7th Global Conference
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Monday 5th May - Wednesday 7th May 2008
Budapest, Hungary
Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers
Session 11: Social Bonds, Communication and Violence
Chair: Richard Herbst
Preventing 'Ideal' Communication by Linguistic Violence
Gabriela Scripnic
Dunarea de Jos University, Galati, Romania
The paper approaches violence from a linguistic perspective, suggesting a possible analytical model of non-rational discourse, viewed narrowly as discourse in which appeal to violence is a constant technique meant to influence on the public or the opponent’s standpoint. The approach is framed in our more general model of collaborative dialogue and ideal communication, which we see as being: 1) rational; 2) relevant (based on the Communication Principle); 3) polite; 4) evidential (there is evidence of the information and / or knowledge sources). The main lines of inquiry are directed – in this particular context – towards conclusions which should answer the following questions: a) which types of speech acts (presumably expressives) are characteristic of the two discourse instances – being / becoming violent? b) which is the discursive connection between evidentiality and violent language – is there any relationship between violence and traces of information source marking in discourse? c) how violence is used as a strategic maneuver in order to defend a standpoint and / or resist the opponent’s standpoint? d) how do fallacies such as ad bacullum, ad hominem, ad personam appear as structuring ‘violent discourse’? The paper summarizes some of the results in two research projects developed within Dunarea de Jos University of Galati.
Boorishness and Insults as Communicative Practices of Negative Solidarity
Nadezhda Kazarinova, Valentina Pogolsha and Elena Strogetskaya
Saint-Petersburg Electrotechnical University, Russia, Saint-Petersburg State University, Russia
This article considers such communicative practices of violence widespread in Russia as boorishness and insults. While in socio-psychological sense they represent self-assertion at the expense of the Other, sociologically they can be viewed as the forms of negative unity, negative tie-up based on forming (including means of boorishness and insults) negative identity. The article offers the results of the research on communicative environment of some Saint-Petersburg institutes of higher education. Discourse-analysis of the process of the discussion and decision-making by university administrations, the communicative interactions between students and lecturers, as well as between students allowed to reveal the structure- and status-forming and identification functions of the violent verbal practice. The results of the research in university environment confirm the views existing in sociological and psychological literature: in the Russian society the forms of positive solidarity as well as interest and attention to the Other are expressed weakly. Many researchers attribute such phenomena as negative identity and the washing out of person boundaries to Russian cultural peculiarities. The wide spread occurrence of emotional violence in Russian families and the lack of the experience of resistance to the Boorishness and insults at the same time should be considered as the consequence of it.
Printing a Pogrom: Violence and Print Communities in the Case of Captain Keller
Roland Clark
University of Pittsburgh, USA
One thing that printing and violence have in common is that both help create communities. Printing of reports about violence also mutates and expands existing communities created by violent events such as pogroms. On 5-6 December, 1927, large numbers of ultra-nationalist students rioted in the northern Romanian towns of Cluj and Oradea Mare. The National Union of Christian Students of Romania (UNSCR) was holding its annual congress in Oradea Mare at the time and, as often happened at UNSCR meetings, things got out of hand. The students attacked Jewish residents and destroyed their businesses and places of worship. Captain Wilfred N. Keller, an American businessman and former YMCA worker, went onto the streets to ask rioters to stop vandalizing his office. The severe beating that Keller received put him in hospital and temporarily brought Romanian anti-Semitic violence into the international spotlight.
This paper examines how the Oradea Mare violence and the court cases that followed were represented in the Romanian and international press. In particular, it looks at how newspaper reports, police memos and diplomatic documents surrounding the Keller case helped to boost the Legion of the Archangel Michael, a nascent student movement out of obscurity and in-fighting. The central question asks how fascist movements proselytized and gained adherents by first creating communities of readers around controversial events such as pogroms. Skillfully manipulated newspaper reports created a national image for UNSCR students which the Legion was able to claim as its own. The Legion’s ability to turn adverse publicity to its own advantage, its dogged determination to forge reading communities through newspapers, pamphlets and the occasional pogrom, and its own pietistic public religiosity helped to make it one of the most famous fascist movements of interwar Eastern Europe.
© Inter-Disciplinary.Net 2008