So far we have two different explanations of war and war-related violence. In the first, violence is purely instrumental and contextual, which means that violence is never studied in its own right. Often such analyses inspired by political science explain war but do not account for what happens when violence breaks out. In doing so, they overlook the cultural framework in which violence is constructed and interpreted (see next paragraph); miss the possibility of operating with innate structural properties of violence; and often reproduce a Hobbesian view of human nature, which views violence as latent and erupting when the centralisation of power erodes. In the structural approach violence is perceived not as a source of social power, but as a source (either acted or imagined) of identity. Furthermore, the inherent logic of violence creates subject positions without the help of any concrete subjects. This perspective ignores the fact that the use of and reaction to violence can change the course of violent events. Claiming that violence creates unambiguous identities, therefore, only accounts for part of the process relevant for understanding the relationship between violence and identification. Violence plays a part in constructing a general polarised atmosphere of ‘us and them’, but this does not say anything about how people react or relate to such a dichotomised space of identity. Furthermore, even if we accept the idea that violence creates unambiguous identities, such consequences should not be confused with explanations of why violence occurs in the first place.
Expression
The next perspective to be found in contemporary anthropology of war and war-related violence focuses on the violent acts themselves, on the meaning they carry and the cultural landscape in which they are shaped and serve as communication. The perspective is based on the implicit assumption that the way in which one dies or is injured is significant and seldom coincidental. The studies grouped together in this second category therefore try to explicate (Geertz 1973) rather than explain violent events; one could say that they make a ‘thick description’ of the violent events.
Van de Port (1998) conducted fieldwork in a Serbian town in Vojvodina. His research was meant to be a study of gypsies, but then the war broke out and left him and seemingly everybody else in a condition of mental and existential chaos. But only seemingly. He discovered the existence of a cultural logic that he, following Taussig, calls implicit social knowledge, which was used to make sense of the madness of the war. This knowledge, which was neither conscious nor verbalised, was for instance manifested in the Serbs’ ambivalent relationship to the gypsies. On the surface, the Serbs condemned the gypsies as uncivilised primitives, but below the surface the Serbs embraced the primitive, uncivilised, emotional craziness that they felt the gypsies represented. So in everyday life the ‘civilised’ Serbian citizens of Vojvodina showed distaste for the war-related barbaric and insane violence; but at night in the gypsy bars they embraced it because of the connection they felt with the implicit social knowledge which the gypsies embodied. Other studies have focused more on the violent acts themselves and shown how they can be loaded with cultural meaning (Feldman 1991; Krohn-Hansen 1997b). Malkki (1998), for instance, analyses the Tutsis’ bestial, violent acts against the Hutus as attempts to dehumanise the Hutus, to associate them with nature and disassociate them from culture. And Olujic (1998) argues that war rapes in former Yugoslavia were not only physical assaults on the women, but also attacks on the male members of their family, whose honour was related to the female members’ chastity. The individual body becomes in this way a metaphorical representative of the social body, and the killing or maiming of that body symbolically kills and maims the individual’s family and ethnic group. The war rapes also reinforced the cultural notions of cleanliness and dirtiness associated with sexuality and ethnic affiliation. Through forced pregnancy resulting from rape, aggressors could ‘purify the blood’ of the attacked group by creating ‘ethnically cleansed’ babies belonging to the group of the invading fathers. On quite a different scale, Appadurai (1999) tries to understand contemporary ethnic atrocities worldwide in relation to a culture of modernity. Modernity and globalisation, he claims, have disembedded social relations and created uncertain and alienated identities. Violence thus uses the body to recreate certainty and intimacy in a grotesque way.3
Anthropological studies of violence that focus on expression and meaning try to understand the cultural anchoring of violent acts and how violence functions as communication. And sometimes such insight is used to explain the potential instrumentality of violence. A major challenge confronting anthropological studies of the expressive character of violence is to consider the ethical dimension thoroughly (see, for instance, Richard Jenkins’ (1992) critique of Allen Feldman). In short, it is essential not to let the act of interpretation overshadow the experience of violence.
Experience/narrative
The third and most recent perspective in contemporary anthropology of war and war-related violence is mainly an ethnographic one. The centre of interest is not on macro-actors’ strategic use of violence, the built-in potential of violence to produce identities, or the communicative aspect of violence. The focus is on actual victims’ subjective experiences of war, violence and torture, and on the narratives people construct in their attempts to (re)create meaning, identities and social relations in a shattered world.4 Concurrently with such analyses, the very possibility of the academic representation of such fundamental and groundbreaking experiences has been discussed. Analyses of actors’ experiences of violence can, it is argued, be seen as a contradiction in terms, since the “experience of war implies a loss of the conceptual and epistemological framework that previously provided means to interpret the events of life and death of others” (Löfving and Maček 2000: 5, see also van de Port 1998: 27-8). At the same time, though, anthropologists have also insisted on the academic responsibility to ‘write against terror’, and speak out against injustice (Scheper-Huges 1992; Taussig 1987).
Experience
Elaine Scarry’s (1985) argument regarding the relation between torture and pain has served as an explicit or implicit theoretical inspiration in many of the ethnographic studies of people’s experiences of war and violence and loss of epistemological framework (Feldman et al. 1993; Green 1995; Jackson 2002; Maček 2000a, 2000b; Nordstrom 1997; Povrzanović 1993, 1997; Scheper-Huges 1992; Van de Port 1998). Her basic contention is that the feeling of physical pain is an irreducible bodily experience that cannot be objectified by anything outside the body including language. This is why torture is such an effective instrument of power, because the inexpressible and non-communicative feeling of pain, the ‘unmaking of the world’, as she calls it, that takes control of the victim can only be alleviated through a new version of the world − another version of the Truth (see also Löfving and Maček 2000: 5; Frykman 2002). Based on ethnographic fieldwork in war-torn Mozambique, Nordstrom (1997) expands Scarry’s idea of torture’s ‘unmaking of the world’ to the general wartime situation experienced by civilians. Nordstrom sees the structure of this experience as bearing clear parallels to Bakhtin’s idea of the grotesque:
When the familiar and everyday are turned into implements of torture and murder, the familiar everyday world is rendered grotesque – not merely by the fact of the present terror and repression, but by the enduring nature of association. (p. 168).
She offers an example of a man who had his throat cut in the family’s mortar by intruding soldiers, the whole village being forced to watch, and she asks if the onlookers