Violence (Anthropology)

Children, Rights, and Modernity in China is an ethnographic study of the emergence of a new type of thinking about children and their entitlements in contemporary urban China. Drawing on participant observation and interviews in primary schools and homes in the city of Shanghai, and on diverse evidence from government, academic, media, and pedagogic publications, the book debunks many popular and scholarly stereotypes about the predominance of Confucian ideas of parental authority in China or about the indifference to individual human rights in the political and public culture of the PRC. The author also recognizes the conflicts that exist in Chinese discourses about and practices toward children, as older ideas of filiality, neoliberal ideologies, and the new awareness of children's right to privacy, to expressing their views, and to protection against violence compete and collude in complicated, often contradictory ways.

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

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

A closely-researched and detailed study of the operations and tactics of early modern armies, it uses the French and Savoyard invasion of Spanish Lombardy in 1636 to explore warfare through a neo-Darwinian lens. This emphasizes the universal features of human behavior and psychology as they relate to violence and war. Oxford University Press, January 2016, Paperback version 2018; Italian translation LEG 2018.

Focusing exclusively on external forces risks producing an over-generalized account of a ubiquitous neoliberalism, which insufficiently accounts for the profusion of local variegations that currently comprise the neoliberal project as a series of articulations with existing political economic circumstances. Although neoliberal economics were initially promoted in the global south through the auspices of structural adjustment programs designed by the International Financial Institutions, powerful global south elites were only too happy to oblige. Neoliberalism frequently reveals opportunities for well-connected government officials to informally control market and material rewards, allowing them to easily line their own pockets. It is in this sense of the local appropriation of neoliberal ideas that scholars must go beyond conceiving of ‘neoliberalism-in-general’ as a singular and fully realized policy regime, ideological form, or regulatory framework, and work towards conceiving a plurality of ‘actually existing neoliberalisms’ with particular characteristics arising from mutable geohistorical outcomes that are embedded within national, regional, and local process of market-driven socio-spatial transformation. What constitutes ‘actually existing’ neoliberalism in Cambodia as distinctly Cambodian is the ways in which the patronage system has allowed local elites to co-opt, transform, and (re)articulate neoliberal reforms through a framework that ‘asset strips’ public resources, thereby increasing peoples’ exposure to corruption, coercion, and violence. It is to such an 'articulation agenda' that this article attends, as in seeking to provide a more nuanced reading to recent work on neoliberalism in Cambodia by outlining some of its salient characteristics, I reveal a more empirical basis to theorizations of ‘articulated neoliberalism’.

The aim of this study was to investigate how individuals;who had been victims of school bullying;perceived their bullying experiences and how these had affected them;and to generate a grounded theory of being a victim of bullying at school. Twenty-one individuals;who all had prior experiences of being bullied in school for more than one year;were interviewed. Qualitative analysis of data was performed by methods from grounded theory. The research identified a basic process of victimising in school bullying;which consisted of four phases: (a) initial attacks;(b) double victimising;(c) bullying exit and (d) after-effects of bullying. Double victimising refers to a process in which there was an interplay between external victimising and internal victimising. Acts of harassment were repeatedly directed at the victims from their social environment at school – a social process that constructed and repeatedly confirmed their victim role in the class or the group. This external victimising affected the victims and initiated an internal victimising;which meant that they internalised the socially constructed victim-image and acted upon this image;which in turn often supported the bullies’ agenda and confirmed the socially constructed victim-image. The findings also indicate the possible positive effect of changing the social environment.

This paper sets out to develop two related ideas. First, it seeks to identify how both violence and neoliberalism can be considered as moments. From this shared conceptualisation of process and fluidity, I argue that it becomes easier to recognise how these two phenomena actually converge. Building upon this conceived coalescence of neoliberalism and violence, the second aim is to recognise how the hegemony of neoliberalism positions it as an abuser, which facilitates the abandonment of those ‘Others’ who fall outside of neoliberal normativity. I argue that the widespread banishment of ‘Others’ under neoliberalism produces a ‘state of exception’, wherein because of its inherently dialectic nature, exceptional violence is transformed into exemplary violence. This metamorphosis occurs as aversion for alterity intensifies under neoliberalism and its associated violence against ‘Others’ comes to form the rule.

Stressing that the pronoun "I" picks out one and only one person in the world (i.e., me), I argue against Hunt (and other like-minded Rand commentators) that the supposed "hard case" of destructive people who do not care for their own lives poses no special difficulty for rational egoism. I conclude that the proper response to a terse objection like "What about suicide bombers?" is the equally terse assertion "But I don't want to get blown up."

This article examines the fatal shooting by the South African Police of 20 people among a small crowd in the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. It explores some cultural characteristics of violence as a social process and social form. In this incident,
the intentions of the actors were not simply confrontational, yet the event had the shape of other "classic" confrontations in South African history. Since direct political chains of command were not functioning at the time, explanation is
sought in terms of the actors' cultural representations of "community," "self,” and "the state," rather than in terms of instrumental action within a formal political
system. Here, social power is presented as the ability to impose an interpretation among competing interpretations after the occurrence of violence, rather than as the ability to cause violence as the instrument of policy or as the intended consequence of intentional social action. [South African politics, violence, explanation in the social sciences, political culture, cultural representations, conflict]

This article argues that the use of sexual infiltration by police and criminal collaborators represents a strategic deployment of surveillance technology by the state with the aim of creating Foucault’s “docile bodies” through the development of totalising omnipresence. The insertion of police into the private sphere of activists’ sexual relationships – a site presumed to be outside of state gaze – serves to not only disrupt the target communities but also to reverberate throughout social networks and create inactivity. By exposing informants from within one’s own “family”, the state is able to collect intelligence, spread insecurity and display totalising disciplinary power to the social movement under observation.

This chapter invites readers to Nagaland (Northeast India) to reflect on the
impulse that compelled thousands of Nagas to participate in a horrific public lynching of a perceived illegal immigrant. The inflow of ‘ethnic strangers’ is seen as challenging the Nagas’ ethno-territorial sovereignty and reinvigorates local obsessions with notions of autochthony – an emotive affirmation of Naga origins, roots, soil, genes, semen, and blood as the prime criteria of rights, entitlements, and belonging. This chapter presents immigration panic and ethnic violence as cultural and bodily friction blocking such flows. The implication? A body politic gripped by a volatile, potentially violent split between those considered autochthonous and those deemed outsiders.

In establishing an anarchic framework for understanding public space as a vision for radical democracy, this article proceeds as a theoretical inquiry into how an agonistic public space might become the basis of emancipation. Public space is presented as an opportunity to move beyond the technocratic elitism that often characterizes both civil societies and the neoliberal approach to development, and is further recognized as the battlefield on which the conflicting interests of the world's rich and poor are set. Contributing to the growing recognition that geographies of resistance are relational, where the “global” and the “local” are understood as co-constitutive, a radical democratic ideal grounded in material public space is presented as paramount to repealing archic power in general, and neoliberalism’s exclusionary logic in particular.

Neoliberal economics have emerged in the post-Cold War era as the predominant ideological tenet applied to the development of countries in the global south. For much of the global south, however, the promise that markets will bring increased standards of living and emancipation from tyranny has been an empty one. Instead, neoliberalisation has increased the gap between rich and poor and unleashed a firestorm of social ills.

This book deals with the post-conflict geographies of violence and neoliberalisation in Cambodia. Applying a geographical analysis to contemporary Cambodian politics, the author employs notions of neoliberalism, public space, and radical democracy as the most substantive components of its theoretical edifice. He argues that the promotion of unfettered marketisation is the foremost causal factor in the country’s inability to consolidate democracy following a United Nations sponsored transition. The book demonstrates Cambodian perspectives on the role of public space in Cambodia's process of democratic development and explains the implications of violence and its relationship with neoliberalism.

Taking into account the transition from war to peace, authoritarianism to democracy, and command economy to a free market, this book offers a critical appraisal of the political economy in Cambodia.
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Reviews:

Gunn, G. C. 2013. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 43.1: 188-191.

Brickell, K. 2011. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 52.3: 372-374.

Percival, T. 2011. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 32.2: 270-272.

Christie, R. 2010. South East Asia Research, 19.2: 349-372.

Ordóñez de Pablos, P. 2010. International Journal of Asian Business and Information Management, 1.4: 65-66.

Violence is a confounding concept. It frequently defies explanation and lacks an agreed upon definition. Yet geographers are well positioned to bring greater conceptual clarity to violence by thinking through its intersections with space. In setting the tone for this special issue on Violence and Space we highlight some of the key lines of flight that have shaped geographical thinking on violence. While there are a significant number of geographers interested in the question of violence, the field of ‘geographies of violence’ remains an emerging area of research that deserves greater attention and a more rigorous examination. By emphasizing the spatiality of violence, this special issue aims to contribute to a more sustained conversation on the violent geographies that shape our daily lives, our encounters with institutions, and the various structures that configure our social organization. This introduction is but an initial sketch of what we believe needs to be a much larger and unfolding research agenda dedicated to understanding violence from a geographical perspective.

Employing a poststructuralist-meets-anarchist stance that advances conceptual insight into the nature of sovereign power, this article examines the dialectics of capitalism/primitive accumulation, civilization/savagery, and law/violence, which are argued to exist in a mutually reinforcing 'trilateral of logics'. In deciphering this triadic system, this article offers a radical (re)appraisal of capitalism, its legal process, and its civilizing effects, which together serve to mask the originary and ongoing violences of primitive accumulation and the property system. Such obfuscation suggests that wherever the trilateral of logics is enacted, so too is the state of exception called into being, exposing us all as potential homo sacer (life that does not count). Proceeding as a diagnostic assessment of sovereign power, where although signposted by Cambodia's contemporary experiences of violent land conflict, this article is not intended as a fine-grained empirical analysis. Instead, it forwards a theoretical dialogue where Cambodia's neoliberalizing processes offer a window on how sovereign power configures itself around the three discursive-institutional constellations (i.e., capitalism, civilization, and law) that form the trilateral of logics. Rather than formulating prescriptive solutions, the intention here is critique, where in particular it is argued that the preoccupation with strengthening Cambodia's legal system should not be read as a panacea for contemporary social ills, but as an imposition that serves to legitimize the violences of property.

Video games are increasingly becoming an important medium today, despite the light connota-tion of its initial categorization. Today they are an industry that produces billions of dollars and employs engineers and artists alike in an art form spanning interactive games, to virtual socie-ties where millions of people dwell. However, like all human products, our same fears, flaws and xenophobia show in the games, with the reflection of hatred, racism and stereotypes that are our everyday experience. Also, as a result of the influence of other media, like television, with misrepresentations of blacks, Latinos and other races, or the objectification of women are present in video games. The significant thing found researching for this assignment is that most of those who use these games are themselves part of minorities or races that are not exactly white Americans. Abuse of the frustrations and desires of the user, handling codes and the sys-tem answers of users to maintain the player engagement, has more resemblance to use of illegal drugs with art, but however, the complexity of the design, stories and global assessment, have led to other considerations by experts. Competing in the games could be considered as having more of escapism that the reality of engaging, but all human beings are expected in their tribes to compete and demonstrate their value as a member while complying with social norms or ex-pectations. Same as satisfying or surrender to corporate or group interests. Here are some ideas for the intent of this survey.

La mia relazione si propone di analizzare la violenza intra- familiare contro le donne in età moderna, nelle sue forme ritenute legittime (la  moderata correzione della moglie da parte del marito o delle figlie da parte dei genitori)  e trasgressive (violenza eccessiva o immotivata). Vuole inoltre evidenziare come il potere dell’uso della violenza delegato dal capo famiglia influisca sulle relazioni di genere e generazionali, e indagare quali figure e istituzioni sono individuate come possibile alleato da chi subisce violenza. Le fonti principali sono processi matrimoniali discussi davanti ai tribunali ecclesiastici italiani in età moderna: processi in cui si richiede la separazione per violenza o l’annullamento di un matrimonio stipulato per costrizione parentale; processi di annullamento dei voti per monacazione forzata; processi in cui a detrimento dei testimoni viene addotto un comportamento violento verso i familiari; infine, alcuni processi inquisitoriali intentati contro uomini accusati di violenza sessuale verso le figlie, i quali avevano giustificato con loro i propri crimini con l’argomento del legittimo esercizio dell’autorità paterna.

Through imaginative geographies that erase the interconnectedness of the places where violence occurs, the notion that violence is 'irrational' marks particular cultures as ‘other’. Neoliberalism exploits such imaginative geographies in constructing itself as the sole providence of nonviolence and the lone bearer of reason. Proceeding as a ‘civilizing’ project, neoliberalism positions the market as salvationary to putatively ‘irrational’ and ‘violent’ peoples. This theology of neoliberalism produces a discourse that binds violence in place. But while violence sits in places in terms of the way in which we perceive its manifestation as a localized and embodied experience, this very idea is challenged when place is reconsidered as a relational assemblage. What this re-theorization does is open up the supposed fixity, separation, and immutability of place to instead recognize it as always co-constituted by, mediated through, and integrated within the wider experiences of space. Such a radical rethinking of place fundamentally transforms the way we understand violence. No longer confined to its material expression as an isolated and localized event, violence can more appropriately be understood as an unfolding process, derived from the broader geographical phenomena and temporal patterns of the social world.

"Opposing the neoliberal rhetoric of a shining middle-class India, the Communist Party of India (Maoist) has, since 2004, called for a New Democratic Revolution. Indian Maoists dismiss parliamentary democracy as a sham insofar as it fails to address the concerns and aspirations of the majority of its citizens, nearly four-fifths of whom live below two dollars a day. In their party programme, Maoists characterize the postcolonial Indian state as ‘reactionary’ and ‘autocratic’ and seek a ‘worker-peasant alliance’ to overthrow ‘imperialism, feudalism and comprador bureaucratic capitalism’ via an armed revolutionary struggle. The CPI (Maoist) politburo, which constitutes its ideological leadership, is thus supported by an underground People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The party’s long-term objective is to establish a ‘people’s democratic state under the leadership of the proletariat’ that will ‘guarantee real democracy for the vast majority of people while exercising dictatorship over a tiny minority of exploiters’.

The CPI (Maoist) is active mostly in eastern and central India, where human development levels rank among the lowest in the world, forest cover and rugged terrain facilitate guerrilla tactics and protracted low-intensity insurgency, and tribal and lower caste groups are preponderant. According to the Indian prime minister, Maoist rebels pose the greatest internal security threat to India since independence. In reality, however, Maoist cadres are estimated to be anywhere between 10,000 and 40,000 in a country of nearly 1.2 billion people, though this number does not include sympathizers and non-combatants. These thinly-spread cadres are concentrated chiefly in what journalists, policymakers, and scholars call the Red Corridor, running from the Nepalese border through the states of Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, and Andhra Pradesh. In these areas, regular elections are held, state and non-governmental organizations routinely participate in rural development, and state police and forest officials coexist with armed rebels and their rural supporters. Since 2005-06, the state has deployed paramilitaries to supplement state police forces in combating Maoist guerillas, which has intensified state-sponsored violence and led to widespread human rights abuses, yet it has been incapable of establishing anything akin to a monopoly of legitimate violence. Shared sovereignty is thus the norm, not the exception, as in other insurgent zones in India such as Kashmir and the northeastern frontier. This state of affairs also suggests that the everyday realities of Indian Maoism are somewhat different from its ideological self-image as a vanguardist revolutionary movement."

Contemporary approaches to integrating "self" and the "other"—such as multiculturalism, cultural diversity, race relations, inclusiveness strategies, or identity politics—are flawed from the perspective of traditional thought. At their core, modernist ideologies are inimical to and destructive of all human diversity. The new face of antipathy to pluralism is becoming more deceptive as it grows less focused on respecting diversity and more on promoting ideological uniformity and the erection of a global monoculture. This essay argues that it is from a metaphysical perspective that human diversity can be fully understood and can seek to reconcile the dichotomy of "self" and the "other".

Euro 14,00 " Molti hanno lodato lo spirito d'animo del duca di Parma, un esempio singolare e mostra spiritosa, della franchezza di un animo degno di Principe libero, e di imparare ai Spagnoli come si dovevano tenere conto dei principi italiani, e con qual rispetto si deva con essi procedere. Altri hanno biasimate le azioni del duca, che era degli primi anni imbevuto di pensieri grandi, di pretenzioni maggiori della sua condizione, che non c'era buona e sufficiente ragione di rompere con la Spagna "

Anthropology has long been interested in violence and human nature. Drawing on the research of two recent volumes, this review article considers current scholarship on the subject. At its heart, this topic deals squarely with a question that has been posed for millennia. Are forms of violence attributable to the human condition, or are they the products of cultural development, behaviors that can be controlled, mitigated, and unlearned? The arguments presented in these two volumes have implications not only for how we view humanity's past and present, but also for how we anticipate manifestations of violence in our future.

Humanity is on the threshold of recognizing the fundamental error in its view of life and death. Both death as well as active life is necessary to the vital formation of a larger, more essential whole. In this paper, I apply the sociology of knowledge and change as it pertains to death and focus on ways in which we can step outside its traditional frameworks and limitations. I also discuss topics related to death such as birth, aging, sickness, and war, and examine cultural differences in attitudes toward death. I offer varying perspectives including the Buddhist view and from these draw implications and conclusions. I apply the lenses of contemporary social scientists such as Edgar Morin, Kenneth Gergen, Edward Stewart, Milton Bennett, Mary Catherine Bateson, E. Doyle McCarthy, Philip Slater, and Piotr Sztompka. To these I add other relevant passages from the writings and speeches of key thinkers on the topic of death, in particular, Buddhist philosopher, peacebuilder, and educator, Daisaku Ikeda. To construct a more humanistic and sustainable view of life, it is first of all crucial to establish a culture which perceives death in its larger living context as but one cycle in the expansive eternity of life.

My contribution to the nuclear debate presents 3 possible concepts for complexity evolution, which make understood that what is at a stake right now is the evolution of complexity. The use of missiles in any war scenario has very little, and if any very bad effects on reality, which I strongly recommend to not to look for.

The official results of the conference were published under the following document, which you can find at the ETH Zürich file archive: https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/154318/MD_Draft%20Report_16102012.pdf

The official report does not resolve the dilemma that was discussed in Brussels. It reveals a one-sided and partial perspective and does not uncover the risks at which Europe was. The debate was stronger than the report tells and the report fails to describe the Russian position adequately as well as the reality of the debate. The US-American assurance, that the missile defense shield set up by NATO is not offensive and does not mean a threat to Russia  is a discussable statement. Quoting Vershbow as main speaker is nice, but the way this report puts facts and presents opinions is debatable.

A report about the real terms of discussion cannot be published.

This article argues for the analytical potentials of the concept of spontaneity in our effort to understand critically the socio-spatial dynamics of Athens, but especially the contemporary collective protest actions in the city. Such critical understanding emerges as a significant task given the current urgency to grasp the capitalist crisis and the collective reactions to it. However, taking into account the re-configuration of extreme-Right violence in the streets of Athens, the article attempts to revisit the Marxist dichotomy between spontaneity and non-spontaneity. Via an anthropological critique of this distinction, the paper suggests an additional point of focus beyond spontaneity.

African refugees are confronted with constantly changing structures of power and border-regimes in different geographical and political contexts during their journey to Israel. This thesis focuses on the expressions of experiences of violence of Eritrean refugees who were held hostage in the borderlands of the Northern Sinai desert by human traffickers for indefinite periods of time. Eritrean refugees bear witness to torture, extortion, rape, and organ removal. Both actual and experiential borders and borderlands crossed by African refugees can be seen as ‘frontiers of violence’ that contest the boundaries between legal and illegal and reflect lawlessness, insecurity, and physical and psychological violence.

This thesis discusses frontiers of violence and experiences of being held hostage from three different perspectives; discursive, bodily, and collective frontiers of violence. Discursive frontiers of violence focus on the limits of everyday language in constituting meaning to experiences of violence. These discursive frontiers are not only experienced by narrators, but also by anthropologists who represent victims of torture in an ethnographic text. Discursive frontiers reflect, on the one hand, the methodological problems, insecurities, and empirical frontiers of representation of the anthropologist and on the other hand the ambiguous relation between violence, text, and the body experienced by the interlocutors of this thesis.

Human suffering is lived and re-lived through the body. Bodily frontiers of violence focus on the limits of expressions of suffering and represent experiences of the body in alternative idioms. Alternative idioms dissolve the limits of bodily expressions of frontiers of violence. The protagonists of this thesis strategically situate their bodies in the narratives and use metaphors with an emphasis on the body to express experiences of torture. Through the use of bodily metaphors and poetry Eritrean refugees try to create continuity between past and present experiences of violence. Scars – embodied expressions of violence serve as an alternative idiom through which otherwise unspeakable suffering becomes expressible. Some violations to the body cannot be expressed through one’s own body and pain resides in another body. Eritrean women strategically narrate their own experiences of sexual torture through other bodies. Alternatively, graves are a symbol of the anonymous, silenced witnesses of power structures encountered during the journey and represent the ultimate bodily frontier of violence: death.

Collective frontiers of violence focus on the collective experiences and expressions of suffering. Individual expressions of violence are part of a larger collective discourse of suffering and flight that dominates the social and political lives of Eritreans in Eritrea, Israel, and abroad. Both publically and privately Eritreans perform communal and political acts of commemoration. In public events of mourning, gatherings of ‘survivors’, and demonstrations for global intervention the community ‘speak for those who cannot speak’. Eritrean refugees in exile bear witness for those who died or who are held captive. In the events of mourning, demonstrations for political change, and funerals without bodies Eritreans have found a common alternative idiom through which they express the discourse of political and social suffering and through which collective and individual tears are consoled. Mourning, remembrance, and commemoration are general expression of loss for a social collectivity under threat.