners of the yard, its social life is mostly dominated by the women as it is them who spend most of their time at the yard while the men are mostly away. The relations between Isabelle and her daughters-in-law are often source of

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heated arguments, because the daughters-in-law accuse Isabelle of unobtrusively spying on them. Now that her own sons have grown up, Isabelle insists on her role of being the senior woman in the yard. She therefore promotes an ethos of respect based on age between and within the generations, which gives her a relatively important source of authority within the family. Although Isabelle is not the direct legitimate parent of her sons’ children, i.e. her own grand-children, she is aware of the fact that they are the progeny of her blood and therefore takes care of them with passion. In turn, she perceives her daughters-in-law solely as those who have given birth to these children, but not as their caregivers. She therefore frequently criticizes their maternal capacities and damages their reputation in front of her sons in the hope that the latter would break up with their wives. In actual fact, most of the daughters-in-law were not able to cope with the tense living arrangements, demanded a divorce, and moved out of the yard. Except for Dolores, who married Isabelle’s and Maximilien’s second son Samuel. Dolores is the other steady factor in the yard. She told Samuel that if he took their marriage serious, he should not eat in Isabelle’s house any longer. Isabelle consequently broke all relations with her son Samuel and Dolores. When relations are broken, says Bougerol (1998: 42), the rules of etiquette prescribe that the break up – she calls it ‘couper les ponts’, i.e. to burn one’s boats or bridges – must happen without any verbal scandal. One simply starts by withdrawing the obligatory greeting of ‘bonjou’ (hello) which in effect is an important barometer of relations. Although Isabelle and Dolores live less than 10 meters away from each other, they never greet each other. Due to the frictions between the Sangely relatives it was often rather difficult to do research with and among them (cf. Klungel 2009). For a good reason, ethnographic fieldwork is frequently presented as much more than a method but rather as an art (Powdermaker 1966: 9), since it often merges with something far more personal (Sluka 2007: 121). Ethnographic research, whatever else it is, is a form of human relationship (McCarthy Brown 2001: 12). In accordance with Henry (1973: xv), I nevertheless thought that the collection of expressions of sexual violence within the family is best done by doing direct observations of relatives in their day-to-day surroundings and to look well beneath the placid and ‘harmonious’ surface that dominant discourses frequently present of family life (Kühl 2009: 24, Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004: 3). I found it very valuable to go offstage (Scott 1990) by becoming intimately part of the everyday life in the Sangely yard over long periods of time (cf. Robben and Nordstrom 1995). I repeatedly stayed within all the houses. I never initiated the topic of sexual violence myself, but simply listened to stories as women were going about their usual business, like cooking, doing the laundry, and repairing clothes sitting on the veranda, and learned by becoming ‘an active listener’ (Halberstam 2000: xv).

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Menstrual Blood I first encountered the significance of blood within the Sangely family, when I had just started to have my period one summer morning in 1993. I enveloped my sanitary towel with care, so the eyes of others could not decipher its content, and threw it inconspicuously in the bin near the door of the old kitchen. However, Isabelle, who seemed to have eyes in her back because she noticed everything going around her, immediately asked Rosalie if I was menstruating. Rosalie passed the question on to me, and when I nodded in assent but with astonishment in my eyes, Isabelle took a pair of fire tongs with which she took my napkin from the dustbin. Next, she walked with it, passing the yard for anyone to see, to the fire place, threw it in and waited until the fire had swallowed the towel. Afterwards, she told me to be very careful with my napkins, to burn them immediately, so no one could put hands on them. She was afraid that a ‘méchante’ (mean woman) would steal my blood-stained sanitary towel and use it to harm the family. I could not look Isabelle in the eye, feeling too ashamed, because the confrontation with my proper menstruation blood felt very unpleasant. As Dresen (1998: 41) points out, the way Dutch women like me deal with menstruation blood is to keep it strictly hidden from others, but obviously I had not succeeded to keep my period a secret. I thus felt very uncomfortable, when Isabelle showed ‘my blood’ to the whole family. That afternoon the family got together for a siesta on the veranda. It was August and the heat at noon was insupportable and covering my body with humidity. I was exhausted, when Isabelle joined us after having spent some time praying in her bedroom chapel. The daily funeral announcements had been broadcasted and now the local radio station Radio Massabielle started its monotonous Hail Mary. As if my shame was not sufficient already, Isabelle conversed with Rosalie about my menstruation as if she did not notice that I was in her sight. The anger which I had been able to control that morning, now made my blood boil anew but I said nothing. With disbelief I heard Isabelle saying to Rosalie, ‘cette fille a du sang chaud, san chò menm!’ (This girl has hot blood, extremely hot blood!). Although Isabelle made the remark smilingly, by that time I knew that the classification of my blood as ‘hot’ did not have positive connotations in Isabelle’s eyes. ‘Hot blood,’ she told me, ‘means hungry for sex,’ a characteristic that does not necessarily displease Isabelle for a married woman, but an unmarried girl should bridle her passions until the man she will marry comes along. During my stay with Isabelle, I was constantly confronted with my own view on menstrual blood, because Isabelle cherished menstruation blood affectionately and loved to talk about it as long as the information remained within the inner circle of her family. The only knowledge she shared with Rosalie and me from her proper religious cahier, which she never disclosed to anyone, not even to her closest family, was on the topic of menstruation. She ordered Rosalie and me to copy the ‘intimate guide of women and young girls’ (cf. Table 7.1) on the fortunes or misfortunes of our monthly period. The guide had been divided into the days of the week, the days of the month, and the days in advance or delay of getting one’s period.

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Table 7.1

Isabelle’s ‘Intimate guide of women and young girls’

Days of the week Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday

Days of the month 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Meaning New acquaintance Present Anxiety Declaration Sadness Business solutions Perfect friendship

Meaning You will live in happiness You will be disdained Quarrel Joy and cheerfulness Sadness soon Love surprise Platonic love You will experience a great joy Modification Intense and unclouded love Total faithfulness Burning hot passion Expect yourself to suffer Happy news That what you are waiting for happens Distance Bad news You will be desired You will be loved You will love Transitory annoyance Melancholy, distrust Adventure and good luck You will have a clash A trip soon Backlash and regret Realization of your dreams One looks after you Hurt and tears Unexpected event You have admirers

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Advance 1 day 2 days 3 days

Delay 1 day 2 days 3 days

Meaning You will be cheerful A new friendship Sadness

Meaning One thinks of you Clash Someone loves you

If a woman starts menstruating on Friday the 13th and she is two days in delay, it means, according to the guide, that she will be sad the rest of the month and can expect clashes and suffering, which is not a very encouraging month prospect. Isabelle, however, hanled this information cautiously, because she knew for which female relative she needed to pray harder for protection during the month. The ‘intimate guide of women and girls’ mainly refers to moods and emotions, material conditions, and relations, especially relationships with men. Guadeloupian women contain of a rich idiom for resisting, punishing, and controlling men’s sexual moves with other women. Men can be tamed, even ‘tied,’ into a kind of submission, and this knowledge is Isabelle’s specialty, because besides being a fulltime housemother and farmer, she is also a renowned gadèdzafè (visionaryhealer) as her religious-healing occupation is called in Creole, because she ‘looks’ (gadé) into people’s affairs (zafè). The knowledge of tying men down has been very important in Isabelle’s own life. When she was newly married to Maximilien, he started an affair and had two daughters with a mistress. Isabelle was left behind alone with the financial and emotional care for their children. It devastated her and it took a long time before she recovered. It was by means of her initiation into becoming a visionary-healer that she could ‘tie’ Maximilien to her again and to gain some control over her proper as well as their children’s lives. Spread by word of mouth, Isabelle has built up a good healing reputation throughout the 40 years that she has been active as ‘a seer’. A steady group of devoted clients whose mothers most often had deceased or migrated, who are mainly single mothers or women who cannot get children (yet), and who are looking for a steady husband, appreciate her for her trustworthiness, discreetness, and effectiveness. At six o’clock in the morning, they would gather at the veranda of the house. There the lined-up clients would chitchat about the hot weather and the latest public news, but they would not share their problems before entering the safe environment of Isabelle’s working and altar room. In effect, no one really liked to be seen by a family member there, because illnesses and troubles are always regarded as relational resulting from an imbalance in the family or social environment. Therefore this has to remain top secret, since, as Isabelle said, ‘no one

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likes to wash his or her dirty laundry in public. With Isabelle as an intermediary, her clients can articulate pain and anger to increase their chances of survival in unmanageable circumstances, to make relational problems easier to handle, and to express private suffering in public. Isabelle’s healing house has become a meeting place for her steady clients, where they can break the silence of their troublesome and often lonesome existence. Vomiting Blood As a visionary-healer, Isabelle likes to perform the story of her religious becoming, which she represents as a constant battle with a witch, who she says broke into her family after her mother had died while giving birth to her ninth baby. After my mother’s death, my father’s heat demanded other women, so he searched for some pleasure and someone who could take care of his nine children. One day, he made love with Celia … Celia of all women, maman! She is a piece of loose woman, having two children with two different men already, who do not provide for them. Ay, mon papa, God bless his soul, made love with Celia in her parents’ house. Her parents, searching a suitor for their daughter, observed from the bathroom and caught him in the act. They told him that he did something only married couples could do, so Celia’s parents insisted that he would marry their daughter. My father had no choice, even if he protested that his earnings from cane and manioc cultivation were not enough to support Celia and her two children. But her parents were adamant and therefore promised that they would continue to provide for Celia and her children. That is how my father made the big mistake to marry Celia.

According to Isabelle it was the fault of her now stepmother Celia that her father soon after their marriage sent her at age five away from her family to live with her godmother. Isabelle was ill at the time and her father believed that it was caused due to an insufficiency of food. When Isabelle’s godmother offered him to take care of her, Isabelle’s father accepted this offer gratefully, but according to Isabelle it was Celia who had put a spell on her and had made her ill. Abandoned and alone in her godmother’s home, Isabelle described how she had to survive in a violent environment where nobody could come at her rescue. At the beginning, Isabelle found that she was treated well, because she soon grew fatter and stronger. But my godmother’s son of 14 did not really appreciate the queen’s treatment that I received from his mother. He said that I ate all his food, while it was him who was really fat! He was so jealous of me and mistreated me so badly. One day, when I was seven years old and there was nobody at home, he entered the house. He wanted to catch me. I ran as fast as I could, but he was quicker and he caught me. He was ready to rape me, but since he was so much taller than I

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Violence Expressed was, he had to lift me up. As he tried to lift me up, I was suddenly rooted to the ground, then I lost my conscience. I did not move, I only saw this beautiful lightskinned lady, dressed in blue with gorgeous long hair, like an angel, coming from the north, coming from the sea. She protected me. My godmother’s son was so frightened that he left me in peace afterwards.

At a later age, as Isabelle became a visionary-healer, she started to interpret the rape attack by her godmother’s son within a religious framework of divine purpose, thus trying to preserve a sense of value. The second instance of rape attacks happened when Isabelle was married to Maximilien and had just given birth to their third and fourth sons, twins. Again it is her stepmother Celia whom she accuses of deploying witchcraft and making her ill and her husband Maximilien going insane by taking over his head and manipulating him into adultery. My stepmother cast a spell on me by using one of my sanitary towels. She spoke the names of dead men over it. Each night, their wicked spirits came to rape me at least ten times. If Maximilien spent the night beside me, he did not notice anything. He quietly slept through, while big balls of blood came out of me! I lost my speech! I took to bed for years!

At night, these manipulated spirits of dead men penetrated Isabelle’s house to rape her repeatedly, just as during slavery, when European men haunted African women as they ‘invisibly’ forced entrance in their cabins to rape them. In order to get rid of the rape spirits, Isabelle first visited a kenbwazè (male sorcerer). He identified the names of three spirits that raped Isabelle each night; men from the neighborhood who had died not long before. In return for helping her, Isabelle said, the sorcerer wanted to sleep with her. He told her that only through intercourse with him her health would be restored. ‘I did not accept his advances, but there was absolutely nothing that could be done about it, for he had the power to control me in my dreams. He entered my dreams to have sex with me on many occasions, and it made me so tired.’ It was only when her aunt helped her to discover her own religious-healing gift that Isabelle learned to protect herself and other people from evil through the healing strength of prayers and medicinal plants. She became a member of a secret religious society beheaded by a woman Isabelle calls la Dame (the Lady), who organized long meetings in her house each Sunday. There all members would regularly unite to find their own powers and divine gifts to combat ‘le mal’ (evil) together. By promising complete obedience to God, Isabelle was willing to sacrifice her life for her family, and succeeded to convince her unfaithful husband Maximilien of his bewitchment by her stepmother Celia, and of her own special religious authority that was the only way to safe him. Maximilien thus decided to return home, started to follow Isabelle’s strict regime, and continued providing for his wife and children.

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When Isabelle narrated her life story, experiences of sexual violence walked along expressions of ‘vomiting blood that she expelled in the form of balls’. In other life stories, as that of Dolores, Isabelle’s daughter-in-law, ‘flowing blood’ is a master trope to narrate her violent life. Dolores’s father regularly battered her mother, abused his sons, and committed incest with his daughters. Dolores did not touch upon this period of her life often, and if she did, she only talked about it when we were alone. As I visited her one day, I found her sitting alone in the dark at the kitchen table. She cried silently when she told me the following: I cannot understand why Samuel stays with me. I am no good as a woman. I cannot accept sex. I do not like it. I do not like it one bit! I have talked about it with a religious acquaintance, who told me that I need to relax, to stay calm. But I cannot. I only see these images of my father on top of me… I want to die! I tell Samuel time and time again to take another woman, but Samuel says that he will not leave me. I am no good as a mother either. The children make me nervous. I only want to leave the house, to go out. I do not care one bit about cleaning, cooking, and washing… And those medicines the psychiatrist gives me, I have not taken one of them. They make me numb. I feel so tremendously depressed that I want to kill myself.

Then Samuel and the children arrive at the house. They turn on the light, the children start crawling around Dolores, and she stands up to put a pan on the fire. Dolores has been feeling like a living dead person since her mother Honorine passed away. While her mother was still alive, Dolores and I once found her with a swollen face full of bruises. Dolores asked me to stay outside while she joined her mother into the little office of the gas station that she ran on her own. I stayed in the car for fifteen minutes. When Dolores showed up, her worried face spoke volumes. She told me that her father had beaten up her mother. We sat silently for some time. Finally Dolores said: You know Janine, I cannot do anything for my mother. It is my mother’s choice to stay with my father. My father has always been violent, but my mother does not want to leave him. She is a religious woman, and she believes to be under God’s protection. I can only respect my mother’s decision. She is a strong woman.

A year later in 1995, I received a phone call from Rosalie with the message that Honorine had died. Later Isabelle wrote me on 6 April 1995, ‘by the way, there is this bad news: Dolores’s father killed Dolores’s mother with a bond stone.’ She also told me that the day after Honorine’s violent death, Dolores’s father had apparently committed suicide, leaving his daughter behind without anything. When I tried to get in touch with Dolores again in 1999, her husband Samuel told me that Dolores had just had a big crisis and was hospitalized. I asked him what had caused Dolores’s admission, and Samuel answered:

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Violence Expressed I had planted a Christmas tree. I planted it at a perfect spot, exactly between my parents’ and my house. So I dug a hole and put in the tree. [The next day, while Samuel was at work, Isabelle discovered the Christmas tree in her backyard, disapproved, and sent Maximilien to Dolores to tell her to pull out the tree immediately]. My father burst out at Dolores, and she, out of rage, fell to the ground. She shook, yelled, cried! Thereupon, she vomited blood on the Christmas tree. It kept on flowing from her mouth on the tree! The twins panicked, and the neighbor, who observed what happened, called me at my work. Dolores was carried into the house and laid down on her bed, where she remained in shock. She did not speak, not even one word. All her brothers and sisters came over to make her talk and to attract her attention, but it was as if Dolores did not belong to this world, she was away. When the doctor found her that way, he immediately phoned a mental home far away in the mountains, whereupon an ambulance came to transport her to the clinic.

A few days later I met Dolores in the clinic, where she sat on her bed in a room that she shared with two other women. The walls were painted pink and the windows offered a splendid view that was spoiled by underpants drying on a clothesline and the iron bars, which had to prevent the patients to escape from the clinic or to jump committing suicide. Dolores had been given sedatives, her face was swollen and she lisped while she was talking. ‘The lots of medicines I am receiving are making me totally senseless. Nothing touches me anymore. I have become indifferent’, she said. She introduced me to the other women in the room. The woman on the bed next to her was lying under a blanket. I gave her a hand and she asked me, ‘do you smell this strange odor, too?’ I gave Dolores a searching glance. The woman insisted and asked me again, ‘do you smell this strange odor?’ I wondered what smell it could be. I could only make out the ‘typical hospital smell’ of penetrating urine and disinfectants. Dolores told the woman gently, ‘it is nothing’. Afterwards, she mocked aloud, ‘she is afraid of bad spirits, because she believes that those spirits that were chasing her at home, now have come after her in the hospital’. Dolores did not ascribe her troubled state of mind to her proper painful family history, but accused Isabelle of having bewitched her; just as Isabelle did not reproach her father when he sent her away from home but blamed Celia for making her ill by putting a spell on her. The day she vomited blood on the Christmas tree had been the climax of the pestering. Dolores lost her consciousness that day, but she remembered vaguely how Isabelle had rushed out of the house to watch what was happening, and how her mother-in-law had sat beside her bed. Isabelle immediately started her treatment, breathing over my body, but instead of becoming better, blood started to flow out from the corners of my mouth. Thereupon, Isabelle had stopped her healing session immediately. She said, ‘there is nothing I can do, the power of witchcraft is stronger than that of the Holy Spirit’. Isabelle had made up her mind, the proof was there, Dolores was bewitched. Dolores, however, had another explanation for her blood vomiting and laughed

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about the idea of being a witch, ‘Janine, I was having my period that day, so out of rage, my menstrual blood moved upwards, instead of downwards’. Dolores was mad at Isabelle, and was convinced that her mother-in-law wanted to bewitch her. She believes that Isabelle has been seduced by the devil, ‘a bad spirit metamorphosed as Saint Mary must have appeared to my mother-in-law’. In actual fact, I never saw anyone vomiting blood, but when Dolores’s depressive feelings exploded after one of her employers had scolded at her, she gave me an indication, that vomiting in general is closely connected to acts of powerlessness, physical attack and humiliation. She had been beaten up by the disabled daughter of her employer, and Dolores complained about her safety to her boss. Her employer told her, ‘you are no good anyway, so if you cause problems I will fire you. I do not tolerate any contradiction from you!’ Dolores felt stifled and humiliated, and she could not express her rage: ‘A big ball grows in my throat.’ When we joined all for Sunday lunch at the kitchen table, Dolores gobbled down her food silently. Next, she started crying. Softly first, but soon she raged and stormed. She yelled and banged her fist on the table. At the same time, she vomited, throwing up all the food on the table and calling her dead mother for help. All people present in the kitchen nervously continued their meal pretending there was nothing wrong. Finally, Samuel pushed away the table and held a bottle of ammonia under Dolores’s nose. One of the twins nervously started to laugh, while the other made a sad grimace and climbed on Dolores’s lap; thereafter she fell asleep. Bloody Witches Blood usually flows – rather invisibly to the eye – through a network of veins and organs internal to the body. As long as it stays ‘in place’, namely there where it is categorized to belong, there commonly is not any trouble. However, when the substance exceeds its boundaries, when it starts fleeing chaotically, and more importantly, the ‘matter out of place’ becomes visible to the eye, it appeals to what Douglas (2002) has pointed out ‘dirt and danger’, because it blurs the clear boundaries of the body. In this sense, the substance of blood is thus highly ambiguous, capable of two kinds of interpretations, positive and negative. When saints bring stigmata to themselves, the blood that flows is controllable and positively contributes to their sanctity, but when ‘balls of blood’ come out of a woman’s mouth or ‘a stream of blood’ trickles from its corners, it becomes an uncontrollable substance and is attributed to the dangerous forces of witchcraft. Favret-Saada (1980) claims that ‘witchcraft is spoken words’. In the Guadeloupian context witchcraft is most of all ‘spoken blood’. The first association with blood vomiting is thus not with the bloodshed caused by rape, but with the determined oeuvre of a female witch consciously aspiring to cause harm and pain to another woman. The witch is accused of having stolen blood from her victim in order to get directly in touch with her life giving fluid.

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Guadeloupian novel writer Condé has described witches as women, who feed on fresh blood, smearing it all over their jowls, licking it off their fingers, and then, in the colorless hours before dawn, they give birth to monsters (Condé cit. in Kadish 2000: 217). In the local idiom, these witches are also called soukougnan, women who have the power to suck blood. According to Leiris (1955: 50–51; see also Leti 2000: 160), a soukougnan undoes herself of her skin at nightfall to fly as a bird to invisibly drink the blood of her prey. At the crack of dawn, she becomes a woman again. Due to the power of invisibility, a soukougnan can break into houses unseen and steal the blood of the woman she wants to cause suffering to. In obtaining an object of her victim that is impregnated with blood, such as a blood-stained sanitary towel, a witch can gain control over this person. Menstrual blood namely is a symbol of fertility and dictates the rhythm of a woman’s life (Jansen 1994: 2); therefore it usually has the power of life. But when it falls into the hands of the wrong people, it becomes hostile, destructive, and causes death to the person under a spell. Although men seem to be more in control over their lives than women, the Sangely women represent men as particularly weak: ‘They have nothing in their head; their heads are completely empty.’ The women believe that the heads of men can easily be taken over by a soukougnan, who can force them into sexual acts, which the men themselves do not want to commit. In this sense, men are the actors of rape, they cause the bleeding, but they are not seen as the ones with bad intentions, nor can they be held responsible since they are not the head behind it. It is women instead who enter the family through marriage who are accused of instigating sexual violence. Living in the same yard, enables them to steal the blood of one of their female in-laws and to speak out a curse over their bloodstained sanitary towels. They thus intend to break the existing family relations and to acquire a better position for themselves within the yard. As mentioned earlier, women’s subsistence base is extremely vulnerable. Due to virilocal residence patterns men, not women, control the scarce resource of land. As a consequence, the rivalry between women in the yard is very strong: they all make demands on the same, often scarce, properties within the yard. Only when women become mothers and thus transmit their blood to a next generation, they gain a bit more authority in the family. Arendt (2004: 239) defines authority as the unquestioning recognition by those who are asked to obey. To keep this authority requires respect, and therefore its greatest enemy is contempt; the surest way to undermine it is laughter. The Sangely women highly value respect, but say to receive little. Rumors are continuously poured in that one of the women is having an affair and that a non-Sangely has put a child in her belly. By accusing other women in the yard of witchcraft, the Sangely women try to gain a bit more authority and status for themselves that is otherwise linked to the number of sons, age, and the time spent in their husbands’ and sons’ yards. It is also the presence of soukougnan (witches) within the yard that allows the Sangely women to express rape relations in the family.

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Hidden Transcripts In interpreting the blood metaphors used to express sexual violence, I have found Scott’s work on hidden transcripts (1990) very useful. Scott uses the term ‘public transcript’ to describe the open interaction between marginalized people and those in power (1990: 2). He applies the term ‘hidden transcript’ to characterize speeches, gestures, and practices that take place ‘offstage,’ beyond direct observation by those in power. This discourse confirms, contradicts, or inflects what appears in the public transcript and is produced for a different audience and under different constraints of power (Scott 1990: 4–5). The public transcript therefore is unlikely to tell the whole story about power relations, because it is frequently in the interest of all parties to tacitly conspire in misrepresentation and to ‘act a mask’ (Fanon 1952). Any analysis of sexual violence based exclusively on the ‘public transcript’ is likely to conclude that women endorse the terms of their subordination and are willing, even enthusiastic partners in it (cf. Bourdieu 2001; Mathieu 1991), and it passes by the fact completely that the practice of domination also often creates a hidden transcript. Building forth on Scott’s work, I maintain that the idea of public and hidden transcript does not only hold for the relations between dominant and dominated groups in society, but also for gender relations within the family, where there is also question of front- and offstages of expression. Within the Sangely family, the offstage for creating and expressing the hidden transcript of sexual violence is the one of witchcraft/religion representing a critique of power. Living amidst the Sangely family, I came close to this spiritual world in which women can find a vehement and full-throated expression for their unspoken riposte and stifled anger caused by rape relations. According to Jackson, speaking out is a powerful strategy for people to transform private into public meanings, as storytelling is not a solely subjective matter but comes into being within an ‘already existing web of human relationships’ (Arendt cit. in Jackson 2002: 23). He considers it a vital human strategy to sustain a sense of agency in the face of disempowering circumstances. Likewise reconstituting events in a narrative means no longer living those events in passivity, but actively reworking them, both in dialogue with others and within one’s own imagination (Jackson 2002: 15). Rose (1999: 164) has defined speaking out as a political act, and as such, as a claim to power.

  Already during slavery, women’s medical role was well established on the plantations (Morrissey 1989: 68). The skills were passed on from one generation to the next and women who knew how to use healing herbs enjoyed prestige and resources. But simultaneously, due to their knowledge of poisonous plants, they were also mostly feared, suspected and accused of killing the plantation owners (Moitt 2001: 139). From 1685 onwards, the Black Code forbade slaves to publicly practice any other religion than Catholicism. Hidden from public view, control, surveillance, and repression, slaves continued to practice other religions underground and in secret that challenged the official religion.

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When this hidden transcript of sexual violence goes public, it takes on – with great dramaturgical power – the disguised form of bloodshed. According to Blok (2001: 95) the event of bloodshed is often staged. He describes such expressive aspects of violence as ritualization, as tied to rules and prescriptions, etiquette and protocol, and stresses its formalized and theatrical character. In expressing sexual violence by means of blood metaphors, the Sangely women are not only finding their own voices, they are also collectively creating new narratives that challenge the individual and collective denial and reproduction of sexual violence. Whitehead (2004: 10) calls these expressions of sexual violence ‘poetic’, because of ‘the rule-governed substrate that underlies it, and for how this substrate is deployed, through which new meanings and forms of cultural expression emerge.’ The blood metaphors by which the Sangely women express sexual violence thus allows room for variation on a central theme and the creation of one’s own unique blood story (Kirmayer 1992: 323). To conclude, reducing the blood metaphor by which Guadeloupian women express sexual violence as being too metaphoric, too general, or a code of silence seems dangerous to me as it might not do justice to the ways women like Isabelle and Dolores have found means to understand their experience and to express themselves. Martin (1991) argues that powerful and insightful commentaries on the social order are exactly embedded in concrete storytelling. It is up to anyone who listens to narratives to hear the implicit messages, to interpret the powerful rage, and to watch for ways in which the narrative form gives a weighted quality to incident. And that is what makes the ethnographic enterprise of collecting expressions of sexual violence in my opinion so important, because anthropologists have the time to listen and are interested in the many detours stories like the one of Mary-Mathilda at the beginning of this chapter, or the ones of Isabelle and Dolores Sangely can take, detours which at the end do not seem secondary and certainly not ‘silence’ at all, but the very heart of the experience of sexual violence. References Arendt, H. 2004. ‘From on Violence’, in Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology, edited by N. Scheper-Hughes and P. Bourgois. Malden: Blackwell, 236–43. Blok, A. 2001. Honour and Violence. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bougerol, C. 1998. Une Ethnographie des Conflits aux Antilles: Jalousie, Commérages, Sorcellerie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Bourdieu, P. 2001. Masculine Domination. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Carby, H. 2007. ‘Postcolonial Translations’. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30(2), 213–34. Carsten, J. 2004. After Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ________ 2007. ‘Introduction: Ghosts of Memory’, in Ghosts of Memory: Essays on Remembrance and Relatedness, edited by J. Carsten. Malden: Blackwell, 1–35.

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Chamberlain, M. 2009. Family Love in the Diaspora: Migration and the AngloCaribbean Experience. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Clarke, A. 2004. The Polished Hoe. New York: Amistad. Das, V. 1997. ‘Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain’, in Social Suffering, edited by A. Kleinman, V. Das and M. Lock. Berkeley: University of California Press, 67–91. Douglas, M. 2002. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge. Dresen, G. 1998. Is Dit Mijn Lichaam? Visioenen van het Volmaakte Lichaam in Katholieke Moraal en Mystiek. Nijmegen: Valkhof Pers. Driessen, H. 2002. Pijn en Cultuur. Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek. Fanon, F. 1952. Peau Noire, Masques Blancs. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Favret-Saada, J. 1980. Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fernandez, J. 1974. ‘The Mission of Metaphor in Expressive Culture’. Current Anthropology, 15(2), 119–45. Halberstam, J. 2000. ‘Foreword: The Butch Anthropologist Out in the Field’, in Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas, by Esther Newton. Durham: Duke University Press, ix–xvii. Henry, J. 1973. Pathways to Madness. New York: Vintage Books. Herman, J. 2001. Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. London: Pandora. Jackson, M. 2002. The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression, and Intersubjectivity. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Jansen, W. 1994. ‘Bloed en betekenis’. Parmentier, 5(2), 2–7. Kadish, D. 2000. ‘Maryse Condé and Slavery’, in Slavery in the Caribbean Francophone World: Distant Voices, Forgotten Acts, Forged Identities, edited by D. Kadish. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 211–24. Kirmayer, L. 1992. ‘The Body’s Insistence on Meaning: Metaphor as Presentation and Representation in Illness Experience’. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 6(4), 323–46. Klungel, J. 2009. ‘Family Pilgrimages to the Sea in Guadeloupe: Matrifocality Under Pressure’, in Moved by Mary: Power and Pilgrimage in the Modern World, edited by A.-K. Hermkens, W. Jansen and C. Notermans. Aldershot: Ashgate, 165–79. Kühl, M. 2009. Life Embedded in Violence: A Feminist Anthropological Study among Women in Germany Surviving Partner Abuse. Utrecht: Research Master Thesis Gender and Ethnicity. Lasserre, G. 1961. La Guadeloupe: Etude Géographique. Bordeaux: Université de Bordeaux, Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines. Leiris, M. 1955. Contacts de Civilisations en Martinique et en Guadeloupe. Paris: UNESCO. Leti, G. 2000. L’Univers Magico-Religieux Antillais: ABC des Croyances et Superstitions d’Hier et d’Aujourd’hui. Paris: L’Harmattan.

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Martin, E. 1991. Metaphors of bleeding in women. Clinical Issues in Obstetric, Gynecological, and Neonatal Nursing, 2(3), 283–8. Mathieu, N-C. 1991. L’Anatomie Politique: Catégorisations et Idéologies du Sexe. Paris: Côté-Femmes. McCarthy Brown, K. 2001. Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mintz, S. 1989. Caribbean Transformations. New York: Columbia University Press. Moitt, B. 2001. Women and Slavery in the French West Indies, 1635–1848. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Morrissey, M. 1989. Slave Women in the New World: Gender Stratification in the Caribbean. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Powdermaker, H. 1966. Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist. New York: W.W. Norton. Robben, A. and Nordstrom, C. 1995. ‘Introduction: The Anthropology and Ethnography of Violence and Socio-political Conflict’, in Fieldwork under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival, edited by A. Robben and C. Nordstrom. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1–23. Rose, S. 1999. ‘Naming and Claiming: The Integration of Traumatic Experience and the Reconstruction of Self in Survivors’ Stories of Sexual Abuse’, in Trauma and Life Stories: International Perspectives, edited by K. Lacy Rogers, S. Leydesdorf and G. Dawson. London: Routledge, 160–79. Scheper-Hughes, N. and Bourgois, P. 2004. ‘Introduction: Making Sense of Violence’, in Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology, edited by N. ScheperHughes and P. Bourgois. Malden: Blackwell, 1–31. Scott, J. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sluka, J. 2006. ‘Introduction Part III: Fieldwork Relations and Rapport’, in Ethnographic Fieldwork: An Anthropological Reader, edited by A. Robben and J. Sluka. Malden: Blackwell, 121–5. Wekker, G. 2006. The Politics of Passion: Women’s Sexual Culture in the AfroSurinamese Diaspora. New York: Columbia University Press. Whitehead, N. (ed.) 2004. Violence. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

Chapter 8

Expressed, Muted and Silenced: Mestizo Childhood and Everyday Violence in a Marginal Neighbourhood in Quito, Ecuador Esben Leifsen

Introduction Working as a volunteer and carrying out fieldwork at a day-care centre in the marginal neighbourhood area El Solar in Quito, the capital of Ecuador, I was surprised by the ease with which young children between three and six years talked to me about violence and death. By the pre-school children that were attending the day-care centre I was asked about my personal mode of relating to those socially and emotionally closest to me. They would want to know if I battered my daughter, or hit my wife. They repeatedly posed these questions during the period of getting to know each other, which seemed to be a response to my unusual replies that were apparently not confirming these children’s expectancies. I was also taken aback by their curiosity and reactions to my account – on their request – of the death of my own father. They were showing a highly developed empathic competence. In play and conversations the children of this centre introduced me to their experiences and expectations of every day domestic violence and death (cf. Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004). They also indicated to me one of the dimensions of structural violence (cf. Bourgois 2004, Farmer 2004) affecting their immediate social environment, by asking me about my job-situation. They wanted to know if I was hit by my boss at work. Quite realistically this question refers to  El Solar and all other names of places and streets, as well as all names of persons, are constructed and form part of a strategy to alter essential information about specific persons in order to protect their anonymity.   This work formed part of a pilot-project to the PhD project Moralities and Politics of Belonging: Governing Female Reproduction in 20th Century Quito (Leifsen 2006). The pilot-project was financed by the Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture at the University of Oslo and by the Nansen Fund of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. The PhD project was financed by the Norwegian Research Council. I am grateful to all three institutions for enabling me to carry out long term and in-depth fieldwork. Many thanks to Maria Six-Hohenbalken and Nerina Weiss for thoughtful and constructive comments and suggestions to draft versions of this chapter.

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the asymmetric labour relationships their parents enter into, and to the legitimate brutality that structural power inequalities more generally foster and reproduce. In this chapter I depart from preschool mestizo children’s everyday experiences in a marginal urban context. I am concerned with their explicit talk of domestic violence, creating in the view of the researcher an image of collective acceptance. The non-dramatic ways children talked about these issues indicated to me that certain kinds and intensities of violent interaction are taken for granted and seen as inevitable. This is quite opposite to the unacceptable, and often hidden, existence of domestic violence of my own social milieu. As I carried out my fieldwork in El Solar in 1999, and also when I came back from 2001 to 2003, I came across quite a few cases of excessive domestic violence nobody wanted to talk about, which conjured up another image of destructive transgressions of the acceptable. One of the aspects that caught my attention was the muted expressions it produced in children. Getting to know these children’s life trajectories, I had the chance to see how much of their experiences were silenced, and I learnt to interpret small and subtle signs as references to painful and destructive pasts which could not be shared collectively, for example in the social context of the day-care centre. The contrast between children’s explicit and easily expressed versus muted and silenced experiences of domestic violence, has challenged me to formulate a series of questions: Can we take this contrast as an indicator of the contents and limits to a social/cultural practice of violent interaction? Can certain types of domestic violence form part of normal everyday social life, and what does this violent dimension of everyday-life tell us about children’s agency, i.e. their capacity and possibility to act in ways which are adequate and constructive for themselves and in relation to their significant others? These questions also address an analytical distinction between alterity and power inequality, which is often emphasized disproportionately in anthropological studies, and which sometimes are treated in combination (cf. Leifsen 2009a). By alterity I here refer to the constitution of cultural difference as an aspect of sociality (cf. Harris 2008). The question here is what we link violent domestic practices to. Are they cultural specific modes of being, or are they reflections of external power structures and practices of inequality? Farmer (2004), for instance, suggests that much of what anthropologists and others see as cultural practices has to be explained within a broader frame of national and global political economies. Moreover, Bourgois (2004), building on Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992), argues that structural violence tends to be translated into domestic violence, and in the process, human aggression is directed towards the aggressors’ immediate community rather than against the structures and agents of oppression. In this sense, translation of structural violence implies a brutalization of everyday domestic life, which among other things contributes to reproduce the power inequalities people live by and cope with (see also Green’s perspective on structural violence in this volume). This context and dimension of brutalization is undoubtedly relevant for childhood and domestic life in El Solar. Still, we need analytical strategies

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to nuance beyond this perspective. In my view, a relevant strategy might be to employ children’s expressive versus muted/silenced responses as a mode of identifying cultural representations of acceptance versus disapproval of violent practices and intensities. I use the concept ‘cultural’ here to denote what is implied in Goldstein’s (1998) ‘class/cultural notions’, meaning collectively recognized notions about human conduct that is specific for a social group or environment, whose alterity first and foremost is a product of a structural position rather than of ethnic difference. The urban mestizo people focused in my study form part of a white-mestizo continuum spanning many social layers. My concern here are the collective orientations, the implicit and explicit shared experiences of people belonging to what the Ecuadorian sociological and anthropological literature identifies as ‘the popular sector’ (sector popular) (cf. Larrea 1994, Mauro 1992, Verdesoto 1995) Identifying these collective orientations, we may understand how power inequalities and structural violence contribute to shape a context for the pragmatic and everyday practice of care, family and sexual intimate social dynamics. The specific character of these social dynamics can not be separated from the structural conditions, and can neither be reduced to a mere transposition and/or misrepresentation of them. The local notions and categories of sociality are proper constructions which can, if we manage to grasp them, guide us in identifying the contours of, and limits to social interaction. It allows us to observe how aggression and violent behaviour as human capacities are played out, tolerated and also rejected when excessive. This perspective also helps us do the troublesome work of evaluating violent actions in accordance to an internal social logic rather than in relation to a set of general or universal standards we might identify closer with, or even approve of. This strategy, then, helps us understand how violence is both a dimension people, including children, can manage as part of their particular social lives; and how it can become a destructive force capable of disintegrating social collectives, personal relationships and human bodies. As a result, we might come closer to understand the distinctions between constructive and destructive modes of everyday violence. A note on the concept of ‘violence’ has to be added here. The meaning of the concept as it is used in this chapter spans from physical punishment (castigo) to severe forms of destructive aggressive acts and abuse. In current child rights discourse and policy formulation there is a tendency to lump a broad range of different practices into one over-arching category. Concerning violence exercised against children, public discourse in my home country Norway, for instance, tends to label all physical aggression children may be exposed to as violation of the basic principle of protection formulated in the UN Convention of the rights of the child, the CRC (Verhellen 2000). This problem is similar to the one observed in relation to the category of ‘child labour’ (cf. Nieuwenhuys 1996), namely that these phenomena as rights based problems conceal a great variation of human conduct, which has a spectre of very different effects on and consequences for social life and interaction.

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Although I employ a general concept of violence here, I will address this issue by being analytically sensitive to people’s, including children’s, own distinctions concerning their experiences of violence. Here, it is necessary to keep in mind that the socio-cultural context for the marginalized mestizo children’s socialization, has to be considered ‘non-ideal’. It is non-ideal in the sense of not corresponding to the character of childhood and socialization ideally envisioned and established as norms in the CRC, and included in dominant policy and public discourse on child rights and child protection – also in Ecuador (cf. Leifsen 2006). A perspective on non-ideal childhoods and conditions for socialization takes into account the practice of different types of child agency, including a spectre of verbal and nonverbal responses to different levels and intensities of violence (cf. Boyden, Ling and Myers 1998, Honwana and DeBoeck 2005, Panter-Brick 2001). Working with Children in El Solar El Solar is one of the popular neighbourhood areas of Quito, inhabited by mestizo, black and indigenous people from the lower social strata. Situated on the steep westward slopes running up towards the volcano Pichincha, El Solar, similar to several other areas of Quito, has been gradually populated since the 1950s, predominantly by labour migrants coming into the city from other parts of the highlands and the coast-region. El Solar is characterized by a mix of rented dwellings, often rooms incorporated into extensive buildings making up whole blocks of a street, and small, privately held plots owned by people of modest means. The transformations that this area undergoes are still by and large influenced by migration – not only by the internal movements of people but also by transnational outmigration to Spain, which exploded in 1999 as a response to a major national economic crisis (Acosta et.al. 2006, Hidalgo 2004, Pedone 2006, Ramírez Gallegos and Ramírez 2005). The general picture one gets of the barrio from a peak in the highest situated sector is of a dense mosaic of uneven-sized, tin-roofed buildings made out of mud bricks, leca blocks and cement scattered in a disorganized fashion in between two longitudinal gorges. The gorge to the south is demarcated by a street running along its edge from the highest point, where small fields of cultivated land meet a sparse eucalyptus wood, and down to a busy marketplace in the colonial part of Quito. This street constitutes one of the red-light districts of El Solar, inhabited by petty criminals of many nuances. The day-care centre I worked at in 1999 as a fieldworker and volunteer for the NGO Fundación niñez y vida is situated in this street. My work there consisted of a range of different activities, spanning from revising the centre’s sparse archive material, carrying out formal interviews and mapping kinship   Fundación niñez y vida is closely related to the Swiss-based NGO named Terre des Hommes. Cristina Báez introduced me to the work of this NGO, and also helped me to formalize my stay in the day-care center as a volunteer and anthropologist.

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relations, engaging in informal conversation, partaking in organized activities and daily chores, and above all involving myself in play and playful communication with the group of attending pre-school children. In the period from 2001 to 2003 I came back to El Solar, this time not to continue the work in the day-care centre, but to follow different data producing methods as part of a multi-sited fieldwork strategy (cf. Leifsen 2006, Marcus 1995, 1999). The rationale of this strategy was to combine fieldwork in the neighbourhood area with data production within a network of child welfare professionals, bureaucrats and policy formulators, and finally to supplement these sources with in-depth studies in historical archives. Data production directly relevant for mapping and contextualizing the life of children and their families in El Solar happened in the two first of these three sites. They comprised visits, informal conversations and formalized interviews with families in the barrio. They were combined with various data producing activities I had access to through the Quito-office of the international NGO, Holt International Children’s Services; accompanying professionals in different types of interventions and service provisioning, discussing cases and observations with staff members, and getting access to the organization’s archive of social reports. Information from the social reports resulted to be a valuable supplementary source to the knowledge I had of children and adults in the barrio. My connections to the two NGOs, Fundación niñez y vida and Holt International Chidlren’s Services, provided me with two entry points to the same field of study, and gave me a valuable chance to learn from and discuss ideas and observations with highly experienced child welfare professionals. The work with them also allowed me to gain insight into the institutional field of professional child welfare practice in El Solar, and to access a range of different and complementary sources of data on children and care situations. In some cases, I managed to produce data on the same children through direct interaction and communication and by systematically revising the social reports on them. There are obvious ethical sides to this method of combining sources of information concerning specific persons, which I partly solved by firming a legal agreement with Holt International on the use of their archival material. I thereby agreed to make all persons referred to anonymous, an obligation I have strictly followed. I have employed multiple techniques to distort information about persons’ identities, relationships and their connection to places. As a result, no person mentioned from El Solar, be it adults or children, can be traced. In the following, I refer to children in specific institutional settings and situations of care. My general reflections on children, violence and social dynamics, however, refer to the wider context of the barrio or neighbourhood area of El Solar. Working with children and their perceptions on such themes as violence is not an easy ethnographic task. I experienced that data that serve to contextualize children’s life worlds and views are more accessible in the field than data giving   The organization both carried out child welfare schemes and dealt with child care transferences through formal foster care and national and inter-country adoptions.

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insight into the child’s perspective. This, I think, has to do with a tendency in social research to base data production concerning meaning and perception in methods such as informal and formal interviews. Interviews presuppose a certain communicational structure and outcome, which can be considered a general limitation in the production of ethnography. This limitation is by far more marked in research with children. Interaction with children requires that the researcher disposes of less delimited time intervals, and has the possibility to follow the ongoing activity until its conclusion. This does not only imply that anthropologists can define the time for the information collecting activity to a lesser degree. It also means that they have to engage in a greater spectre of communicative interaction; play and role play, dramatizations and visualizations, teasing and joking, negotiation and teaching, and, for example, the use of photographing and filming as modes of talking about things and creating trust. Working with children also requires another kind of flexibility and willingness to follow the sudden and associative shifts of communication, and to dedicate larger time periods to only sit and watch. Moreover, these ways of approaching children’s social life and life worlds require access to certain places of interaction, such as a play-ground or a day-care centre. Doing ethnography on children’s experiences of violence implies to employ the above mentioned approaches and techniques. We have to keep in mind that children are not only victims of violence and abuse, they might also be spectators or even perpetrators. Children are both receivers and makers of physical aggression in peer and sibling groups, and they engage in violent socialization outside the realm of the family and home. Nevertheless, the crucial issue is not if violence creates children as victims or if it could be directly observed or not. In my view, the main attention should be given to its effects; in form of pain/suffering, agency, meaning, brutalization and destruction. The challenge is, how to get a hold of children’s experiences. We can gain a lot of information on and insight in children’s experiences by spending time with them and engaging in different types of communication. Obviously, children as young as three to six years are not elaborate about their own experiences in the way adults are. My impression is that concerning experiences that do not produce severe emotional disturbances, children tend to be descriptive. In one of my conversations at the day-care centre, for instance, I returned the question of a little boy, Samuel, by asking him if he was hit by his parents. ‘Sometimes’, he answered. ‘Once I lost a shoe, and because of that my mother hit me.’ No further reflection was added to this experience, so even if Samuel was clear about the fact that it hurts to be punished physically he did not communicate any emotional disturbance. It is easy to think that this and similar statements are less elaborate ways of expression than those of adults. However, as a specific current in the anthropology of childhood emphasizes (cf. James 2007, James and James 2004, James and Prout 1990, Olwig and Gulløv 2003, Montgomery 2009) it is necessary to treat children’s discourse not as incomplete adult versions, but as proper rationales of early age. As an approximation to this understanding I introduce in this chapter a kind of

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association through contextualization. It is relevant to link children’s unstrained talk about violent experiences to collective understandings of the common and acceptable. This implies to associate children’s expressions with common notions and values expressed in society at large – and most elaborately articulated by adults. My aim is not to demonstrate how children mimic adults’ views, but rather to make a plausible correspondence between unstrained talk about violence and cultural specific ideas about the space of manoeuvre and limitations to interpersonal physical aggression. This approach does not suggest seeing children constituting proper communities of communication (Hirschfeld 2002). They are rather considered relational beings actively participating in shaping the norms, knowledge and social habits they are gradually made part of through socialization and enculturation (cf. Leifsen 2009b, LeVine 2007, LeVine and New 2008). Contextualizing Everyday Violence Association through contextualization implies to go from children’s explicit mentions of violence; and relate these to the conceptualizations and rationalizations of the children’s significant others; parents and other adult care takers. It implies to connect certain expressions and intensities of violence to specific purposes or societal functions. For example, parents in El Solar argue that it is necessary to use la mano dura, i.e. to physically punish children. Physical punishment is seen as part of their upbringing in order to teach them right from wrong, and to make them distinguish between the sound modes of their home (la casa) and the dangers and destructive potentials of street life (la calle). Parents see punishment as a necessary making of an intra-familiar sense of authority, which is seen as the basic resource of survival and what they conceive of as a good life. Goldstein (1998) suggests on the basis of ethnographic studies in Brazilian favelas that punishment, and to times cruel violent behaviour, form part of an ethics of care in which adults prepare children for survival under harsh living-conditions. In El Solar, mestizo parents talk about physical punishment as a necessary aspect of the teaching of costume (enseñar costumbre). By this concept they refer to a range of caring and nurturing activities, spanning from the concrete and daily activities of preparing food and feeding, providing for clothes and dressing, teaching skills, and to the moral and emotional moulding of the child (cf. Leifsen 2006). And the moulding of the child requires among other qualities a firm adult hand that can guide children and youngsters in making the right choices concerning their present and future life. Pre-school children are not very articulate about the purposes of punishment, as in the example of Samuel, but they accept the use of la mano dura. The tension between the parents views on their children’s needs to understand and appreciate the ways of their families and their home, and the children’s inclination to choose the tempting, yet dangerous and often cruel ways of street life, increases when children reach adolescence. Parents often see it as

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their own failure and shortcoming if the youngsters assume the modes and roles of street life, and drop out of school at an early age. Contextualizing everyday violence also implies to take into consideration people’s perceptions of everyday coexistence and cohabitation. For example, violent response to critique of one’s personal conduct is a common explanation in El Solar of why male partners/husbands hit their female partners/wives. Such reactions apply to many different aspects of coexistence, but are probably most explicit concerning expansive male sexuality (LeVine 1986, Melhuus 1997). It is quite common that men hit women when they are suspected of or caught in having intimate relationships with other women. Intra-familiar confrontations of this kind could easily produce the threat of using, or the use of violence. Gendered violence, I learnt by conversing with married and un-married women in the barrio, is an expected, although not desired dimension of adult intimate life. Children’s frequent and non-dramatic mention of it to me illustrates one dimension of this generalized expectancy. Having said this, however, my impression is that the line between what could be tolerated and accepted and what could not, is unclear. When does physical punishment convert into maltreatment and abuse, when does male aggression within partner-relationships transform into cruel and destructive violence? And when do pain and suffering transform into experiences of trauma and destruction difficult or even impossible to articulate directly? There is a considerable grey zone here, and if commented on, excess and transgression is mentioned by people in El Solar with reference to specific situations and cases. My alternative way of approaching this issue is to look for subdued and inverted modes of expression. I am interested in the muted expressions and silence of children – but surely, and as I will come back to in some of the examples further down, adults also bear disturbing experiences and ambivalences which are not and cannot be expressed. For instance, the leader of the day-care centre in El Solar told me that some of the women working there had crude personal experiences of intra familiar violence. He detailed how one woman, pregnant at the time, was kicked so vehemently in the belly by her partner that she lost the baby. Another got boiling water poured over her in a quarrel with her husband. These women never or rarely expressed or hinted at the traumas these and other events produced in them to the other employees at the centre. If one contextualizes the everyday violence mestizo children (and families) of the urban popular sector express, it can shed light on the reasons why these children talk and relate non-dramatically to certain violent practices and are silent about others. But contextualization of this kind also concerns structural power differences and the correspondence between power inequalities and domestic violence. Labour and other economic relationships, as the children indicated to me, establish positions of marginalization where their parents experience violence. More generally, one can hold that marginalization constitutes a structural asymmetric situation where people are exposed to violence in different ways. As such, this structural position comprises of much more than work, economic activity

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and exchange. Another aspect of marginality concerns where people live in the urban landscape. In marginal urban zones, security measures are scarce or lacking and the walls protecting the domestic sphere penetrable. People here cannot afford to build closed residential safe zones, employing guards and installing advanced security systems (Caldeira 2000). Moreover, in the densely populated dwelling areas contact between extended family members and neighbours increases the probability that co-existence converts into friction or outright conflict. Structural violence is also produced by an economic crisis, like the one that hit Ecuador in 1999. The collapse of the banking system and the financial cure that followed it, pushed masses of people into under- and unemployment, and thus under the poverty-line. According to the National Statistics Bureau, the number of poor in the three largest cities in Ecuador (Guayaquil, Quito and Cuenca) increased from 34 per cent to 71 per cent in the period between 1995 and 2000 (Acosta, López, Villamar 2006) The sudden marginalization that resulted in people losing their savings and jobs, changed the living-conditions of many, and increased thus the insecurity people have to live by and the risk they have to take in order to survive. Excessive Violence and the Interpretation of Muted Signs People from El Solar, adults and children alike, are not overtly explicit about the limits between acceptable everyday violence and excessive and disruptive forms of violent experiences and behaviour. A considerable grey zone between the acceptable and unacceptable is maintained by a spectre of sensitivities and different tolerance thresholds, determined by persons’ gendered positions, their exposure to structural violence and their specific life conditions. People tend to identify the limits to everyday violence by reference to specific cases and by voicing critique of self experienced and heard of violent acts and episodes. Behind these comments and critique one can often find hidden or muted and brutalized conditions of cohabitation and family life – difficult to imagine and painful to take into account. Nevertheless, insight into some of these hidden violent social life worlds will help us understand the social and interpersonal nature of the excessive. I will now return to the day care centre in El Solar and to the case of a young boy, which I here choose to name Alejandro. Data to this case was produced through my direct communication and interaction with Alejandro. Additionally I also had access to his social report that I had found in the archive of the organization Holt International Children’s Services. Thanks to Magdalena Cuvi, the director of the Holt Quito office, I had unlimited access to the reports elaborated by the   A particularly strong and violent expression of this situation of crisis was summed up in the Ecuadorian fiction movie, Ratas, ratones y rateros from 1999. One of the main arguments in the story is that there were basically two personal solutions to the crisis; one was to become a criminal and the other to migrate abroad.

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organization’s PPMA team on the cases they had treated since they initiated systematized data registering in 1998. The material consisted of reports and detailed descriptions of a little less than 500 cases. Out of a thorough examination of a selection of cases I got a detailed insight into the life trajectories and shifting conditions of cohabitation and dwelling of families living in El Solar (and other marginal barrios of Quito as well). When I first met Alejandro he was a five year old, apparently happy child strolling around the playground of the day-care centre. Alejandro was easy to be aware of in the playground because of his eagerness to joke himself into a conversation and to share out smiles and hugs. He approached me with a surprisingly direct question: Did I have a father? To my somewhat saddened answer that no, he was dead, Alejandro paid me full attention. Alejandro’s intense participation in the story about my father, was no doubt special. In an unforeseen moment of mutual comprehension I realized that this five-year-old was completely capable of identifying himself with my sentiment of loss. Concerning this issue Alejandro was concentrated and emotionally coherent; he simply knew and felt what I was talking about. When it came to his family situation, however, he became heavily inconsistent and vague, and would in our quite frequent conversations make up a series of new identities for his father, imagined, I realized, after having gone through the social report on his case and talked to key persons professionally involved in the care transference and therapy of him. The investigations which had been carried out by several institutions in relation to the legal declaration of Alejandro as abandoned, and the following process of adoption to a couple from Spain, did not manage to get any information on Alejandro’s father. The child’s mother had three children with three different men, and the only one that there was reliable data on was the mother’s actual partner. Alejandro had, like one of his brothers, run away from home, or rather run away from a confusing, violent and shifting life together with his mother, stepfather and a younger sister, offspring of this cohabitation. He had sought refuge in the house of a señora (Madam) living nearby, who invited him to stay for a while.   A professional team consisting of several social workers, a physician, a lawyer and a psychologist working with a program for child protection of children at risk of becoming abandoned, called Programa de Protección al Menor Abandonado – PPMA. While carrying out fieldwork in and through the Holt organization, I was connected to and also spent time with the PPMA team, basically as a participant observer. The issue of how anthropological knowledge and methods could contribute to work in a professional team of this kind could not be answered by the field work experience, and would rather require a fully fledged involvement as a professional.   Holt International was the organization formally involved in the care placement of Alejandro. The considerable work the organization carried out in identifying abandoned children’s social connections and potential care networks, made Holt an untypical adoption organization. The role of adoption organizations and other NGOs in the adoption of children at risk in marginal neighborhood areas as El Solar, is thoroughly dealt with elsewhere (cf. Leifsen 2004, 2006, 2008).

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Shortly after, this woman approached Alejandro’s mother and suggested that she care for him for a while so that the mother could get some time to sort out the problematic relation to her maltreating and heavily drinking partner, and also to improve her precarious economic situation. Soon after, Alejandro’s mother moved out of the barrio and disappeared, and this proved to be the last that he ever saw of his original family. Meanwhile, Alejandro was in trouble in his new home at the señora’s place. The medical examinations that he would undergo some months later, when he was incorporated into a foster family at the PPMA program of Holt, indicated with a high degree of probability that he had been sexually abused. Although it was never admitted, the violator seems to have been an adult son of the woman who cared for him. Alejandro ran away from his new caregivers and managed to establish contact with the president of the neighbourhood association who took the necessary steps to get Alejandro into a safe care situation. His new foster family sent him to the day-care centre, and when I came to know him three quarters of a year later, he had already been through sessions of therapy. Alejandro’s experience in his foster family was very subtly communicated to me by himself through a single image: a key he would finger out of his pocket and hold up for me and other spectators as a highly personal valuable. Once in a while he would fondle the key, and it was impossible to overlook the importance that it had for him. Alejandro was very unspecific about the object, he would never tell much about what it was for or what he felt for it. It sufficed, it appeared, that we knew it pertained to his current home, to a door in the house of the new family he stayed with for the moment, a link to a social space of his own. The key formed part of a silent way Alejandro talked about belonging, and through this silence he told us this belonging was of vital importance to him but at the same time vulnerable. The key was a precious thing he could come to lose. The implicit talk of the foster family was notably contrasted to Alejandro’s eagerness to make sense of his original family and tell us about it. One day, while Alejandro was resting in my lap, sitting in the staircases between two levels of the centre which gave a spectacular outlook over the city, we were spotting out places in the old colonial centre far beneath us. Alejandro intended to show me where his parents lived. He had been visiting them this weekend: his father, mother and several of his brothers. He had many brothers he told me, although he didn’t manage to specify how many. They had been playing with kites that weekend, but all of them had been broken, and so he had left them behind at his parent’s house. His father, though, would buy him a new one, he told me. I asked him if they had managed to make the kites dance in the wind. Alejandro kept silent, but I could notice he liked my question, and by this kind of silent sharing I perceived he emphasized its significance. I also noticed Alejandro had a special interest in airplanes, and I guess my presence triggered this interest, since the image of an airplane, I learnt later on, is a common way the foster families talk about the adoptive parents that will come and fetch them one day. It occurred to me that while other children at the centre had

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their families, Alejandro had the airplane, the kite and the key. The three images are my recordings in situations where he signalled significance or a specific interest through subtle, silent and almost unnoticeable forms of communication. Alejandro made me see the airplane cross the high Andean sky as a possibility, the kite dance in the wind as an inverted reminder of what he was disconnected from, and the key opening a door to a social space he could call home. Interestingly, these signs concerned belonging and not social disconnection, exclusion and isolation. Another aspect of the silent and muted everyday ways children express experiences of excessive violence is that they tend to be inversions of the social effects this violence produces. It seemed to me that Alejandro wanted to tell me that although he was maltreated and abused out of most of his social spaces of belonging, he still carried with him the capacity to relate and connect; his appearance as a sociable being was more important for him to communicate than the destruction and suffering he had been exposed to. Moreover, the signs of social belonging can also replace silence: They can stand instead of a missing language to express destruction and suffering, when violence transgresses the limits of the acceptable. The researcher’s access to signs like those mentioned above is only made possible through the building of a specific sensitiveness in continued interaction. Time is here essential. My awareness of Alejandro’s signs developed little by little and required a good understanding of the child’s specific relational and emotional personal universe. Undoubtedly, my possibility to compare first hand data from communication and interaction with secondary sources, such as the social report on Alejandro’s case and conversations with child welfare professionals working with him, helped me to capture his personal universe. It has to be noted that the approach described here is a result of experimentation in the field. I had not identified children’s experience of violence as a research objective, nor did I follow a specific method strategy in relating to this kind of issue. My observations are suggestions to a field of study of children and violence which, if further developed and systematized, could contribute to an emerging field of anthropology of non-ideal childhoods (Boyden, Ling and Myers 1998, Honwana and DeBoeck 2005, Nieuwenhuys 2003, Panter-Brick 2001, ScheperHughes and Hoffman 1994, Taylor and Hickey 2001). To compare everyday modes with observations in therapy sessions can contribute to systematize the study of children’s experience of excessive violence. Different from everyday life, the violent experience is targeted explicitly in the therapeutic context. The guided outcomes of such sessions and the further anthropological observation and interpretation of them add insight, in combination with the inversions and evasions of children’s everyday expressions. As in childhood studies more broadly, an interdisciplinary approach seems necessary in order to understand the essential processes of relatedness, socialization, care and psychological dimensions involved (Leifsen 2009b).

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Excessive Violence and the Possibility for and Limits to Agency An additional example of excessive violence, might highlight another aspect of children’s experience, namely embodied expressions. This example comments further on the issue of child agency and the conditions under which children respond to and make choices concerning their own situation of care and relatedness. Excessive violence can be so destructive and enduring that it may disintegrate the child’s basic capacities of acting and communicating in the world. Certain bodily expressions can be interpreted as signs of this disintegration. The following case was detailed in one of the files in the Holt archive and concerned a boy of three years, who at the time I had the opportunity to look into the case, was placed in foster care in a family living in the barrio El Solar. The medical expert’s examination of the child reported on a series of fractures of older and newer date in his skeleton. The additional psychological report diagnosed the child as showing signs of ‘child maltreatment syndrome’ and furthermore stated that he suffered from ‘profound retardation in the development of language and motor skills.’ Investigation of the case, based on conversations with persons within the boy’s extended family network, revealed probably only part of this cruel personal story of continued battering and mutilation. Nevertheless, the most severe acts of violence were inscribed into his body. Due to a coxal damage the boy had severe difficulties in walking, and, sadly, this health problem had contributed significantly to the intensified violence he was exposed to by the adults surrounding him. Because the child needed hospital treatment, which implied medical expenses, he was an expensive child to care for. His special needs seem to have provoked aggression in the shifting adults looking after him, occasioning repeated battering. The violence, already made corporeal, produced more violence, and at the age of two and a half years, the situation was so serious that a sister of the child’s mother handed him over to the child welfare organization. That woman feared that continued maltreatment could cause his death. By reviewing these reports together with the report of the social workers, the image that came to my mind was that of a child without language and with a broken body. This image was reinforced when I had the chance to meet, observe and also tried to relate to the boy as he stumbled around in the house and the courtyard of his host family; his repertoire of bodily and voiceless signs was severely restricted. I was told by the mother in care that his moods shifted in unpredictable ways, from communicative, to violent and resistant, and to reserved and introverted. The restricted modes of expression of the child informed me about how violent aggression can be embodied to such an extent that it conditions the child’s overall social and communicative capacity. Aspects of the violent exposure of the child’s aggressors are integrated into the child’s general modes of acting, responding and relating – constituting a basic form of muteness. The child’s language and body motor skills are affected. The child’s expressions are muted. Excessive violence had in that case, a crippling effect on his capacities to interact and communicate, i.e. to be social and to partake in socialization. To a great extent I believe this

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happened because of the young age of the child and the prolonged violence he had been exposed to. Because of his age this child did not mange to distance himself by his own actions from the sources of violence; he was heavily dependent on the people caring for him. As we have seen in the examples presented here, persons in the immediate social environment of the child are not necessarily protective or socially responsive in constructive ways. They can be outright destructive. The destructive character of Alejandro’s immediate social environment is comparable with that of the little boy. Still, his situation differed, in my view because his care situation deteriorated drastically when he had reached an age where he could act on his own behalf and also make own decisions. He managed to distance himself from the source of violence. Although he had to replace himself several times in new social settings, he succeeded in finding the kind of care that could build rather than disintegrate his basic social capacities. As discussed above, the situation was different for the boy with the ‘broken body’, whose basic capacities to act and his possibility to seek constructive care environments were violently destructed at a too early age. He became trapped within a crippling context of ‘care’; a final decision from an important adult person in his social environment saved him, probably from death. A final example can further illustrate the limits to child agency in violent non-ideal contexts of care and belonging. This case will illustrate the importance of and the child’s dependency on specific persons’ decision to carry out a care transference – as an ultimate act. In the following, I will present some details of a period in the domestic and intimate life of Lourdes, a woman in her late 20s, and Julian, her almost three yearold son. Lourdes was born in one of the newly urbanized areas on the outskirts of Quito, but she moved into the city when the mother died in her early youth and, seemingly, broke bonds with her remaining family. Like many other young girls coming into the city on their own, she started to work as a domestic servant in houses where she also lived. At the age of twenty she met a man, moved in with him and soon after got pregnant. She was three months pregnant when he died. He had been a soldier in the border zone to Peru, in one of the low intensity wars between the two countries, in 1995. Lourdes gave birth to Julian alone, and soon after she managed to obtain a job in a house where she could live together with the baby. She served in this house for nearly two years, when, in 1997, she met a new man to live with. He worked as an electrician and house painter and managed quite well to maintain the three of them with only his income. Her disconnectedness from her own family and the one-income situation seem to have contributed to generate her dependency, which gradually was seen by the Holt PPMA team to cement the destructive relations of violence Lourdes’s partner had to her and her son. Lourdes’s partner directed the rage and aggression occasioned by frictions he had with his ex-partner concerning their off-spring, towards Lourdes and Julian. The man hit the two-year-old for whatever reason he could find, because he didn’t talk, because he refused to eat, because he urinated in his pants, and he hit him with whatever object he could find. He also obliged Lourdes to abstain from

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consoling her son, and Lourdes admitted she gave more importance to her partner than to Julian, that she didn’t defend him because of fear for the violent reactions it could cause. She blamed Julian for the difficulties she had with her partner, and she withdrew from showing her son affection. Julian internalized this rejection because, as Lourdes commented, he stopped seeking her protection. Five months after moving together Lourdes got pregnant, and this probably had the gravest consequences for Julian and his possibilities of staying included in the group. With this pregnancy Lourdes’s dependency on her partner deepened, not only affectively and socially because of the reproductive bond created between them, but also because she let herself be influenced by his threats that he would take the baby when born if she decided to leave him. During the next half a year this dependency constituted a violently exclusive unit, which in the end led Lourdes to abandon Julian. Probably out of despair and no previous planning, Lourdes one day left Julian to the care of a lady she occasionally met at the central bus terminal on her way home. This separation could be seen as the end-product of the breakdown of their relationship; Julian was so to speak beaten out of his cohabitation unity. The act of abandonment can be interpreted as his birthmother’s final intent to protect him from the destructive violence she significantly contributed to make and maintain. If we focus on the child in this account we see that he was subject to harsh maltreatment combined by rejection of the crucial persons in his cohabitation unit, including the care person closest to him; the birthmother. Moreover, he was a permanent witness to the violence directed towards his significant others, and especially towards his mother. Julian was very young when he gained these types of experiences; he was in what one in a child development perspective would label a formative period of early age, crucial for the building of language skills and attachment capacities, and also important in influencing his social-emotional orientation (LeVine, New 2008). Aggression clearly transgresses the limits in this case; there is an excess of violence both concerning its permanence and gravity. Julian was exposed to disruptive relational dynamics, which had its roots in the fact that the birthmother’s partner perceived of Julian as the product and symbol of her sexual and procreative relationship with another man.

  This account of violence and exclusion directed towards Julian was confirmed by observations made by the PPMA team later on. Without going into any detail, the medical examinations and the therapy sessions confirmed that the child had been exposed to severe physical and psychological violence.   After a period of temporary care in a foster family in Quito, Julian was adopted by a European family.

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Final Comments I have argued that accepted and excessive violence that children are exposed to, should be seen both as culture-specific practices and modes of reaction, and as misplaced expressions and acts of structural violence. I have warned about a simplistic perspective of the distinction between alterity and power inequality, and would rather argue that both accepted and excessive violence are context specific since they are established in a specific socio-cultural space and time. At the same time, the level and distinction between what is considered within the limits and what transgresses them, are influenced by the structural violence people live by. Severe and brutalizing power-inequalities also structure the human capacity and propensity to accept and reject human social conduct and to respond to different types and intensities of human aggression. A focus on child agency informs us about other distinctions and limits concerning excessive violence. Agency, and the limits to agency, might indicate how violent interaction can disintegrate a child’s basic capacities to act and communicate. In my view, the transgression of these limits concern general (or universal) human social, physical and psychological capacities. These capacities are affected and altered in culture-specific contexts, and perceived of in culture-specific ways. They do, however, still work on the human body and its social and psychological resources. I argue that a better understanding of these absolute limits, as well as the relative distinction between acceptable and excessive violence, can be reached by ethnographic methods that register a child’s silences and muted signs. The challenge addressed in this chapter is furthermore to capture the experiences of the child when these are muted or silenced. How is it possible to approach a child’s disruptive or traumatic experiences of violence? In the case of Julian, I did not have the chance to enter into a personal communication that could have led me to his perspective. Through my work in the day-care centre, and by working with Holt and the PPMA team in El Solar, however, I got to know children and cases, such as Alejandro’s and the boy’s with ‘broken body’, where observation and interaction resulted in my awareness of articulated, visualized and embodied signs. Experimenting with different methods and sources of information helped me interpret these signs. These interpretations can be seen as the end-product of a strategy to approach the child’s own view of the violence it cannot talk about. Undoubtedly, we need specific methods in order to get in touch with the muted and silenced. Hidden experiences are not directly observable or easily accessed through conversation and interview techniques, even more so when it comes to children. Concerning the violence which is not talked about, I have found it very useful to combine participative communication with other sources of information, such as detailed studies of social reports and discussions with child welfare professionals knowing the cases (and having written the reports). Fitting the many small pieces of information together in order to compose realistic life trajectories and chronologies of past experiences, have served as highly relevant backgrounds to analyze and interpret the often subtle and very small signs communicated.

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Apparently insignificant details voiced by children in communication and play, together with explicit evasions and also embodied reactions, might become comprehensible and meaningful against such backgrounds. References Acosta, A., López, S. and Villamar, D. 2006. La migración en el Ecuador: Oportunidades y amenazas. Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional. Bourdieu, P. and Wacquant, L. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bourgois, P. 2004. ‘US Inner-city Apartheid: The Contours of Structural and Interpersonal Violence’, in Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology, edited by N. Scheper-Hughes and P. Bourgois. Malden, Oxford and Carlton: Blackwell Publishing, 301–7. Boyden, J., Ling, B. and Myers, W. 1998. What Works for Working Children. Stockholm: UNICEF/Rädda Barnen. Caldeira, T.P.R. 2000. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo. Berkeley: University of California Press. Farmer, P. 2004. ‘On Suffering and Structural Violence: A View from Below’, in Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology, edited by N. Scheper-Hughes and P. Bourgois. Malden, Oxford and Carlton: Blackwell Publishing, 281–9. Goldstein, D.M. 1998. ‘Nothing Bad Intended: Child Discipline, Punishment, and Survival in a Shantytown in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’, in Small Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood, edited by N. Scheper-Hughes and C. Sargent. Berkeley: University of California Press, 389–415. Harris, O. 2008. ‘Alterities: Kinship and Gender’, in A Companion to Latin American Anthropology, edited by D. Poole. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 276–302 Hidalgo, R. 2004. Migraciones: Un juego con cartas marcadas. Quito: Abya Yala. Hirschfeld, L.A. 2002. ‘Why don’t Anthropologists like Children?’, American Anthropologist, 104(2), 611–27. Honwana, A. and De Boeck, F. (eds) 2005. Makers and Brakers: Children and Youth in Postcolonial Africa. Oxford: James Currey, and Codesira / Africa World Press. James, A. 2007. Giving voice to children’s voices: practices and problems, pitfalls and potentials. American Anthropologist, 109(2), 261–72. James, A. and James, A.L. 2004. Constructing Childhood: Theory, Policy and Social Practice. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillian. James, A. and Prout, A. (eds) 1990. Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood. London: The Falmer Press.

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Larrea, R. 1994. Criar hijos no es fácil: Familia y crianza en los sectores populares. Quito: CEPLAES. Leifsen, E. 2004. ‘Person, Relation and Value: The Economy of Circulating Ecuadorian Children in International Adoption’, in Cross-Cultural Approaches to Adoption, edited by F. Bowie. London: Routledge, 182–96. ________ 2006. Moralities and Politics of Belonging: Governing Female Reproduction in 20th Century Quito. Oslo: UNIPUB. ________ 2008. ‘Child Trafficking and Formalization: The Case of International Adoption from Ecuador’. Children & Society, 22(3), 212–22. ________ 2009a. Child rights and the structuring of unequal childhoods. Paper presented at the XXVIII International LASA Congress: Rethinking inequalities. ________ 2009b. ‘Childhoods in Shifting Analytical Spaces: Cross-cultural, Biosocial, Human Ecological and Global Perspectives’. Reviews in Anthropology, 38(3), 197–216. LeVine, R.A. 2007. ‘Ethnographic Studies of Childhood: A Historical Overview’. American Anthropologist, 109(2), 247–60. LeVine, R.A. and New, R.S. (eds) 2008. Anthropology and Child Development: A Cross-Cultural Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. LeVine, S.E. 1986. ‘The Martial Morality of Mexican Women: An Urban Study’. Journal of Anthropological Research, 42(2), 183–202. Marcus, G. 1995. ‘Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multisited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 95–117. ________ 1999: ‘Critical Anthropology Now: An Introduction’, in Critical Anthropology Now: Unexpected Contexts, Shifting Constituencies, Changing Agendas, edited by G. Marcus. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 3–28. Mauro, A. 1992. La vida es larga y nos importa mucho: la salud en las familias de sectores populares urbanos. Quito: CEPLAES. Melhuus, M. 1997. ‘The Troubles of Virtue: Values of Violence and Suffering in a Mexican Context’, in The Ethnography of Moralities, edited by S. Howell. London: Routledge, 178–202. Montgomery, H. 2009. An Introduction to Childhood: Anthropological Perspectives on Children’s Lives. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Nieuwenhuys, O. 1996. ‘The Paradox of Child Labor and Anthropology’. Annual Review of Anthropology, 25, 237–51. ________ 2003. ‘Growing Up Between Places of Work and Non-places of Childhood: The Uneasy Partnership’, in Children’s Places: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, edited by K.F. Olwig and E. Gulløv. London: Routledge, 99– 118. Olwig, K.F. and Gulløv, E. (eds) 2003. Children’s Places: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. London: Routledge. Panter-Brick, C. 2001. ‘Street Children and their Peers: Perspectives on Homelessness, Poverty, and Health’, in Children and Anthropology:

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Perspectives of the 21st Century, edited by H.B. Schwartzman. Westport: Bergin and Gravey, 83–97. Pedone, C. 2006. Estrategias migratorias y poder: tu siempre jalas a los tuyos. Quito: Abya Yala. Ramírez Gallegos, F. and Ramírez, J.P. 2005. La estampida migratoria Ecuatoriana: Crisis, redes transnacionales y repertories de acción migratoria. Quito: Abya Yala. Ratas, ratones y rateros (dir. Sebastian Cordero, 1999). Scheper-Hughes, N. and Hoffman, D. 1994. Kids out of place. NACLA Report on the Americas, 27(6), 16–24. Scheper-Hughes, N. and Bourgois, P. (eds) 2001. Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology. Malden, Oxford and Carlton: Blackwell Publishing. Taylor, L. and Hickey, M. 2001. Tunnel Kids. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Verdesoto, L., Ardaya G., Espinosa R. and García F. (eds) 1995. Rostros de la familia ecuatoriana. Quito: UNICEF. Verhellen, E. 2000. Convention on the Rights of the Child. Leuven-Apeldoom: Garant.

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Part III Remembering and Aftermath

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Chapter 9

Silence, Denial and Confession about State Terror by the Argentine Military Antonius C.G.M. Robben

Introduction ‘We still had hopes for some sort of confession; that he would say what they had done with the children’ declared Rodolfo Yanzón the day after Héctor Febres was found dead in his cell, only days before being sentenced for the abduction and torture of four civilians during the 1976–1983 Argentine dictatorship (Moores 2007a). The sixty-six year old retired intelligence officer Febres, also known as Fat Orlando, Selva and Daniel, had been in prison since December 1998 on an indictment for baby theft. Febres had pertained to the coast guard and had been stationed at the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA, Escuela de Suboficiales de Mecánica de la Armada, previously Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada) in Buenos Aires. It had housed one of Argentina’s most infamous secret detention centres. Looked down upon by the naval officers and humiliated in the presence of the captives, Héctor Febres had mostly been in charge of the pregnant inmates and made name as a ferocious torturer. Febres was found dead on the morning of 10 December 2007. It was known that he suffered from diabetes, had a history of heart problems and had become deeply depressed during his eight years in prison. At first a heart attack was suspected, but the autopsy established cyanide poisoning between midnight and 2:00 am of Monday 10 December as the cause of his death. The question was now whether it had been suicide or murder. Rodolfo Yanzón, the lawyer of the torture victims, suspected an assassination: ‘This is a message so that nobody is going to talk [about the illegal repression]; of the existence of a pact of silence and that nobody is going to be convicted’ (Moores 2007b). Within days, Febres’s wife, son and daughter and the two guards on duty at the Coast Guard prison in Tigre were arrested. Speculations abounded in the press, most assuming that Febres had been assassinated. Febres had been held in a comfortable one-bedroom prison-apartment with all means of communication at his disposal, free to receive visitors. A naval intelligence officer had visited Febres a few days before his death, allegedly telling him to keep his mouth shut because otherwise he  Research in Argentina was made possible by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research.

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would be eliminated (Meyer 2009). His wife and two children had seen Febres on the eve of his death, and his daughter had apparently tampered with the computer in his cell; supposedly regarding a secret bank account or confidential information. One month after the death, the two prison guards Angel Volpi and Rubén Iglesias were indicted for murder. Volpi had had dinner with Febres on the eve of his death. Forensic experts determined that the cyanide had been orally ingested after dinner. Judge Sandra Arroyo Salgado believed that Febres was assassinated to prevent him from talking about the baby thefts at the Navy Mechanics School, because a manuscript had been found in his cell, entitled ‘Marti- (children) tell everything’ (Abiad 2008). The title referred to a captive who had been allowed to go into exile with her two children. Febres had told his physician and his relatives that he was not going to be the Navy’s fall guy. He said: ‘This folder contains what I’m going to say at the trial. It’ll serve to release me. It’s going to be a bombshell’ (Meyer 2009). At the moment of writing, the case is still pending in court and the prison guards Volpi and Iglesias have been released from detention. The mysterious death of Héctor Febres reveals the intertwinement of multilevel expressions of violence and strategies of silence, denial and confession. It is suspected that the naval and coast guard officers are involved in Febres’s death to preserve their institutions’ integrity and protect comrades with tainted pasts. The premature death, whether through suicide or assassination, also suggests a pact of silence among perpetrators which Febres threatened to break. From the perspective of the victims, Febres’s death prolonged their suffering by preventing him from telling the truth and allowing indicted officers to continue to deny that babies had been kidnapped and their mothers had disappeared or were assassinated. Damage was thus not only done to the victims’ but also to society’s sense of justice. Febres escaped his sentencing due to a stay of proceedings, and his death added to the impunity of almost two hundred other indicted perpetrators who died before being convicted (CELS 2009: 71). The distinct meanings of the multi-level connections emanating from Febres’s premature death can be discerned in many other situations of human rights violations in Argentina because of the similarities in the silence, denial and confession strategies of perpetrators and their apologists. This chapter focuses on the ways in which Argentine perpetrators have tried to erase the traces of their violence, silence their victims, reject any wrongdoing, deny and finally admit to their responsibility for the state terror inflicted on Argentine society. Their strategies have unfolded at different levels of social complexity, have taken place in different areas with diverse interlocutors and audiences. They have yielded distinct expressions of violence and have even resulted in continued manifestations of violence after Argentina’s turn to democracy. Witnesses and repentant perpetrators have been intimidated, disappeared or were assassinated in order to prevent the prosecution of the repressors. This intertwinement of repression and justice calls for a rethinking of the tension between the reproduction and inexpression of violence in the aftermath of state terrorism. It demands due attention to the permeable boundary

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between representations and manifestations of violence, and requires a theoretical elaboration of the strategies of silence, denial and confession. Rhetoric and Logics of Denial Theories differ in the conceptual ways in which scholars interpret the denial of perpetratorhood. The sociologist Cohen (2001) focuses for instance on the rhetoric of deniers, whereas the historian Lipstadt (1993) concentrates on the logics of Holocaust denial. I will draw on both approaches to create a conceptual framework with which to analyze the logics and rhetoric of denial of Argentine perpetrators of violence. The logics of denial relate to the reasoning for inflicting violence and involve the interpretation of the violence unleashed. The rhetoric of denial applies to the art of challenging the credibility of accusations about inflicting such violence. Lipstadt’s analysis of the logics of Holocaust denial can be generalized to the denial of other forms of massive violence because they refer to political rationalities and not to personal conducts and responsibilities (Lipstadt 1993). The Argentine denial logics contain five elements: moral relativism, fate, self-defence and denial of victimhood, economic survival, and media manipulation. Firstly, the Argentine military argued that their repression of the guerrilla insurgency was not less or worse for the individual victims than in other wars throughout world history. They drew a moral equivalence between the Dirty War in Argentina (1976–1983) and all other types of violence to relativize the human suffering they inflicted on the Argentine people. Secondly, the disappearances in Argentina were not caused by a deliberate military strategy, but were the sad and inevitable fate of people in all wars. Thirdly, Argentina had the sovereign right to protect herself against revolutionary insurgents who wanted to overthrow the authorities. The military acted in self-defence, which is why the dead enemies should not be regarded as victims but as legitimate targets. Fourthly, the Argentine revolutionaries wanted to do away with private property and replace the country’s capitalist system with a state economy. They would pass control over Argentina’s natural resources to the Soviet Union and thus turn the country into a satellite within the expanding communist empire. Finally, the military argued that human rights activists had fabricated their testimonies about the torture and disappearances at the hands of the Argentine armed forces and police. They were successful in planting these lies in Argentine society because whoever controls the media has the truth on his or her side. These logics of denial have been used in conjunction with the rhetoric of denial by employing the following techniques: One, the human rights violations did simply not occur. Two, the incriminating testimonies, whether by survivors or perpetrators, are false because all witnesses have subjective viewpoints and personal interests. Three, all incriminating documents, blueprints and written sources are forgeries. Four, deniers take ‘a small and dubious particle of knowledge

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and then use it to dismiss far more substantial evidence’ (Lipstadt 1993: 161). If discrepancies in certain documents or testimonies are found, then all documents and testimonies are treated as unreliable. Five, some wrongful actions are admitted but any responsibility is denied (Cohen 2001: 103–13). These logics and rhetoric of denial are found in the discourse of Argentine perpetrators about the Dirty War of the 1970s and early 1980s, as will be substantiated below. The Politics of Secrecy, Silence and Denial Secrecy, silence and denial were deliberate strategies to demoralize and inflict suffering on enemies and adversaries believed by the Argentine military to threaten the existence of their Christian, democratic and capitalist society. These strategies constructed a discursive façade that concealed violent practices specifically designed to avoid future accountability. Abducted citizens were taken to secret detention centres and the right of habeas corpus was denied to searching relatives. Final verdicts about the captives were given as oral commands. The bodies were cremated, buried in mass graves or thrown into the ocean. Many torture centres were dismantled after the fall of the military regime. Furthermore, practices of silence were continued after military rule to obstruct incriminating testimonies and confessions during democratic times. Witnesses and repentant perpetrators have been intimidated, disappeared or were assassinated to prevent the prosecution of repressors under indictment, as in the case of Héctor Febres. This intertwinement demonstrates how secrecy, silence and denial among perpetrators are dynamic expressions of violence that change with shifts in the political context, and may even reproduce the very violence that is silenced and denied. Silence and denial come natural to the military because they have been trained to shroud strategies and tactics in secrecy when faced with enemy forces. ‘At the root of the rationale for military secrecy, is the imperative of self-preservation.’ (Bok 1989: 192) The Argentine military believed that they were engaged in a war with guerrilla insurgents during the 1970s and early 1980s. This belief resulted in state terror against enemies, opponents, and bystanders. The public denial of this systematic repression gave rise to a culture of fear that silenced all and fed the presumption of impunity among perpetrators. ‘Silence demands that the enemies disappear suddenly and without a trace. Silence prefers that no voice—of complaint or protest or indignation—disturb its calm. And where such a voice is heard, silence strikes with all its might to restore the status quo ante—the state of silence’ (Kapuściński 1992: 190). The military made many victims of state terror disappear in a conscious effort to confound guerrilla combatants about the fate of missing comrades, discourage political protest, traumatize surviving relatives, and erase incriminating evidence (Robben 2005a: 278–81). Secrecy continued into Argentina’s transitional democracy after the fall of the repressive military regime. Accusations of human rights violations were perceived as a threat to military institutions and perpetrators from high to low through calls

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for military reform and individual accountability. Silence to such charges implied the rejection of the interlocutors’ legitimacy, while denial confronted politicians, prosecutors, journalists, survivors and searching relatives openly in an arrogant display of omnipotence. Payne (2008: 9–10) considers such accounts of silence and denial as a distinct performative response to accusations. The silence of perpetrators in Argentina had the obvious goal to obstruct prosecution and prevent incriminatory truths from undermining the armed forces as one of the traditional pillars of state power. According to Payne (2008: 183), ‘Silence is healthier for the military than denial or remorse’ because denial makes the past visible and can produce disaccord within the ranks. Silence perpetuates the strategy of uncertainty employed during dictatorial rule and reasserts the military’s power in defiance of the law. Still, silence also raises the suspicion of guilt and allows political and ideological opponents to influence society’s perception of the past. Governments, perpetrators and even victims often believe that silence is beneficial to the social reconstruction of a post-conflict society. There is a persistent belief in Western societies that the confrontation of past suffering must be postponed to facilitate the healing of a torn society. Argentina has been an exception with its ongoing debates about the past and the public denial of human rights violations by high-ranking veterans of the Dirty War (Robben 2005b). Silence and Denial about Disappearances during the Military Rule The state violence perpetrated by the Argentine armed and security forces between 1976 and 1983 had been premeditated. The disappearance of political opponents had occurred regularly since the 1971-1973 military rule of General Lanusse. It became a means of systematic repression in February 1975 during the counterinsurgency campaign in Tucumán province against Marxist insurgents and was instituted nationwide after the March 1976 coup d’état. Captives disappeared, were assassinated and their bodies were secretly cremated, buried or thrown in the Atlantic Ocean. Authorities kept their repressive methods secret and denied any knowledge of disappearances to the searching relatives during the first year of military rule. But they could not ignore the persistent talk about people being abducted from their house, work or on the street (Robben 2005a: 264–9). What began as silence turned into denial in face-to-face encounters with anguished relatives and later developed into public disclaimers in the media by members of the junta. The official response to accusations of state terrorism by Amnesty International and exiled Argentines expanded the official denials beyond national borders. The junta contracted in 1977 the American public relations company Burson Marsteller to improve its image abroad. Foreign journalists were invited to Argentina in 1978 to gain a favourable impression of the country, advertisements were placed in major newspapers, and a seminar was organized in 1979 at Georgetown University

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in Washington, D.C. to create sympathy for the dictatorship (Guest 1990: 69–70). President Videla also addressed the issue: Argentina has nothing to hide, and nothing about which we have to be ashamed. Certain things have happened here, certainly, we have lived through a war. A war which we didn’t call for and didn’t want … In that war, as in every war, there were dead persons, there were prisoners, and there were disappeared persons.’ The Argentine junta distributed a black book about terrorism to foreign governments containing gruesome pictures of mutilated corpses and facsimiles of newspaper articles to substantiate their claim that Argentina had been suffering from political violence during the years preceding the military coup and was fighting a war against a large guerrilla force (PEN 1979). This multi-level contest between power holders and political opponents about the interpretation of massive violence can be observed in many other countries in ‘a competition to avoid being counted among the perpetrators and to secure one’s place among the victims’ (Bartov, Grossmann and Nolan 2002: xxiii). The dispute about who has the right to claim victimhood and point an accusing finger has remained with Argentina till today, albeit in various guises and at different social levels according to the political and judicial circumstances. The defeat of the Argentine armed forces by British troops in the Falklands (Malvinas) War in June 1982 meant the end to the dictatorship. A transitional military government took over and announced national elections for October 1983. The transitional military authorities prepared themselves for the uncertain times ahead by ordering the armed forces in April 1983 to destroy all documents related to the counterinsurgency war (Ejército Argentino 1984: 673). Facing the CONADEP Truth Commission and the Federal Court The discovery of a large number of mass graves throughout Argentina obliged the military to come up with a plausible explanation and persuade the Argentine people of their account of the armed confrontation between the armed forces and the guerrilla insurgency. They addressed Argentina as a nation, trying to emphasize the military’s organic relation with the Argentine people as one undivided social collectivity in need of a master narrative to make sense of the country’s recent history. This logics of denial consisted of five points. Firstly, the Argentine military had waged a just war which saved the country from ruin and revolution. They should be praised for their heroic victory instead of questioned about their strategy. Even just wars are dirty because clean wars do not exist. Secondly, the counterinsurgency war was fought with the law in hand, while torture and disappearances were the inevitable excesses of war. Thirdly, the Argentine military acted in self-defence by fighting an antirevolutionary war against a guerrilla insurgency supported by Cuba and the Soviet Union. Not the guerrillas killed in combat were the victims,   La Nación newspaper, Argentina, 31 August 1979.

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but the hundreds of troops and policemen who sacrificed their lives for Argentina. Four, the military government rescued Argentina from political disintegration and economic downfall. Five, the unfounded accusations launched against the military were part of an international media campaign organized since 1977 by guerrilla commanders living in exile in Europe. The accusations about forced disappearances and the rumours about torture centres were false. The military presented their response to the insurgency as legitimate self-defence, a reparative use of force to save Argentine society from declining into anarchy, and a redemptive sacrifice of patriotic lives to rescue Argentina’s Western, Christian civilization which could now enjoy free democratic elections (Agüero and Hershberg 2005, Marchesi 2005, Robben 2005b). The electoral campaigns of the two main contestants, the Peronist party (Partido Justicialista) run by Italo Luder and the Radical party (Unión Cívica Radical) led by Raúl Alfonsín, were influenced by the tension between the military denial and the human rights violations denounced in the media. The Peronists were rumoured to have cut a deal with the military not to prosecute them and thus keep a lid on the past, while the Radicals emphasized the need for truth and justice. Alfonsín won the elections by an absolute majority and in December 1983 he instituted the National Commission on Disappeared Persons or CONADEP (Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas) to address Argentina’s most pressing concern. The CONADEP truth commission gathered thousands of oral and written testimonies, made site visits to suspected secret detention centres and conducted exhumations of mass graves. The military discredited the forensic methodology and the quality of the evidence, maintaining that these dead had been killed in internal disputes of the guerrilla organizations. The weight of the truth commission’s findings rested therefore principally on the survivor testimonies. Thus, the Argentine military succeeded in confining all expressions of violence to the domain of speech by achieving a discursive equity among perpetrators and victim-survivors, and by creating the ideal circumstances for a rhetoric of denial. The rhetoric of denial becomes most apparent regarding the issue of the disappeared. An analysis of three decades of public perpetrator discourse demonstrates that the rhetoric of the military interacted dynamically with the growing material evidence produced by courts and human rights organizations in the ways delineated by Cohen (2001: 103): ‘Each variant of denial appears in the official discourse: literal (nothing happened); interpretive (what happened is really something else) and implicatory (what happened is justified). Sometimes, these appear in a visible sequence: if one strategy does not work, the next is tried.’ The 1984 truth commission report and the 1985 trial against nine junta commanders yielded so much incriminating evidence that the Argentine people became convinced that the military had exercised a reign of terror. The military reacted in three ways. They reiterated that Argentina had been in a state of war and the armed forces had the constitutional right and obligation to defend its sovereignty. This line of reasoning repeated the logics of denial used since 1983.

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The second reaction was to reinforce the discourse with public performances that emphasized that the military were the victims of political persecution. Masses were celebrated for fallen comrades. Plans were made to erect a memorial for the victims of the war against the Marxist subversion and the mothers of fallen officers and soldiers were mobilized as a moral counterforce to the mothers of the disappeared. The military had simply denied their involvement in the disappearances during the dictatorship. This denial, however, was no longer tenable after the sentencing of the junta leaders. They switched their approach to dismissing the testimonies as politically motivated, doubting the forensic evidence, and explaining away the disappearances. The last argument deserves a closer look because it reveals the convolution of the denial rhetoric. A Military Lawyer’s Defence Statement General Osiris Villegas provided the most elaborate denial in his defence of General Ramón Camps who was being investigated by the Armed Forces Supreme Council for his role in the disappearances in Buenos Aires Province. He began by describing the context in which the allegations had taken place, following closely the abovementioned logics of denial, and concluded that the incidents had been ordinary acts of war: There are no excesses in war. Violence is used to the maximum possible with the objective to cause the greatest physical, moral and material destruction of the enemy to accelerate the outcome, in order to minimize one’s own losses. This is asserted by the one hundred and fifty thousand dead, wounded and disappeared of the detonation of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Villegas 1990: 67).

This reasoning is in obvious defiance of international war conventions and appeals therefore to the just war argument that extreme means are allowed when a state’s existence is at stake (Walzer 1977: 252). Villegas’s rhetorical strategy consisted of sowing doubt about the charge by human rights organizations that the state had made thirty thousand people disappear, and was aimed at raising reasonable doubts in the court. A judicial truth and not a historical or political truth was at stake and the denial rhetoric was therefore formulated in legal terms. Villegas made a distinction between disappeared persons who were alive and persons who were genuinely missing. Many people reported as disappeared were still alive, so Villegas (1990: 182) argued, because they were 1. living in exile; 2. fighting as mercenaries in Algeria, Yemen, Lebanon, Nicaragua, or El Salvador; 3. living as political agitators under false names in Brazil, Chile and Peru; 4. had returned to Argentina illegally; or 5. were known to be alive but had been reported missing nevertheless. However, it was emotionally hard to imagine and even harder to prove that these people were

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alive unbeknown to their relatives. So, Villegas resorted to the rhetorical technique of generalizing a specific piece of knowledge to all reported disappearances and thus dismiss them as a whole. On the list of Argentines who had survived a major earthquake in Mexico in September 1985, there were sixteen persons whose names coincided exactly with the names of disappeared listed in the CONADEP truth commission report. Furthermore, around one hundred names showed some resemblance (Areas 1985). Villegas concluded that many other disappeared must be alive. He implied that the truth commission report and its figure of nearly nine thousand disappeared were unreliable. He further tried to discredit this number by citing fourteen different estimates made in the press ranging from less than one thousand to thirty thousand disappeared (Villegas 1990: 185–9). Villegas could of course not ignore that some people were really missing in Argentina, especially since his defendant General Camps had declared in the press that: ‘About five thousand people disappeared when I was Chief of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police. I had some of them buried in anonymous graves’ (Areas 1984: 7). Villegas argued that if there are disappeared persons in peace time, then all the more so in times of war. ‘For the act of war as such, there are no disappeared but unidentified combat dead’ (Villegas 1990: 182). Most of these unidentified guerrilla casualties had died in combat with the Argentine forces, so Villegas argued, during raids on police stations and military bases, bank robberies, attacks against military or police personnel and attempts to detain them. Others had fallen victim to infighting among the guerrilla forces, committed suicide upon capture or were assassinated by right-wing death squads. Many of the dead carried false documents, had removed their finger prints with pumice stone or were foreign combatants. Therefore, their death did not imply human rights violations. They were buried in unmarked graves by the military or by their own comrades. These were not clandestine graves but war graves. Villegas invoked the symbol of the Unknown Soldier to make his point (Villegas 1990: 182–5). Villegas treated all disappeared as combatants and could thus argue that no human rights violations were committed by his client, General Camps, but that he had attacked only legitimate targets. Much depends of course on who is considered an enemy combatant. The enemy definition of the military expanded from guerrilla insurgents in 1975 to ideologues in 1976 because the latter were believed to generate the former (Robben 2005a: 186). Finally, eyewitness testimonies about torture and the sighting of disappeared persons in secret detention centres were dismissed as false and unfounded. In the end, Villegas never had his day in military court because the Armed Forces Supreme Council was taken from the case and General Camps was tried by a federal court. The 1985 conviction of five of the nine junta commanders promised to lead to hundreds of court cases against the Argentine military, police, and their civilian collaborators. Pressure from a disgruntled military led to amnesty legislation in 1986 and 1987 that closed most cases with the exception of those involving theft, rape and the abduction of babies. The 1989 and 1990 presidential pardons of indicted officers and guerrillas and the incarcerated junta members seemed to

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bring the confrontation with past violence to an end. President Menem tried to achieve national reconciliation ‘to heal without more ado the bleeding wound of the Argentine body’ (Pisani 1990). The Argentine government attempted to turn the page on the past and bring economic prosperity by installing a neoliberal economic model. What remained was a discursive contest between human rights organizations, critical politicians and lawyers who continued to gather material evidence about the crimes of state terrorism and a group of retired military who declared such proof to be invalid while emphasizing that they had saved Argentine society from its fall into chaos and revolution by defeating the guerrilla insurgency. Confession of a Perpetrator: Captain Scilingo’s Death Flights What seemed to have become an entrenched discursive contest between two antagonistic opponents about the meaning of past violence, took a radical turn when in March 1995 the journalist Horacio Verbitsky aired his recordings of a series of chilling interviews with retired Navy Captain Adolfo Francisco Scilingo which incorporated Argentine society as a whole into the debate. Scilingo confessed to his participation in two death flights in mid-1977. He described how captives held at the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA) were told that they were going to be taken to southern Argentina and needed a vaccination before the departure. Instead, they were given a tranquilizer. Drowsy, they were helped into a truck, driven to an airport and boarded onto a small cargo plane. Once on the plane, they were given a second sedative, undressed and thrown one by one down an open hatch into the Atlantic Ocean (Verbitsky 1995: 30, 57–8). The reasons for Scilingo’s confession are complex, involving his discharge from the Navy because of psychological problems due to the death flights; frustration about a failed business venture; humiliation by his superiors for not responding to his letters explaining his emotional distress and soul-searching; feelings of injustice by a Congressional refusal to promote two navy-men because of their involvement in the Dirty War; and anger at General Videla for denying that thousands of Argentines had disappeared. Videla’s denial was particularly hurtful because it made Scilingo into a war criminal for hurling captives from a plane even though he had simply carried out orders given by his superiors. He was saddled with the blame and guilt for violent acts committed in the line of duty. Scilingo understood the need of secrecy in war and had accepted the justification of disappearing enemy combatants to leave their comrades guessing about their fate; but he also believed that there was no more need to remain silent in times of democracy. In a letter from February 1991 to the pardoned General Videla, he wrote: In response to the issue of the disappeared you said: There are subversives living under false names, others died in combat and were buried as NN [anonymously],

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and finally you did not rule out some excesses by your subordinates. Where do I appear? Do you believe that these weekly transfers [death flights] were the result of unauthorized excesses? (…) Let us end this cynicism. Let us tell the truth. Make the death lists public, even though at the time you failed to take responsibility by not signing their execution order (Verbitsky 1995: 180).

Scilingo’s 1991 letter effectively undermined the rhetoric of denial employed by General Villegas and others. The silence by some and the denial of others did not cease but were now juxtaposed to a perpetrator’s confession whose credibility increased because of its self-incriminatory admission of guilt and visible signs of traumatic suffering. Scilingo’s confession was of course problematic. The existence of the death flights had been known for more than a decade and parts of his account could be corroborated by testimonies from ex-disappeared. What made the interview so revealing was that he filled in the silent unknowns of the survivor accounts. Only Scilingo had been present at the final moment of dropping the captives from the cargo plane. Be this as it may, his interviews were structured along a rhetoric of confession that transferred the responsibility on others, downplayed the suffering of his victims, elaborated with telling detail about his troubled conscience, but was deliberately vague about the death drops themselves. Scilingo admitted to sharing the ideological justification for the military coup and understanding the tactical need of disappearing enemy combatants, but he diluted the responsibility for his acts into a military culture of not questioning orders and obeying superior officers. As if to nullify the violence committed and soothe the surviving relatives, Scilingo asserted that the captives were happy when they heard about their transfer south, did not know they were going to be killed, and died untroubled because they were: ‘Completely asleep. Nobody suffered absolutely anything.’ (Verbitsky 1995: 60). He emphasized that no one ever woke up or resisted the fall to death. The image of a serene sleep exudes a peacefulness that conceals the forced sedation. The rhetorical contrast between a description of airdropped captives who were unaware about their real fate and the dramatic account of his torn and haunting emotions was a discursive device to raise the audience’s empathy for him in a self-serving way. He emphasized that all navymen found it emotionally difficult to assassinate the captives: ‘Nobody liked to do it, it wasn’t something pleasant’ (Verbitsky 1995: 32). Furthermore, he had suffered from psychological and somatic problems resembling post-traumatic stress disorder and had almost died accidentally while throwing out the unconscious captives before being saved by a fellow crew member: ‘As I was quite nervous about the situation, I almost fell and tumbled into the abyss…. I stumbled and they grabbed me’ (Verbitsky 1995: 58). He turned himself into a victim of the violence ordered by his superiors. The attorney-general Luis Moreno Ocampo, however, recalled that Scilingo had told him that one captive had awoken during the flight, resisted and almost dragged Scilingo with him out of the aircraft (Verbitsky 1995: 149).

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Scilingo’s deliberate silence, denials, half-truths and lies about the course of events served to manipulate the representations of state violence revealed to the Argentine people and gave a sanitized rendition of the violence done to the disappeared with the excuse that he had forgotten much or that a detailed description would be ‘very morbid’ (Verbitsky 1995: 57), as if he was concerned about the sensibilities of his interviewer and audience. In this sense, his confession differs from the accounts by Israeli conscripts about their conduct in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Grassiani (see this volume) shows how soldiers bracket their emotions through a discourse of professionalism that instrumentalizes their actions, while showing an empathetic awareness of the suffering of their victims. Scilingo reverses this discursive strategy through a rhetorical confession that highlights the perpetrator’s moral dilemmas, desensitizes the victims and represents the violence as an expedient procedure. Scilingo’s confession cost him dearly. At first, he was offered money to remain silent, then his family was threatened and finally he was warned of putting his Navy benefits at risk (Verbitsky 1995: 148). President Menem also tried to silence him, fearing that Scilingo might endanger his political goal of closing the book on the past. He discredited him by suggesting that Scilingo was looking for money and wanting to sell his fabrication to Hollywood. Later, Scilingo received death threats, one allegedly from his former comrades at the Navy Mechanics School who warned him against his plan to put his experiences on paper: ‘We know about the book. Your days are numbered. Stop soon or we’ll take you on a flight. We have people watching your steps. You know how we work’ (Payne 2008: 52). He was considered a traitor and his wife was ostracized from the navy’s social circles. The Argentine armed forces could not but react on Scilingo’s revelations and army commander General Martín Balza declared in April 1995 that the military had used unjustifiable means to restore the social order in the mid 1970s. The commanders of the other forces also came forward with their veiled admissions of guilt, while a group of retired generals persisted in their denial of the human rights violations. Within a year of his confession, Scilingo was given a two-year prison sentence for financial fraud; a charge which turned out to be unfounded (Feitlowitz 1998: 205, Payne 2008: 49-50). The intimidation did not cease when he was released from prison. On 11 September 1997, he was abducted and warned to stop talking to the press. As a visual reminder of their threat, his captors carved the initials of the three journalists who had interviewed Scilingo into his face (Sims 1997). Scilingo fled to Spain in October 1997 to testify in an investigation into the disappearance of Spanish citizens during the Argentine dictatorship but, to his dismay, was arrested. He recounted his confession in court and said he had made up the death flights out of hatred and revenge against Admiral Massera who had ordered the arrest of Scilingo’s sister for being a terrorist. Scilingo was convicted to 640 years in prison in April 2005; a sentence which was commuted to thirty years (Algañara 2005).

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The Intimidation of Witnesses for the Prosecution during Democracy With Scilingo in prison, the mea culpa of the armed forces made in public and the amnesty legislation still in place, the public attention to the Dirty War abated quickly. It was another confession, but this one boastful and defiant instead of remorseful, by Navy Captain Alfredo Astiz that incited the public debate again. Astiz had been convicted in absentia in France for the 1977 murder of two French nuns working together with the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo but was a beneficiary of Argentina’s amnesty laws. In a January 1998 interview he spoke about his aptitude for destruction and his heroism in the Dirty War (Cerruti 1998: 3). Other officers also came forward, and army commander General Balza declared in June 1998 that the armed forces had a standard operating procedure of separating captives from their children. The material evidence collected by human rights organizations all of a sudden became of judicial value. The reaction came within days. On 9 June 1998, former dictator Jorge Videla was taken in preventive custody on baby theft charges. Admiral Massera, like Videla pardoned in 1990 while serving a life sentence, was detained six months later. In March 2001 a federal judge declared that the 1986 and 1987 amnesty laws were unconstitutional and Congress followed suit in 2003. The Supreme Court overturned the amnesty legislation in June 2005 and the 1989 and 1990 presidential pardons were ruled unconstitutional in April 2007. By December 2008, there were 385 suspects in protective custody and forty-six fugitives from justice. Many of the forty-four convicts received sentences from twenty-five years to life (CELS 2009: 71). By April 2009, there were 556 persons under indictment for human rights violations made during the dictatorship. Clearly, the revelations about baby theft resonated with the popular sentiment about the dictatorship and rallied Congress, the government, the Supreme Court and public opinion behind the call of accountability. The first court case since the amnesty legislation of the 1980s was held against retired Police Commissioner-General Miguel Osvaldo Etchecolatz. He had already been detained in May 1986, was given a twenty-five year sentence but was amnestied in 1987 under the Due Obedience Law. In 1997 Etchecolatz (n.d.) published a book avoiding to address the Dirty War practices of abduction, disappearance, torture and assassination but, instead, providing typical denial logics. He put the armed and security forces in the victim role by reproducing long lists of their dead and itemizing the terrorist acts between 1973 and 1978. The seventy-seven year old Etchecolatz was indicted again in June 2006 for the abduction, torture, and assassination of six disappeared persons and the abduction and torture of two ex-detained-disappeared persons, one of them being the bricklayer Jorge Julio López. On 18 September 2006, the day when prosecution and defence were pleading their cases, López vanished. When two  See for a complete list of names: www.mpf.gov.ar/Institucional/UnidadesFE/ DDHH_Procesados_Abril_2009.pdf. [accessed: 13 August 2009].

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days later Etchecolatz was given a life sentence and the key witness Jorge Julio López was still missing, his relatives began to worry about the seventy-seven year old man suffering from Parkinson’s disease. A street protest of five thousand people demanded the ‘appearance alive’ of Julio López, a common phrase used by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. The ex-disappeared Adriana Calvo commented: ‘It’s a clear message about the life sentence of Etchecolatz and a threat against the witnesses in the trials against genocidaires’ (Lara 2006). The second key witness Nilda Eloy declared that she had received an intimidating phone call with sounds of a mock torture session (Meyer 2006). The judge who had presided over the trial received a death threat with the caption ‘true Justice will arrive’ and other judges and several reporters were equally intimidated. Fear set in that López had been abducted by retired policemen close to Etchecolatz who intended to take revenge, threaten other witnesses, and prevent López from testifying in future trials against the Buenos Aires Provincial Police. In fact, there arose new cases of intimidation. The fifty years old ex-disappeared Juan Evaristo Puthod, active in the human rights movement as president of the House of Memory (Casa de la Memoria) in Zárate, was abducted on 29 April 2008 around 7 P.M. as he was walking to a local radio station to host a human rights program. A massive search party was organized by the police. Puthod’s captors released him the next day at 11 P.M. after interrogating him about his involvement in the memorial tribute to the revolutionaries Eduardo Pereyra Rossi and Osvaldo Cambiasso, whose disappearance and assassination in 1983 were attributed to police commissioner Luis Abelardo Patti (CELS 2009: 28–9, Fioriti 2008). Puthod had been receiving threats for the last three years. His captors told him that apparently he had not understood those messages and added that his life still belonged to them, even after thirty-two years. Blindfolded and with his hands tied, Puthod was asked about the homage to Pereyra Rossi and Cambiasso: ‘Why, if society has forgotten about the case, do you have to go out and refresh the death of these two terrorists?’ (Martínez 2008). For memory’s sake, answered Juan Puthod. The intimidation continued after Puthod’s release with threatening phone calls. Puthod and his family were also shadowed by two cars wherever they went but the police investigation into the abduction continues in the dark. Unlike Puthod, Julio López did not reappear. Years went by without a trace until in January 2009, a dumped Volkswagen was located, in which, according to one witness, López had been moved only hours after his abduction. The car was found next to the residence of a retired physician and close friend of Etchecolatz who visited him frequently in prison. The investigation failed however to yield new leads. The abductions of López and Puthod were violent attempts to silence a remembrance of the past by reproducing the violence they had denounced, just as the presumed assassination of the torturer Héctor Febres and the physical assault on Adolfo Scilingo. The silencing of eyewitnesses and perpetrators blocks out meanings and expressions of violence that can then be more easily denied.

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The logics and rhetoric of denial persist to this day. Groups of retired officers and civilian sympathizers try to counter, what they call, the Gramscian indoctrination of Argentina’s youth with a distorted version of Argentina’s history. They produce books and documentaries denying the testimonies about disappearance and torture, and praise the Argentine Armed Forces for destroying the guerrilla insurgency (e.g. AUNAR 1999, Foro de Generales Retirados 2004, Márquez 2004). For example, the youth organization Argentines for a Complete Memory (Argentinos por la Memoria Completa) dedicated itself ‘to the men and women who wore a uniform during the 1970s to defend the Fatherland. Because we have collected the blood of our martyrs to raise the Argentine flag and because we are committed to our prisoners of war.’ The prisoners of war are the Argentine officers currently detained for human rights violations. The pro-dictatorship interest groups condemn the trials for being carried out by a partisan judiciary. They contest the testimonies submitted to the courts and dismiss forensic evidence as manipulated, forged and misinterpreted. Conclusion: The Perpetrator Triangulation of Violence An analysis of three decades of silence, denial and confession strategies employed by the Argentine military against accusations of human rights violations committed during the 1976–1983 dictatorship demonstrates that their responses varied with the political circumstances of Argentina’s transitional democracy, the political, public and legal arenas, their respective audiences and the increasing knowledge about past violent events. The persistent truth finding of the Argentine human rights movement and the equally persistent denial by the Argentine military placed the issue of the disappeared on the public, political and legal agendas when prompted by shocking revelations. Efforts by several Argentine presidents to leave the past behind or, as critics would say, to silence the past by sweeping amnesty and pardon legislations, failed and were eventually overturned by Congress and the Supreme Court. The confessional testimonies of perpetrators are no less disturbing than their denials and silences. All three are forms of agency, as Das (2007: 54) has argued about the speech acts of female victims of India’s Partition: ‘I found a zone of silence around the event. This silence was achieved either by the use of language that was general and metaphoric but that evaded description of any events with specificity so as to capture the particularity of their experience, or by describing the surrounding events but leaving the actual experience of abduction and rape unstated.’ This chapter has given examples of a similar use of general statements, metaphors and silences to describe Argentina’s state terror. What is so troubling here are the rhetorical devices employed by perpetrators to give voice to their   www.memoriacompleta.com.ar. [accessed: 24 July 2007]. Hard copy of the website text in the author’s possession.

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victims and control the expression of violence and suffering which only they have witnessed. In a parallel way, there have been forces at work in Argentina during democracy that tried to silence the witnesses of atrocity with acts of violence similar to the ones for which the perpetrators deny any responsibility, thus undermining the right of the state to hold its citizens accountable for their actions. Intimidation and assassination are means to extend impunity from the authoritarian to the democratic state and to erase knowledge about past crimes permanently. What do these three different strategies reveal about the expressions of violence by perpetrators? This analysis of the perpetrator triangulation of violence suggests that silence, denial and confession are not mutually exclusive but rather complementary strategies that carry their own ideological, political, moral and psychological weight, but are united by an irresolvable complicity in horrendous acts. These discursive strategies are violent in themselves by depriving the relatives of the victims of a knowledge which only they possess, and by the words they use to verbalize their denials, confessions and even their silences. Thus, perpetrators manipulate people’s imagination and feed their nightmares by condemning them to fill in the voids deliberately left vacant by offering only distorted expressions of a violence they created. References Abiad, P. 2008. ‘Para la jueza, a Febres lo mataron porque estaba decidido a hablar’. Clarín, 5 January. Agüero, F. and Hershberg, E. 2005. ‘Las Fuerzas Armadas y las memorias de la represión en el Cono Sur’, in Memorias militares sobre la represión en el Cono Sur: Visiones en disputa en dictadura y democracia, edited by E. Hershberg and F. Agüero. Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno de España Editores, 1–34. Algañaraz, J.C. 2005. ‘El represor Scilingo fue condenado en Madrid a 640 años de cárcel’. Clarín, 20 April. Areas, T. 1984. ‘Camps en el banquillo’. Somos, 384 (27 January), 6–11. ________ 1985. ‘Los desaparecidos reaparecidos’. Somos, 474 (23 October), 6_10. Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team. 2007. 2007 Annual Report: Covering the period January to December 2006. Buenos Aires: EAAF. Argentinos por la Memoria Completa. [Online]. Available at: www. memoriacompleta.com.ar [accessed: 24 July 2007]. AUNAR. 1999. Subversión: La historia olvidada. 2nd Edition. Buenos Aires: Asociación Unidad Argentina. Bartov, O., Grossmann, A. and Nolan, M. 2002. ‘Introduction’, in Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century, edited by O. Bartov, A. Grossmann and M. Nolan. New York: New Press, ix–xxxiv.

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Bok, S. 1989. Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation. New York: Vintage Books. CELS (Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales). 2009. Derechos humanos en Argentina: informe 2009. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores. Cerruti, G. 1998. ‘Dos horas frente a un asesino’. Trespuntos, 30(28 January), 2–7. Cohen, S. 2001. States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge: Polity Press. CONADEP. 1986. Nunca Más: The Report of the Argentine National Commission on the Disappeared. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. Das, V. 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ejército Argentino. 1984. ‘Incineración de documentación estadística’. Boletín Público Ejército Argentino, 4524 (8 November), 673. Etchecolatz, M.O. n.d. La otra campana del Nunca Más. Author’s edition. Feitlowitz, M. 1998. A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture. New York: Oxford University Press. Fioriti, S. 2008. ‘Puthod describió su secuestro: “Temí terminar con un tiro en la cabeza”’. Clarín, 2 May. Foro de Generales Retirados. 2004. Las Fuerzas Armadas y la crisis militar. Buenos Aires: Foro de Generales Retirados. Guest, I. 1990. Behind the Disappearances: Argentina’s Dirty War Against Human Rights and the United Nations. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kapuściński, R. 1992. The Soccer War. New York: Vintage. Lara, R. 2006. ‘Masiva marcha por la aparición del testigo clave del caso Etchecolatz’. Clarín, 23 September. Lipstadt, D.E. 1993. Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. New York: Free Press. Marchesi, A. 2005. ‘Vencedores vencidos: las respuestas militares frente a los informes “Nunca Más” en el Cono Sur’, in Memorias militares sobre la represión en el Cono Sur: visiones en disputa en dictadura y democracia, edited by E. Hershberg and F. Agüero. Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno de España Editores, 175–210. Márquez, N. 2004. La otra parte de la verdad: la respuesta a los que han ocultado y deformado la verdad histórica sobre la década del ’70 y el terrorismo. Mar del Plata: author’s edition. Martínez, D. 2008. ‘Lo vinculo con la policía y no lo desvinculo de Patti’. Página/12, 2 May. Meyer, A. 2006. ‘Una búsqueda que despierta fantasmas’. Página/12, 23 September. ________ 2009. ‘“No surgen elementos de riesgo suicida”’. Página/12, 26 April. Moores, L.F. 2007a. ‘Apareció muerto el represor Febres, el primer acusado por el caso ESMA’. Clarín, 11 December.

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________ 2007b. ‘El represor Febres tenía cianuro en la sangre e investigan si fue asesinado’. Clarín, 14 December. Payne, L.A. 2008. Unsettling Accounts: Neither Truth nor Reconciliation in Confessions of State Violence. Durham: Duke University Press. PEN (Poder Ejecutivo Nacional). 1979. El Terrorismo en la Argentina: Evolución de la delincuencia terrorista en la Argentina. Buenos Aires. Pisani, S. 1990. ‘Instó Menem a una definitiva reconciliación’. La Nación, 17 June. Procuración General de la Nación 2009. Procesados por Jurisdicción. [Online]. Available at: www.mpf.gov.ar/Institucional/UnidadesFE/DDHH_Procesados_ Abril_2009.pdf [accessed: 13 August 2009] Robben, A.C.G.M. 2005a. Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ________ 2005b. ‘How Traumatized Societies Remember: The Aftermath of Argentina’s Dirty War’. Cultural Critique, 59, 120–64. Sims, C. 1997. ‘Vicious Reminder of 70s Atrocities in Argentina’. The New York Times, 12 September, 1, 4. Verbitsky, H. 1995. El Vuelo. Buenos Aires: Planeta. Villegas, O.G. 1990. Testimonio de un alegato. Buenos Aires: Author’s Edition. Walzer, M. 1977. Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations. New York: Basic Books.

Chapter 10

From Traumatic History to Embodied Memory: A Methodological Challenge for Anthropologists Adelheid Pichler

Introduction According to the estimates, anywhere between 9 and 20 million people disappeared from their communities and families in Africa to become slaves in the New World (Argenti 2006, Palmié 2002). By its very nature as a tragedy of unprecedented dimensions, one cannot expect slavery to be recalled today by the descendents of those affected by the trade, and the suffering that followed the trade in the New World. Focusing on the effects of violence and terror on the plantation in colonial Cuba involves a time horizon which is beyond the reach of testimony or what we can call the communicative memory, which is actively produced in social groups through everyday interactions. In my studies I explore a notion of memory in which it is already telescoped and appears as a selective recreation of the past – what Jan Assmann (1992) or Diana Taylor (2003) call ‘cultural memory’ – and which lies outside the realm of the everyday. Assmann asserts that cultures of remembering represent the technologies by means of which we elaborate meaningful constructs of the experience of the past. But ‘the fact that we often cannot access the past in a direct referential manner once it has been lived, implies that it may gain an influence that escapes the normal mechanisms of remembering, objectification and forgetting’ (Assmann 1992 in Argenti and Rötschenthaler 2006: 33). Studies on memory, which extend the time frame from communicative memory to cultural/ social memory, are rare. The key studies on violence and memory are based on personal and subjective suffering and individual biographies. Without dismissing the suffering that violence and memories of violence undoubtedly engender, we need to question how individual suffering is enculturated at the collective level (Argenti 2007, Argenti and Schramm 2009). My contribution to the topic of ‘perspectives on expressions of violence’ raises general considerations about the possibility of constructing coherent histories of the experiences of slavery, forced work, torture and constant punishment. How can a society come to terms with such fundamentally violent human experiences? In which social and cultural contexts can they be overcome? Under which circumstances can violent acts be passed on from one generation to another as realities not only worth remembering but which may also become the foundations of a group’s or individual’s self-conception?

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In this chapter, I will show some of the ways in which Afro-Cuban religious communities have developed certain social practices for shaping memory. The case study investigates the transmission of violent historical experiences and its articulation in ritual performance. I will show how memories of violent experiences, which occurred during the colonial past, are remembered along a register of nondiscursive, unconscious social performative practices and transmitted from one generation to the next. Embodied memories and veiled discourses of slavery and forced work on the plantations of the New World continue quite literally to haunt contemporary generations along a socio-cultural register of spirits (called muertos or eggúns) embedded in the cultural repertoire of these religious communities. After a short introduction to religious system, I will look at ‘haunting revenants’ (Weigel 1999: 62), ubiquitous dead, and at the socio-cultural archives in which the memory of the terror of slavery has been inscribed. The arguments are explored with reference to three different forms which ‘memory’ assumes in the sociocultural representation of the experience of slavery. Defining Memories of Slavery and its Transgenerational Aftermaths As Rosalind Shaw (2002: 4) argues with respect to memories of slavery among the Temne-speaking people of Sierra Leone, ‘the past is remembered not only in words but also in images and non-discursive practical forms that go beyond words’. Shaw’s model of memory has been criticized. Stewart (2004) argues that if memories are not made explicit, or if there is no verbal exegesis to prove that nondiscursive practices are overtly recognized to embody the traces of past events, they cannot be said to exist as memories. Nicolas Argenti considers that […] such critiques are based on a narrow cognitivist definition of memory as the conscious recollection of concrete forms of knowledge, but of course we know that the phenomenon of memory is complex, embracing many different kinds of knowledge, experience and emotion at several levels of consciousness, and not only in individuals, but as social memories existing in the relations between people (Argenti 2007: 73).

Following Shaw (2002), I argue that memories of violent events and experiences, which occurred under the Cuban colonial system, are produced and transmitted by means of social practices embedded in socio-religious communities, and that Afro-Cuban religions should be approached as socio-cultural legacies of post slave society. In this light, the forced work which followed dislocation is not only an empirical set of events. For the large numbers of uprooted persons,

  This chapter is part of a research project carried out between 2001 and 2005 in Cuba. The research was supported by the Austrian Science Fund.

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working in inhuman conditions in the New World, it is also a social reality that still reverberates on both sides of the Atlantic (Palmié 2003). It is anthropological writing about victimized communities (Cole 2001, Lambek 2002, Shaw 2002) that has shown that these communities finally find ways of bearing witness to the silences in their histories. The traumatic effects of forced immigration and labour, and the disruption of social order, affected not only those it directly touched, but also those who came later. Cuba, as a people and as a culture, emerged from the depths of solitude and uprooting which always accompany torture and death. The examination of this emergence is what constitutes Cuban history, and the consequences of these convulsive events – alienation, desolation, anxiety – belong to us until today (Figarola 1998: 47).

Often elided from explicit discourse, the history of slavery insistently recurs in manifold wholly ignored sets of non-discursive performative genres. Memories of slavery and forced work are incorporated in people’s bodies, their movements and gestures, in their actions and objects (Shaw 2002). I agree with Argenti (2007) that the descendents of those who suffered through the death space of the Middle Passage, who laboured and died on the plantation, are silent about these events and their contemporary postcolonial sequels, not ‘because they do not know of them, but rather because [they] bear witness to their excessive nature in radically alternative ways’ (Argenti 2007: 50). Alternative Epistemologies of Remembering The central aim of this chapter is to imagine memory as practice. Memories are produced by experience and, in turn, reshape it. In the course of history and its transgenerational transmission, a unified cultural memory is being constantly widened and transformed by traces of specific memories. My approach to memory is less psychological or psychoanalytic than anthropological and historical. The examples that follow examine the cultural means and social institutions through which practices of memory are mediated. Psychoanalytic literature (Quindeau 2004, Moré 2007) on trauma describes a fixation on a past which cannot be integrated into the flow of time. Past experiences seem eternally present, but are, in fact, sealed off, and are only apparently accessible to reason. They cannot be expunged by merely relating them, or working them through. According to this model, traumatic memories make their appearance as postponed symptoms when they are set off by crises. The ethnographic examples will, however, indicate a path leading away from the dichotomy, which situates   The Middle Passage refers to the forcible passage of African people from Africa to the New World.

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memory/remembering between successful overcoming through symbolization and mourning and traumatic, crippling and melancholy fixation. The examples will address arguments concerning the relationship between embodied performance and experience that lies at the heart of memory. The violent experiences of slavery lay four to six generations back, and a present-day psychic phenomenon such as mediumistic trance cannot be integrated into the dichotomy between obsession and healing. Instead, I will introduce the term ‘traces of memory’ following Quindeau (2004). Although the notion ‘traces of memory’ achieves greater flexibility with respect to trauma at the cost of definitional clarity, it is precisely because of this ‘flexibility’ that it may coincide with the ambivalences of remembering as an analytical category. In his ‘Studies on Hysteria’ Sigmund Freud ([1895] 1982: 86) does not conceive memory as a purely cognitive process, but rather as a process which expresses itself in motor and affective spheres. Freud uses the term memorysymbols and also recognizes that memories, which cannot be communicated in other ways, are often expressed in motor behaviours (see Quindeau 2004: 17). By ‘memory traces’ Freud refers to the corporal inscription of experience, which has both neurophysiological and psychopathological dimensions. Following Quindeau (2004: 17) the concept ‘traces of memory’ thus links the three fundamental levels of psychoanalysis: the somatic, the social, and the unconscious. Transgenerational Transmission of Trauma Sigmund Freud ([1895] 1982) describes the notion of transgenerational subconscious as follows: The transgenerational transmission of trauma is the means ‘a generation employs to transmit its psychic state to the next’ ([1895] 1982: 190, see also Weigel 1999: 62). Freud predicates not only ‘the sons’ interest in their inheritance but also the fathers’ interest in leaving a legacy, assuming that the parental generation also has an interest in conveying its experiences and emotional states to its offspring’ (Freud [1895] 1982: 190) . When Freud further writes: ‘Generally speaking, Folk Psychology has concerned itself little with the ways in which a generation assures the prolonged continuity of the psychic life of the one it is replacing’ (ibid.), we can infer that Freud takes for granted a desire on both sides for the production of transgenerational continuity. But at the same time he also observes an opposite intention on the part of the older generation, namely to keep concealed from the next generation certain important psychic events (Moré 2007: 211). What in fact guarantees the continuity between generations is, according to Freud, the reproduction of those original emotions, which the older generation sought to encode in rituals, customs or ceremonies. The younger generation does not enter into a cognizance of history and its contexts, but rather into the adoption of an emotional legacy, the existential orientation and conditions of which arose from the history of their forebears (Freud [1895] 1982: 190, see also Moré 2007: 191).

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According to Freud, memory transcends the temporal boundaries of a generation and thus, in terms of culture, remains connected to a collective ‘community of memory’. Hence there must be a cultural group within which certain ‘units of memory’ are cultivated. These formulations of Freud are part of his more general thought on ‘social memory’ (Warburg 1929) or ‘collective memory’ (Halbwachs 1925). Relevant to my further analysis is his recognition that social and collective memory processes make use not only of conscious and unconscious mechanisms of selection, but also of interpretation and displacement. Afro-Cuban Religions Slaves in Cuba originated from many different regions in the African continent, each with a distinct language and distinct ritual practices. They built creolized cults in the New World, fusing different elements of the practices of their regions of origin. Through the transmission of African-based cosmologies and religious practices they put together a new syncretic matrix of religious practice on both sides of the Atlantic. The legacy of the Cuban colonial past is a complex of hybrid Afro-Cuban socio-religious practices, which have four main branches: (1) the Yoruba-derived Santería, also known as the Regla de Ocha; (2) the Bantu-derived Regla de Palo Monte (which itself has three main branches, known as Mayombe, Kimbisa and Vrillumba); (3) the Abakuá secret society, also known as ñáñigos; and (4) the Regla de Arará . The Regla de Arará has been largely absorbed by Santería and has few remaining followers in a handful of locations, while Santería and Palo Monte have countless adherents throughout the island. The Abakuá society counts 100,000 members in Havana and Matanzas, the only places it has ever existed (Palmié 2002: 162). All of these groups emerged from the repeated transplantation of African aggregates of knowledge throughout the entire course of the slave trade, and their progressive transformation, under the conditions of slavery and its aftermath, into relatively coherent sets of social practices and beliefs. Genealogical memory of the Spiritist Isidra: The Living Dead What is the nature of the memories, which inscribe earlier experiences in ‘traces of memory’ and which can be observed in social practice? Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Havana (1996–2005) I will analyze the following example cited from Ochoa (2007). In his description of Isidra’s conversation with the dead, Ochoa  See Argenti (2006), Argenti and Röschenthaler (2006) and Palmié (2006)   The internal differentiation of regional African-American religious formations has been discussed in the anthropological literature by Palmié (2002), Brandon (1983) and Cabrera (1983).

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attempts to develop a language of the dead. The author Ochoa does not link Isidras conversations with memory theory nor with genealogical ideas of history. His text is especially interesting, as he inspires to reflect further on the term Kalunga. Isidra has not slept the whole night, but had wandered around without thinking. When Ochoa arrived at her house early in the morning, the spiritist Isidra is agitated and eager to talk: You know, I don´t choose to get up. It is my dead (mis muertos) […] who pull me. Then I was sitting on the edge of this couch, here in the sunroom. The dead lead me here last night. Everything was blue from the light outside, blue like shadows in the sea Kalunga […] like the shadows of Kalunga. And you know what solution came to me. It was the dead. The dead that woke me and brought me here to think (Ochoa 2007: 473–5).

As the author did not understand what Isidra wanted to say, she further elaborated on the arrival of the death. […] I heard and felt my mother, Cucusa, telling me what is hurting. I can feel Kalunga right here, in my gut. It´s keeping me awake, so I wait. Then I hear them again, the dead [mis muertos]. And then I can recognize her, and it is Old Chacha, my great aunt, Chacha, la Vieja […] (Ochoa 2007: 476).

Ghosts as Expressions of Transgenerational Transmission Isidras experiences that night referred to several layers in the narrations about and attributes of Kalunga. She experienced the blue colour that she associates with the sea. According to Laman (1964), Kalunga is a Kikongo word referring to the sea, in the depths of which reside the dead (see also Ochoa 2007: 482). She did not only talk with Kalunga, she sensed Kalunga who appeared to her together with several of her dead relatives through sounds as well as in her body, as she said, in her ‘guts’. Isidra gives the impression of speaking simultaneously to her family member (Chacha), to all her dead ancestors (mis muertos) and to the mass of the dead, Kalunga. On an individual level, Isidra´s conversations with ‘her dead’ can be interpreted as an example of the experience of living simultaneously in two different worlds: the place and time of former generations who were slaves, and the place and time of contemporary lives. As such, they recall the testimonies of Holocaust survivors who perceive their lives – and often their bodies – as a duality, as described in Laurence Langer’s (1991) work on these testimonies. As the texts discussed by Langer make clear, the dissociative aspect of trauma results in the fact that the two lives of trauma victims are not lived consecutively, but rather simultaneously (Argenti and Schramm 2009). As informants who passed through Auschwitz put it ‘I don’t live with it [Auschwitz], it lives with me’ (Langer 1991: 95). Langer speaks of a permanent duality or a parallel existence in which

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survivors are condemned to dwell. The doubling of the self entails the perpetual presence of a past. Although the period of slavery lies six generations back, Isidra’s vivid conversations with her muertos seem to be embedded in a double time structure: in that of the past and of her present. This became clear in my own conversations in Paolo Monte idioms and ritual languages. Kalunga is a metaphor representing all the dead buried in, or thrown into the sea. The line of a ritual song ‘Kalunga carries me on one leg (por un pie kalunga me lleva, por un pie)’ refers to the period when the slave trade was declared illegal. If a ship was challenged by a British man-of-war, the slaves were thrown overboard, chained to each other by one foot, to sink and drown. One informant on Palo Monte told me that Kalunga ‘originally’ was an African cemetery on a platform raised by poles, in the sea. The sea is also clearly identified with the Middle Passage. I interpret narratives on Kalunga as memory traces, which link Isidra’s stories with the time of slavery. Isidra’s conversation points to representation of memory as ‘processes sedimented in gait, posture, movement, and all the other corporal components which together realise cultural code and social dynamics in everyday communicative practices’ (Kleinman and Kleinman 1994: 716–17). Isidra said ‘I can feel Kalunga right here, in my gut. It´s keeping me awake’. It is evident here that this way of remembering is not applicable outside the cultural sphere of its elaboration. Serving the purposes of memory, they can only be interpreted in the context of a culture-bounded form of memory (Assmann 1992: 106–7, Halbwachs 1985). Further, ‘the living dead’ of Isidra cannot be interpreted as individual pathology, as might be indicated. The mode of conversation is linked to social contexts and sociocultural expressions of its transgenerational transmission. The Spiritist cult groups which are organized in many Afro-Cuban cult houses can be interpreted as sociocultural communities which create specific communication situations reflecting transgenerational emotional legacies in their members’ relationships both with each other and with their gods. The ritual settings are a socio-cultural framework for remembrance. Removed from the socio-cultural communication situation, the sentences (of Isidra) appear to be more or less disorganized, unstructured fragments which do not lend themselves easily to historical analysis. The traumatic history is fixed, somehow encrypted in the term Kalunga, culturalbounded, because only descendents of post-slave communities communicate with   These songs have been recorded and transcribed by the Cuban ethnographer Lydia Cabrera (1983: 77) in the first half of the last century.  In Rough Crossing Schama (2006) describes a similar event: When slaves that were transported by sea in order to be sold fell sick during the journey, they would be thrown overboard since they could not be sold weak. The captain would have made a loss if he had kept and fed these sick slaves. By throwing them overboard he was even able to claim insurance - if he reported the loss as a consequence of an accident. Reports of this event galvanised the abolitionist movement in the United Kingdom (Ulz 2010).

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Kalunga in contemporary interactions. Weigel (1999) defines the relationship of traumatic memory to common memory in its full paradoxically, when she refers to the realm of the deep memory as a ‘crypt’, a place hidden within, sealed off from the outside, of which it is nevertheless an inherent part. The metaphor of ‘crypt memory’ refers to signs buried in the unconscious, those which are excluded from the established discourse, or which are rather, encrypted and shut up within it. ‘The crypt’ is the archive of those symbolizations in which blocked knowledge continues to generate itself as if it were a foreign body (1999: 62). In this manner, the dead do not represent individual suffering, or mourning. Kalunga may be entombed in individuals whose family members came as slaves to Cuba, but Kalunga and other spirits come to live only in the communication between individuals as social characters. Isidra’s performance is intersubjective rather than subjective. Such phenomena can only partly be explained by trauma theory. They cannot be interpreted as individual pathology unlinked to social contexts and socio-cultural expressions of its transgenerational transmission. As such, the individual experiences of Holocaust survivors may not be compared with the representations of spirits and the dead as legacies in post-slave societies. Apart from psychoanalytical theories and the ‘assimilation model’ of the Holocaust, there are few studies about the phenomenon of transgenerational trauma, which transcends the time horizon of family-bounded, genealogical memory to form collective repertoires of cultural memory. This is why it seems legitimate to seek a comparative basis in psychoanalysis. From Genealogical Memory to Collective Repertoires of Cultural Memory: Mounted Mediums and Songs of Humiliation in a Palo Ceremony Today the Palo Monte religion is practiced throughout the island. The Regla de Palo (religious rule) is divided into three different branches (ramas): Mayombe, Briyumba and Kimbisa. Mayombe refers to a jungle area in the Angolan province of Cabinda, from which a large number of Kikongo-speaking slaves were deported. Members of these cult houses in Cuba (nsó-nganga) are called paleros. A highlight of many Palo ceremonies is the ‘mounting’ of one or more mediums, called ‘dogs of the prenda’ (perros de la prenda), with the dead spirit locked up in the prenda. The Spanish term prenda (or cazuela, caldero, fundamento) and the Cuban nganga describe a clay pot or an iron cauldron which is kept in a separate room in the sorcerer’s house, either in a closet, in a hut in the backyard, in the bush (monte) or it is buried under a tree. The religious ceremony evokes one or more dead spirits, one of which is then locked in the prenda/nganga, the key artefact of the Palo ceremony. While performing the rituals involved, the practitioners enter into dialogue with the dead spirits (nfumbi) in the prenda, speaking or singing in

 One reason of the notion dog is that the medium starts shouting and breathing like a furied dog.

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ritual languages (that is in Bozal or Congo). A medium (one of the participating members) of the Palo house is then mounted by a dead spirit. In some cases the Palo spirit enters the body of the medium as a wounded, rebellious, wrathful character. Images of slavery appear during his or her trance. Some of these spirits inscribe on the bodies of the mediums what might be perceived as traces of their experience of slavery: wounds and mutilations, such as burns with candles and torches; some mediums mimic having their tongues cut with machetes, others move about spasmodically, and limp visibly, recalling for the observer images of punishments and torture. Ferrandiz (2009) looks in detail at the corporeal display in the contemporary Maria Lionza spiritist cults in Venezuela, examining how the spirits present themselves and are acted out in possession. He observes that ‘many African Spirits display as deformed corporality: no muscles or articulations, humbling, with at least one foot turned inwards or an arm hanging stiffly by the trunk, and these defects are often explained as punitive amputations of feet, arms or hands’ (Ferrandiz 2009: 53). He quotes Teresa, a medium who receives an African spirit in her body called Mr Bárbaro (Mr Barbarian). ‘[When Mr Bárbaro arrives] in your body, you feel a sort of rage. […] Then you think: this spirit is going to come in cutting and jabbing, wielding a machete. I get very scared then’ (Ferrandiz 2009: 52). In her later description she associated the twisted corporality of that spirit to mutilations he received when he lived as a slave. This Bárbaro was […] bravest of them all […] They would take him prisoner and he’d escape. So they cut off his leg so he would not run away again, and still, leg or no leg, he ran away again. […] So they chopped off his hand, too. His left hand. That’s how all African spirits come down with a twisted foot, to honor him. Bárbaro twists his hand because it’s been chopped off. When the spiritual fluid is entering your body [in the first stage of trance] you can feel there is no hand. Same thing with the foot, you can feel the missing foot (Ferrandiz 2009: 52).

Traces of violence are also found in the iconographies, material depictions and body images of Afro-Cuban deities. Three orichas (Afro-Cuban deities) are lame (Osain, Babalú Ayé and Eleguá), and as I will describe below, Osain is mutilated in other ways, too. Practitioners of the Palo Monte religion say that the dead spirit in the prenda mounts the medium in a kind of trance which is rougher than that of most spirits in the Regla de Ocha. But this Venezuelan spirit has a Cuban variant in Babalú Ayé/San Lázaro, the crippled beggar (and resurrected dead man) whose typical garb is the sackcloth of a slave. When Babalú Ayé comes down, he often mounts first on the leg and he rises first on one leg, and then passes strength and power. Once again, the motif of one-leggedness, whatever its legendary explanation, recalls the corporal punishments that awaited runaway slaves in colonial times. I will pick it up as a third ethnographical example. During the Palo ceremonies, memories of slavery return on several levels, beginning with the representation of the enslaved soul and the body which is forced

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to work. The pot (prenda) shelters a dead soul (nfumbi) which did not volunteer for this position. The priest steals his remains from the cemetery (usually a skull, kiyumba), and mounts the rest of the prenda around this centrepiece (‘the dead man has a fondness for his remains’, Cabrera 1983: 121). The dead spirit is also, in a separate ritual act, sealed inside a small bottle (another type of prenda) in which it will be permanently imprisoned and forced to do its master’s bidding. The aim of the ceremony is to stimulate the dead soul to work for its owner, to ‘wake him up’, as he is thought to be slumbering. The priest calls him to work, at first in a friendly tone, but he doesn’t set willingly to work. The priest starts to sing songs of humiliation (cantos de puya) to stimulate the dead soul to work for the owner. The slave has to be driven to work. This means that the tata nganga, the priest, and his ritual assistant, the mayordomo, often have to curse him, insult him, and provoke him. The priest has to wake him from his slumber and fire him up to work, and he does so in word and song. First when he is angered, incensed, wild, will he work well. Practices of verbally abusing, beating, spitting on, or flogging the nganga in order to activate him, drive him to work, are common. The priest and his assistant use insulting terms, both in Congo and in Spanish, while they simultaneously spit on or beat him, just as the slave driver used to, in order to make a slave work (see also Ortiz 1958: 851, Palmié 2002). These ritual interactions between performers, objects and its inhabiting spirits are saturated with themes of dominance and subordination, enslavement and revolt. The priest, called ‘father of the nganga’ (tata nganga), is a mystical entrepreneur commanding a labour force bound by contract or capture (Palmié 2002). The relationship of dominance and control during the performance recalls slavery, and it is underscored in ritual symbolism. The social roles adopted by initiates in their performance during the ritual, duplicate the social status functions of a slaveholder-society according to a specific scheme, beginning with the representation of the slave as an enslaved soul. As we already said, the enslaved soul is locked up in the prenda and forced to work. The owner of the prenda buys one or more slaves and puts them to work for him. The plantation economy and its forced labour system, violence and torture, social humiliation and degradation, are thus mirrored in ritual as structuring and pervasive themes: In the physical/temporal enactment of their ceremonies, the practitioners, paleros, enter the world of the plantation. Memory as an historical record finds its fullest and most ambitious expression in the field of non-verbal, embodied memory. Indeed, bodily practice makes them an especially powerful mnemonic tool for a corporeal social memory performed collectively during ritual interaction. As constantly repeated ritual gestures, these actions become habitual, and, as Paul Connerton writes, ‘habit is knowledge, and in the cultivation of habit it is our body which understands’ (Connerton 1996: 95). The repetitive character inherent in embodied performative acts or utterances represents, on the one hand, the condition of ‘being enslaved’, and, on the other, great power. It has at its command a broad arsenal for both attack and defence, present in all the other

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components of the iron pot, which the dead spirit deploys, and which is needed in the service of the priest. It is evident that the hierarchical structure of the ritual mirrors that of the plantation. During ritual interaction, the priest becomes the owner and master of the plantation, he becomes the one who has paid for this slave and who has a contract to prove it. His assistant (bakonfula in Congo) is known in Spanish as mayordomo, the title given to the administrator of a sugar estate, and the right-hand man of the ‘owner’ of a slave. The dead soul (nfumbi) is the overseer (mayoral), who is directly in charge of the slave force (dotación), and assigns the various slave gangs (cuadrillas) their tasks. Further technical vocabulary, the material culture of ritual, tools and everyday objects, are borrowed from the working environment on the sugar plantation. For example, the cepo, the place where prendas (the pots) are placed to work, was, in colonial times, a kind of ‘stocks’, where blood flowed, sentences were pronounced, and life and death decided. The word refers to an instrument of torture, well-known in Europe, consisting of a wooden rafter with three openings, two for the hands and one in the middle for the neck, in which recalcitrant slaves were locked face down, to be whipped. In the Palo ritual, the enslaved soul is then locked up in the iron or clay pot and forced to work. The cepo is the place in which the enslaved nfumbi waits to learn its tasks. It appears that in rituals violence becomes encrypted in the social body of the people (Argenti 2007: 245). Violence is expressed in bodily practices that bring people together for joint performances. Artefacts as Iconographic Figures of Memory The third and last example focuses on the material artefacts which represent memories of slavery. I will concentrate on the relationship between body, artefact and verbal modes of articulation. My argument is that, over time, socio-cultural memories coagulate to cultural archives in the form of material artefacts. I will show this, using the example of what is arguably the most powerful Afro-Cuban god, known in the Regla de Ocha as Osain, and in the Palo Monte religion as Gurunfinda. In Cuba one will not find anyone possessed by the god Osain, because it is said to be too powerful for the human mind. Possession by Osain would cause the person to go mad. But one finds his material representation as artefacts in every Cuban altar of Santería and Palo Monte. The representations of Osain in the cult houses differ according to religious branch. I want to describe here one altar representing Osain as a small wooden object, with one leg, one arm, a mutilated tongue, and a twisted face. In Cuba, Osain is the lord of all plants, and the holder of the knowledge of healing. For my interpretation, I focus on the mutilations which determine his material representation as a human figure. From this perspective, Osain represents the punishment and torture inflicted upon slaves for their rebelliousness. In the contemporary mythology about Osain, one hears about his physical state, but it is not related to a discourse of slavery. The explanations indicate he is a creature between plants and humans. Of all the deities that make up the Afro-Cuban pantheon,

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it is the most powerful god, and he displays signs of physical torture. The depiction of the wooden statuette bespeaks the corporal punishments that awaited runaway slaves in colonial times. The picture of the naked, battered man, stigmatized by having had his ear cut off, and by castration, cannot be interpreted merely as an object of transformation and as a creature oscillating between nature and culture, as suggested by various versions of the legends. The mutilations are too specific and determined for that. In fact, his figuration unambiguously displays the signs of torture sustained by real offenders in past punishment rituals. A historical comparison of images may illustrate the fate suffered by Osain. Both the narrative themes and their iconographic representation indicate the fugitive slave who was cruelly castigated for his escape. In order to understand the injuries we have to take a look at the punishments experienced by slaves who tried to escape the control of their white owners. According to historical sources, hunts were organized to recapture runaway slaves, known as cimarrones. When the hated slave dogs finally tracked them down (de Merlin in Ortiz [1916] 1958: 358–9) the slaves faced horrible punishments. Among those described by Ortiz were flogging, slitting the tongue, cutting off ears, or, if further flight was feared, parting the Achilles heel. Interestingly, the myths, or patakis as they are called in the Cuban ritual language, describe Osain as a creature that dwells in the woods and knows each and every plant, exactly like the cimarrones, as long as they were able to evade pursuit. Yet, they do not give any reasons for his injuries. With regard to the significance of violence in memory-based narratives Regina Bendix writes, ‘[n]arrating violent events is a fundamental means to transform an unsettling and dangerous experience into a meaningful story. It is less commonly known in this context that memories are not only “archived” in language, but also in the form of artefacts. The event is replaced by representations’ (Bendix 1996: 170). Similarly, Scarry concurs that ‘[p]ain is language-destroying, language is replaced by artefacts’ (Scarry 1985: 35). Studying the aftermaths of slavery under the aspect of torture, points to the fact that, in order to survive, a slave-owning society had to rely on a system of punishments, discipline and torture. In her study of torture, Scarry (1985) examines the relationship between tormented bodies and the way they are represented in cultural artefacts. Such memory-artefacts prove to be crucial for memories of violence as human beings are not able to represent violence in all its aspects verbally, and thus to recall it in narrative form. The physical pain itself, an essential component of the violent act, knows no words. Hence it can at best be verbally paraphrased, whereas any direct expression must rely on sounds alone. In addition, recent research in memory and cognitive psychology has shown that memories ‘exist in the body, while language has to generate them anew again and again, i.e. by means of narrating’ (Bendix 1996: 168). According to Scarry Artefacts and linguistic signs neutralise the distress of physical immediateness while at the same time constituting a medium that allows human beings to grant each other access to their inner feelings. We respect the objects of sentience, the

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worldly forms of self-extension, precisely because they lead one in to the fact of another’s sentience (Scarry 1985: 37).

In the case of the deity Osain, language is replaced by artefacts which represent a nexus for social consensus. On the first level, his disfigurement is a slavecommunity’s expression of powerlessness. As has been said, the mutilated, powerless slave Osain, is the most powerful deity in the Afro-Cuban pantheon. The artefacts create an interconnectedness between bodies objects, and verbal forms of expression, which have been destroyed by torture. It is this special nexus that constitutes the equivalence of words and things. The objects represent a community’s acceptance; by being socio-culturally accepted, they become part of the material archive of a culture. Conclusion Slavery is remembered not only in words and explicit narratives but also in images and non-discursive practical forms of memory that go beyond words. Pursuing Freud’s ideas on memory traces (Quindeau 2004), transgenerational transmission of emotional legacies (Moré 2007) and the possibility of unconscious transmission (Weigel 1999), has challenging consequences for anthropological research. The ‘memory approach’ allows for alternative interpretation of rituals and ritual performance. The focus on memory links the Caribbean deities and spirits not so much with invented ideas of the powerful agency of African based cosmologies, but rather with frames of socio-historical facts: punishment, torture, deportation. One may speculate about the socio-cultural transformations of historical experience into magical practice. In the ethnographical examples, I explore the cultural means and social institutions through which practices of memory are mediated, adding new complexity and new dimensions to ritual and the analysis of ritual performance. Each case study stands for its own practice of mediating memory: Isidra’s conversation with Kalunga recalls a family-based, and, as such genealogical memory. Teresa’s description of being mounted by the medium Mr Bárbaro, and the ritual interaction among initiated priests of Palo cult houses, allow us to perceive the powerful spirits of religious institutions as condensed memories of violence which have been integrated into cultural repertoires of collective memories. Finally, artefacts, as socio-culturally accepted images, become part of the cultural archive. These three different representations of memories of slavery show that memory is not a simple, unmediated reproduction of the past, but rather a selective re-creation that is dependent for its meaning on the contemporary social context, beliefs and aspirations of the individual or community. What these examples have in common is a mimesis of the one-legged slave. The unconscious memory trace of slavery in all its implications, the one-leggedness is the ‘encrypted’ code which links all these stories with slavery.

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The anthropological perspective on memories leads away from the presumption that these phenomena might replicate the post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) model, with its emphasis on the intrusive and embodied nature of memories of violence. They depart from the symptomatology of PTSD in significant ways. Most importantly, the example ‘working the prenda’ in addition to the sung dialogue between priest and prenda, show that the past does not recur in the present as an uninvited and debilitating irruption into the midst of a wholly incommensurate present, but rather that the past is wilfully evoked and made to engage, during the ceremony, with the contemporary political and social Cuban present. During the ceremony, the palo priests appropriate the past to address the present in an agentive and open-ended way that is aimed at the present and the future and that is very far removed from the pathological discourse of trauma (Lambek 2002: 19, 256–7, Argenti and Schramm 2009). The key to the distinction between socio cultural expressions of trauma (for example in rituals) and individual trauma approach is the element of mimesis. While we observe in palo ceremonies that one of the priests, the ‘dog of the prenda’ reenacts episodes of extreme violence in dance performances that become possession states, one palero objected to my interpretation of this as a recapitulation of the suffering of slavery: ‘We have long left all that behind. Now we are the masters and have fun.’ This criticism only apparently contradicts the images of slavery evoked during the ceremonies, which have been transformed into elements of independent ritual complexes. In other words, the assertion that ‘we have long since left all that behind’ that paleros ‘now have fun’, cannot be assumed to indicate either ignorance or silence. On the contrary, rituals bear witness in radically alternative ways. And, as Argenti-Pillen (2003) points out, individual and collective reactions to extreme violence, over both, the short and longer term, may not be universal, but rather socially or culturally informed or determined. The methodological challenge for the social anthropologist is to develop the analytical methods to bear testimony to these silent witnesses. The late Cuban anthropologist Joel James Figarola asserts that conventional histories have never been able to grasp the most fundamental aspects of the experience of slavery, and suggests a discursive silence from within the world of slavery: Neither in Cuba nor anywhere else have the social sciences ever been able to apprehend the true nature of the trauma of the slave ship, the rupture of emotional context and world of reference, the market of human beings, the slave barracks, the rope, the overseer’s whip or the flat side of the machete of the rural police. We have never succeeded in grasping the dramatic dimension of all these violations and dislocations, nor can we integrate into our own lived experience the study of this suffering (James Figarola 1998: 47).

It is anthropological writing about victimized communities that recently has begun to develop the analytical methods to show that these communities do find ways of bearing witness and to explore responses to the violence in their histories.

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References Alfonso, M. 2004. Tata Nganga. El mundo mágico-místico de la religión bantú. La Habana: Ediciones Prensa Latina. Argenti, N. 2006. ‘Remembering the Future: Slavery, Youth and Masking in the Cameroon Grassfields’. Social Anthropology, 14(1), 49–69. ________ 2007. The Intestines of the State: Youth, Violence and Belated Histories in the Cameroon Grassfields. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Argenti-Pillen, A. 2003. Masking Violence: How Women Contain Violence in Southern Sri Lanka. PA: Pennsylvania University Press. Argenti, N. and Rötschenthaler, U. 2006. ‘Introduction. Between Cameroon and Cuba: Youth, Slavetrades and Translocal Memoryscapes’. Social Anthropology, 14(1), 33–48. Argenti, N. and Schramm, K. (eds) 2009. Remembering Violence: Anthropological Perspectives on Intergenerational Transmission. London: Berghahn Assmann, J. 1992. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. München: Becksche Reihe. Bendix, R. 1996. ‘Zur Ethnographie des Erzählens im ausgehenden 20. Jahrhundert’, Zeitschrift für Volkskunde, 92, 169–84. Brandon, G. 1983. The Dead Sell Memories: An Anthropological Study of Santería in New York City. Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI University Microfilms International. Cabrera, L. [1954] 1983. El Monte. Igbo Finda. Ewe orisha, Vititi nfinda. Miami, Florida: Colección del Chicherekú. Cole, J. 2001. Forget Colonialism? Sacrifice and the Art of Memory in Madagascar. Berkeley: University of California Press. Connerton, P. 1996. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferrandiz, F. 2009. ‘Open Veins: Spirits of Violence and Grief in Venezuela’. Ethnography, 10(1): 39–61. Freud, S. 1910. Über Psychoanalyse. Fünf Vorlesungen, gehalten zur 20jährigen Gründungsfeier der Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, September 1909. Leipzig-Wien: Deuticke. ________ 1982. Fragen der Gesellschaft. Ursprünge der Religion. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag Studienausgabe GW Band IX. ________ [1895], 1991. Studien über Hysterie. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch. Fuentes Guerra, J. 2002. Nzila ya mpika (la ruta del esclavo). Una proximación lingüística. Cienfuegos/Cuba: Ediciones Mecenas. Halbwachs, M. [1925], 1985a. Das Gedächtnis und seine sozialen Beziehungen. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. James Figarola, J. 1998. ‘La Cuba profunda y la religiosidad Popular’. La Gaceta de Cuba, 5, 47.

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Kleinman, A. and Kleinman, J. 1994. ‘How Bodies Remember: Social Memory and Bodily Experience of Criticism, and Delegitimation Following China’s Cultural Revolution’, New Literary History 25, 708–23. Laman, K. 1964. Dictionaire Kikongo-Francais avec in Ètude Phonétique Décrivant Les Dialects les Importants de la Langue Dite Kikongo, Ridgewood, New Jersey: Gregg Press. Lambek, M. 2002. The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar. New York: Palgrave Macmillian. Langer, L. 1991. Holocaust Testimonies. The Ruins of Memory. New Heaven: Yale University Press. Moré, A. 2007. ‘Gefühlserbschaften und kulturelles Gedächtnis’. KulturanalysePsychoanalyse-Sozialanalyse, edited by E. Timm and E. Katschnig-Fasch. Wien: Österreichische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde, 21(110), 209–20. Ochoa, T.R. 2007. ‘Versions of the Dead: Kalunga, Cuban-Kongo Materiality, and Ethnography’. Cultural Anthropology, 22 (4), 473–500. Ortiz, F. 1958. ‘Las “malas palabras” en los sacriloquios afrocubanos’, Miscelánea Paul Rivet, México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico. ________ [1916] 1958. Los Negros Esclavos. La Havana: Editorial de Sciencias Sociales. Palmié, S. 2002. Wizards and Scientists. Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition. Durham and London: Duke University Press. ________ 2006. ‘A View from itia ororò kande’. Social Anthropology, 14(1), 99–118. Quindeau, I. 2004. Spur und Umschrift. Zur Bedeutung von Erinnerung in der Psychoanalyse. München: Wilhelm Funk Verlag. Scarry, E. 1992. Der Körper im Schmerz. Die Chiffren der Verletzlichkeit und der Erfindung der Kultur. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch. Schama, S. 2006. Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution. New York: Ecco Press. Shaw, R. 2002. Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone. Chicago. University of Chicago Press. Taylor, D. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire. Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Ulz, M. 2010. ‘The Guilty Ship: Memory and Cultural Denial in a Post Abolitionist Society’, Slavery in Art and Literature, edited by B. Haehnel and M. Ulz. Berlin: Frank & Timme Verlag, 125–46. Warburg, A. [1929], 2000. Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, edited by M. Warnke and C. Brink. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag. Weigel, S. 1999. ‘Télescopage im Unbewußten. Zum Verhältnis von Trauma, Geschichtsbegriff und Literatur’, Trauma. Zwischen Psychoanalyse und kulturellem Deutungsmuster, edited by E. Bronfen, B. Erdle and S. Weigel. Köln Weimar Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 51–77.

Chapter 11

‘All Filmmaking is a Form of Therapy’: Visualizing Memories of War Violence in the Animation Film Waltz with Bashir (2008) 

Michaela Schäuble

Introduction The blurb to a recently published German-language anthology of texts on animation film begins with the words: ‘In animation, anything that the human mind can imagine and render artistically is possible by definition. One thing, however, animation can never do is to make its viewers think they might be watching a documentary’ (Friedrich 2007, my translation). This is an assertion that categorically excludes any application of animation, cartoons or other forms of graphic invention from documentary film, and by extension also from nonfiction in general. It is one based on the premises of a truth claim that locates factuality and sobriety at the centre of documentary discourse. Non-realist imagery and narrativity in this perception are not considered an appropriate media for representing ‘authentic’ episodes or for documenting historic events. One of the progenitors of classical film theory and an advocate of the realist mode, Siegfried Kracauer, insisted on film’s ‘photographic nature’. According to Kracauer’s modernist approach, the realistic potential of film was grounded in the materiality of photographic technology – an approach that saw the valid reproduction of reality as resting on the efficacious deployment of photographic imagery (Hansen 1997: vii). Yet, on occasion, Kracauer also wrote of film’s capacity to mirror unspeakable horrors ‘and thus incorporate into [the spectator’s] memory the real face of things too dreadful to behold in reality’ (1960: 306). Kracauer acknowledged, early on, the potential of film not only to mirror, but to transcend reality through visual representation, particularly in the case of traumatic events  In an interview with journalist Michael Guillén, Ari Folman stated: ‘My belief is that any kind of filmmaking is therapy […]’ For a full version of the interview see http:// theeveningclass.blogspot.com/2009/01/waltz-with-bashir-evening-class.html   For Kracauer, the specific feature of the medium film – as opposed to the aesthetic possibilities of the ‘traditional arts’ – is its ability to ‘record and reveal physical reality,’ a material reality that he also refers to as ‘the visible world’, ‘nature’, ‘life’ or ‘camerareality’ (Kracauer 1997 [1960]: 28; see also Hansen 1997: ix).

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and/or repressed memories related to war violence. This appreciation that seems inconsistent with his otherwise photorealist credo anticipates the most recent development of documentary techniques that employ artificial imagery to grant access to the realms of memory and imagination. The semantic communication of traumatic events in diverse narrative forms – in literature, theatre, film or photography – involves reflection on contents and forms of historical representation and appraisal. It also requires transcription of individual processes of memory. In spite of the dialectic of unrepresentability and documentary aspiration, visual documents take on a particular significance in a non-fictional presentational setting of experiences of violence, a significance founded in the putatively mimetic quality of photographic reproduction. In comparable terms, eyewitness accounts in oral history are most often assumed to constitute incontestable firsthand testimonies providing unmediated access to past events with a capacity to reproduce or to unveil ‘the truth.’ Challenging this notion, however, the German novelist W.G. Sebald, writing about the Allied aerial raids over Dresden in World War Two, noted that the genre of eyewitness accounts tends to be structurally ‘blind’ and therefore needs ‘to be supplemented by what a synoptic and artificial view reveals’ (Sebald 2003: 25–6). In a different context, the anthropologist Veena Das has similarly and famously claimed that ‘some realities need to be fictionalized before they can be apprehended’ (Das 2003: 69). Representing Reality in Documentary Film: Truth Claim vs Naïve Delusion In the following, I will proceed from an assumption that the truth claim of a documentary is based on the conceit of the real. I will further elaborate on some consequences of the recognition that it is impossible to represent war violence, destruction, mass mortality and social suffering for the development of the insight that non-realistic modes of representation might be a more adequate medium for approaching or registering such horrors. Within the genre of documentary film, new artistic techniques and aesthetic modes of engagement with the realist paradigm continue to emerge today. They mostly focus on finding creative ways of handling essentially hard-to-depict topics, rather than solely focusing on these topics’ pure factual content. Within these innovative artistic representational forms, drawings and animation occupy an exceptional position, as they thematize narrative subjectivity and explicitly point towards the constructedness of the imagery they employ. As the digital animation filmmaker Sheila M. Sofian writes, ‘Animation is more transparent in its construction. The audience understands that the image is created entirely from the artist’s hand. Unlike live-action, there is no pretence to represent a true replica of events onscreen’ (Sofian 2005: 10). The use of drawing and animation in documentary film and other narrative accounts is therefore by no means a cinematic oxymoron, as assumed by the German volume on animation film mentioned at the outset. Moreover, animation challenges the claim to unmediated reality in documentary. In this capacity it ‘[h]as adapted

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techniques often (if unfairly) dismissed as trivial into an intense and revealing meditation on a historical catastrophe and its aftermath’ (Scott 2008). Cartoons and graphic novels such as Art Spiegelman’s famous Maus – A Survivor’s Tale (1973–1991), a series of talking-animal comic books based on the author’s parents’ experience as concentration-camp survivors, have indeed initiated a new genre of confronting history. Likewise, Joe Sacco’s graphic journalistic work Palestine (originally released in 1996) on life in the occupied territories during the first intifada, ‘juxtaposes the pop style of comics with human tragedy, making the brutality of war all the more jarring’ (Stein 2000). Sacco continues this fusion of comics and reportage in his three-part work on the war in Bosnia and its aftermath in Safe Area Goražde – The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992–95 (2000), in The Fixer – A Story from Sarajevo (2003), and in War’s End – Profiles from Bosnia 1995–96 (2005). Cartoonists such as Spiegelman and Sacco challenge the inadequacies of traditional historical representation and expose ‘perhaps its inability to represent the actual obscenities of the Holocaust [and genocidal warfare, MS] by using realism as a code’, as Jill Godmilow (1997: 93) puts it. It is precisely the inadequacy and consequent scepticism towards the realist mode that has necessitated an artistic and self-reflexive turn in media production inasmuch as art ultimately allows stories to be told beyond the limits of actual events. These are but a few recent examples of the genre of political graphic novels that attempt to deal with the dilemma posed by the impossibility of expressing the horrors of war, violence and mortality, and the simultaneous need to describe and document them. By finding new visual forms of narration these graphic artists also attempt to rescue viewers from their desensitization to omnipresent (and often politicized) images of war and poverty, and thus seek to overcome the notion or prejudice of ‘naivety’ that is often associated with animation. The positivist assumption that empirical or historical truths can be established through photographic evidence as opposed to hand-rendered images has largely been based on the observation that ‘our awareness of the subjective nature of imaging is in constant tension with the legacy of objectivity that clings to the cameras and machines that produce images today’ (Sturken and Carwright 2001: 17). This assumption, however, is now being challenged and the debate on the ‘truths’ that images can tell is revisited. Rather than simply aiming to reproduce or reenact the past, representational approximations to ‘holocaustal events’ – to use a term of Hayden White (1996) – require a narrative form that is aware of its own limits, contingencies and artificiality. Such artistic artificial devices and deliberate alienation effects – ways of looking and re-presenting that Sebald (2003) refers to as a ‘synoptic and artificial view’ – are conveyed by imaginative creation and are inevitably subject to an inexpungeable uncertainty. They have the potential to unveil and articulate inner states of mind that reach beyond a historicist realism based on categories such as evidence, proof and fact. Filmmaker Godmilow even goes as far as to state that ‘the claim to, and reliance on, the real strangle[s] ideas, originality, and truth in documentary filmmaking’ (1997: 89). I argue here that it is precisely the artistic

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and imaginative component in the discourse and styling of the animation genre that saves the historic narratives represented by them from definitive disconfirmation. Among recent artists who refuse to submit to the naïve realism of photography and documentary footage, and who question the rigorous distinction between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ images of memory, are Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman and illustrator David Polonsky. In 2008 their film Waltz with Bashir was announced as the first feature-length animated documentary in film history. Covering the 1982 Lebanon war, the film deals with Folman’s own story as a soldier and literally re-animates his long-lost memories of the war and his personal involvement in it. This fictionalized docu-autobiography triggers a new kind of cinematic storytelling that produces artistically and artificially estranged images and simultaneously scrutinizes the limits of representation. Folman seems less interested in depicting or evoking historical facts than in discovering the traces that the experience of (war) violence may leave on survivors’ minds and imaginations. In this sense, the film succeeds in registering the horrors of war and historical catastrophe in the form of traumatic, and thus hazy, distorted and fragmented memories. In this chapter I explore the terms and potentialities of using animation film as a means of tackling the horrors of war violence – as well as its cohesive strategies of repression and oblivion. Discussing the visualization technology and narrative perspective of Waltz with Bashir in relation to current theoretical debates on survivor narratives and filmed testimony, I want to analyze how or whether violence and the memory of violence can be expressed in the form of animated images. Folman himself never doubted his decision to animate his film: ‘There was no other way to do it, to show memories, hallucinations, dreams. War is like a really bad acid trip, and this was the only way to show that.’ (Freedland 2008) It is the very subjectivity and fallibility of these memories, in combination with the narrator’s partial amnesia and recurring hallucinations that render his accounts ‘authentic.’ A Detour through Fictive Constructs In 1982, 19-year old Ari Folman was an infantry soldier in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). In the summer of that year, the IDF invaded Lebanon with 60,000 troops and advanced through the southern part of the country toward Beirut. In August, Phalangist leader Bashir Gemayel had been elected president of Lebanon, while the country was occupied by Israel and Syria, and was torn by civil war. A month after his election, Bashir Gemayel was assassinated and Phalangist militiamen stormed two of Beirut’s Palestinian refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila, where   This accolade, however, is not entirely uncontested. Although not feature-length, a one-hour animated autobiography appeared in 1995 by Paul Fierlinger, entitled Drawn from Memory, with animations by the film-maker himself and a narrative voice-over of the artist’s life (Driessen 2007).

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they suspected the assassins to be hiding. Between 16 and 18 September 1982, the Lebanese Forces’ Christian militia massacred between 320 and 3,500 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, – an exact account of the death-toll is impossible – ostensibly to avenge the death of Bashir Gemayel. Known as the Sabra and Shatila Massacre, the retaliation caused an international outcry (al-Hout 2004). The IDF – at that time guards of the refugee camps – was held indirectly responsible on the grounds of not having taken appropriate preventative measures against the ‘foreseeable’ bloodshed. In his film Folman addresses the question of his own whereabouts during the massacre and whether he can be blamed for complicity in the killings. The quest for ‘truth,’ however, seems to demand ‘the detour through fictive constructs,’ as Michael Renov (1993: 6) points out. ‘The itinerary of a truth’s passage (with ‘truth’ understood as propositional and provisional) for the documentary is, thus, qualitatively akin to that of fiction’. (Renov 1993: 7) Waltz with Bashir indeed consists of a number of fictive, if not fictional, elements. They start with the film’s narrative composition as a search for memory traces, the consequent creation of suspense, the self-reflexive construction of the narrator/filmmaker’s character, the use of poetic language and of an affective soundtrack, and finally the agency of embedded narratives – all the way through to the use of animation. Dogs of Memory Waltz with Bashir is structured like a road movie and tells the story of the film’s director and main character, Ari Folman, and his journey in search of his lost memories from the first Lebanon war. In the opening scene, 26 ferocious, snarling dogs dash down a street of Tel Aviv, knocking everything over that gets in their way. The soundtrack, a combination of the panting, snorting and racing of the dogs and the overlaying accelerating electronic music, creates a highly threatening atmosphere. Finally, the dogs come to a halt and growl at the silhouette of a man in a dimly-lit window. This man, Boaz Rein-Buskila, is a friend of Folman from his early 1980s army service period, and the dogs turn out to feature in Boaz’ recurrent nightmares connected to the men’s early army experiences in Lebanon. Filmmaker and film-character Folman is alarmed to discover that he himself has seemingly no memories of this time. Upon meeting Boaz and hearing about his nightmares more than 20 years after their Lebanon-deployment – the film’s narrative startingpoint and motivation is the year 2006 – Folman’s reminiscence is triggered and he decides to reconstruct his personal involvement in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the massacre of the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut.

  The complicity of the IDF in the Sabra and Shatila massacre was established by the Kahan Commission, a report set up by the Israeli government in 1983 that found the Israeli forces indirectly responsible for the atrocities committed by Phalangists.

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Confronted with his own unreliable commemorative capacity Folman embarks on a journey to reconstruct the past and to recover his memory of what happened and what he had done. This journey is transformed into a filmic journey in the course of which he interviews a number of old comrades and fellow veterans. Folman consults a post-trauma expert, the famous Israeli journalist Ron BenYishai who reported from Lebanon at the time of the massacre, and relentlessly interrogates his own dreams, hallucinations and recurrent fragments of shadowy recollection. Information is fitting piece after piece into a puzzle that amounts to a feature-length narrative that tells the story of a young soldier’s participation in the invasion of Lebanon and his involvement in the massacre of Sabra and Shatila. It also conveys the outlook of a whole generation, and simultaneously explores the pitfalls of traumatic memory. Compared to other forms of illustrative media, the medium of (documentary) film approximates best to the elliptical character of memory. One of the pioneers of ethnographic documentary, David MacDougall, describes the affinity between the mechanisms of film technique and memory as follows: Films have a disconcerting resemblance to memory. They register images with lense and emulsion in a process better understood but often no less astonishing than the physiological process of eye and brain. Sometimes film seems even more astonishing than memory, an intimation of memory perfected. […] And yet memory offers film its ultimate problem: how to represent the mind’s landscape, whose images and sequential logic are always hidden from view (MacDougall 1998: 231).

The synchronous presence and absence of memories is mirrored in film’s reconstruction of images present on screen, but absent from reality. This dual capacity, in which images act as substitutes for the absent, constitutes the very illusion of the fusion of signifier and signified that a ‘synoptic and artificial view’ attempts to unmask. Although film cannot record memories but only its referents and correlates, many documentaries employ photographic or filmic archival material as proxies for memories themselves. Ari Folman, however, is not trapped by the visual component of memory. He refers rather to a retrospective filmic narrative beyond one-to-one presentability. In his film review The Responsible Dream Jayson Harsin refers to Waltz with Bashir as a ‘fictional docu-psycho-autobiography’ (2009: 1) – an assessment that states the film’s seeming blurring of boundaries between fiction and documentary and a conflation of the narrative voices of autobiography, suspenseful thriller and revisionist history. Upon closer examination, however, it becomes clear that the film neither relies on blurring genre divisions nor on questioning the distinction between the invented and the real. It rather develops its narrative strength by insisting on these differences and exploiting them. It is precisely because Waltz with Bashir acknowledges its own detour from the real – by questioning the adequacy of the representational systems of both memory and factual photographic/filmic

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documentation – that it is able to uncover a ‘more real truth’, namely of the uncertainties and different states of consciousness that constitute our lives. Imagery and Filmic Language The title Waltz with Bashir refers to a scene in which the commander of Folman’s infantry, Shmuel Frenkel, ‘dances an insane dance’ with a machine gun on a frontline street in Beirut amid heavy enemy fire. This scene takes place under huge posters of Bashir Gemayel, the assassinated leader of the Lebanese Phalangists. ‘The snipers were nothing to him, he was in a trance. He danced as if he meant to stay there forever…just to show them: a waltz among their bullets’, Folman recalls. At the same time, Bashir’s followers decided to avenge their leader’s death by preparing the massacres in Sabra and Shatila. Folman’s missing memories of the massacre itself find their visual substitute in a recurrent theme: over and over, his character has a nightmarish vision in which he and his comrades emerge naked from the sea, coming like zombies out of the water, machine guns in hand, walking towards the bombed-out skyline of Beirut that is illuminated by flares resembling a rain of shooting stars. It is not clear to the viewer if the ghostly scene is a distorted memory or a dream, but it generates a hallucinatory, surreal mood. The images are tinted in shades of sulphuric yellowish-orange and greyish-black and the whole scene is underlaid with an electronic soundtrack featuring a beautiful violin movement entitled ‘The Haunted Ocean’. This piece spanning five separate tracks is the film’s leitmotif. As Folman wanders the streets of a ghostly empty Beirut like a somnambulist, silent masses of terrified, distorted women and children pass him by, streaming towards a seemingly unknown destination beyond him. The yellowish-orange is a colour theme that, like the musical themes, keeps reappearing throughout the film and connects the erratic memory-snippets of the narrator. Dreams, visions, hallucinations, flashbacks and other chimerical states of mind feature prominently in this film. It is therefore not surprising that Folman’s search for his own long-lost memories of the war – and with it the beginning of the filmic narration itself – is triggered by a nightmare. By means of the effectively employed animation, the powerful opening scene ab ovo conveys a highly symbolic imagery in which the snarling dogs function as an emblematic epitome of the violent and haunting force of repressed memories. As one commentator writes: The pack of growling dogs – animal furies – is a striking embodiment of the violence of repressed memories, the fear and anger involved in confronting a shameful past. The rest of the film tries to answer the question posed by this opening nightmare – what memories is this former soldier, and by extension Israeli society, pursued by? What is he guilty of? (Lindsay 2009)

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Ursula Lindsay’s extension of the protagonist’s repressed memories to the whole of contemporary Israeli society is a brisk interpretative step that suggests a classic psychoanalytic Freudian view on the film. In the years since the Sabra and Shatila massacre, the crimes of those responsible have been systematically hushed up in Lebanon as well as in Israel. Thus, Folman’s repression of his own personal memories can be interpreted as a symptomatic handling of these events on a broader level (Harsin 2009). From this point of view, the film itself can be understood as a form of psychotherapy – a personal as well as national confrontation with repressed memories and with a violent past that has been denied. Folman seems to support this understanding of the therapeutic capacity of film when, in an early scene, confronted for the first time with Boaz’ nightmares, he answers his friend hesitantly with the words: ‘What do I know? I am a screenwriter.’ To this sidestepping, Boaz replies: ‘That’s a kind of psychotherapy, too, isn’t it?’ The statement is followed by Folman’s somewhat puzzled realization that he himself had neither concrete recollections nor disturbing flashbacks of his deployment in Lebanon, although Boaz reminds him of his indeterminate involvement in the massacres of Sabra and Shatila. Following this conversation, Folman recounts that ‘That night, for the first time in twenty years, I had a terrible flashback from the Lebanon War.’ His ensuing confrontation of his own repressed memories, the awkward query concerning his personal role in the massacres and his feelings of culpability materialize in the film Waltz with Bashir. In a later interview Folman refers to the making of the documentary as ‘four years of therapy’ (Allen 2008). Nevertheless, a reading of the film that suggests Folman’s personal grappling with the past to be transferable to his whole generation carries the risk of misinterpreting Waltz with Bashir as a kind of national therapy. A single documentary film cannot possibly deal with the negation of a whole country’s past or the hushed up responsibility in the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Such a film can, however, at least have the potential to generate a public discussion on Israeli commanders’ and soldiers’ involvement in bloodshed. And considering the broad reception of Waltz with Bashir and the discussions it has triggered on a national and international level, the film has stimulated or revived a hitherto neglected discourse on Israeli war crimes in Lebanon. Although I agree that Folman’s film opens up a range of important political questions on Israel’s role in the Lebanon wars and the ensuing concealment of this role, I am much more interested in the filmic language that Waltz with Bashir employs in trying to pursue these questions on a personal level. The use of animation to approach a non-fictional historical topic not just through factual accounts but through the emotional states of eyewitnesses, offers a unique chance to recover what is otherwise lost – especially when dealing with traumatic events that are prone to sensory overload, repression or oblivion. In an interview with the BBC, Israeli war journalist Ben-Yishai who also features in the film as a correspondent in Beirut at the time, said: ‘The animation is adding a layer, a psychological layer of his trauma. In a normal documentary film you couldn’t have documented all these

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things – like the dreams’ (Allen 2008). The depiction of haunting dreams, visions, hallucinations and flashbacks can indeed best be represented through animation, and provides an understanding of how surreal, deficient or fragmentary memories of violent traumatic events can be. For this reason Waltz with Bashir has recently even become part of a training programme of Natal – Israel’s Trauma Centre for the Victims of Terror and War, where therapists specialized in treating military trauma watch the film to better understand the processes by which former soldiers reconnect to their memories (Ben-Shimon 2009). The animation format opens up innovative approaches to putting history onto film where documentary goes beyond producing images that merely refer to or illustrate given historical facts. Animation instead creates an idea of how internal images are produced. It also creates an idea of the imprints that experiences of violence can leave on people’s minds and their imagination (Diederichsen 2008: 2). The symbolism of the imagery would most probably be regarded as overconscientious by a majority of viewers when applied in a feature film. In Folman’s fictionalized docu-autobiographical approach, however, visual and acoustic film language mostly appears as poetic excess of the narrator’s subconscious (Kilb 2008). As a stylistically hybrid form of narration that combines factual, symbolic and imaginary registers, and that works at levels of epistemology or fantasy and affect, the animation technique provides the very ‘artificial and synoptic view’ necessary to process the story and its unfolding horrors. By telling us about the gap between someone’s personal affective memories of war and war scenes as they are recorded and preserved in film archives, Waltz with Bashir challenges our way of thinking about filmic narrations of war and violence, and maybe even our understanding of history. Technical Realization of Waltz with Bashir Art director David Polonsky and six illustrators – all of whom integrated animated versions of themselves into the films as extras (Anderman 2009) – realized the entire computerized animation of Waltz with Bashir. The animation technique and visual effects produced resemble very much the rotoscope technique as, for instance, used in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001), in which animators trace over lifeaction movement frame by frame. Waltz with Bashir, however, is not rotoscoped, although the conversations that Folman carries out in the actual movie were shot in a film studio before the animation phase started (Anderman 2009). In an interview, Polonsky confirmed that ‘[i]t was not rotoscoping – that is, the illustrations for the characters are not achieved by tracing over Ari’s live-action shots. The film Ari shot was only a general point of reference for the illustrations and the animation. We tried to imitate face and body language as much as possible’ (Lanski 2008). Instead of rotoscoping, the film is actually rendered in Flash Animation, with some Photoshop for the backgrounds, and use of Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI). The effects of these techniques are at times highly realistic and at other

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times rather resemble the dream-like states. Corresponding to the state of mind portrayed, the images are inked in different colours: the nightmarish flashbacks of Boaz and Folman are presented in yellowish-orange and an almost colourless greyish-black. The scenes in which Folman remembers his first home leave and his recall to the front are tinted in bright red. An escape-fantasy of Folman’s friend Carmi who dreams of an oversized woman, half mermaid, half pin-up, who saves a sea-sick young soldier while his ship and its crew are blown-up behind him, is mainly painted in turquoise, whilst memories of Folman’s father of Word War II are simply held in black-and white. Through the animation, the actual three-dimensional effect of reality makes way for multiple layers of two-dimensional drawings. In his analysis of the film’s aesthetics, the German film critic Diedrich Diederichsen (2008: 2) notes that the landscape in the background, the tanks and buildings in the middle and the closeup of images in the foreground seem to derive from different visual media, such as impressionistic photography, calked photos and expressive wash drawings. The layers are part of a collage of different levels of space-time, and also reflect the protagonists’ various layers of memory and their diverse states of mind. Driessen (2007) claims that ‘in documentary cinema, animation sometimes offers extra information about reality’. It is this surplus that accentuates the air of surreality at stake in the stories told and that at the same time allows the viewer to get highly involved with a number of middle-aged Israeli war veterans’ recollections of their bygone military service. ‘We are willing to receive animated images without putting up any barriers, opening ourselves up for a powerful and potentially emotional experience. The simplicity of the images relieves some of the harshness of the topic being described,’ writes Sofian (2005: 7). I argue, however, that it is not Folman’s intention to ‘relieve’ the harshness of experiences and memories of war. On the contrary, the extremely personal level of his narration affects the viewer emotionally and the dramatizing effect is even further highlighted through the use of music. The soundtrack, composed by the minimalist electronic composer Max Richter, is a central narrative element in the film. The recurrent musical themes connect the various time and consciousness levels – such as narrative present, flashbacks, hallucinations, memories and dreams – and enhance the filmic ‘puzzle-piecing’ (Harsin 2009: 2). The film also features music by Navadey HaUkaf (‘Good Morning Lebanon’), a remake of the Cake song ‘I Bombed Korea’, retitled ‘Beirut’ by Ze’ev Tene, as well as the song ‘Incubator’ by The Clique. The soundtrack anticipates and underlines the change of atmosphere throughout the film, and when Folman remembers his return to civilian life after his first weeks of military action in Lebanon as a very young man, Johnny Rotten’s hit ‘This Is Not a Love Song’ not only captures (and reverses) the feeling of being alive in the 1980s but also points toward the absurdity and arbitrariness of warfare. Similarly, ‘OMD’s 1980s, darkly ironic electro-pop cult fave “Enola Gay” accompanies Israeli planes pouring bombs onto Lebanese combatants’ (Harsin 2009: 2) and thus highlights the surreal image-, dream- and soundscapes prevailing in Waltz

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with Bashir. The melancholic yet strangely euphoric lyrics of this song are about the pilot who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. It expresses an ambivalent New-Wave attitude of life beyond unequivocal moral positionings (Diederichsen 2008). The grotesque reality of war in which young men, almost children, are sent to war on so-called love boats to camouflage a military invasion, however, opposes and reverses any hedonistic posture. The soundtrack in combination with the dreamlike, hallucinatory images produces a rhythm of its own that lingers in the viewer’s memory long after having watched the film. Whilst the images of the film are animated, the voices of the characters are ‘real’ in the sense that they do not belong to actors but are actual recordings of interviews conducted by Folman. Hence the interviewees in Folman’s film speak with their own voices, except for two, whose comments have been dubbedin post-production, because they wanted to stay anonymous. Accordingly, the animation technique made it possible to create fictitious characters to protect the interviewees’ identity. From an ethical viewpoint, drawing and animation technique in documentary film facilitate a more sensitive approach to issues such as sex or crime in which the protagonists do not want to appear onscreen or need to conceal their identity. It thus enables a filmic treatment of sensitive themes and of particular social phenomena and subcultures otherwise impossible to document visually. Driessen writes that ‘[animated documentary] is often the form of choice when there’s no normal film footage available, or perhaps because documentary subjects want to remain anonymous. In the case of the latter, it’s usually about delicate subjects such as sex, crime or war’ (Driessen 2007). In the history of film, drawings and animation have traditionally been used to depict events of which no actual images exist. The representation of elements that can be hard to film with a camera carries a particular challenge for the medium of documentary film and at the same time entails many creative opportunities. Through a use of drawings and animation, particular attention can be paid to the dense richness of detail and nuances, such   Winsor McCay’s 12-minute film The Sinking of the Lusitania, released in 1918, is the first cinematic example that makes use of animation to portray a historic event of which no recorded film footage exists. Other prominent examples of animated documentaries that have attempted to transcend the limits of factual representation are the Swedish film Aldrig som först gången! (Never like the first time!) by Jonas Odell (2006) that consists of animated segments based on people’s descriptions of their first sexual experiences. In a comparable manner, the teen series Bloot (2006) by Mischa Kamp in which young people talk about sex is rotoscoped to conceal the identity of the protagonists. The Aardman Animations film Lip Synch: Going Equipped (1987) by Peter Lord is a ten-minute interview film with a criminal whose biographical account is re-enacted by a clay animation. Likewise, stories such as the narratives of people who claim to have been abducted by aliens, as assembled in the film Abductees (1995) by Paul Vester or Sheila Sofian’s film Survivors (1997) – an animated documentary about domestic violence based on interviews and expressionistic illustrations of the statements of victims and perpetrators alike – could not have been told without use of drawn animation.

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as a character’s gestures and facial expressions. Furthermore, states of mind such as fantasies, dreams, hallucinations and, above all, memories that are otherwise impossible to grasp and to be visually portrayed, can thereby be shown onscreen. The subtlety of the approach also facilitates access to testimonies that would otherwise have ‘remained hidden in the informants’ minds, beyond the reach of conventional interviewing’ (Afonso 2004: 76). Another major advantage of the use of graphics in documentary film is the relative independence of linear time and space continuum. The opportunity to frequently change temporal and spatial perspective without confusing the viewer, yields an even greater degree of narrative freedom. The animation technique enables Folman for example to nonchalantly move back and forth between the episodes that happened in 1982 and the time of the filmic narration. We see the same actors, including the filmmakercharacter Folman, only as younger men. ‘The freedom afforded by animation – a realm where the prosaic standards of versimilitude and the inconvenient laws of physics can be flouted at will – allows Mr. Folman to blend grimly literal images with surreal flights of fantasy, humor and horror,’ writes A.O. Scott (2008) in his New York Times review of the film. This artistic freedom allows for an enactment of history as drama that is alive with emotional intensity and imaginative verve. From Animation Back to Photographic Realism In the course of the film, the character Folman gradually regains his memory of the Lebanon invasion, except for the episode of his personal involvement in the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Eventually, however, it is revealed – to the viewer and to himself – that he apparently fired the flare guns that provided the light the Lebanese Phalangists needed to massacre the Palestinian refugees in the camps. This insight towards the end of the film is as subjective as the rest of his memories and ultimately not verifiable. In an earlier episode in the film Folman audibly contemplates the possibility that his memories and flashbacks might be invented or tricks of the brain. And later, as his quest proceeds, he states: ‘I can’t find anyone who was with me during the massacre. I can’t find a single genuine memory of anyone connected to me then. The only thing I have is this hallucination’. However, the filmic realization of this closure to the filmmaker’s search for ‘the truth’ is very interesting: it is staged as a reverse shot of the hallucination that recurrently haunted Folman throughout the film, in which he walks the streets of Beirut like a somnambulist and is confronted by hundreds of ashen-faced women and children. In the reverse shot at the end, the camera-perspective is placed behind screaming women and children who stream towards Folman in search of their sons, husbands, brothers and fathers. Whole families had been killed in the Palestinian refugee   At one point in the film Folman asks his friend Carmi if he could draw him playing with his son in the snow and Carmi answers ‘Sure, as long as you just draw and don’t film’.

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camp. Folman’s character is breathing heavily, and at this point the animation mode of the film is interrupted by 50 seconds of terrifying archival newsreel footage of the carnage. This sudden shift from animation to TV news footage is a radical and for the viewer highly disturbing and shocking filmic device. The film footage shows piles of dead bodies, blood, severed body parts, ruins and screaming women. One of the women screams ‘my son, my son’ in Arabic and turns toward the film camera, crying: ‘take photos! take photos!’ (Antoun 2009). Without subtitles and without further commentary, these words close the film, followed only by the credits. By inserting this validating authenticating footage, Folman returns to a rather conventional truth claim in documentary. As if having to ‘prove’ that the massacres really happened, he relies on photographic and filmic material to finally verify not only his personal hallucinations but also the historical authenticity of the massacre. However, in an almost ironic turn to the whole narrative, the cruelty and inhumanity of the newsreel footage generates arbitrariness to the extent that they could have been taken in any war zone – the images might hence be utterly shocking and disgusting, but contain no specific truth claim regarding the massacre of Sabra and Shatila. In the preceding filmic narrative Folman continually states the unreliability of photographs. In one scene, Folman’s best friend Ori tells him a story about photographs in which people are depicted through photo-montage in surroundings they have never actually frequented. ‘Eighty percent of the people saw themselves in the phony picture and remembered the event, even though it had never happened,’ Ori recounts and concludes that ‘memory is dynamic, it’s alive.’ In yet another scene, Folman shows a photo of himself as a young man to Ronny Dayag, a former commander who does not recognize him on the picture. Folman replies ‘I don’t recognize myself,’ indicating that photographs are not reliable factual sources but underlie individual interpretations and recognition. In the last scene of the film, however, he strangely revises this belief and cancels the fallibility of photographic or filmic truth by using documentary footage to substantiate the factuality of the massacre of Sabra and Shatila. This aesthetic device not only revives the discussions on the truth content of (visual) documentary evidence but also simplistically authorizes the presentability of events that seem unspeakable and even unthinkable. My negative assessment of the ‘realist turn’ in the last scene of Folman’s film dissents with most critics’ opinions on this point. Harsin (2009), for example, reads Folman’s switch from animation to newsreel footage quite differently in stating that Folman uses animation expressionistically to present a surreal ethos, the mind driven through dreamscapes in pursuit of an elusive memory. Thus, when that dream surrenders to the recovered memory, it no longer makes sense to continue the animation; and it makes more sense that the footage is not just in color, but graphic and disgusting for viewers (2009: 3).

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Harsin’s point notwithstanding, I am nonetheless of the opinion that in seeking a form of closure to his narrative and personal quest for recovered memory, Folman here ultimately annuls his otherwise successful questioning and deconstructing of the ways we think about authenticity and the reliability of eyewitness accounts and historic truth in documentary film. International Acclaim and Critical Reactions ‘at Home’: The Reception of Waltz with Bashir While almost immediately banned in Lebanon upon release, Waltz with Bashir attains increasing international attention and praise. After it premiered at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, the film has won and been nominated for many national and international awards. While receiving wide acclaim from international film critics – Waltz With Bashir was praised as ‘a memoir, a history lesson, a combat picture, a piece of investigative journalism and an altogether amazing film’ Scott (2008) – it has been viewed more critically and suspiciously in Israel and Palestine. Naira Antoun, for instance, remarked that non-Israeli victims have no voice of their own in Folman’s film and Palestinians are ‘never fully human’ (Antoun 2009). Drastically, she criticizes the ‘perverse moment’ of the film’s success in general, arguing that ‘an apparently “anti-war” Israeli film wins several Israeli and international film awards in a context not only of Israel’s ongoing brutal occupation, violations of international law, racism and denial of refugee rights, but also while atrocities are still being committed by Israeli forces in Gaza’ (Antoun 2009). Similarly, Haaretz reviewer Gideon Levy states that the film is ‘stylish, sophisticated, gifted and tasteful’ but nonetheless ‘propaganda’ for Israel in failing to portray the country’s role in the massacre sufficiently critically (Levy 2009). It is indeed possible that ‘the suffering and experiences of Palestinians are significant principally for the effects that they have on the Israeli soldiers, and never in their own right’ (Antoun 2009). Yet as Antoun argues, any strained attempt to demonstrate an undifferentiated handling of the current Israeli-Palestinian in Folman’s work is ultimately out of place. In my view, such criticism makes the mistake of equating an artistic narration based on an individual’s memory with history or historiography – a mistake that Folman himself avoids (except for maybe in the very last scene), as he never   Much to the pleasure of writer and director Ari Folman, the film was finally screened in Beirut in early 2009.   Waltz with Bashir was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, a BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language and an Annie Award for Best Animated Feature. It won six Israeli Ophir Awards and was awarded a Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the Directors Guild of America Award for Best Documentary, the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Picture, an NSCF Award for Best Film, a César Award for Best Foreign Film and an IDA Award for Feature Documentary.

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claims Waltz with Bashir to be an historical account. He narrates his version of the Sabra and Shatila massacre as a subjective search for traces of memory and the film develops its strengths exactly through its acknowledgement of the insecurities and omissions of personal testimonies. Political correctness and squabbles over claims to the greatest ‘victimhood’, as displayed by some of the film’s critics, are in my opinion beside the point here and miss the ground-breaking potential of this newly-established filmic genre. Conclusion The synoptic composition of introspection and retrospection enables a subjective and reproductive approximation towards a past that derives its meaning from the emotional engagement of its narrator. Its visual realization in documentary film corresponds to a dramatized re-visioning of history that Hayden White has poignantly labelled historiophoty, defined as ‘the representation of history and our thought about it in visual images and filmic discourse’ (White 1988: 1193). In Waltz with Bashir the connection between traumatic memory and historical truth is detected on the basis of the insight that the present constitutes the site of all representation and any knowledge about the past. Remembrance thus takes the shape of retrospection and is declared as a perspectivist inquiry into the texture of historical consciousness. The means of transportation for this narrated retrospection is a cinematically staged journey and the visualization of hitherto invisible or obliterated traces. ‘Journeys and the retracing of steps are especially favored by films of memory because revisiting places – like viewing photographs – produces emotions of both retrieval and loss,’ writes David MacDougall (1998: 234). Identifiable in this sense as a ‘film of memory,’ the emotional quest of Folman’s documentation constitutes as much a cause and impetus for the narration as an effect and consequence of the film itself. The balance between the real and the imagined is maintained as the authenticity of the narration is primarily produced by the non-realistic mise-en-scène of the retraced memories. Waltz with Bashir operates with a tropic procedure that allows for an experimental conjunction of fact and fiction, but never without collating biographic with historiographic details. In this sense the film fulfils Joshua Hirsch’s claim for the responsibility of cinematic discourse to historical consciousness: Documentary images must be submitted to a narrative discourse whose purpose is, if not to literally traumatize the spectator, at least to invoke a posttraumatic historical consciousness – a kind of textual compromise between the senselessness of the initial traumatic encounter and the sense-making apparatus of a fully integrated historical narrative […] (Hirsch 2004: 101).

In Waltz With Bashir this ‘textual compromise’, as posited by Hirsch, is staged as a search for traces of memory concerning a traumatic event, the Sabra and Shatila

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massacre, and the narrator’s possible repressed complicity in it. The successive uncovering and reconstruction of the memories of the Sabra and Shatila massacre hence define the subject, narrative structure and ultimately also the visual aesthetics of the film. The depicted search for traces employs cinematic devices common in fiction film, such as the use of music, editing and montage, abrupt temporal and spatial shifts, flashback episodes and re-enactments, separation of image and soundtrack, the contrasting of contradictory passages, the use of poetic narrative elements and other alienation effects, including the graphic alienation of events, memory fractions, dreams and hallucinations through animation. All of these are devices that Robert A. Rosenstone (1996: 206) designated as criteria for a ‘postmodern historical film.’ The quasi-fictional plot structure of this documentation is (post-)modernist inasmuch as the film is not chronologically structured, employs omissions, dreams, hallucinations and flash-backs, and juxtaposes the most diverse sources of information and images. In addition, the director-narrator occupies a highly subjective and self-reflexive narrative position. Nevertheless, Folman’s documentary antagonizes the radical tendency towards de-realization of a (post)modernist historical consciousness that would eventually result in a dismissal of the historicity of all events. In my understanding, the film neither tends toward historicizing relativism nor does it treat historiography merely as a form of fictionalization. It oscillates rather between ‘simultaneous insistence on an irrevocable truth and refusal of the realist mode’ (Walker 2003: 111). Between the poles of this (seeming) paradox, images and narratives of the horrors and traumas of war violence become an integral part of commemorated, imagined and lived history – no matter how deficient, fragmentary or alienated they may be. References Abductees (dir. Paul Vester, 1995). Afonso, A. 2004. ‘New Graphics for Old Stories: Representation of Local Memories through Drawings’, in Working Images: Visual Research and Representation in Ethnography, edited by S. Pink et. al. London: Routledge, 72–89. Aldrig som först gången!/Never like the First Time! (dir. Jonas Odell, 2006). al-Hout, B.N. 2004. Sabra And Shatila: September 1982. London: Pluto Press. Allen, L. 2008. Journalist Relives Nightmares of War [Online: BBC News]. Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7754301.stm [accessed: 20 October 2009]. Anderman, N. 2009. Drawing a War Dance. [Online: Haaretz Online]. Available at: http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasen/spages/1065599.html [accessed: 3 July 2009]. Antoun, N. 2009. Film Review: Waltz with Bashir. [Online: The Electronic Intifada]. Available at: http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10322.shtml [accessed: 3 July 2009].

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Atkins, M. 2008. Objects that Look: How is Ambiguity of Body and Self Maintained in the Public Sex Encounter? Unpublished Master thesis, Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, Manchester University. Ben-Simhon, K. 2009. Speak, Memory. [Online: Haaretz Online]. Available at: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1061907.html [accessed: 3 July 2009]. Bloot (dir. Mischa Kamp, 2006). Diederichsen, D. 2008. Kampf im Kopf. [Online: DIE ZEIT, 6 November 2008 Nr. 46 – 7 November 2008]. Available at: http://www.zeit.de/2008/46/Waltz-withBashir [accessed: 3 July 2009]. Drawn from Memory (dir. Paul Fierlinger, 1995). Driessen, K. 2007. More than just talking mice. [Online: IDFA Magazine]. Available at: http://www.idfa.nl/repository/documents/More%20than%20just %20talking%20mice%20(Paul%20Fierlinger).pdf [accessed: 3 July 2009]. Erll, A. and Wodianka, S. (eds) 2008. Film und kulturelle Erinnerung. Plurimediale Konstellationen. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. Flohr, M. 2009. Animation ist ehrlicher als Fernsehen. [Online: Spiegel Online]. Available at: http://www.spiegel.de/unispiegel/wunderbar/0,1518,608849,00. html [accessed: 3 July 2009]. Freedland, J. 2009. Lest we Forget. [Online: The Guardian, 25 October 2008]. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/oct/25/waltz-with-bashirari-folman [accessed: 20 October 2009] Friedrich, A. (ed.) 2007. Filmgenres Animationsfilm. Stuttgart: Reclam. Godmilow, J. and Shapiro, A.-L. 1997. ‘How Real is the Reality in Documentary Film?’, History and Theory, Vol. 36, No. 4, 80–101. Guillén, M. 2009. Waltz with Bashir – The Evening Class Interview With Ari Folman. Available at: http://theeveningclass.blogspot.com/2009/01/waltzwith-bashir-evening-class.html [accessed: 20 October 2009]. Hansen, M.B. 1997. ‘Introduction’, in Theory of Film. The Redemption of Physical Reality, by S. Kracauer [1960]. Princeton: Princeton University Press, vii– xlv. Harsin, J. 2009. The Responsible Dream. [Online: Bright Lights Film Journal]. Available at: http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/63/63waltz.html [accessed: 3 July 2009]. Hirsch, J. 2004. ‘Post-traumatic Cinema and the Holocaust Documentary’, in Trauma and Cinema. Cross-Cultural Explorations, edited by E. Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 93–121. Kilb, A. 2008. Ein Meilenstein des Kinos: ‘Waltz with Bashir’. [Online: Frankfurter Allgemeine. Faz.net]. Available at: http://www.faz.net/s/ Rub070B8E40FAFE40D1A7212BACEE9D55FD/Doc~ED6689252FF2846 4DAFEE9165B3E6A8F4~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html [accessed: 3 July 2009]. Klein, U. 2008. Shooting and Crying, but Differently. [Online: Haaretz Online]. Available at: http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasen/spages/984384.html [accessed: 3 July 2009].

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________ 2009. Why Hollywood Did the Tango with ‘Waltz with Bashir’. [Online: Haaretz Online]. Available at: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1054945. html [accessed: 3 July 2009]. Knoben, M. 2008. Höllenhunde, jede Nacht. [Online: Sueddeutsche Zeitung]. Available at: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/989/316869/text/ [accessed: 3 July 2009]. Kracauer, S. 1997 [1960]. Theory of Film. The Redemption of Physical Reality. With an introduction by M. Bratu Hansen. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kuhn, A. 1995. Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination. London: Verso. LaCapra, D. 1999. ‘Trauma, Absence, Loss’. Critical Inquiry 25, 696–727. ________ 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma, Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press. ________ 2004. History in Transit. Experience, Identity, Critical Theory, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Lanski, N. 2008. Art Therapy. [Online: Haaretz Online]. Available at: http://www. haaretz.co.il/hasen/spages/992286.html [accessed: 3 July 2009]. Levy, G. 2009. ‘Antiwar’ Film Waltz With Bashir Is Nothing But Charade. [Online: Haaretz Online]. Available at: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1065552. html [accessed: 20 January 2010]. Lindsay, U. 2009. Shooting Film and Crying. [Online: Middle East Report Online]. Available at: http://www.merip.org/mero/interventions/lindseyINT. html [accessed: 3 July 2009]. Lip Synch: Going Equipped (dir. Peter Lord, 1987). MacDougall, D. 1998. ‘Films of Memory’, in Transcultural Cinema, edited and with an introduction by L. Taylor. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 231–44. Oren, M.B. 2008. Waltzing With Beirut. What Israel and the Rest of the World Can Learn from 18 Years of War with Lebanon. [Online: The New Republic Online]. Available at: http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=320e4ee3e968-42d5-87b9-41cfcf93ff06 [accessed: 3 July 2009]. Orobitg, G.C. 2004. ‘Photography in the Field: Word and Image in Ethnographic Research’, in Working Images: Visual Research and Representation in Ethnography, edited by S. Pink, L. Kürti and A.I. Afonso. London: Routedge, 31–46. Peucker, B. 2008. The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Renov, M. 1993. ‘Introduction: The Truth about Non-fiction’, in Theorizing Documentary, edited by M. Renov. New York and London: Routledge, 1–11. ________ 2003. ‘Animation – Der imaginäre Signifikant des Dokumentarischen’, in Texte zur Kunst. 13. Jahrgang, (51), 37–45. Rosenstone, R.A. 1988. ‘History in Images/History in Words: Reflections on the Possibility of Really Putting History onto Film’. The American Historical Review, 93 (5), 1173–85.

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________ 1996. ‘The Future of the Past: Film and the Beginnings of Postmodern History’, in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Televison, and the Modern Event, edited by V. Sobchack. New York: Routledge, 201–18. ________ 1995. Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. ________ 1995. ‘The Historical Film as Real History’. Film-Historia, 5 (1), 5–23. ________ 2000. ‘A History of What Has Not Yet Happened’. Rethinking History, 4 (2), 183–93. Sacco, J. 2000. Safe Area Goražde – The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992–95. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books. ________ 2003. The Fixer – A Story from Sarajevo. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly Books. ________ 2005. War’s End – Profiles from Bosnia 1995–96. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly Books. Scott, A.O. 2008. Inside a Veteran’s Nightmare. [Online: New York Times Online]. Available at: http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/12/26/movies/26bash. html?8dpc [accessed: 3 July 2009]. Sebald, W.G. 2003. On the Natural History of Destruction. London: Penguin Books. Segev, T. 2009. Waltz with History. [Online: Haaretz Online]. Available at: http:// www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1060053.html [accessed: 3 July 2009]. Sobchack, V. 2006. ‘Final Fantasies: Computer Graphic Animation and the (Dis)illusion of Life’, in Animated ‘Worlds’, edited by S. Buchan. Eastleigh: John Libbey, 171–82. Sofian, S. 2005. ‘The Truth in Pictures’. FPS – Frames Per Second. The Magazine of Animation, I (1), 7–11. Spiegelman, A. 1996 [1973–1991] The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Pantheon Books. Stein, J. 2000. Books: What’s Going On? [Online: Time]. Available at: http:// www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,996786,00.html [accessed: 9 November 2009] Sturken, M. and Carwright, L. 2001. Practices of Looking: Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Survivors (dir. Sheila Sofian, 1997). The Sinking of the Lusitania (dir. Winsor McCay, 1918). Travers, P. 2009. Waltz with Bashir. [Online: Rolling Stone Online]. Available at: http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/movie/20532240/ [accessed: 3 July 2009]. Vahabzadeh, S. 2008. Vom Mainstream umarmt. Im Gespräch: Regisseur Ari Folman. [Online: Sueddeutsche Zeitung]. Available at: http://www. sueddeutsche.de/kultur/998/316878/text/ [accessed: 3 July 2009]. Waking Life (dir. Richard Linklater, 2001) Walden, K.L. 2008. Double Take: Rotoscoping and the Processing of Performance [Online: Refractory. A Journal of Entertainment Media]. Available at: http://

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blogs.arts.unimelb.edu.au/refractory/2008/12/24/double-take-rotoscopingand-the-processing-of-performance-–-kim-louise-walden/ [accessed: 3 July 2009]. Walker, J. 2003. ‘The Traumatic Paradox: Autobiographical Documentary and the Psychology of Memory’, in Contested Pasts. The Politics of Memory, edited by K. Hodgkin and S. Radstone. London & New York: Routledge, 104–19. Waltz with Bashir (dir. Ari Folman, 2008) Ward P. 2005. ‘“I was dreaming I was awake and then I woke up and found myself asleep”: Dreaming Spectacle and Reality in Waking Life’, in The Spectacle of the Real: From Hollywood to Reality TV and Beyond, edited by G. King. Fishponds: Intellect Books, 161–71. Wells, P. 1998. Understanding Animation. London: Routledge. White, H. 1988. ‘Historiography and Historiophoty’. The American Historical Review, 93 (5), 1193–9. ________ 1996. ‘The Modernist Event’, in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event, edited by V. Sobchak. London and New York: Routledge, 17–38.

Chapter 12

Blurred Boundaries in World War I: Strategies of Censorship, Denial and the Role of Witness Accounts Maria Six-Hohenbalken

Introduction In this chapter I will analyze personal accounts from soldiers who participated in World War I, also called the Great War. In anthropological studies on violence, the diverse forms of witnessing and the role of bystanders in conflicts have not been taken into consideration sufficiently. There are hardly any studies on how the third part in the triangular relationship between offender, victim and spectator of a violent act, that is, the witnesses, feel and act, or what kind of role they play. I will also examine the question of responsibility, of the possibility of intervening and of complicity. I will investigate how bystanders deal with, legitimize or distance themselves from their witnessing in the aftermath of a violent event. The topic of complicity in crimes against humanity is ‘under-analyzed, and is a research agenda that receives comparatively little attention in the literature on massive human rights violations’ (Stoett 2004: 32). In the context of the crimes committed in Germany during World War II, as well as in Rwanda, ScheperHughes (2002) poses the question of bystanders who ‘simply “allow” adverse and hostile policies to continue … without massive forms of civil disobedience, or … [who] can be recruited to participate in acts of genocidal violence’ (2002: 368–9). Neither the role of bystanders on a small scale, nor their role on a national or international level (governments, NGO) is well analyzed. I will thus try to outline the different roles bystanders or witnesses play. I will examine if and how their narrations and accounts are included in the official narratives of a conflict, and what kind of interest they have to convey their testimony in the aftermath. A clear typology of complicity is still outstanding, and therefore Stoett (2004) proposes, besides focusing on the intentionality, a categorization in which ‘acts of complicity with reference to the distance between the accomplice and the atrocity committed’ (2004: 33) can be analyzed in time and space. In addition to direct participation or support with technical equipment or financial help, we have to deal with ‘resonant complicity [which] rises from historical abuses [that are] distant in  I am grateful to Andre Gingrich, Nerina Weiss and Verena Loidl for their input.

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time but [are] still present in implication. Indifference and selective intervention refer to ethical claims that, even when physical proximity to the acts existed, actors neglected their obligation to intervene and stop them’ (Stoett 2004: 34). In this chapter I will combine Stoett’s categorizations and outlines of complicity with the approach of an Anthropology of Violence, and I would like to scrutinize different kinds of accounts during acts of violence and thereafter. My focus lies on the expressions and narrations of Austrian soldiers who participated in World War I in the eastern part of the Ottoman Empire. These Austrian soldiers were made witnesses of acts of mass murder and atrocities against parts of the Ottoman population, which the Ottoman Empire carried out in the shadow of the Great War’s battlefields. My starting material includes published as well as unpublished diaries, (secret) diplomatic reports and accounts of higher ranking militaries of the Austro-Hungarian Army who were employed in the battlefields in the eastern part of the Ottoman Empire. As allies of the Ottomans, the Empires of Germany and Austria-Hungary had a complex network of diplomats, military and commercial representatives, who were in a ‘position to report to their superiors as locus in quo observers on many aspects of the wartime treatment of Ottoman Armenians’ (Dadrian 2002: 60). Upsetting is the comprehension of the knowledge and detailed information the two war allies had. One of the salient features of the many reports sent to Berlin and Vienna from various diplomatic and military posts in wartime Turkey is their recurrent use of the theme the ‘Armenian question’. The fate of the Armenians in these reports is explained less in terms of wartime ‘Armenian provocations’ and Ottoman counteractions than in terms of solving the Armenian question. (Dadrian 2002: 60).

Dadrian focused on the ‘official reports’ of German representatives with their ministries. My monograph on this subject is, however, a thorough look on personal accounts and an analysis of (semi-)official documents. The successor states of the Central Powers as well as the Entente elaborated different rhetorics on the mass atrocities and acts of genocide during the Great War in the Ottoman Empire. Different political standpoints and national discourses have been applied since the inter-war period, and the diverse ascriptions of perpetrators, aggressors, bystanders, conspirators and victims that have since developed, are contradictory. Blurred are the boundaries of competence and responsibility insofar, as the allies of the Austro-Hungarian and German Empire had military units in the battle-fields. The Austro-Hungarian units were not involved directly in war acts against the Entente or against the Ottoman population. It was obvious that they not only supported the troops with military knowledge and technical equipment at the frontline, but indirectly the Ottoman army, so that crimes against humanity in the interior of the Empire against its own population could be conducted. Unlike the Austro-Hungarian military engagement, the German army showed more interest in being involved in the Ottoman military. The idea behind this was to have

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access to the natural resources and huge development projects after the war (Jung 1992: 128). Censorship and silencing in the aftermath was manifold. The allied nations Germany and Austria-Hungary practised strong censorship about the (war) crimes executed in the eastern parts of the Ottoman Empire, silencing critical voices amongst their own soldiers, diplomats and, as a consequence, from their critical citizens. Neighbouring ethnic groups, with whom the Armenians had had close contacts over centuries, also silenced the violent events. Only recently have the Armenian-Kurdish relations become a topic within Kurdish historiography, including the question of responsibility concerning (war) crimes undertaken by hired Kurdish tribal units against the Armenian population. Until today violent actions in the aftermath of the war from the Ottoman military or special units against hired Kurdish tribes have therefore also not been examined sufficiently. The role of armed Armenian groups, which were established within the Armenian national movement and mostly armed by foreign powers (e.g. Russia), is either overemphasized or not discussed at all. These Armenian units tried to defend their national ideas and their co-ethnics by leading a guerrilla warfare (Jung 1992: 140– 41). The official narrations in Turkey on these crimes against humanity range from describing a common war situation that caused a great number of deaths, through diseases and supplies of bad food, to civil war. The activities of the comparably small number of armed Armenian units can, however, not be compared to the terror and planned mass destruction executed by the Ottoman military. My focus here is on personal memories and accounts of soldiers of the AustroHungarian army who witnessed the atrocities and acts of genocide. I will show how different the personal narratives of the witnesses/bystanders are concerning their involvement. How do these personal accounts help us to understand the meta-narratives? How did the soldiers of the Central Powers narrate and judge crimes against humanity? How did they cope with these odious crimes? How did they succeed in relating the witnessed atrocities despite censorship? Can an anthropological glance help to understand the different layers in the narrations of these soldiers? I will analyze if, and how these soldiers kept silent or denied the facts, and if they had shown responsibility although their government was eager to conceal the genocidal acts that were executed by their ally. How did these soldiers regard themselves in this war; as spectators, witnesses or accomplices? I also would like to discuss how official dictions of narrating war atrocities had been dealt with over a period of time. Because of censorship, published literature during and after World War I was in general either heroic or literary, mostly fictional. For those who pursued a more critical standpoint, the literary genre was the only way to deal with war crimes, post war situations and collective traumas (Winter 1995: 178–203). In the last   For example the Austrian Franz Werfel wrote the novel Die vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh (The Forty Days of Musa Dagh) which is a fictionalized account on the atrocities against Armenians, published in 1933.

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two decades, historians have paid special attention to the way of narrating and writing about the World War I, focusing on propaganda and censorship, post-war literature and the long term effects within civil society (see Kramer 2008, Mosse 1990, Winter 1995). Personal accounts that were written by soldiers in the battle fields have become a focus of today’s historians (Kramer 2008, Mosse 1990, Schofield 2009). The Imperial War Museum London, for example, collected many soldiers’ personal accounts for the public, despite critical standpoints of historians concerning the reliability of these materials. I agree with Schofield that the value of personal accounts are not in their ‘accuracy and reliability … [but] as artefacts from which the social commemoration of warfare, and an understanding of its condition, character, and its personalities, can be pursued.’ (Schofield 2009: 217). The critical reflections that Klein (2000) and Berliner (2005) outlined are furthermore helpful when discussing these types of narrating and memory. In reference to Halbwachs (1950) Klein states that memory is a social phenomenon (2000: 128), that is based on two moments: on repetition and recollection. Repetition involves the ‘presence of the past’, while recollection involves present representations of the past (Hutton 1993 in Klein 2000:132f). European Interests Due to their natural resources, minerals, petrol and agricultural products and the exploitation for the world market, Eastern Anatolia and Mesopotamia laid within the special interest of foreign powers (such as Germany, Great Britain, France and Austria-Hungary) from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. At the end of the nineteenth century, the ideas of nationalism also spread to the different ethnic groups within the weak Ottoman Empire. South-East and East Anatolia was inhabited by several ethnic and religious groups. Within the several Christian denominations – the Nestorians, the Syrian and Greek Orthodox Christians or the Chaldeans – the Armenians were the demographically largest Christian groups and at the same time the politically most active ethno-religious community. The Kurds, belonging to diverse orthodox and heterodox denominations and marked by their specific tribal structures, established a national movement in the late nineteenth century. Together with the Arab national movements in Mesopotamia they had contributed to the destabilization of the political situation (Deringil 2003). This instability attracted foreign powers who supplied weapons, (secretly) sent military officers and established (Catholic and Protestant) missions in order to attract different ethnic and religious groups as bridgeheads to gain influence in the Ottoman Empire (Joseph 1983). A report of the Austro-Hungarian embassy in Constantinople showed that already in 1909/1910 a military confederacy between the Habsburg and the Ottoman Empire was being discussed. The Austro-Hungarian Empire showed an interest in having a strong ally for their policies in south-east Europe, but due to the unstable political situation there (Jung 1992: 18), the Austro-Hungarian Empire reduced a

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cooperation to dispatch Ottoman officers in the Habsburg army (Pomiankowski 1909/10). Despite eager intentions of the Entente for a confederation, the Ottoman Empire decided to federate with the Central Powers (Buchmann 1999: 261). A plan to establish a common economic and trade region from the North Sea to the Persian Gulf, the so-called Berlin-Bagdad plan (Länderbericht Türkei 1915: 339) prompted the Young Turk Triumvirat already in August 1914 to sign a secret agreement with Germany. This gave the German military mission significant influence on the Ottoman Army (Buchmann 1999: 261). While the Central Powers were interested in a common trade market, the Entente sealed the Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916 in order to ensure their influence after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. During World War I the main sites of war in the Ottoman Empire were against Russian troops in the north and British troops in the south. The Austrian military units remained under the leadership of their officers and supported their ally with weapons and know-how (Jung 1992: 80), but they became partly dependent on German units when the establishment of a joint command was prevailed in 1916 in Berlin (Buchmann 1999: 262). About 2,500 Austro-Hungarian soldiers were inserted at three of four frontlines of the Ottoman Empire. These soldiers were thus responsible for transportation, for logistic and technical support, but were not engaged in front line battles (Jung 1992: 133). Crimes against Humanity It is estimated that between 100,000 and 300,000 Armenians had already been killed in the years from 1894 to 1896. This was during the time of Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1876–1909) and before the acts of genocide against the Christian population during World War I. At the end of the nineteenth century many of these assassinations were executed in public, in the city centers, while in Eastern Anatolia special units, herein also the Kurdish tribal units Hamidiye, were involved (Levene 2005: 304). These massacres were ‘episodic and affected selected communities’ (Adalian 2009: 74). They were repeated in 1909 in the province of Adana, where between 10,000 up to 30,000 were killed (Adalian 2009: 70).   The Young Turk Triumvirat (Enver Pasha, Talaat Pasha and Cemal Pasha) was based on the Young Turk movement. This was in the beginning a reform movement of various groups to restrain the power of the Sultan, modernize the country and reinstall the constitution. In the beginning the Young Turk movement was a revolutionary movement with liberal and secular ideas that developed a strong Turkish nationalism and installed 1913 a non-constraining dictatorship under Enver Bey.   Genocide is a term that was introduced by the Polish lawyer Raphaël Lemkin to describe the atrocities of Nazi Germany. Lemkin tried to establish judicial principles to prosecute those responsible for genocide. The term was also applied during the Nuremberg Trials, where the main charges were marked by ‘crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity’ (Hinton 2002: 2).

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From then on a ‘policy of priming’ (Hinton 2002: 14) can be determined. This means that conflict situations were set alight by defined actions or ‘planned incidents’, ‘[w]hile each genocide has a distinct etiology, similarities exist in the process of “genocidal priming”, which is characterized by at least three key primes: deep structural divisions and a identifiable victim group, a legitimating ideology of hate, and a breakdown in moral restraints’ (Hinton 2002: 13). Under the authority of the Young Turks, a planned and strategic procedure was implemented with the aim to assassinate the Armenian population and Christian denominations that were accused of collaborating with foreign powers. This was done through deportation, execution and forced starvation. ‘Beginning in April 1915 and continuing through the summer and fall, the vast majority of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were deported’ (Adalian 2009: 57) and killed in remote areas. These acts were not executed by only a small number of special forces in secrecy, but organized along a whole chain of commands which ‘joined every link in the administration of the Ottoman state’ (Adalian 2009: 65). Starvation was the last measure in this ‘three-part plan … [to] solve the Armenian question’ (Adalian 2009: 59). It is estimated that at least one million, but more probably close to one and a half million Armenians were assassinated (Totten, Bartrop and Jacobs 2008: 19). There were no noticeable resistance movements in the eastern part of the Ottoman Empire against these crimes. As silence was demanded from neighbouring ethnic groups, their complicity and sometimes their cooperation were purchased (Adalian 2009: 66). However: ‘… individual Turks, Kurds, and Arabs saved many lives’ (Hovannisian 1992 in Adalian 2009: 72). A few brave governors refused to deport their population (Dadrian 1986 in Adalian 2009: 65), and foreign diplomats tried to assert their influence in order to prevent mass atrocities against Christian groups (Totten, Batrop, Jacobs 2008: 22) and the ‘heretical religious group’ of the Kurdish Yezidis (Levene 2005: 322). Already in 1918 the then American ambassador in Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau, blamed Germany for its ideological and military support. He accused Germany of instigating the idea of mass deportation. Several times Morgenthau met the German ambassador in Constantinople Wangenheim and tried to convince him to use his influence to end the persecutions. Reconstructing a conversation with Wangenheim, Morgenthau argued, ‘I do not claim that Germany is responsible for these massacres in the sense that [Germany] instigated them. But [Germany] is responsible in the sense that it had the power to stop them and did not use it’ (Morgenthau, 1918: 27). Even in the pre-war period the German military rendered assistance for reforms in the Ottoman army. At the beginning of World War I about 70 German officers served in the Ottoman army (Will 2006: 142) where they took over important key positions in the military administration and in the structure of command. It must also be mentioned that from his frequent contacts with German diplomats, military  Pages refer to the chapters in the online edition.

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officials and journalists Morgenthau was familiar with the disagreements between the various German officials about the politics of their country. In the (secret) accounts and correspondence of Austria-Hungarian and German ambassadors and militaries, we find detailed description of the political situation. The Young Turk government employed strategies to conceal these policies. Not to pressure the Young Turk government, the allied Central Powers practiced preceding obedience and they finally adopted the ‘official version’ that ‘Armenians were disloyal subjects and spies collaborating with the Entente’ (Buchmann 1999: 265). This allowed the German and Austria-Hungarian allies not to impose any political consequences against the Ottoman Empire. It has to be mentioned, though, that in some diplomatic reports, invocations to their governments were conveyed to take political measures to intervene in these crimes against humanity, and also direct interventions of diplomats and militaries were to protect the life of persecuted persons. Military officials and diplomats witnessed mass murder, and reported on the horrible socio-economic situation, famine, diseases and mass desertion within the Ottoman army, (Buchmann 1999: 262–5). They faced, however, censorship, gagging order and the approval of professional secrecy. With these means the allied Empires tried to refrain from their responsibility. Also European and American (mostly Protestant) missionaries witnessing genocidal acts, faced censorship. The German theologian and orientalist Johannes Lepsius, who was engaged in relief organizations for the Armenians, published the documentation Bericht über die Lage des armenischen Volkes in der Türkei (Report on the situation of the Armenian people in Turkey) (1916), which was forbidden by the German censorship immediately after it was published (Gust and Gust n.d.). These documentations together with Henry Morgenthau’s reports to the US government and press are still today outstanding documents and one of the sources for the recognition of the genocide (Goltz 1994). During the last decade it had been scholars like Adalian (2009 [1997]) and Dadrian (2002) who have studied the question of the involvement and conspiracy of the Central Powers. Ultimate responsibility for the Armenian genocide, however, rests with those who considered and took the decision to deport and massacre the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. It also rest with those who implemented the policy of the central government and finally, with those who personally carried out the acts that extinguished Armenian society in its birthplace (Adalian 2009: 57).

Totten, Bartrop and Jacobs have listed the different forms of denial in the following decades in the successor state Turkey. After the first trials in the post-war period against high ranking militaries in Turkey, a policy of impunity as well as the development of official narratives was applied. This ranged from complete denial to the argument that it was certainly not the state authorities that could be held

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responsible, since people died from disease and starvation. It was also argued that it was a civil war in which Armenian guerrilla groups had killed Turkish civilians (Totten, Bartrop and Jacobs 2008: 21). Due to manifold developments such as the denial of the Armenian genocide within the nationalist policies in Turkey, the silencing of the atrocities in the USSR and the lack of interest in European states, it was several decades until a new examination in Armenia and in the international community of these atrocities became possible. Detailed documentation started from the 1960ies onwards, when several state archives opened their collection of diplomatic correspondence (Adalian 2009: 75). Yet, not before 1965 was a commemoration of the mass atrocities was possible in the Soviet regime (Tölölyan 2001). After the Cold War scholarly research contributed to a discourse as did the post-genocide generation. Slowly, the role of the allied nations has (once again) been put into question. Witness Accounts – Records with Limited Dissemination Because of the British troops taking Baghdad, the Austrian embassy was moved from Bagdad to Mosul in 1917 (Konsulat Bagdad 1917, 1918). Two Austrian soldiers with special tasks, Alexander Rippel and Edmund Jaroljmek were assigned in 1917 to Mosul. Their accounts give personal insight in the political developments and the humanitarian situation. At the same time, Victor Pietschmann, an Austrian scholar, was stationed further north as a military official, training a mountain platoon near the town of Erzurum (1927: 191). Since the authors were not engaged directly in combat operations, these three accounts cannot be indexed as soldiers’ diaries (Kriegstagebücher), – like a genre which came to be of special interest for historians (Horne and Kramer 1994). The authors were members of the allied nations and were bystanders and witnesses. They did not report on combat, but because of their specific tasks and position reported rather on the socio-political and humanitarian situation and give an insight into the mentality behind. What Horne and Kramer noticed for the war in western Europe – the ‘rapid blurring of the German army’s own distinction between “true” and “treacherous” forms of warfare, and thus between soldiers and civilians’ (1994: 25) can possibly also hold true in the Ottoman Empire. The Secret Report of Alexander Rippel Alexander Rippel, born in Vienna in 1884, started as a volunteer in the AustroHungarian army. With the beginning of World War I he was mobilized as a Lieutenant Colonel (Reserve) in Constantinople, and from 1916 on he was assigned to the resource supply unit, where he was responsible for the organization of the resources transport in the interior of the Ottoman Empire, in Anatolia, Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia. The poor transportation infrastructure and embargoes on several products had been a major obstacle for the confederate troops. Rippel

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therefore conducted several expeditions in remote ‘dangerous’ areas to provide resources (Orientabteilung 1918, 32479, Konsulat Bagdad 1917). Thus he organized an expedition into the central Kurdish regions to forge links for the acquisition of wool, tobacco and cotton. He had to determine the possibilities of economic relations with the Kurdish tribal leaders and investigate further resources and transport facilities. In his secret report to the military and the Austrian Embassy he outlined the economic resources and the political situation (Orientabteilung 1918: 8863; 9055). The route of the expedition started from Mosul and lead into the high Kurdish mountain ranges. The first part of the secret report is a detailed description of the socio-economic and security conditions along this old caravan route between Mosul and Bitlis. In his documentation of 1917, Rippel addresses the war crimes against the Christian population in the years before, but without reflecting on the perpetrators directly. He mentions the deserted and destroyed Christian villages, abandoned districts and desolated cities, depopulated valleys and the many destroyed villages. The formerly well-known city of Cezire was had been abandoned. In Zakho, Mardin, Diarbekr at least the Armenians were brought off apart; north of this line not only these, but all other Christians were massacred. Consequently, Turks and Kurds can hardly progress, as they relied on the work of the Christians. Now the Christians are gone, their industries are extinguished, the houses and fields, which the Turks and Kurds took possession of, are ruinous and barren, as tendency and preservations is missing. Misery is rising. … Those reasonable and forward looking persons among them complain already about the senseless massacres, which have served only some to enrich themselves, but hit the masses in their lifeblood. To render the manifolded cruelties, especially those of the Kurds, I heard about, is not within the scope of this information (Rippel 1917: 48–9; my translation).

Rippel mentioned in addition to the Kurdish population a small number of Turkish military officials, but several deserted Turkish and Kurdish soldiers in the inaccessible mountain ranges. His documentation gives insights into the post-war situation a short time after the deportation and crimes against humanities occurred. In military documents it is noted that he himself was never involved directly in acts of war (Orientabteilung 1918: 32479).

 In general, these genres of military reports are not an exception. For example. the Kurdish historiography relies on the accounts of British, French and Russian militaries to write the history of the national movement in the following decades, a (colonial and postcolonial) history they codetermined themselves. See for example Soane (1912), Edmonds (1957), Nikitine (1956).

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Edmund H. Jaroljmeks Engagement in Mosul During the outbreak of the Great War Edmund Jaroljmek was on an expedition in Persia. He intended to return to Austria, but due to his knowledge of the language and the country he was appointed to several missions. From 1916 onwards he participated in the German-Persian military mission (Jaroljmek 1916), where he was, like Rippel, responsible for the organization of the resources transport supply in Transjordan and also for reporting (Jung 1992: 135). In 1915 and 1917 he stayed with the German consul in Mosul and was chief of the area Mosul for the German-Persian military mission of the VIth army and for several months the German military governor in Mosul (Jaroljmek 1942: 4). In diplomatic correspondence the political and poor socio-economic situation in and around Mosul is reported. In October 1916 it was communicated that the commander of the VIth Army, Djemal Pasha claimed that foreign consuls should not interfere in internal affairs (Konsulat Aleppo 1916: 369), and it was noted that the American consul was not eager to follow these instructions. The military confiscated foodstuff, so the population had only one third of the necessary food supplies. Several reports from the Austro-Hungarian consulates provide insights into the misery and crisis the civilians had to face (Konsulat Bagdad 1918). From these sources we know that in June 1917 about ten people were dying of starvation every day (Konsulat Bagdad 1917). The inhabitants sought refuge in the mountains and surrounding cities in order to escape the looting by the military. Distressing is the record of the Deputy Consul Pongracy to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of February 1918 (Konsulat Bagdad 1918). Due to the winter rain, the food as well as the military supply had been disrupted. Therefore the military administration imposed an additional contribution of 340 tons of grain and as these were not delivered on time, the contribution was increased. The consul reported also on the misery of the Kurdish and Armenian refugees, of whom about 30 to 35 daily were dying of starvation in the streets. The number of those dying at home because of maltreatment or diseases is not included in this number. German physicians estimated that it could easily have been 60 to 70 persons that died each day. Those inhabitants, who were primarily suffering the misery, were the detained Armenians and those Kurds from the Persian borderland who sought refuge from the Russians. The local population longed for the deliverance from the Turkish military and administration. Since the trade has totally collapsed, a relief from the famine could be neither expected through grain supply from Diyarbakir nor through a price-reduction, but only through the upcoming harvest, the consul analyzed (Konsulat Bagdad 1918). In one important Austrian journal of that time, the Österreichische Monatsschrift für den Orient, (the Austrian Monthly on the Orient), we find a long article on the economic importance of the District of Mosul, from where the famine and socio-economic condition was, due to censorship, reported in the following way:

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The year 1917 started with a shortage of foodstuff, … after the defeat of Baghdad the war was to be felt more harshly. … The domestic production was needed to feed the army, which at the same time occupied most of the means of transport. Imported goods could thus be supplied only in small amounts, so the food supply was on the decline. As a consequence of this prices were slowly rising (Das Vilajet Mossul 1918: 245; my translation).

Compared to these official and unoffical reports, we find very critical standpoints towards the policy of the allied nations in Jaroljmeks diary, where he documents the situation of the refugees of that region. Thousands of Armenians and Christians, who had been deported, had camped along the main road. Their misery defied all description. Generally, what one can hear about the slaughtering is horrible. About three thousand Christians were assassinated and tortured to death. Other hundreds of thousands were simply displaced, “deported” is the technical term. These are mainly women and children, the people have nothing, nothing at all … Here in Mosul are about ten thousands, but still others are arriving … The misery of these people is unutterable … And those unprecedented cruelties are obviously staged by the government – our illustrious confederate – and those cruelties are still lasting (Jaroljmek 1916: 5–7; my translation).

Jaroljmek noted that due to the presence and commitment of the German consul in Mosul, persecutions of Christians in the town could be avoided. Nevertheless he was regularly informed about other cruelties in the region. In Ras el Ain there are ten thousand Armenian refugees, in Nisibin many more. Typhus and typhoid fever are raging. In Ras el Ain there are between 30 and 50 persons dying each day. The misery cannot be described. There is hardly any food (Jaroljmek 1916: 9; my translation).

One of his biggest concerns in supporting the refugees and the local population was the limited medical supplies and the outbreaks of typhus, typhoid fever and cholera. The Turkish military did not take his concerns seriously but constrained him in his attempt to take measures against the squalidness of the town. Finally, his attempt to provide medical treatment to civilians and refugees was supported by a German staff physician, whom Jaroljmek assisted during operations in the mobile army surgery hospital. He often inspected the refugee camps along the Tigris and was worried about the fate of those who were on the way to take refuge in Mosul. With Jaroljmek’s diaries, starting in January 1916, and the diplomatic accounts from Mosul from March 1917 onwards, we have a detailed description of the horrendous situation. It is evident that Edmund Jaroljmek and the diplomats tried to improve the situation but were hampered by Ottoman military

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officials. One of the Ottoman civil servants, Vali Hajdar Bey, resigned and filed his demission – it was not accepted (Konsulat Bagdad 1917). Edmund Jaroljmek’s diaries have never been published. He had spent more than 15 years in the Near East in various missions. After World War I Jaroljmek was responsible for the establishment of aviation in Persia (Jaroljmek 1942). He published his experiences in the Near East in the form of an ambitious travelogue ([1942], extended reprint in 1951), which displays mostly without prejudice his insights into the country’s rapid socio-economic transformation. The focus in these publications is mainly on Persia, but he also reports on the difficult situation concerning diseases in Mosul, and he mentions the situation for the soldiers during World War I in one sentence (1942). This sentence was, however, deleted in the reprint of 1951. In neither of the two editions does he report the horrible situation of the Armenian and Kurdish refugees in the camps around Mosul. Things in Common The sources discussed above, that is, the secret report of Alexander Rippel and the diaries of Edmund Jaroljmek, give an insight into how the genocidal acts affected the Eastern Ottoman Empire. These crimes against humanity resulted in the breakdown of the whole region’s economic and cultural life. From diplomatic reports, e.g. from Trabzon in 1917 and the beginning of 1918, and from Jwaideh (2006: 125), we can gather that the political and socioeconomic situation was likewise disastrous in other Eastern Anatolian regions and in Mesopotamia (Konsulat Trabzon 1917). Until today sources remain scarce and hardly outline the socioeconomic conditions in the years during and after World War I. An exception is Jwaideh (2006) who scrutinized famine and diseases in nearby regions. It is astonishing that until the second half of the twentieth century, sources like these were not discussed in wider political circles or within the scientific community. Due to the persistent denial of these atrocities over decades it was hardly possible to integrate similar documents into the official narratives of the allied nations. Silence and denial was thus practised at the national levels as well as within the region. Until today scholars face silencing as well as social and cultural amnesia in the Kurdish and Turkish population, a fact which remains difficult to deal with (Wießner 1997). Witness Accounts – Reports for Public Dissemination Victor Pietschmann’s Hidden Agenda The third account is that of Victor Pietschmann, zoologist and curator at the Museum of Natural History in Vienna, who after participating in the Mesopotamia Expedition of 1909/10 organized an expedition to Armenia in 1914. The members of the scholar society sponsoring the expedition saw Pietschmann’s endeavour

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also as a ‘political success’ (Naturwissenschaftlicher Orientverein 1915: 4). Being caught by the outbreak of war, during his stay in the Kurdish mountains he had to change the expedition route and return to Austria. A few months later he was back in the region as an instructor for the establishment of a mountain platoon (Jung 1992). At the northern front line around Erzurum he instructed Turkish and Kurdish soldiers in skiing (Pietschmann 1927, Jung 1992). Victor Pietschmann’s diary and his accounts of his experiences between 1914 and 1915 have been published under quite special circumstances. It seems that the purpose of his writing was to fascinate his readers and to convince them ideologically – decades after he had stayed in the region. His diary of the Armenian Expedition was published many years later in 1940. In 1927 he had nevertheless tried to convey his testimony and experiences in the East of the Ottoman Empire by publishing an account of his various travels in Unter Eis und Palmen (Under Ice and Palm Trees), giving an overview of several of his scientific endeavours as a limnologist from the Bering Sea, to Hawaii and the Kurdish and Armenian regions. In addition to his maritime expeditions, however, he also outlined in separate chapter of this book his experiences during World War I. He reported the cruelties against the Armenian population that he had witnessed (Pietschmann 1927). On the way to and the retreat from the front line, through Baiburt, Erzincan, Erzurum and several other towns, as an Austrian officer in the service of the Turkish army together with the Turkish and German militaries, he observed the atrocities and mass deportation of the Armenian population. This ‘hidden’ report between his popular scientific presentation is a pitiless eye witness account. Pitiless because of the persecutions he witnessed and cruel because of the way in which he describes the waves of deportees, and how the deportations were managed. He reports on the way old and sick people were pushed into the Kemach gorge to die. Pietschmann’s narration is full of prejudice against the Armenians, when he writes about their ‘dirty and paltry villages’, about the Armenians being ‘astute and clever traders’. Decades later all these rather contradictory accusations were applied to Jews. It is not the accounts alone that are horrifying. It is the language Pietschmann uses, and the ideology behind it, which he tries to convey in a quite trivial manner. He writes about the ‘experienced compilation’ (sachkundige Zusammenstellung) of the ‘first load’ of deportees (Pietschmann 1927: 247), as they were the most influential and wealthy persons. He writes about the ‘target’ of the deportees and the ‘logistical problems’ due to a shortage of vehicles needed for deportation. One day he observed a long line of people on the horizon. He describes it from afar as ‘colourful and picturesque’. It turns out to be a vast number of Armenians to be deported. Most abhorrent are his accounts on deported children. Poor little worms! You have only a few days left, then you will be surrounded by the wet grave of the Kemach gorge. It will end all your fairy-tales, all the beliefs in a beautiful, warm, green, friendly and cheerful world (Pietschmann 1927: 287; my translation).

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He never criticizes the politics of this planned destruction, nor does he show compassion. Seldom does he ask himself how these people must have felt. He only shows some criticism regarding the official public rhetoric. Thus he questions official reports that claim that the tracks of deportees had been raided by Armenian gangs or Tschetniks (1927: 267). Pietschmann never mentions the perpetrators directly; he writes about ‘danger’, about an intangible ‘enemy’ of the Armenians. Reading his narration it almost seems that the long tracks of deported Armenians he witnesses are not accompanied at all, are not being driven out by soldiers, neighbours, local administrative staff or special units, but by an invisible power which leads them into their cruel fate. In his account there are not any perpetrators to be accounted for. Grammatically he uses the passive form to express people being attacked or assassinated. Most of the deportees ‘vanish’ in the gorges where they are beaten to death and thrown into rivers. Pietschmann mentions that it is not clear how many ‘crumbled away’, and referred to different sources. According to one it is two-hundred thousand, according to another source more than a million Armenians were murdered. Pietschman did however deliberately did not cite the sources (1927: 291). In the last chapter he states that these massacres will not solve the ‘Armenian question’. ‘The glowing hatred between the peoples continues to exist and it is even becoming deeper. The streams of blood ‘weakened the Armenians, but it did not extinguish them. The decisive victory can only be achieved by a fight where no blood is spilt’ (1927: 291 my translation). The manner of his narration is more than racist. His diction is of an ideology of total destruction. With no word does he – as an officer in the service of the Turkish military – feel responsible for any of these atrocities. On one side he wants to play the role of a distant observer documenting ‘inevitable developments’. From his diction, however, it is clear that his documentation is a horrible kind of voyeurism. He is being driven by a seduction of observing these death marches. When he is asked by the German consul in Erzurum to help some of the deportees to take refuge, Pietschmann sees himself obliged to take a few relatives of the Armenian Bishop of Erzurum with him to Constantinople. Only once does Pietschmann show some kind of compassion in his narration. This is when his endeavour is stopped by an Ottoman army representative after days of travelling, and Pietschmann has to communicate to his protégés that he cannot take them along further. In 1940 Victor Pietschmann published his diary of the Armenian Expedition of 1914 Durch kurdische Berge und armenische Städte (Through Kurdish Mountains and Armenian Towns). The political idea behind it can only be seen in comparison with his publications in 1927. In his account of 1940, he gives a detailed description of his Armenian expedition, which had ended some months before he returned as a military official to Eastern Anatolia. In this very detailed chronological diary, written in a popular scholarly manner he tried to convey some background knowledge of the region. Neither in the foreword or the introduction to his account, nor in one line of its 350 pages does he mention the atrocities against the Armenians in the   With Tschetniks or Tschets he applies a term from the Balkans to describe outlaws.

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years before and after the expedition in 1914, when he was engaged once more in the country as an army officer. In none of his daily accounts does he outline the clear cycles of crime and ‘situations of priming’. His autobiographical memory is an outstanding example of the ‘malleability of the past’ (Berliner 2005: 204). His ‘diary’ was published long after his expedition, and there were probably political intentions and ideology behind it. Why did he write about ‘Kurdish mountains and Armenian villages’ in a kind of historical perspective, trying to convey that ‘nothing wrong’ had happened in the time since then? How did he describe life there before the atrocities? The Armenian cities he visited in 1914 were no longer Armenian cities in 1940. Did the policy of mass destruction and persecution during World War II influence him to publish his diary? Today, Pietschmann is known for his political involvement before and during World War II, and as an adherent of the Nazis during the pre-war illegal period of the National Socialists (Kren 2000: 574, Pietschmann 1940b). Pietschmann’s descriptions of Armenian villages are marked by prejudice. He describes their ‘paltry housing’ (1940a: 277), their ‘shabby way of life’ as well as ‘their strange marriage ceremonies’, their ‘malicious character’ and ‘their ambitions as traders’. He claims that they are ‘false, corrupt and betray their customers’ (1940a: 323–4). After visiting an establishment of German missionaries where Armenian children were taught and fostered, he stressed their alleged hate for all Germans, even those who helped Armenians. As these children lacked thankfulness, he argued that all endeavour was senseless and support should be given to other peoples who were more brave and loyal. In subordinate clauses we can get an idea of the strategies of priming of that time. It was for example forbidden to buy goods or to undertake enterprises with Armenians, and they were prevented from moving away from their villages. The picture that Pietschmann draws of the Turks and Kurds, on the other hand, are marked by an ‘Orientalist’ dichotomous imputation, describing them as ‘loyal but dumb’, ‘wild but docile’. This is based on the concept of Orientalism (Said 1978), that is marked by ‘double-edged, potentially subtle, and at times even dialectical way of selfing oneself and othering the other’ (Baumann 2004: 21). The prejudice and ascriptions Pietschmann used for the Armenians were quite common at the time he published the material, as these stereotypes and ascriptions can be compared to those applied against Jews. The fate of the Armenians was not worth mentioning for him in the publication of his diary in 1940, nor does he refer to his own publication of 1927, where he had reported the persecutions. This outrageous amnesia can be explained by the ideology of that time. He silenced the fate of persecuted peoples that he had witnessed and described only thirteen years earlier. Both publications are an extreme. His accounts of 1927 with his descriptions of war crimes are horrible in a voyeuristic way. In his publication of 1940 he silences all those extreme and horrible accounts. It must be said that when Pietschmann’s diary was published in 1940, it was in the style of the National Socialist political ideology in its of terminology and also its simply leaving out and silencing the fate of

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the Armenians. In his speech to Wehrmacht commanders on 22 August 1939 concerning the invasion of Poland, Hitler remarked ‘Wer redet heute noch von der Vernichtung der Armenier?’ [Who still talks about the extermination of the Armenians today?]. Categories of Complicity As I have already outlined in the introduction, Stoett (2004) proposed different categories of complicity based on the degrees of distance from the crimes against humanity. While resonant complicity often coincides with official denial, the category of indifferent and selective complicity means that also officials were well informed and actually saw themselves obliged to intervene although they finally decided to ‘sit around and … allow genocide to happen’ (Stoett 2004: 38). In the category of active participation, Stoett does not only see the troops that are directly involved in crimes like bombings and shootings, but he also includes the ‘supply of soldiers and/or military know-how, supply and delivery of arms’ (Stoett 2004: 42). Although these categorizations are helpful, and although the role of the Central Powers becomes clear due to the military supply and their ‘resonant complicity’, I will further discuss the different responsibilities and narrations of the soldiers here. Concerning the language and the genre, the three documents discussed above appear to be personal accounts since they do not include the official rhetoric. They were written either for a different purpose or different readers. Alexander Rippel’s secret and semi-official account was intended for internal use in the military and diplomatic circle, whereas Edmund Jaroljmek’s reports appear to be private and personal accounts. The case of Victor Pietschmann is a special one as he was actively involved politically. Although the accounts are different, I will try to compare them according to their topics and apply an anthropological approach. According to the form of expressions used, Rippel applied legal-endorsed military and diplomatic diction. Within this he tried to report in a neutral way using neutral language. Despite his orientalist views he is accuses units of the Ottoman army as well as some Kurdish tribal forces for all the misery he saw. In contrast to Rippel’s sober accounts, Edmund Jaroljmek used a highly emotional style and his accounts became far more than mere documentation. As Das (2007) puts it: What is to bear witness to the criminality of the societal rule that consigns the uniqueness of being to eternal forgetfulness through a descent in everyday lifeto not simply articulate loss through a dramatic gesture of defiance but to inhabit the world, or inhabit it again, in a gesture of mourning (2007: 62).

 On the discussion around the sources of this speech see Albrecht (2007) and ‘Akten zur deutschen Aussenpolitik’ (1939).

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Victor Pietschmann in comparison, uses a very contradictory language, but without expressing any emotions. He documents the crimes he saw almost from a bird’s eye view. The facts seemed to leave him untouched and unimpressed. He tries to create a distance between himself and the crimes he witnessed by a language that tries to give his outlines a scholarly, ‘ethnographic’ touch and by conveying a kind of normalcy about them. On the other hand, however, he applied terms of the National Socialist diction. In addition to notes on their cultural traditions, he described Kurds and Turks in an orientalist manner. He described the Armenians with negative statements, with the effect that it is hardly possible to emotionally relate to them. Concerning the naming of the perpetrators directly, Rippel’s document makes clear whom he accused. Beside special military forces he also blames some Kurdish tribal units (without naming them exactly) for their atrocities, but mentions that it is not his duty to point this out. Jaroljmek, on the other hand, indicates the perpetrators by name, especially those with whom he had negotiated directly, like military officials who had hindered him to take measures against the outbreak of diseases. In Pietschmann’s diaries, the perpetrators are not mentioned at all. The enemy of the Armenians has no face and no name. It was a diffuse danger, nowhere and everywhere (Pietschmann 1927). Only once he mentions ‘Tschets’, applying a term from the Balkans used to describe outlaws. ‘Tschets’ are mentioned as an elusive danger; they were used by the military as a scapegoat for atrocities committed against civilians The three reports display different levels of responsibility. Rippel reflects the interest of the Austro-Hungarian military mission as a war ally with very special economic and imperial interest. He became an involuntary witness and had to face the atrocities within the country. As said before, Alexander Rippel’s account is written in a quite neutral and distant manner. He was in charge of the economic exploitation, in a quasi-colonial endeavour, which is also shown in the photos he made and which he added to his report. He did not directly question his and Austria-Hungary’s responsibility. The situations he witnessed and formulated for the Austrian ambassador in this semi-official account did not touch him emotionally, and he did not show sensitivity to the suffering of others. The account rather stresses the unemotional negotiator in a purely economic endeavour. It is a minimization of moral agency and responsibility as Grassiani (cf. this volume) has elaborated. Jaroljmek, on the other hand, notes several times quite desperately ‘where we had become involved’ and ‘what we were actually doing there’ (1916: 5). Pietschmann was the one who was engaged in the most direct form. He was a skiing instructor and a first-hand witness, but he never questioned this endeavour. In his publication of 1927, where he describes his way to and from the front line, he did not further outline his military engagements. He pictured the equipment and the nature, but did not explain his work as an instructor. According to Stoett’s (2004) categorization of complicity, Pietschmann was the one with the closest contacts. He was an eyewitness of the tracks of dispersed people, but he created a

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distance above all by language. Pietschmann was also the one who manipulated his ‘involvement’ in the next two decades. His accounts on his military engagement or his civic missions remain blurred. Dealing with Censorship and Denial The Young Turk Triumvirat was quite aware of the international implications in the internal tensions and atrocities against the Christian populations as European powers had tried to intervene on their behalf during the preceding decades. ‘With the passage of time, the Ottomans became more resolved to prevent the recurrence of such intervention by quickly and violently suppressing expressions of social and political discontent’ (Dadrian 1989 in Adalian 2009: 60) and thus they established special units who sent and monitored official narrations. Even in the Great War (World War I) the German Empire realized that they had to control media accounts from the war zones, an ‘Orient News Agency’ (Nachrichtenstelle für den Orient) was established. It adopted the official Turkish version, as the news agency had to create a legitimizing rhetoric of war atrocities and crimes against humanity (Oppenheim 1915, Hajo and Savelsberg 2003). It tried to explain atrocities with terms like ‘common acts of war’, ‘political resistance’ or ‘defence of national security’ (Gust and Gust n.d.). This rhetoric had a longlasting effect: over many decades the search for the truth was hindered. It was in fact not until the end of the Cold War that it allowed to question involvements, responsibilities and the collective memory of the parties involved. Kramer, who is working at the interdisciplinary Centre for War Studies in Dublin, analyzed German documents about World War I and stated that in the inter-war period a ‘non-conformist research was still unwelcome in academia’ (Kramer 2008: 386). Due to the traumatic experiences of World War I as a total war, the defeat and exploitation of the civilian population, the Nazis started ‘to re-appropriate the memory of the first World War … [and] to rewrite the history of the war’ (Kramer 2008: 397). The three authors, examined above, dealt with their witnessing in their own way. Rippel applied the official (Austro-Hungarian) version of silencing. He obeyed the censorship without mentioning the official Ottoman military rhetoric, and thus in contrast to the official German narrative, for example, he did not reproduce those narratives of legitimization. Jaroljmek questioned the official rhetoric of legitimizing, silencing and denying several times, and seemed eager not to obey. Since official terms for mass atrocities did not exist then, he remarked sarcastically: ‘Deportation is the new term for what happens here’(Jaroljmek 1916: 5). Compared to the first two accounts, Victor Pietschmann’s publications, his travelling reminiscences (1927) and diary (1940a) are completely different.  Both the term genocide and ethnic cleansing were introduced in the second half of the twentieth century (see Hinton 2002: 2).

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Both books were published as personal accounts, which is misleading because the ideological mission behind them is silenced. His personal narratives convey an aggressive political endeavour, trying to document the measures of solving the ‘Armenian question’ in 1927, having already forgotten these atrocities 13 years later in 1940. It is not only a moral disengagement, as Grassiani (cf. this volume) has outlined, but a policy of silencing and denial as well as an attempt of manipulation (cf. Robben this volume). In Jaroljmeks publication on Persia, wherein a small account on the situation in Mosul during the war is given, he does not mention the fate of the Armenians which had so impressed him earlier. The difference of ‘silencing’ to Pietschmann is that Jaroljmek did not try to amplify the official narration nor did he stereotype the Armenians; he simply did not mention them at all. Engagement From the documents and archive material it is not clear whether Alexander Rippel showed any kind of engagement for the local population. From his curriculum vitae we know that he was engaged in the Near East until his death. He was a member of the Knights’ Order from the Holy Grave in Jerusalem – Proconsulat of Austria from 1917 onwards, and he represented this Catholic order between 1943 and 1951. From Edmund Jaroljmeks diary it is obvious that he tried to organize help and support, above all medical treatment for the refugees, and that he assisted physicians in military hospitals. If based on Stoett’s (2004) approach of complicity in time, Pietschmann’s publications are an outstanding example of a long term complicity, as he transformed and shaped his narrations and adjusted them to the changing official narratives and ideological background during the time of National Socialism. He shaped his memory according to the political demand. Pietschmann held his position at the Vienna Museum of Natural History until 1946. Although his Nazi background is known, still today it has not been examined enough. Considering the accounts of informed soldiers in the battle-fields, we can outline different roles that they carried out and different forms of engagement. Their expressions and narrations of violent acts reveal (at least) three different ways of reporting and acting, based on their personal and moral engagement. Victor Pietschmann constitutes on accomplice over time, who even felt obliged to repeat and shape his narrations of denial and (re)produce his manipulations even decades after the crimes had been executed. Alexander Rippel’s accounts reflect the role of a bystander, somebody who obeyed according to his role. He did, however, not actively reproduce any kind of legitimizing rhetoric. Edmund Jaroljmek acted as an engaged witness during the war, and dared to counteract official prescriptions and narratives, but nevertheless he silenced the crimes he had witnessed in his publications. In regard to the pressure exerted by the international community on Turkey to finally acknowledge the mass atrocities as genocide, the role of complicity

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of the allied nations has, as yet, not been discussed sufficiently. The role of the international community still remains ambiguous. Since 1965 several nations have signed the UN-Convention acknowledging these crimes against humanity as genocide (GfbV n.d.). Both Germany and Austria have, as yet, not considered this matter sufficiently important. Almost a century after World War I, Turkey and Armenia signed an agreement in October 2009 to normalize relations between the two countries. In addition to establishing diplomatic relations and opening the borders, the two countries also agreed on installing a joint commission of historians and international experts, who are to examine the truth about the atrocities preceding and during World War I. References Adalian, R.P. 2009 [1997]. ‘The Armenian Genocide’, in Century of Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views, edited by S. Totten, W.S. Parson, I. Charny. 3rd Edition, New York: Routledge, 55–94. Albrecht, R. 2007 ‘Wer redet denn heute noch von der Vernichtung der Armenier?’ Adolf Hitlers zweite Rede vor den Oberkommandierenden auf dem Obersalzberg am 22. August 1939 – Eine wissenschaftliche Skizze. [Online]. Available at: www.grin.com Document V76273 [accessed: 10 January 2010]. Akten zur deutschen auswärtigen Politik. 1939. Zwangsmigrationen in Europa 1938–48. Die NS-Bevölkerungs- und Vernichtungspolitik für Osteuropa (1939). [Online]. Available at: http://library.fes.de/library/netzquelle/ zwangsmigration/32ansprache.html [accessed: 3 February 2010]. Baumann, G. 2004. ‘Grammars of Identity/Alterity: A Structural Approach’, in Grammars of Identity/Alterity. A Structural Approach, edited by G. Baumann and A. Gingrich: New York: Berghahn, 18–50. Berliner, D. 2005. ‘Social Thought and Commentary: The Abuses of Memory: Reflections on the Memory Boom in Anthropology’. Anthropological Quarterly, 78(1), 197–211. Buchmann, B.M. 1999. Österreich und das Osmanische Reich. Eine bilaterale Geschichte. Wien: Wiener Universitätsverlag. Dadrian, V. 1986. ‘The Naim-Andonian Documents on the World War I Destruction of Ottoman Armenians: The Anatomy of Genocide’. International Journal of Middle East Studies 18(3), 311–60. ________ 1996. German Responsibility in the Armenian Genocide: Key Elements of Turko-Armenian Conflict. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Dadrian, V.N. 2002. ‘The Armenian Question and the Wartime Fate of the Armenians as Documented by the Officials of the Ottoman Empire’s World War I Allies: Germany and Austria-Hungary’. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 34(1), 59–85. Das, V. 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press.

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Das Vilajet Mossul, 1918. Österreichische Monatsschrift für den Orient, 245–65. Deringil, S. 2003. ‘“They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery”: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Post-colonial Debate’. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 45(2), 311–42. Edmonds, C.J. 1957. Kurds, Turks and Arabs. Politics, Travel and Research in Northeaster-Iraq 1919 – 1925. London, New York: Oxford University Press. Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker (GfbV). n.d. Ein Zeichen der Gerechtigkeit für die vergessenen Opfer von 1915. Für eine Anerkennung des Völkermordes an den Armeniern. [Online]. Available at: http://www.armenian.ch/gsa/Docs/ DokGenD.pdf [accessed: 9 October 2009]. Goltz, H. (ed.) 1994. Deutschland, Armenien und die Türkei 1895–1925. Dokumente und Zeitschriften aus dem Dr. Johannes-Lepsius-Archiv an der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. München: K.G. Saur Verlag. Gust, W. and Gust, S. (eds) n.d. Der Völkermord an den Armeniern im Ersten Weltkrieg. Vorgeschichte und Ereignisse anhand von Dokumenten aus staatlichen und privaten Archiven. [Online]. Available at: http://www. armenocide.de [accessed: 10 October 2009]. Hajo, S. and Savelsberg E. 2003. Ein Diavortrag Oskar Manns über seine Kurdistanreise 1906/07. Kurdische Studien, 3(1,2), 135–86. Hinton, A.L. 2002. ‘Introduction: Genocide and Anthropology’, in Genocide: An Anthropological Reader, edited by A.L. Hinton. Malden, Oxford: Blackwell, 1–23. Horne, J. and Kramer, A. 1994. ‘German “atrocities” and Franco-German Opinion, 1914: The Evidence of German Soldiers’ Diaries’. The Journal of Modern History, 66(1), 1–33. Hovannisian, R. (ed) 1992. The Armenian Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Hutton, P. 1993. History as an Art of Memory. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England. Jaroljmek, E. 1916. Tagebuch 5 [Diary 5] (unpublished). Nachlass von Edmund H. Jaroljmek 1882–1953, Austrian State Archives, Kriegsarchiv, Nachlässe B/526:2. ________ [1942] 1951. Das andere Iran. Persien in den Augen eines Europäers. With an introduction from Ali Asghar Azizi. München: Nymphenburger. ________ 1942. Ich lebte in Nah-Ost. Buntes Morgenland zwischen einst und jetzt. Wien: Dt. Verlag für Jugend und Volk. Joseph, J. 1983. Muslim-Christian Relations and Inter-Christian Rivalries in the Middle East. The Case of the Jacobites in an Age of Transition. New York: State University of New York Press. Jung, P. 1992. Der k.u.k. Wüstenkrieg. Österreich-Ungarn im Vorderen Orient 1915–1918. Graz: Styria. Jwaideh, W. 2006. Kurdish National Movement, Its Origins and Development. With a foreword by Martin van Bruinessen. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press.

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Klein, K.L. 2000. ‘On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse’. Representations, 69, 127–50. Konsulat Aleppo. 1916. Austrian State Archives. HHSTA Politisches Archiv XXXVIII K. 369. Vienna. Konsulat Bagdad 1916. Austrian State Archives. HHSTA Politisches Archiv XXXVIII K. 369, Vienna. Konsulat Bagdad 1917. Austrian State Archives. HHSTA Politisches Archiv XXXVIII K. 370.Vienna. Konsulat Bagdad 1918. Austrian State Archives. HHSTA Politisches Archiv XXXVIII K. 371. Vienna. Konsulat Trabzon 1918. Austrian State Archives. HHSTA Politisches Archiv XXXVIII K.371 Vienna. Kramer, A. 2008: ‘The First World War and German Memory’, in Untold War. New Perspectives in First World War Studies, edited by J. Jones, J. O’Brien and C. Schmidt-Supprian. Leiden: Brill, 385–415. Kren, K. 2000. Kurdologie, Kurdistan und die Kurden in der deutschsprachigen Literatur. Münster: LIT Länderbericht Türkei n.a. 1915 Österreichische Monatsschrift für den Orient, 339–40. Lepsius, J. 1916. Bericht über die Lage des armenischen Volkes in der Türkei. Potsdam: Tempelverlag. Levene, M. 2005. Genocide in the Age of the Nation State: Volume I: The Meaning of Genocide. London, New York: Tauris. Morgenthau, H. 1918. Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story. Formerly American Ambassador to Turkey. [Online]. Available at: http://net.lib.byu.edu/~rdh7/ wwi/comment/morgenthau/MorgenTC.htm [accessed: 7 October 2009]. Mosse, G.L. 1990. Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Naturwissenschaftlicher Orientverein 1915. Jahresbericht des Naturwissenschaftlichen Orientvereins. Wien: Selbstverlag des Vereins. Nikitine, B. 1956. Les Kurdes, étude sociologique et historique. Paris: Impr. nationale. Oppenheim, M.v. 1915. Bericht. Der Leiter der “Nachrichtenstelle für den Orient” (Max von Oppenheim) an den Reichskanzler (Bethmann Hollweg) [Damaskus, 29 August 1915]. Available at: http://www.armenocide.de [accessed: 10 January 2010] Orientabteilung 1918: Austrian State Archives. Kriegsarchiv, 1918, Orientabteilung des k.u.k. Kriegsministerium Pietschmann, V. 1915. Kurzer Bericht über den Verlauf und die Ergebnisse der Armenien-Expedition XX. Jahresbericht des Naturwissenschaftlichen Orientvereins über das Jahr 1914. Wien: Selbstverlag des Vereins. 4 – 7. ________ 1927. Eis und Palmen. Reiseskizzen aus Nord und Süd. Wien: Braumüller.

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________ 1940a. Durch kurdische Berge und armenische Städte. Tagebuch der österreichischen Armenienexpedition. Wien: Luser. ________ 1940b. Führer durch die Sonderschau ‘Ostmarkdeutsche als Forscher und Sammler in unseren Kolonien’. Ein Anteil der Ostmark an der Erforschung und Erschließung der deutschen Kolonialgebiete. Wien: Waldheim-Eberle Pomiankowski, J. 1909/1910. Report. Austrian State Archives, Kriegsarchiv MKFF, Auswärtige Angelegenheiten Karton 203/2a. Vienna. Rippel, A. 1917: Notizen zur Kurdistan Expedition 21. August bis 1. Oktober 1917. [unpublished] Austrian State Archives, Politisches Archiv XXXVIII Konsulat Bagdad, K. 370. Vienna. Said, E. 1978. Orientalism London: Pantheon Books. Scheper-Hughes, N. 2002. ‘Coming to Our Senses: Anthropology and Genocide’, in Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide, edited by A.L. Hinton. Berkeley: University of California Press, 348–81. Schofield, J. 2009. ‘Message and Materiality in Mesopotamia, 1916–1917: My Grandfather’s Diary, Social Commemoration and the Experience of War’, in Contested Objects. Material Memories of the Great War, edited by N.J. Saunder and P. Cornish. London, New York: Routledge, 203–19. Soane, E.B. 1912. To Mespotamia and Kurdistan in Disguise. London: John Murray Pub. Stoett, P. 2004. ‘Shades of Complicity: Towards a Typology of Transnational Crimes against Humanity’, in: Genocide, War, Crimes and the West. History and Complicity, edited by A. Jones. London, New York: Zed Books. Tölölyan, K. 2001. ‘Elites and Institutions in the Armenian Transnation’. Diaspora. A Journal of Transnational Studies 9(1). 107–36. Totten, S., Bartrop, P.R. and Jacobs, S.L. 2008. Dictionary of Genocide. 2 vol. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. Werfel, F. 1933. Die vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh. Berlin: Zsolnay. Wießner, G. 1997. Hayoths Dzor-Xavasor: ethnische, ökonomische und kulturelle Transformation eines ländlichen Siedlungsgebietes in der östlichen Türkei seit dem 19. Jahrhundert. Wiesbaden: Reichert. Will, A. 2006. Grenzerfahrung beim Waffenbruder. Offiziere der Mittelmächte im Orient 1914–1918, in Die Grenzen Europas, edited by S. Pent et al. St. Ingbert: Röhrig. 141–56. Winter, J. 1995. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: the Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Index

Author names are marked with an asterisk* accomplice see witness accountability 22, 65, 94, 120, 72–73, 181 Adalian, R.P.* 227–30, 240 aesthetics 4, 9, 11–12, 55–6, 60, 63–4, 75, 84, 212, 218 agency 8, 10, 29, 63, 97, 102, 143, 148–50, 183, 207 child agency 148, 150, 159–60, 162 moral agency see moral Alaska 4, 21–35 alterity 148–9, 162 Amnesty International 173 anthropology of childhood see childhood Arendt, H.* 6, 142–3 Argentina 10, 169–83 Armenians 224–41 Armenian genocide 229–40 artefacts 7, 197–9, 226 assassination see also murder 109, 112–24, 169–70, 181–2, 184, 227 Assmann, J.* 7, 187, 193 atrocities, see also human rights violations 7, 10–11, 120, 216, 224–42 authority 11, 24, 27, 41, 46, 48, 73, 111, 130, 132, 133, 138, 142, 153 Bandura, A.* 10, 92, 95–8, 103, 107 battlefield 2, 85, 80, 224 Berliner, D.* 6–7, 226, 237 Binford, L.* 1, 5 blood 12, 74–5, 80, 114, 118, 129–44, 183, 197, 207, 210, 236 menstrual blood 134 Bosnia 205 Bourdieu, P.* 4, 42, 143, 148 Bourgois, P.* 3–4, 13, 147–8 Butler, J.* 11 bystander see witness

censorship 11, 223–40 child 4–5, 11, 13, 26, 31–3, 97–8, 106, 111, 132–3, 136–9, 147–63, 169–70, 181, 209, 213–14, 233, 235, 237 child agency see agency children’s expression see expression childhood 147–163 anthropology of childhood 152 civil war 2, 6, 12, 38–40, 43, 46, 52, 71, 76, 206, 225, 230 civilians 11, 55, 61–2, 71–2, 78, 92, 96, 99, 104, 169, 207, 230, 232–3, 239 Cohen, S.* 92, 94, 96, 101, 103, 107, 171–2, 175 Cold War 2, 37–8, 52, 63, 66, 230, 240. collective memory see memory colonialism 33, 52, 129 colonization 26–7, 72 community 22, 30, 33–34, 46, 72, 77, 80, 148, 191, 199, 226 international community 110–11, 230, 241–2 Kurdish community see Kurds complicity 22, 184, 207, 218, 223–4, 238–9, 241 resonant complicity 11, 223, 238 confession 10, 169–84 Connerton, P.* 6, 196 crime see also war crimes 4, 120, 178, 184, 213, 223–5, 227–8, 237, 239 crimes against humanity 223–4, 227–9, 231, 234, 238–42 Csáky, M.* 7 Cuba 7, 174, 187–212 cultural memory see memory Culture of Fear see fear

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Das, V.* 1, 5, 8, 12–13, 121, 130, 183, Dadrian, V.N.* 224, 229, 240 death 2, 12, 14, 24–26, 28, 30–34, 67, 71–86, 115, 121, 137, 147, 169–70, 192, 225, 236 death flights 178–80 death threats 180–82 deep memory see memory denial 10–12, 72, 92, 107, 169–84, 216, 223–41 collective denial 99, 144 implicatory denial 96–9, 101, 103, 107, 175 interpretative denial 100, 107 Diaspora 76, 84, 110–11 Dirty War 10, 171–3, 178, 181 disappearance 10, 171, 173–83 discursive strategy 10–11, 14, 91–107, 180, 184 documentary 203–218 economy 24, 38, 40, 171, 196 political economy 124 Ecuador 4, 147–63 emergency 71, 232 ethics 13, 46, 105, 153 ethnic 12, 72, 122, 149, 225, 228, 240 ethnographic seduction 5, 123 expression 1–6, 9–14, 37, 62, 121, 131, 133, 139, 153, 170, 175, 182, 184, 187, 200, 224, 238–41 children’s expression 153, 159 cultural expression 3, 10, 56, 144, 193–4, 200 embodied expression 159, 214 metaphoric expression see also metaphoric language 129–30 muted expression see also muted language 71 visual expression 148, 154 Fabian, J.* 6 Farmer, P.* 27, 148 fear 8, 10f., 28f., 44, 59, 92, 113, 119f., 125, 161, 172, 209 Culture of Fear see 10, 172 Ferguson, R.B.* 3, 37, 51 Freud, S.* 190–91, 199, 210 funeral 80–82, 118

gender 11, 27, 64, 82, 85, 112 gender discourse 8 gender relations 23, 27, 42, 143 gender roles 11–12 gendered violence see violence genocide 7, 11, 35, 224–5, 227–30, 238, 240–42 genocidal acts 224–5, 227 Goffman, E.* 10f., 94, 123 Gramsci, A.* 22, 183 Guadeloupe 129–145 guerrilla 109, 115ff., 120ff., 171ff., 174ff., 177f., 183, 225, 230 Halbwachs, M.* 6, 191, 193, 226 Handelman, D.* 56, 60 haptic 1, 4, 13 healing 136–8, 140, 143, 173, 190, 197 historiography 13, 216–18, 225 historiophoty 217 Hinton, A.L.* 26, 227–8, 240 history 4, 8–9, 13, 21–23, 27, 34–5, 51–2, 56, 72, 82, 85, 118, 129, 174, 183, 189–93, 205–6, 211–16, 231, 240 mythico-history 115–18 oral history 23, 204 traumatic history 187–202 Holocaust 7–8, 171, 194, 205 Holocaust survivor 7, 192, 194 human rights violations 2, 112, 170–73, 175, 177, 180–83, 223 humanity see crimes against humanity ideology 13, 52, 66, 74, 76–8, 84, 86, 103, 107, 110–11, 228, 235–7 ideological discourse 6, 11 ideological justification 105, 179 ideological motivation 28, 104 image 7, 9, 13, 37, 60–61, 72, 74, 82–3, 124, 130, 148, 157–9, 188, 195, 198–200, 203–6, 208, 211–18 impunity 2, 21–2, 34–5, 115, 170, 172, 184, 229 indigenous people 21, 150 injustice 4, 178 international community see community inverted violence see violence Israel 10, 38, 52, 91–108, 180, 206–12, 216

Index Jackson, M.* 3, 5–6, 118, 143 Japan 4, 29, 55–67 journalist 110, 116, 173, 180, 205, 208, 210, 229 justice 42, 85, 118, 144, 170, 175, 178, 181, 182 Kaldor, M.* 2, 52 Kansteiner, W.* 7–8 Kidron, C.A.* 7, 9 Klein, K.L.* 7, 226 Kleinman A.* 1, 109, 121, 123–4, 193 Kurds 109–27, 124, 226, 228, 231–2, 237, 239 language 1, 6–8, 10, 50, 58–9, 62, 72, 92, 96, 105, 158–9, 183, 191, 198–9, 235 , 238–40 banal language 94 blood, language of 129, 131 body language 50, 95, 211 filmic language 209–11 martial language 66, 75 metaphoric language see also metaphoric expression 2, 8, 12, 130, 183 muted language 13–14, 158; see also muted expressions poetic language 207 ritual language 78, 192–3, 195, 198 Lebanon 9, 176, 206–16 legitimacy 10–11, 24, 48–9, 55–6, 76, 118, 173 loss 31, 71, 156, 217 LTTE 12, 71–86 Malkki, L.H.* 3, 109, 113, 118 manifestations see also manifestations of violence 1, 4, 25, 51–52, 75, 170–171, Marcus, G.E.* 13, 151 marginalization / marginalized people 4–5, 13, 27, 52, 143, 147, 154–6 martyr 12, 48, 71–86, 115, 183 material culture 80, 84, 197 media 63, 171, 173, 175, 203, 205, 208, 212, 240 medicine 27, 30, 32–3, 140

249

memory 4, 6–14, 21–22, 76–77, 113, 182–183, 187–200, 203–18, 226, 240–41 collective memory 6, 8, 86, 191, 240 communicative memory 7, 187 cultural memory 4, 7, 187, 189, 194 deep memory 7, 194 distorted memory 209 embodied memory 187, 196 geneological memory 191, 194, 199 historical memory 13, 130 individual memory 6–7 social memory 187–8, 191, 196 traces of memory 190–91, 193, 199, 207, 217 traumatic memory 9–10, 189, 194, 208, 217 remembrance 7, 9, 81, 182, 193, 217 metaphoric language see language migration 131, 150, 189 military 4, 10, 38, 50, 55–68, 72–81, 86, 91–105, 109–24, 169–83, 211–13, 224–40 morality 10, 47, 60, 63, 96–108, 115–17, 121, 171 moral agency 10, 95–9, 239 moral dilemma 10, 180 moral disengagement 92, 96–7, 107, 241 moral justification 96–7, 99, 103–5, 107 murder see also assasination 112, 115–25, 129, 169, 181 mass murder 224, 229, 236 political murder 112, 115, 181 muted language see language myth 23, 56, 76, 83, 118, 120, 124–5, 197–8 mythico-histories 109, 115–18, 124 narrative 1–4, 31, 109–27, 129, 144, 198–9, 204–8 grand narrative see master narrative historical narrative 206, 217 master narrative 109, 174 official narrative 2, 11, 14, 223, 229, 234, 240–41 secret narrative 19–20

250

Violence Expressed

Native Americans see also Yup’ik 27–28, 35 new wars see war Nordstrom, C.* 1, 2, 3, 13, 52, 120, 133 normalization of violence see violence Ottoman Empire 11, 224–235 Palestine 205, 216, 230 Palestinians 91–107, 216 peace 50, 63–6, 101, 118, 120, 177 peace-keeping 64–6 performance 3–4, 56, 58–60, 64, 73, 176, 188–90, 194, 196–7, 199–200 perpetrator 2–3, 5–6, 10, 94–5, 97, 116, 124, 152, 170–75, 184 PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan) 109–23 poetic 3, 9, 71, 144 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 179, 200 power 2, 8, 11, 22, 24, 27, 34, 60, 62–4, 97, 111, 119–23, 129, 140–44, 148, 173, 195, 198–9 power inequality 4, 148–9, 154 military power 62–3, 173 priming 228, 237 professional secrecy 229 professionalism 10, 100–107, 180 public events 2, 55–6, 65–6 rape 11, 116–17, 129–43, 177, 183 refugees 76,113, 206–7, 214, 232–4 religion 43, 47, 52, 83–4, 143, 191–7 remembrance see memory repression 7, 9, 206, 210 resistance 72–3, 83, 111–15, 119–20, 240 ritual 7–8, 55, 64–7, 71, 76, 78, 188, 191–9 Robben, A.C.G.M.* 2, 52, 123, 133, 241 role models 1, 6, 11–12, 14, 37–38, 49–53; see also gender roles Ross, F.C.* 8, 112, 121, 124 routinization of violence see violence rumour 117, 119, 122, 142, 175 sacrifice 48, 76–78, 84, 138, 175 Scarry, E.* 8, 198–199 Schalk, P.* 75–78, 80–83 Scheper-Hughes, N* 4, 223 Schmidt, B.E., and Schröder, I.W.* 3, 64

Schneider, J.* 13 Schneider, P. and Schneider, J.* 120 Schott, A.O.* 205, 214, 216 Scott, J.* 131, 143 secrecy 10, 119–23, 172, 178, 229 security 50, 97, 100, 110, 132, 155, 240 security forces 40, 110, 173, 181 shame 8, 22, 31, 34 silence 1–2, 4, 8–13, 21–2, 31, 34–5, 50, 119–21, 125, 130, 144, 154, 157–8, 169–73, 180–84, 200, 228, 234 slavery 7, 129, 131, 187–200 social memory see memory society 3–6, 12, 55, 63, 71, 73, 85, 93, 98, 100, 105, 121–4, 130, 143, 153, 170–82, 187–91, 210 civil society 115, 226 dominant society 22, 27 secret society 138, 191 soldier 74–86, 91–107, 111, 160, 206, 212 spectator see witness Sri Lanka 71–86 state terror see terror stereotype 7, 237, 241 Stoett, P.* 11, 223–4, 238 structural violence see violence suffering 4, 7, 9–12, 22, 25, 31–4, 91–107, 111–12, 123–4, 152, 154, 158, 170–74, 179–84, 200, 239 individual suffering 187, 194 private suffering 131, 137 social suffering 109, 204 suicide 25, 33–4, 73, 78, 139, 169–70 suicide bombings 83, 96, 98, 105 survivor see also Holocaust survivor 11, 34, 175, 179, 206, 213 Tamil 71–86 Taussig, M.* 119–20 terror 8, 119–20, 175, 187–8, 225 state terror 170–72, 183 state terrorism 170, 173–4, 178 terrorist 7, 81, 98, 101, 104–6, 110, 124, 181 testimony 99, 121, 124, 129, 187, 206, 223, 235 therapy 28, 156–8, 210 torture 111, 113, 120–21, 169, 171–83, 187–99

Index Totten, W.S.* 228–30 transcript, hidden 12, 131, 143–4 transgenerational transmission 10, 189–94, 199 trauma 7–10, 22–35, 154, 189–94, 200, 208–11 traumatic events 203–4, 211, 217 traumatic memory see memory tribe 39–48, 225 truth 6, 9, 11, 170–77, 203–9, 214–17, 240 truth commission 11, 112, 121, 174–5, 177 tuberculosis 25, 33–5 Turkey 109–27, 224–5, 229–30, 241–2 United States 26, 28–30 vicarious memory see memory victim 3, 5, 77, 80, 106, 141–2, 175, 181, 223–8 victimhood 5, 12, 109–12, 123–5, 171, 174, 217 violence 1–14, 21–3, 27, 37, 50, 56, 63–5, 94, 109, 113, 119–20, 124–5, 149–54, 158–62, 171, 174, 180, 187, 197–9, 204–6, 223–4 domestic violence 4, 25, 147–8, 154 everyday violence 5, 118, 147, 149, 153–5 expressions of violence 1–14, 37, 56, 64, 67, 121, 130–31, 170, 172, 175, 182, 184, 187, 197, 206

251 gendered violence 5, 154 military violence 55–6 normalization of violence 2, 4, 13, 31–5, 55–6, 65–7, 99 routinization of violence 1–2, 4, 13 sexual violence 12, 129–31, 133, 139, 143–4 structural violence 4, 147–9, 155, 162

war 2–3, 8–12, 29, 56, 66, 71–7, 106, 110, 172–8, 204–18, 224–41 civil war 38, 52, 71–6 crimes 210, 225, 231, 237 diaries 233–41 new wars 2, 6, 11, 52 warfare 23, 205, 212, 225–6, 230 World War I. 223–41 warrior 11–12, 41–51 Whitehead, N.* 3, 37, 144 witches 173–42 witness 5, 8, 11, 61, 113, 120, 129, 161, 182, 235, 239–41 accomplice 2, 11, 223, 225, 241 bystander 11, 93–94, 111–12, 223–5, 241 spectator 4, 11, 56–62, 152, 217, 223 Yemen 11–12, 37–53, 176 Yup’ik see also Native American 4, 21–36