Christian Krohn-Hansen

The Anthropology of Violent Interaction

THIS ESSAY ARGUES that the future of anthropology depends in part on sustained reflection on and extended empirical inquiries into violent processes. It places emphasis on the potential that a strengthened anthropology of violence would have for growth in general theory about societies. I return to this assertion toward the end. In the bulk of my essay, I discuss certain-in some cases sketchy-anthropological contributions to thinking about violence. I base my discussion on three assumptions. First, we need theories about violence which are as cross-culturally applicable as possible. Second, we should attempt to build a perspective on the use of violence upon a notion of actions as constituting the raw material of society. To put it another way, I am seeking a perspective on violence which aims primarily to understand violence as performance, i.e., as violent action. Third, we need to understand violence by understanding the perspective of the perpetrator. Some research into violence yields limited understanding because it is too focused on the victim.1 If we are to understand violence as performance, we must look for the motives and the values of the user of violence.

Making New York Dominican: Small Business, Politics, and Everyday Life

Introduction PART I 1. From Quisqueya to New York City 2. Origin Stories PART II 3. From Bodegas to Supermarkets 4. From Livery Cabs to Black Cars PART III 5. Dominicans and Hispanics 6. Up Against the Big Money 7. In Search of Dignity Conclusion Notes References Index Acknowledgments

The Anthropology and Ethnography of Political Violence

Two recent books have shown the fruitfulness of approaching the analysis of political violence and terror based on a set of general anthropological ideas about meaning formation, cosmology and ritual. One of these works in particular reveals links between what may be described as the cultural construction of political violence in modern industrialized contexts and the shaping of particular spatial and bodily symbolism among social actors. The other book has contributed to the field of cross-cultural studies of political violence by examining connections between the making of particular concepts of the past - or history - among groups of actors, and the suffering and perpetration of political violence. This study sheds general light on the relationship between collective remembering of violence and spirals of ethnic violence. This review essay also briefly assesses a third book, i.e. a collection of essays which discuss different aspects of what it means in theoretical, methodological, and ethical terms to carry out research based on fieldwork when political violence in the field is, or has until recently been, commonplace. Together the three volumes can be said to reveal central features of recent trends among anthropologists who investigate political violence.

The construction of Dominican state power and symbolisms of violence

Maurice Bloch has argued that, under certain circumstances, aspects of a particular cosmology can become an idiom for expressing and justifying the necessity of using bodily violence in relationships of domination and subordination. This article seeks to develop this key idea with the aid of historically and ethnographically specific material from the Dominican Republic. The author attempts to show that both hegemonic Dominican nationalist imagery and hegemonic Dominican masculinity imagery contain certain ‐ different ‐ ideas about conquest. These ideas have supplied idioms for the legitimation and exacerbation of state violence and terror. The article also argues that symbolic and social complexes familiar to anthropologists under the labels of ‘religion’, ‘nationalism’, and ‘gender’, can furnish idioms for the legitimation of the illegitimate. We should not primarily conceptualize and study forms of political violence as phenomena outside a daily and ritually constructed reality of a particular kind, bu...

A tomb for Columbus in Santo Domingo. Political cosmology, population and racial frontiers

La formation de lEtat semble impensable sans leffort quotidien et rituel de lEtat pour faconner des idees en vue de transformer ses populations en un peuple. LA. soutient quil faut examiner la fabrication de populations nationales comme des constructions historiques de cosmologies. Il analyse comment la Republique Dominicaine a produite une idee particuliere du Peuple dominicain. En les fondant dans un alliage dorigines blanches, hispaniques et catholiques les elites et lEtat dominicains firent de leurs origines une descendance de Christophe Colomb. A partir de la fin des annees 1870 la Republique Dominicaine presumait que la tombe de Colomb se trouvait a Saint Domingue et que ses restes se trouvaient ainsi inhumes en territoire dominicain. LEtat sappropriait ainsi la depouille du navigateur, la transformant en objet symbolique et materiel pour a la fois territorialiser et essentialiser la notion de peuple dominicain. Traites comme des reliques objectives, les ossements de lancetre comme heros fondateur enracinaient, incorporaient, pour mieux fonder les renvendications identitaires. La fabrication des idees dominicaines sur Colomb, pour faire de lui lancetre dominicain, restait etroitement liee a cette idee de la suprematie blanche - donc dune notion raciste. LA. defend lidee que ces idees et ces pratiques inaugurees par lEtat setablirent et setablissent encore au detriment des populations noires.

Resistance vs. self-inflicted bonds vs. tacit understandings: or an essay on legitimacy and political practice in light of bread and circuses and weapons of the weak

Apres avoir decrit les relations entre une industrie de tabac et une communaute locale de Colombie et avoir presente lapproche de Bourdieu et sa notion dexperience doxique, lA. analyse les theses opposees de J. Scott et de P. Veyne : alors que le premier soutient que les subordonnes ne cessent de resister dans les relations de pouvoir, le second avance quils sinfligent cette situation. Ces deux theses donnent une certaine definition du pouvoir et de la legitimite