Life and words: violence and the descent into the ordinary – By Veena Das

Shah, Alpa

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9655.2007.00472_31.x

Cited by 69 publications

(117 citation statements)

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“…Lo que podría considerarse como una continuidad imaginada entre las violencias del presente y del pasado, en las que “el pasado … está presente en el trauma corporizado en el temor, en la violencia de Estado cotidiana, en las nuevas masacres, en las nuevas desapariciones, torturas, encarcelamientos, ejecuciones, persecuciones, secuestros” (Argüello 2016, 99), en el caso de los pueblos originarios se remonta a una temporalidad mucho más profunda. Como en otros territorios de América Latina, esto ha hecho resurgir una conciencia crítica sobre la perpetuación de las dinámicas de racismo, exclusión y violencia coloniales, a lo que algunas se han referido como “violencia continua” (Das 2007; Mora 2017) y otras “continuo del genocidio”: una “herida histórica de la conquista europea de las Américas” que genera un “vínculo moral entre el presente y el pasado” y en el que el sufrimiento – expresado en las narrativas de desposesión territorial, pérdida de autonomía, lucha por la tierra y resistencia – adquiere un matiz identitario y un significado político y ético (Espinosa Arango 2007, 55).…”

Section: Discussionunclassified

Defensa comunitaria y culturas del terror: Crimen organizado y violencia de Estado en comunidades originarias de Guerrero, México

Delgado

2022

J Latin Amer Carib Anth

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Rich in raw materials, the state of Guerrero, Mexico, is one of the main enclaves of opium production, mineral extraction, and a focus for the multiplication of armed actors in Latin America, which, together with the overlapping of counterinsurgent violence in the past, post‐colonial violence and the militarization of the policies of the so‐called fight against drugs has contributed to very high rates of multiple and continuous violence. Drawing on investigative ethnographic fieldwork, testimonial work and a hemerographic review in Guerrero, this article investigates how the entanglement between state, para‐state, criminal and community actors leads to some short of “state of exception,” as well as to the emergence of forms of territorial organization. Through a case study in rural Nahua communities of Chilapa and echoing studies on the anthropology of violence, state anthropology and anarchist anthropology, we discuss the culture of terror at the margins of the state and the strategies of community and everyday resistance, that, although seek to ensure their political and economic survival, are at risk of being captured by some forms of the violence they fight.

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Section: Discussionunclassified

Defensa comunitaria y culturas del terror: Crimen organizado y violencia de Estado en comunidades originarias de Guerrero, México

Delgado

2022

J Latin Amer Carib Anth

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“…“Unspeakability” has been a dominant analytic lens for gendered violence in South Asia (Das, 2006). This scholarship attends to the limits of language in describing suffering that cannot yet be put into words or categories of pain that annihilate speech (Scarry, 1987).…”

Section: The Belly Speaksmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Belly's Word: Domestic Violence in a Bengali Clinic

Maitra

2023

Med Anthropol Q

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Unspeakability is a dominant analytic lens in scholarship on gendered violence in India, but women can and do speak out. This article examines how Bengali women complain about domestic violence through peter katha, the belly's word. The capacious pet (belly) is the seat of tension, where abuse dwells in the body. At a clinic in Kolkata, India, women describe sensations of abdominal pain, pressure, and hunger to convey patterns and temporalities of violence. Yet complaints of belly pain go unacknowledged by local clinicians. Hygiene discourses frame poor women's bodies, not structural violence, as the problem. Peter katha is more than an idiom of distress: it is a genre of embodied complaint that illuminates violence as the accrual of harm and, in its dynamic and layered quality, moves beyond a binary of disclosure or concealment. Anthropologists may use peter katha to extend the conceptual vocabulary of gender and silence. [domestic violence, kinship, complaint, hygiene, belly, India]

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“…Conversely, some anthropologists of violence have critically analyzed embodied emotion, but mainly in terms of suffering (Daniel 1996; Das 2007; Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997). Emotions, such as rage, translate the excessive, embodied intensities of affect into a narrative, socioculturally meaningful form (Massumi 1996, 221), drawing from “open‐ended and often unrecognized chains of semiotic associations” (Newell 2018, 1).…”

Section: How Violence Became a Dead Zonementioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond the dead zone: The meanings of loving violence in Highland Mexico

Whittaker

2022

American Anthropologist

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When violence clearly conveys a message and produces order, it simplifies meaning. Worded differently, it creates a “dead zone” (Graeber 2012). This article argues that intense, passionate love, like intense, physical violence, drastically diminishes meaning and enhances the potential for harm. In recent globalized feminist discourse, it is commonly claimed that love and violence are mutually exclusive, which rests on the assumption that violence is bad and love is good. Yet strictly separating love and violence (e.g., by purging sacrifice from one's understanding of love) intensifies the two and produces dead zones. By contrast, many inhabitants of Milpa Alta, a rural, partially Nahuatl‐speaking community south of Mexico City, contend that violence can only be understood in relation to love. They define both concepts in terms of their affective qualities and potential to transform marital and social life. Violence, like love, is neither inherently negative nor positive because sacrifice and punishment are often considered key ingredients for maintaining a productive love among spouses, siblings, and within the wider community. Leaving the boundary between love and violence conceptually and morally porous allows them to remain generative of meaning and retain their productive potential.

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Life and words: violence and the descent into the ordinary – By Veena Das

Cited by 69 publications

References 0 publications

Defensa comunitaria y culturas del terror: Crimen organizado y violencia de Estado en comunidades originarias de Guerrero, México

Defensa comunitaria y culturas del terror: Crimen organizado y violencia de Estado en comunidades originarias de Guerrero, México

The Belly's Word: Domestic Violence in a Bengali Clinic

Beyond the dead zone: The meanings of loving violence in Highland Mexico

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