Everyday Violence: Bodies, Death and Silence Writing about El Salvador in 1982, Joan Didion noted in her characteristically

spartan prose that the dead and pieces of the dead turn up everywhere, everyday, as taken-for-granted as in a nightmare or in a horror movie. In Salvador there are walls of bodies; they are strewn across the landscape, and they pile up in open graves, in ditches, in public restrooms, in bus stations, along the sides of the road. Vultures, of course, suggest the presence of a body. A knot of children on the street suggests the presence of a body. Some bodies even turn up in a place called Puerto del Diablo, a well-known tourist site described in Didions inflight magazine as a location offering excellent subjects for color photography. It is the anonymity and the routinization of it all that strikes the naive reader as so terrifying. Who are all these desaparecidosthe unknown and the disappearedboth the poor souls with plucked eyes and exposed, mutilated genitals lying in a ditch and those unidentifiable men in uniform standing over the ditches with guns in their hands? It is the contradiction of wartime crimes against ordinary peacetime citizens that is so appalling. Later we can expect the unraveling, the recriminations, the not-so-guilty confessions, the church-run commissions, the government-sponsored investigations, the arrests of tense and unyielding men in uniform, and finally the optimistic reportsBrazil, Argentina (later, perhaps even El Salvador) nunca mais. Quoth the raven, Nunca mais. After the fall, after the aberration, we expect a return to the normativ e, to peacetime sobriety, to notions of civil society, human rights, the sanctity of the person (Mauss personne morale), habeas corpus, and the unalienable rights to the ownership of ones body. But here I intrude with a shadowy question. What if the disappearances, the piling up of civilians in common graves, the ano nymity, and the routinization of violence and indifference were not, in fact, an aberration? What if the social spaces before and after such seemingly chaotic and inexplicable acts were filled with rumors and whisperings, with hints and allegations of what could happen, especially to those thought of by agents of the social consensus as neither persons nor individuals? What if a climate of anxious, ontological insecurity about the rights to ownership of ones body was fostered by a studied, bureaucratic indifference to the lives and deaths of marginals, criminals and other no-account people? What if the public routinization of daily mortifications and little abominations, piling up like so many corpses on the social landscape, provided the text and blueprint for what only appeared later to be aberrant, inexplicable, and extraordinary outbreaks of state violence against citizens? In fact, the extraordinary outbreaks of state violence against citizens . . . entail the generalizing to recalcitrant memb ers of the middle classes what is, in fact, normatively practiced in threats or open violence against the poor, marginal and disorderly popular classes. For the popular classes every day is, as Taussig . . . succinctly put it, terror as usual. A state of emergency occurs when the violence that is normally contained to that social space suddenly explodes into open violence against the less dangerous social classes. What makes the outbreaks extraordinary, then, is only that the violent tactics are turned against respectable citizens, those usually shielded from state, especially police, terrorism. . . What makes the political tactic of disappearance so nauseatinga tactic used strategically throughout Brazil during the military years (1964-1985) against suspected subversives and agitators and now applied to a different and perhaps an even more terrifying context (i.e., against the shantytown poor and the economic marginals now thought of as a species of public enemy)is that it does not occur in a vacuum. Rather, the disappearances occur as part of a larger context of wholly expectable, indeed even anticipated behavior. Among the people of the Alto, disappearances form part of the backdrop of everyday life and confirm their worst fears and anxietiesthat of losing themselves and their loved ones to the random forces and institutionalized violence of the state. The practices of everyday violence constitute another sort of state terror, one that operates in the ordinary, mundane world of the moradores both in the form of rumors and wild imaginings and in the daily enactments of various public rituals that bring the people of the Alto into contact with the

state: in public clinics and hospitals, in the civil registry office, in the public morgue, and in the municipal cemetery. These scenes provide the larger context that makes the more exceptional and strategic, politically motivated disappearances not only allowable but also predictable and expected. "You gringos, a Salvadoran peasant told an American visitor, are always worried about violence done with machine guns and machetes. But there is another kind of violence that you should be aware of, too. I used to work on a hacienda. My job was to take care of the dueos dogs. I gave them meat and bowls of milk, food that I couldnt give my own family. When the dogs were sick, I took them to the veterinarian. When my children were sick, the dueo gave me his sympathy, but no medicine as they died.. . . Similarly, the moradores of the Alto speak of bodies that are routinely violated and abused, mutilated and lost, disappeared into anonymous public spaceshospitals and prisons but also morgues and the public cemetery. And they speak of themselves as the anonymous, the nobodies of Bom Jesus da Mata. For if one is a somebody, a fildalgo (a son of a person of influence), and a person in the aristocratic world of the plantation casa grande, and if one is an individual in the more open, competitive, and bourgeois world of the new market economy (the rua), then one is surely a nobody, a mere fulano-de-tal (a so-and-so) and Joao Pequeno (little guy) in the anonymous world of the sugarcane cutter (the mata). Moradores refer, for example, to their collective invisibility, to the ways they are lost to the public census and to other state and municipal statistics. The otherwise carefully drafted municipal street map of Bom Jesus includes the Alto do Cruzerio, but more than two-thirds of its tangle of congested, unpaved roads and paths are not included, leaving it a semiotic zero of more than five thousand people in the midst of the bustling market town . . . The people of the Alto are invisible and discounted in many other ways. Of no account in life, the people of the Alto are eq ually of no account in death. On average, more than half of all deaths in the municpio are of shantytown children under the age of five, the majority of them the victims of acute and chronic malnutrition. But one would have to read between the lines because the death of Alto children are so routine and so inconsequential that for more than three-fourths of recorded deaths, the cause of death is left blank on the death certificates and in the ledger books of the municipal civil registry office. In a highly bureaucratic society in which triplicates of every form are required for the most banal of events . . . the registration of child death is informal, and anyone may serve as a witness. Their deaths, like their lives, are quite invisible, and we may as well speak of their bodies, too, as having been disappeared. The various mundane and everyday tactics of disappearances are practiced perversely and strategically against people who view their world and express their own political goals in terms of bodily idioms and metaphors . . . At their base community meetings the people of the Alto say to each other with conviction and with feeling, Every man should be the dono [owner] of his own body.. . . Against these compelling images of bodily autonomy and certitude is the reality of bodies that are simultaneously discounted and preyed on and sometimes mutilated and dismembered. And so the people of hte Alto come to imagine that there is nothing so bad, so terrible that it cannot happen to them, to their bodies, because of sickness (por culpa do doenca), becuase of doctors (por culpa dos medicos), because of politics and power (por culpa da politica) or because of the state and its unwieldy, hostile bureaucracy (por culpa da burocracia) ... " . . . The intolerableness of the situation is increased by is ambiguity. Consciousness moves in and out of an accpetance of the state of things as normal and expectable-violence as taken for granted and sudden ruptures whereby one is suddenly thrown into a state of shock (susto, pasmo, nervious)-that is endimic, a graphic body metaphor secretly expressing and publicizing the reality of the untenable situation. There are nervous, anxious whisperings, suggestions, hints. Strange rumors surface."
Anthro 198 notes:

Ethnography, emerging from anthropology, and adopted by sociologists, is a qualitative methodology that lends itself to the study of the beliefs, social interactions, and behaviours of small societies, involving participation and observation over a period of time, and the interpretation of the data collected. Loshini Naidoo Ethnography developed as the tool of social science, and involved the social scientific observer, the observed, the research report as text, and the audience to which the text ispresented; provided it led to new knowledge. The researcher as participant observer has the advantage of being immersed in the culture over an extended period and therefore in a position to discover what was hidden, but it became clear that the subjectivity of the researcher also has to be taken into account. Ethnography is linked to the lived experience of the ethnographer (Berry, 2011). Rosen (1991) comments that there is no absolute truth of interpretation, but rather the value of the account lies in whether it is a plausible explanation for the data collected. The aim is to provide meaning for the culture under study, and the strength of ethnography lies in the use of more than one method (Reeves, Kuper and Hodges, 2008), this flexibility allowing for change as the research continues over time. The process involves the collection of data via field notes, journals, audio visual material and cultural artefacts, and the analysis of this data using codes and references. This is then strengthened by triangulation and analysis, using such techniques as interviews both individual and group, and informal dialogue. Auto ethnography seeks to communicate the mechanisms of the inner world (Holt, 2003, p.5) of an individual from the perspective of the researcher. It is important to recognise that auto ethnography not only places the researcher within the experience of an individual or group, but it sees the researcher reflecting upon their own, personal experience of the experience being researched. The process involves writing the self into the history and projecting it into the present, by using various writing and communication techniques and forms (Denzin, 2006; Holt, 2003). It is a study of the self as other and when linked with culture, involves a negotiation between the ethnographer stories (us) and their relevance to culture. It exposes the hidden I in the accounts, to allow for a more authentic process (Berry, 2011). The aim of auto ethnography is always to challenge the norms of methodological practices in order to achieve a more egalitarian and just society, making clear where power, privilege and biases lie (Denzin, 2006; Berry, 2011), in the process of studying those who have been hidden or represented as abject, abnormal, exotic, and uncivilised, and to critique the master narratives of western white history writers (Spry, 2011, p.500). Performance ethnography links sociology, anthropology, community studies, performative arts and cultural studies, and is gaining impetus, as a useful tool for bringing new

knowledge and understanding to an audience, as well as revealing power structures. From there, depending on the response of the audience, which can be varied depending on gender, ethnicity or social class, it can lead to action (Smith and Gallo, 2007; Hamera, in Denzin and Lincoln, 2011). Warren (2006) argues it has the potential to change ourselves and others, and by disrupting the taken-forgranted aspect of a practice, it can make that practice more meaningful. It creates the ability to see how lives are constructed, real people in real places, describing lived experiences, so that what seems stable can be probed and possibly transformed (Warren, 2006, p. 318; Smith and Gallo, 2006). The ubiquity of image in todays society challenges the ethnographer to consider the place of photography in qualitative research (Prosser in Denzin, 2011). In the past it has been seen as a means of portraying truth. Where images have been used to capture aspects of a culture, it was seen as an unproblematic piece of information, and was often used to portray something that was difficult to describe with words, and was considered as part of the process of observation (Harper, 2006). It was popular, as it seemed to reflect scientific realism, and was used extensively in sociology, science, geography and history. However, this view has been contested, as Prosser (In Denzin, 2011) points out, even photographs are an interpretation, they are not the thing itself. In using visual material, there is still a need for reflexivity and an understanding of the subjectivity of the photographer. Whilst this can be expressed in text, in photography, the viewer is not aware of why they are confronted with one image and not another, whether the image reflects something that is true, or simply an isolated incident. The gaze of the camera leads the viewer to see the image or film from the photographers point of view, so that they end up with the same viewpoint (Pink, 2006, p. 2). Anthropology and the Genocide of Balkans -Thomas Cushman Balance in Interpretation: The hallmark of the recent Balkan War is the prominence of equivocal and relativist position in the interpretation of war The role of the West: Cultural legitimation for indifference and non-intervention Collective Memory and Preemptive Genocide: Does not acknowledge the causes or the outcomes of the war beyond a focus on Croatian symbolic aggression against Serbs The Orientalist Fallacy in Balkan Serbs as regressive and inferior Application of the term orientalist to Croatians and Sloveness connotes that the latter dominates the serbs Yugonostalgics

Western intellectuals who are deeply committed to the Yugoslav project of federalism - acceptance of the extreme views of the Serbs on war; Serbian Hegemony --------------------------------------------------------------------------------o We Wish to Inform you that tomorrow, we will be killed with our families - Philip Gourevitch Kanguka Newspaper main theme is the Habyarimana establishment -1991: Habyarimanas FAR faked an attack, blamed RPF - based on economic rather than ethnic conflict - Akazu knows nothing about newspaper -wake up - Hutus o o Kangura Newspaper Wake it up -Hassan Ngeze: editor -RPF documents about the previous Tutsis supremacist conspiracy to subjugate Hutus in feudal bondage o Interahamwe hutu militas, who who attack together

ON SUFFERING AND STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE -Paul Farmer Haiti the place where the story took place - Extreme human suffering -AIDS and tuberculosis o Acephie Josephs story -Kay: Haitis plateau region with unpaved roads - as pretty as she was nice - went to cooking school after death of captain Jacques honorat, which prepared her for an inevitable turn as servants in the city - Acephies life was consumed by managing her own drenching night sweats and debilitating diarrhea after giving birth while attempting to care for the child - had AIDS o Peligre site of the dam and the military barracks - haphazardly imposed fines - toll of flirtatious banter o Captain Jacques Honorat -became acephies sexual partner for less than a month o Blanco Nerette - planned to marry acephie - wasnt too happy about Acephies pregnancy o Large Scale Social Forces 1. Bureaucracy

gender her standing vis a vis the males she encountered 3. Class employee-employer 4. Stratified Society 5. others o Chouchou Louis Story - was beaten by an out-of-uniform soldier and his attaches after commenting on the situation of their roads 2. *duvalieristes military, Haitis best bet for democracy, 1991 * pwen - a pointed remark intended to say something other than what it literally means - Any scrape with the law led to a certain blacklisting o Explaining vs. Making Sense of Suffering -Modal Suffering a consequence of human agency *STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE explanations: -Suffering is structured by historically given and often economically driven processes and forces that conspire, whether through ritual, or routine, or, as is commonly the case the hard surfaces of life- to constrain agency Exoticization of suffering Knowledge of suffering cannot be conveyed by pure facts and figures. The horror of suffering is not only its immensity but the faces of the anonymous victims who have little voice 3. The dynamics and distribution of suffering are still poorly understood. The world that is utterly satisfying to us is utterly devastating to them.- Uruguayan Jesuit Juan Luis Segundo *Making Sense: - Rebecca Chopp: Do numbers really reveal the agony, the interruption, the questions that these victims put to the meaning and nature of our individual lives as a whole? - can be urgent and feasible if we are to promote and protect human rights There is, of course, plenty of [poverty] in the world in which we live. But more awful is the fact that so many people including children from disadvantaged backgroundsare forced to lead miserable and precarious lives and to die prematurely. That predicament relates in general to low incomes, but not just to that. It also reflects inadequate public health provisions and nutritional support, deficiency of social security arrangements, and the absence of social responsibility and of caring governance. Amartya Sen, Morality as an indicator of economic success and failure - The Axis of Gender >Poverty, Aids > Maternal Mortality >Gender Bias 1. 2.

- The Axis of Race and Ethnicity >Race biologically insignificant term >Story of Rwanda > - racial classifications e.g. South Africa > Race as a substitute term for class > Race and class differentials -Other Axes of Oppression >Biological or social >Refugee or immigrant status >Sexual preference and homosexuality *homophobia THE CONFLATION OF STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE AND CULTURAL DIFFERENCE *Conflation when the identities of the two concepts became lost or they seem to be of a single identity Issues: 1.

supposed to be quite divergent, especially across borders of nationality and community? Can we have anything like a universalist approach to these ideas, in a world where cultures differ and practical preoccupations are also diverse? Human rights as entitlements to capabilities I have argued elsewhere that opportunity and process are two aspects of freedom that require distinction, with the importance of each deserving specific acknowledgement.1 While the opportunity aspect of freedoms would seem to belong to the same kind of territory as capabilities, it is not at all clear that the same can be said about the process aspect of freedom. An example can bring out the separate (although not necessarily independent) relevance of both substantive opportunities and freedom of processes. There is clearly a violation of freedom even here though Natasha is being forced to do exactly what she would have chosen to do anyway, and this is readily seen when we compare the two alternatives choosing freely to go out and being forced to go out. The latter involves an immediate violation of the process aspect of Natashas freedom, since an action is being forced on her (even though it is an action she would have freely chosen also). *valuing free choice It is important to recognise that both processes and opportunities can figure powerfully in the content of human rights. A denial of due pro ess in being, say, sentenced without a proper trial can be an infringement of human rights. The idea of capability (i.e. the opportunity to achieve valuable combinations of human functionings what a person is able to do or be) can be very helpful in understanding the opportunity aspect of freedom and human rights.Indeed, even though the concept of opportunity is often invoked, it does require considerable elaboration, and capability can help in this elucidation. For example, seeing opportunity in terms of capability allows us to distinguish appropriately between (i) whether a person is actually able to do things she would value doing, and (ii) whether she possesses the means or instruments or permissions to pursue what she would like to do (her actual ability to do that pursuing may depend on many contingent circumstances). Differences in the capability to function can arise even with the same set of personal means (such as primary goods) for a variety of reasons, such as: (1) physical or mental heterogeneities among persons (related, for example, to disability, or proneness to illness); (2) variations in nonpersonal resources (such as the nature of public health care, or societal cohesion and the helpfulness of the community); (3) environmental diversities (such as climatic conditions, or varying threats from epidemic diseases or from local crime); or (4) different relative positions vis-a`-vis others (well illustrated by Adam Smiths discussion, in the Wealth of

Structural Violence are systematic ways in which social structures harm or otherwise disadvantage individuals. 2. Cultural Relativism 3. Cultural differences as nearsightedness does not consider motives, no larger picture 4. Culture furnishes an alibi STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE AND EXTREME HUMAN SUFFERING - Class-oppressed: infrastructural expression of the process oppression - Suffering is part of human life but not all suffering s are equivalent - What needs to be taken care of first and in with what resources? POVERTY worlds greatest killer, the poor being the chief victims, more likely to suffer and the suffering most likely is unnoticed HUMAN RIGHTS AND CAPABILITIES AMARTYA SEN There are many human rights that can be seen as rights to particular capabilities. However, human rights to important process freedoms cannot be adequately analysed within the capability framework. First, can human rights be seen as entitlements to certain basic capabilities, and will this be a good way of thinking about human rights? Second, can the capability perspective provide a comprehensive coverage of the content of human rights? Third, since human rights need specificity, does the use of the capability perspective for elucidating human rights require a full articulation of the list of capabilities? And finally, how can we go about ascertaining the content of human rights and of basic capabilities when our values are

Nations, of the fact that the clothing and other resources one needs to appear in public without shame depends on what other people standardly wear, which in turn could be more expensive in rich societies than in poorer ones). Indeed, the freedom to have any particular thing can be substantially distinguished from actually having that thing. What a person is free to have not just what he actually has is relevant, I have argued, to a theory of justice. A theory of rights also has reason to be involved with substantive freedoms. The process aspect of freedom and information pluralism In the discussion so far I have been concentrating on what the capability perspective can do for a theory of justice or of human rights, but I would now like to turn to what it cannot do. In this context, I should comment briefly also on a misinterpretation of the general relevance of the capability perspective in a theory of justice. A theory of justice or more generally an adequate theory of normative social choice has to be alive both to the fairness of the processes involved and to the equity and efficiency of the substantive opportunities that people can enjoy.9 In dealing with the latter, capability can indeed provide a very helpful perspective, in comparison with, say, the Rawlsian concentration on primary goods. But capability can hardly serve as the sole informational basis for the other considerations, related to processes, that must also be accommodated in normative social choice theory. Consider the different components of Rawlss (1971) theory of justice. Rawlss first principle of justice involves the priority of liberty, and the first part of the second principle involves process fairness, through demanding that positions and offices be open to all. The force and cogency of these Rawlsian concerns (underlying his first principle and the first part of the second principle) can neither be ignored nor be adequately addressed through relying only on the informational base of capabilities. We may not agree with Rawlss own way of dealing with these issues, but these issues have to be addressed, and they cannot be sensibly addressed within the substantive boundaries of capability accounting. On the other hand, the capability perspective comes into its own in dealing with the remainder of the second principle; namely, the Difference Principle a principle that is particularly concerned with the distribution of advantages that different people enjoy (a consideration that Rawls tried to capture, I believe inadequately, within the confines of the accounting of primary goods). Listing capabilities Indeed, I would submit that one of the uses of the capability perspective is to bring out the need for transparent valuational scrutiny of individual advantages and adversities,

since the different functionings have to be assessed and weighted in relation to each other, and the opportunities of having different combinations of functionings also have to be evaluated.10 The richness of the capability perspective broadly interpreted, thus, includes its insistence on the need for open valuational scrutiny for making social judgements, and in this sense it fits in well with the importance of public reasoning. This openness of transparent valuation contrasts with burying the evaluative exercise in some mechanical and valuationally opaque convention (e.g. by taking marketevaluated income to be the invariable standard of individual advantage, thereby giving implicit normative priority to institutionally determined market prices). Public reasoning, cultural diversity and universality

If the listing of capabilities must be subject to the test of public reasoning, how can we proceed in a world of differing values and disparate cultures? How can we judge the acceptability of claims to human rights and to relevant capabilities, and assess the challenges they may face? How would such a disputation or a defence proceed? Indeed, the role of public reasoning in the formulation and vindication of human rights is extremely important to understand. Any general plausibility that these ethical claims or their denials have is, on this theory, dependent on their ability to survive and flourish when they encounter unobstructed discussion and scrutiny (along with adequately wide informational availability). The force of a claim for a human right would be seriously undermined if it were possible to show that they are unlikely to survive open public scrutiny. But contrary to a commonly offered reason for scepticism and rejection, the case for human rights cannot be discarded simply by pointing to the possibility that in politically and socially repressive regimes, which do not allow open public discussion, many of these human rights are not taken seriously at all. It is, however, important not to keep the domain of public reasoning confined to a given society only, especially in the case of human rights, in view of the inescapably universalist nature of these rights. Questions are often raised about whether distant people can, in fact, provide useful scrutiny of local issues, given what are taken to be uncrossable barriers of culture. A belief in uncrossable barriers between the values of different cultures has surfaced and resurfaced repeatedly over the centuries, and they are forcefully articulated today. The claim of magnificent uniqueness and often of superiority has sometimes come from critics of Western values, varying from champions of regional ethics (well illustrated by the fuss in the 1990s about the peerless excellence of Asian values), or religious or cultural separatists (with or without being accompanied by fundamentalism of one kind or another). Sometimes, however, the claim of uniqueness has come from Western particularists.

Conclusions To conclude, the two concepts human rights and capabilities go well with each other, so long as we do not try to subsume either entirely within the other. There are many human rights for which the capability perspective has much to offer. However, human rights to important process freedoms cannot be adequately analysed within the capability approach. Furthermore, both human rights and capabilities have to depend on the process of public reasoning, which neither can lose without serious impoverishment of its respective intellectual content. The methodology of public scrutiny draws on Rawlsian understanding of objectivity in ethics, but the impartiality that is needed cannot be confined within the borders of a nation. We have to go much beyond Rawls for that reason, just as we also have to go beyond the enlightenment provided by his use of primary goods, and invoke, in that context, the more articulate framework of capabilities. The need for extension does not, of course, reduce our debt to John Rawls. Neither human rights nor capabilities would have been easy to understand without his pioneering departures.