Professional Documents
Culture Documents
http://www.enotes.com/soc/discuss/how-do-anthropologists-explain-human-violence-93336
Anthropologists study violence through the lens of human cultural development. They usually focus on
institutionalized violence such as warfare and genital mutilation. They also study subcultural violence like
fraternity hazing. Anthropologists see violence as a means of establishing and maintaining hierarchy within
a cultural group. People who undergo violent rituals to become part of a group are likely to invest great
time and energy into protecting that group. They will highly value their group membership group because it
was so painful to become initiated.
One non-anthropological approach to explaining human violence is the psychological approach. The
psychological approach explains violence by describing what happens within the psyche of the individual
perpetrating the violence. A psychological approach to explaining violence emphasizes individual
motivations rather than cultures and institutions.
Violence is a way of communicating. It was used before we had complex language. Anthropologists see
violence as a power struggle. The most powerful person in the tribe is the alpha, or leader. Another way to
look at it is that violence is part of our modern society, even though we like to pretend that it isn't.
cannibal savage (which we could maybe connect later with the popular image of the
baby eating communists?). In sum, the rubber company owners systematically sought
to inspire terror because they were themselves terrified of the jungle, constructed in
colonial imagination as a space of death.
To an important extent all societies live by fictions taken as reality. What distinguishes
cultures of terror is that the epistemological, ontological, and otherwise purely
philosophical problem of reality-and-illusion, certainty-and-doubt, becomes infinitely
more than a "merely" philosophical problem. It becomes a high-powered tool for
domination and a principal medium of political practice. And in the Putumayo rubber
boom this medium of epistemic and ontological murk was most keenly figured and
objectified as the space of death. (Taussig 492)
The use of violence and torture was an effective way to assert complex hierarchies of
race and class (many of which persist today to some degree in Latin America). Torture as
a systematic and ritualistic practice, in this context, became not only a mean, but a
mode and aim of production of power and meaning. This is all helpful to understand how
ritualistic violence is intrinsic (rather than opposed) to the bureaucratic rationality of the
state.
http://www.academon.com/analytical-essay/michael-taussig-culture-of-terror-16780/
This paper critically reviews Michael Taussig's essay on the culture and society in which
terror reigns supreme. It isolates Taussig's most important point that no matter how
much we try to understand the psychology of terror or victimization, we can never
satisfactorily reach its core because we have never really experienced it personally. It
discusses exposure to extreme terror, that forces people to escape reality and explores
Taussig's concept of "the space of death". The significance of this "space of death" is
assessed, applied to victims of colonization and the writer gives his/her personal opinion
on this coping mechanism. Taussig's work is compared to that of Eric Wolf, who wrote
"Europe and the People without History", about life in the colonies during imperial rule;
and the authors' differing approaches are highlighted.
"Michael Taussig has conducted a very powerful analysis of the culture and society in
which terror reigns supreme. He has focused on the world of victims and victimizers to
explain how and why their thinking differs from those who fortunately do not fall in either
of the two categories. The strongest point made by Michael Taussig is that no matter how
much we try to understand the psychology of terror or victimization, we can never
satisfactorily reach its core because we have never really experienced it with our own
eyes or flesh. This means that since the stories of terror usually reach us through word of
others, we are simply unable to understand why someone would go to such extreme
lengths to destroy other human beings. He is of the view that Indians or Africans and all
those who suffered under the Imperial rule did not exist in the same world as we do
today."