Advanced Seminars-Culture and Conflict

Culture and Conflict: The Poetics of Violent Practice, an advanced seminar chaired by Neil Whitehead, University of Wisconsin, Madison, April 28-May 2, 2002

Participants
Neil Whitehead, Chair
Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin, Madison
"On The Poetics of Violence"

Begonia Aretxaga
Department of Anthropology, University of Texas, Austin
"Before the Law: The Narrative of the Unconscious in Basque Political Violence"

Veena Das, Discussant
Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University

Stephen Ellis
Afrika-studiecentrum, Netherlands
"Culture and Violence: Some Reflections on West African Wars"

Kenneth M. George
Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin, Madison
"Violence, Culture, and the Indonesian Public Sphere: Some Ethnographic Tasks"

Alex Hinton
Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University
"The Poetics of Genocidal Practice: Violence under the Khmer Rouge"

Pradeep Jeganathan
Department of Anthropology, University of Minnesota
"Anthropology, Nationalist Thought, Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan, and an Uncertain Descent into the Ordinary"

Mark Seltzer
Department of English, University of California, Los Angeles
"True Crime"

Christopher C. Taylor
Department of Anthropology, University of Alabama
"Rwandan Sacred Kingship"

Kay B. Warren, Discussant
Department of Anthropology, Harvard University

Summary

Culture and Conflict: The Poetics of Violent Practice

This year's second Advanced Seminar, "Culture and Conflict: The Poetics of Violent Practice," took place April 28-May 2, 2002. Two discussants joined the eight participants whose papers examined violent practice in a range of cultures including those of West Africa, the Khmer Rouge, Rwanda, the Basque region of Spain, and the United States. Neil Whitehead, who chaired the seminar, described the purpose of the seminar as "seeking an understanding of violence as a cultural expression."
     Anthropologists have tended to treat violence as evidence of the "breakdown" or "end limit" of culture, generally regarding violent acts as meaningless and "without sense or reason." Whitehead suggested that such a perspective leaves violence under-theorized, "assuming its senselessness requires no theorization or interpretation." However, ethnographic research makes clear that within specific cultures, violent acts are expressions of cultural codes imbued with great meaning for both perpetrator and victim. "Rather than being at the margins of culture," posited Whitehead, "perhaps violence is at the center of culture."
     By conjoining the concepts of violence and culture, the seminar intended to "trouble our notions of both concepts," and seek new ways to comprehend and interpret violent practice. "Unless the perpetrator's view is part of our own understanding," Whitehead observed, "how to address the sources of violence will escape us." The seminar examined various aspects of state violence, legitimate and illegitimate forms of violence, and the impact of anticipatory violence on daily life.
     For anthropology to fully understand the cultural impacts of modernization and globalization, Whitehead said, innovative research on violence is vitally important. "It is in the marginal spaces of the global ethnoscape that violence becomes a form of cultural affirmation and expression in the face of a loss of 'tradition' and a dislocation of ethnicity."

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