Search Results

This book is about the everyday violence in the lives of ladinas in Oriente, Guatemala. It focuses on the violence not directly attributable to individual actions intended to cause harm but embedded in institutions and in quotidian aspects of life, where violence is familiar, routine, a commonplace and so much part of life that it is often not recognized as such. It is about violence that women habitually experience, which is intertwined with the other forms of violence. The objective of this book is to unearth and disclose the misrecognized violence that women habitually experience in familiar and commonplace spaces. It seeks to unveil the violence that is hidden and difficult to measure because it is not confined to individual acts or crimes that can be tabulated. The focus is on the effect of social violence that social orders bring to bear on people. It brings attention to the veiled violence in the forms of social control of women that often lead to humiliation and devaluation — the kind of violence that does not shock the observer because it is part of their everyday lives.

This introductory chapter provides a brief background on the power of everyday violence in the settler colony of German Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia) at the beginning of the twentieth century. It explores the “unspectacular” violent acts orchestrated by the police force of German Southwest Africa. Instead of being built primarily on formal, legal, and bureaucratic processes, the colonial state was produced by improvised, informal practices of violence. Contrary to most social theories of the state, the chapter argues that the organization of state power was not merely a matter of claiming the monopoly of force and thus proscribing any excessive, disruptive, and nonofficial violence. Rather, it reveals that colonial rule consisted in diffusing and regulating specific types of seemingly self-evident harm throughout society.

This chapter considers several issues on the anthropological insights taken from a study of structural dynamics. It shows that anthropologists have been influenced to overlook the forms of political terror and “everyday violence” that often affects the peoples whom they study. It analyzes the relationship of Alfred Kroeber and Ishi, the “last California aborigine”, in order to show how anthropologists also took an active role in preserving and recording the cultural life of indigenous peoples. This chapter also emphasizes that anthropologists should directly confront the question of what makes genocide possible.

This concluding chapter offers some reflections on the nature of everyday violence in colonial Africa. Coming from multiple cultural groups, the African and German men of the Landespolizei shared a host of moral codes that can best be subsumed under the heading of honor. This study reveals significant similarities between policemen from Europe and those from Southern Africa. Out of the Landespolizei's distinctive racial and social composition unfolded a dynamic that made the police decidedly efficacious. Instead of a grand narrative of quantified violence, the chapter draws out the lives of people getting by, living with violence in the everyday. It tries to uncover how the dynamics of violence were inscribed into a moral economy of the accepted and normal. The chapter concludes that violence is not necessarily antithetical to community or social order. Indeed, it can be constructive. The daily brutality of modern colonialism was a horrific injustice. But it was also a way of life with its own rules and regularities.

This chapter approaches practices of everyday violence through the lens of its material instruments. Three tools are examined in depth: the whip, the shackle, and the gun. Their specific use emerged as improvised responses to contextual constraints, refining ideological discourses and official policy along the way. The chapter reveals that violent technologies of policing were parceled out according to the system of status hierarchy that defined colonial order. Under what circumstances they were used, and how, were more important as a matter of social distinction than efficient practice. Symbolically, who used what tools in what situations clarified hierarchy, for instance in the general ban on Africans owning guns. Moreover, the expert or approved use of tools—professionalism—could also serve as a marker of social distinction that elevated the policemen, Africans included, above other colonial actors, such as settlers. This chapter offers a first substantiation of the thesis that police praxis drove legal rationalization. As the cases of corporal punishment and of weapons usage against fleeing subjects illustrate, policemen manufactured procedures that police headquarters reluctantly yet gradually accepted as the rule.

This book examines how the intimate experiences of illness and distress are linked to what medical anthropologists refer to as “social suffering”—the broad array of social and structural conditions that underlie human anguish and misery. Drawing on the narratives of market- and working-class women from the small Bolivian town of Punata, the book argues that emotions and the embodiment of emotion are at the heart of various diseases and symptoms. It shows how the political and economic volatility that hit Bolivia during the 1990s and in the first years of the twenty-first century as a result of neoliberal reforms sparked protest on a much smaller scale as people complained and embodied the so-called violences of everyday life. It shows that much of the emotional distress voiced by the women of Punata was related to social conflicts, domestic violence, economic scarcity, and what is termed “failed sociality.” This introduction explains the book's research methodology and provides an overview of the chapters that follow.

This chapter by Asif Farrukhi pays tribute to the Karachi-based poet Azra Abbas. Farrukhi presents a poignant selection of eleven of Abbas’ poems. These poems address experiences of fear, loneliness, grief, death and shock, in ways that political and random acts of violence insinuate themselves into domestic, commonplace experiences of “ordinary” everyday life in Karachi. Farrukhi shows how, in moving away from the traditional ghazal form of Urdu poetry, Abbas carved out a distinctive, unconventional style of gritty resistance. His relationship to Abbas’ work, and to the poems themselves, raise broader questions around how to articulate suffering in words, what languages are appropriate to capture pain, and how poetic forms may capture a fiery expression of outrage and resistance to violence.

The only survey of migrant farmworkers’ health in California that used clinical exams to collect data found this occupational group had “startlingly” high rates of hypertension and risk factors for cardiovascular disease. Drawing upon the narratives of two migrant farmworking women who were both hospitalized for hypertension, this chapter explores the role of “immigration stress” and “work stress” in producing their chronic disease. While public health researchers have recently pointed to racial minorities’ physiological response to chronic discrimination as an explanation for their higher rates of hypertension, this chapter makes an analogous argument for legal minorities. It suggests that the recent trend towards heightened interior immigration enforcement subjects all noncitizens to forms of “everyday violence,” only increasing their chronic worry and “perseverative stress.” This chapter explores how the stress of being a legal minority gets under migrants’ skin, helping account for migrant farmworkers’ higher rates of chronic morbidity and mortality.