Session 1: ATtempting to Understand Violence

Session 1: Attempting to Understand Violence
Chair: Patricia Turrisi

Phenomenological Explanations of Violence and their Interdisciplinary Value
Michael Staudigl
Austrian Program for Advanced Research and Technology (APART), Austrian Academy of Sciences, and Visiting Fellow, Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna

My lecture will attempt to show that phenomenology provides an adequate tool for a thorough-going description of different phenomena of violence, like physical, psychic and structural violence. My overall aim is to provide those approaches within the humanities, which analyze violence by focusing on the acting subject’s point of view in its concreteness, within a theoretical framework that allows for capturing the many faces of violence in a methodologically grounded way.
By drawing an outline of classical phenomenology (Husserl), I will first give a brief introduction concerning its methodological principles, its general aims, as well as the thematic fields it covers traditionally. As I will argue, a phenomenology of violence, which has not traditionally been part of phenomenology’s attempts to understand human reality in its meaningful totality, has most recently turned out to be a desideratum of phenomenological research.
Secondly I will present, by drawing foremost on the resources of M. Merleau-Ponty and A. Schutz, an outline of a phenomenologically grounded theory of violence. In order to elaborate general leading clues for further analyses, I will restrict myself to explicating two main points phenomenological research emphasizes: (1) the extra-ordinary constitution of the experience of violence taking place within socially derived schemes of interpretation that either fail in the face of violence or neutralize its facticity by passing it over to the regimes of representation; (2) the understanding of violence in terms of the violation of the claims of the other, which refers to the exposition of our bodily being-in-the-world as the medium as well as the subject of human violence.
Finally, it will be shown that these are not only at the core of a phenomenological theory of violence, but to the contrary that they have to be acknowledged as general starting-points in any interdisciplinary approach concerning human violence.

This paper will examine changing modes of analysis and representation of violence in ethnographic and broader anthropological analyses. Ethnographically anthropology has proved hesitant to try and understand the ferocity and forms of such violence since witnessing such acts is problematic in itself to say nothing of the challenges to the practice of ethnography that violent cultural practices present. While various theoretical approaches to the anthropology of war have certainly emphasized the relevance of changing global conditions to the violent contestation of nationalism, ethnicity and state control the question as to why such violence might take particular cultural forms – such as specific kinds of mutilation, “ethnic cleansing”, or other modes of community terror – has not been adequately integrated into wider anthropological theory despite the pioneering work of relatively few authors.
This has meant that anthropology has been unable to effectively counter media and popular commentary that stresses only the “primitive” or tribal nature of many of these conflicts, through repeated reference to the culturally opaque forms of violence practices being observed. These pseudo-anthropological attempts at explanation only serve to recapitulate colonial ideas about the inherent savagery of the non-Western world and, as such, proffer no hope for better understanding.
This paper will argue that this necessarily involves moving away from an anthropology of identity, principally concerned with political, economic and social phenomena and their transformations, toward an anthropology of experience in which individual meanings, emotive forces and bodily practices become more central. Such a recognition of the need to interpret violence as a discursive practice, whose symbols and rituals are as relevant to its enactment as its instrumental aspects, is an indispensable aspect of being able to interpret, and not just condemn, the meaningful nature of violence.

Globalization and Structural Violence
Stefan Bucher
Centre for the Study of Globalization and Cultural Difference, Tamkang University, Danshui, Taiwan

This paper is based on a broad concept of violence following the peace researcher Johan Galtung, who suggested speaking of violence whenever one of the following basic needs of mankind is infringed and violated: The very survival of an individual, general physical well-being, personal identity, or the freedom to choose among various options. This extended concept helps us to coherently integrate a range of phenomena in a holistic and interdisciplinary approach to violence and facilitates the study of cases of violence in the context of an entire “culture of violence”.
Structural violence is a mostly invisible form of violence, embedded in social structures, thus it appears to be normal and is often hardly noticed. However, like direct violence structural violence produces suffering and death. My paper explores the relations between direct violence and structural violence in the current development of global hegemonic structures and includes examples from the economic sphere, where so many people die as a result; however my main focus is on language and culture.
In the linguistic world we can see, roughly speaking the emergence of structures with an Anglophone “centre” and a periphery of other languages. This creates asymmetric relations and leads to linguistic imperialism, colonization of the mind and a loss of languages, which all are forms of linguistic structural violence. The paper ends with a concept of linguistic human rights and other ways to overcome structural violence.

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