Monday 12th August - Friday 16th August 2002
Prague, Czech Republic

Session 1: Conflict, Discourses and the Language of Violence

Randall Hall - Justifying Violence: Ninety Years of Explanations for a 1912 Court-Room Massacre in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains
Associate Director of Merit-Based Scholarships and Assistant Professor of History , Wake Forest University, USA

This paper will approach the question of violence from a historical perspective by examining a courtroom gun battle that brought brief national prominence to the Blue Ridge mountain town of Hillsville, Virginia, in 1912 and will analyze the subsequent discursive struggle to define the significance of the violence. Upon conviction for a minor offense, Floyd Allen, the patriarch of a prominent and well-to-do local family of leaders in the Democratic political party, and various members of his family engaged in a gun battle with county officials (most staunch members of the Republican party) that left the judge, the sheriff, the prosecuting attorney, and two others dead. The state of Virginia electrocuted Floyd and his son, while several others served lengthy prison sentences. This paper will analyze the subtle ways that a variety of groups shaped competing narratives of this one outbreak of extreme violence.

Historians and sociologists have long labeled the American South as a culture of violence. This incident provides insights at a time of transition in that it occurred during the Progressive era of reform, as the state extended rational court systems and bureaucracies more deeply into the ruling structure of such small towns. Accustomed to doing as they liked in their local arena of power, the Allen family members reacted violently to law enforcement from a newly strengthened state court system. They and many supporters around the state defended their actions as legitimate reaction to a threat from their political opposition. Other contemporaries defended the killings in the name of family honour, a pre-modern trait being carried into a modernizing society. Over the past ninety years, Virginians have continued to debate the causes and meaning of the shootings in books, memoirs, a play, a novel, and even a rock opera. Conclusions moved from political defence to a romanticized sense of heroic resistance to government. One education reformer in the 1930s used the incident to illustrate the inherent depravity of southern mountain culture. Most recently, two amateur historians who have lived in the area wrote of the shootings and concluded separately and rather tepidly, that both sides were to blame. This middle ground in analysis, along with certain ritual commemorations in the community, demonstrate that even now partisan passions flare if blame is allocated to the instigating family. The community has yet fully to work through the traumatic aftermath of violence in an objective way.

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Sabah Salih - The Dogma of State Violence: Saddam-Style
Department of English, Bloomsburg University, Bloomsburg, PA 17815

In the November 2, 2001, issue of Le Monde, Jean Baudrillard, responding to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, writes: “Terrorism is the act that restores an incredible singularity to the heart of a generalized system of exchange.” The singularity in question here is, of course, Islamic fundamentalism, now the only international singularity at war with transnational capitalism. Since coming to power in Iraq in 1976, Saddam Hussein, in much the same way, has transformed the single singularity of violence (executions, torture, terrorism, forcible relocation, among others) into the state’s most important dogma: a totalized order accountable to no one but himself.
Saddam’s conception of violence as state dogma goes back a long time. My purpose here is to focus on a small but significant part of it. From 1982 through 1988, Saddam organized, directed, and financed a systematic campaign of terror and extermination against the Kurdish minority in Iraqi Kurdistan. He called it Anfal, after a verse from the Koran calling upon Mohammed to “cast terror into the hearts of the infidels. Strike off their heads, strike off the very tips of their fingers.” The unbelievers had to be killed, their villages and towns burnt, their properties confiscated, their women enslaved.

Saddam’s resurrection, transformation, and, to a degree, distortion of Anfal 1,364 years later was intended to accomplish several goals: to reinvent himself as a Muslim leader resolutely committed to serving the faith; to give religious justification to large-scale violence against noncombatants; to reawaken the racist notion that non-Arabs, their conversion to Islam notwithstanding, generally harbour anti-Islam feelings; to transform the Muslim Kurds into an otherness hostile to “true” Islam and thus justify their obliteration by whatever means available. More important, Saddam hoped the successful end of the campaign would pave the way for him to emerge as the undisputed leader of the Arab and Muslim worlds. Saddam invested not just money and material in the campaign but also enlisted the help of many writers, poets, journalists, popular entertainers, and the enormous power of the state-controlled media.

By the time it was over, some 5000 villages had been leveled, an area one half the size of the state of New Jersey had been depopulated, its many orchards and virgin forests burned to the last tree, its many fresh water springs shut under heavy layers of concrete and steel. To this day, some 180,000 people remain unaccounted for.

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Kathleen Young - The Translation of Violence: The Anthropologist as Madwoman
Western Washington University, USA

For 10 years of participant-observation among refugees, immigrants, and American citizens from the former Yugoslavia, I have analyzed the ways war and acts of violence are waged on the battlefield of consciousness through speech acts, inclusive of witness testimony and academic analysis. I discuss the ways war and acts of violence are waged on the battlefield of consciousness through various speech acts and some of the difficulties encountered in translating occurrences on the battlefield of consciousness into speech. Anthropologists often bear witness to human suffering, but few have openly discussed the personal and professional costs of research involving violence directed by or against members of their own ethnic group or gender or the effects upon their audience. The translation of violence, by those who have experienced violence, can be an embodied translation edified when the conversants "speak the same language" or share the dialect within the dialectic of violence. Bearing witness to the effects of the war and violence has meant 10 years of continual speaking about the unspeakable: rapes, atrocities, imiseration, and death. Translation of violence into words is an act of interpretation linked to reality. The core link here, is the translator's own lived experience as an embodied self and in semiotic terms, the core way the translator is able to convey the experience of violence by being an index to it. As an anthropologist of violence, my subjectivity points to the reality I describe as smoke does to fire. When the lived experience of the scholar transforms the translation of violence and thereby transforms the translation of academic scholarship is a reader unaffected by violence unaffected by this kind of embodied language of rape nor has he conversed in the language of atrocity with people scholarship? In a professional setting, are the listeners enlisted in the translation and thereby participants in the subjectivity of violence?