7th Global Conference
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Monday 5th May - Wednesday 7th May 2008
Budapest, Hungary
Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers
Session 7: Discourse and Public Sphere Dynamics
Chair: Oumar Cherif Diop
‘Resurrecting’ the Self: Atomizing the Individual via Solitary Confinement
Siyaves Azeri
Department of Philosophy,
University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
In 1992, a former Iranian political prisoner killed himself in Ontario, Canada, where he was living as a refugee. During his imprisonment he was subjected to an extremely inhumane torture method, that is called “coffin” or “resurrection,” the central aspect of which is absolute isolation combined with extreme physical and mental abuse.
The approach that describes his suicide based on “victim’s confrontation with monstrousness of human kind” fails to explain this act fully, since it reproduces what was aimed for by “resurrection”, namely, atomization of the individual; such an approach asserts the false dichotomy between the individual and the society.
The “success” of resurrection signifies the social make of the self. If the self were a solipsistic entity, one that individual-subjectivist theories suggest, solitary confinement and isolation techniques would not function. Isolation aims for breaking down the resistance of the individual and dehumanizing him/her through atomization. Moreover, the social construction of the self yields to transcription of this personal breakdown into a social retreat, i.e., since consciousness is a social construct the punitory system succeeds in terrorizing the society through punishing the individual, traumatizing both the individual and the society.
Furthermore, the destruction of the self via atomization results in social misconceiving of this trauma as an isolated problem peculiar to certain individuals due to their mischief. In other words, the society tends to view the trauma that is caused by torture and isolation as the personal problem of the immediate victims of these cruelties, victimizing them by intrinsically labeling them as “others”. Such misconception, in turn, makes this trauma insurmountable; in this way, the atomization of the self continues on a social scale and the tragedy of the immediate victim prolongs even after his/her release. Unless the social make of consciousness is admitted the trauma and its social extent cannot be confronted and thus, cannot be surmounted.
The Struggle for Survival and Security in the Middle East: An Ethnological Observation of Public Discourse in Israel
Aide Esu
Facoltà di Scienze Politiche,
Unversità degli Studi di Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy
This paper will exam the construction of public discourse, of Mossad officials, Shin Bet commanders, high ranking officials of Israeli Defence Force, Military Judges and “war heroes”. It is based on field observation with the Shurat Hadin Law Center travel tour to Israel on an “eight day exploration of Israel’s Middle East”. The position in the military and political hierarchy and the place where the public discourse is performed - military museum, military bases, the Defence Ministry, military Court Houses, intelligence observation station - influence and shape the discourse and delimit the narration (wars, battlefields, military technology, media argumentations). The participatory approach to the study of those speeches facilitate and highlight the social representation and the performance dimension of public discourse, and it shows minor details like the body language, the variations of public speech and audience reaction. The frame analysis highlights all those dimensions of public discourse, the military-political and social construction of the conflict, the narration of the “self” and the denial of the “other”. The discourse is framed in the institutional ceremonies by internal codes, constrains of what can and what cannot be pronounced in public, status obligations, deference, security, hierarchy. In fact what the organisers presents as exceptional meetings constitute a classical example of what the sociology of total institutions define as institutional ceremonies. Their function is to open places that in general are exclusive, and present a predefined image of the institutional purpose. This unique case of public relevance of military discourse in a democracy engenders the social construction and the maintenance of the conflict sustains the discourse of the legitimate use of violence.
Legitimation of Violence Against Women in Peri-Urban Tanzania
Hilde Jakobsen
University of Bergen, Norway
The paper will discuss the preliminary findings from a qualitative exploration of people’s attitudes and opinions of physical male-on-female partner violence (‘wife beating’) in peri-urban Tanzania. Levels of physical male-on-female partner violence are estimated to be high in Tanzanian society (WHO, 2005). Among survey respondents, 50-70 per cent of ever-partnered women report they are ‘beaten regularly’ (TAMWA, 1999). The experiences of legal, development and social work practitioners working with the issue suggest a strong and largely unaddressed normative dimension to the violence. The recent US-administered Demographic and Health Survey supports this - estimating that 60-80% of Tanzanians think wife-beating can be justified – but little other research on the normative dimension of this type of family violence has been identified (DHS, 2005).
I have used focus group discussions to further explore the socially shared attitudes and opinions suggested by the responses to the internationally standardised closed-ended question asked by the Demographic and Health Survey. I used purposeful sampling aiming for socio-economic, age and sex representativity. Group participants (n=400) were encouraged to discuss issues of justification, legitimation, blame and responsibility amongst themselves through vignettes, group exercises and discussion questions. This paper will discuss the preliminary findings of this research in relation to theoretical constructs such as Galtung’s ‘cultural violence’ and Bourdieu’s ‘symbolic violence’.
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