Материал: Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

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simply the instrumental means by which departures-from-order were socio-culturally inscribed and overcome.

Also significant in the above ethnography is the impossibilty of differentiating between violence as a physical act and its symbolization: between ‘doing violence’ and ‘talking violence’. Talking is a form of doing in the London underworld, and doing a mode of expression.This insight warrants being put on a wider footing.The socio-cultural context of violence may be expected always to encompass both the done and the said, such that no ontological disjunction is positable between ‘real’ violence and ‘symbolic’ violence, between the physical and the merely figurative.

Clear-cut and universal distinctions have been anthropologically sought, notwithstanding, between the violence of words and of action, between violent expression by tongue and by fist, these distinctions then implying others: ‘verbal-cum-symbolic violence implies no neurological change in the perpetrator, self-control not yet giving way to rage (real, physical violence)’; or ‘verbal-cum-symbolic violence implies upperclass socialization rather than plebeian, where tongue-lashing is likely to give way to physical beating’ (cf. May 1972).These kinds of reductionist and deterministic theorizations show little respect for the ethnographic record, however, and do not stand close empirical inspection. The symbolical and the physical are inextricable in human behaviour. Certainly, resort to physical violence cannot be correlated with alienation from, or negation of, language; there is no possible or necessary differentiation (and hence relation) between them such that ‘symbolic’ violence negates ‘real’ violence, or ‘figurative’ violence makes ‘physical’ violence more likely (cf. Wertham 1971; Frank 1976). To appreciate the complexities of particular situations is to see any combination of behaviours (of the so-called symbolic/figurative/lingual as opposed to the real/physical/fistical) as being possibly negotiable in the constitution of routine social relations, and any number of means and modalities by which they can be ‘violated’—and violence done to them (cf. Rapport 1987).

‘Democratic’ versus ‘nihilistic’ violence

A more fruitful avenue of enquiry than that of attempting to understand violence either as specific behaviours, or as a relationship between behavioural types, is perhaps to explore issues of predictability: violence as a matter of behavioural expectability rather than explosiveness. Here, ‘violence’ is understood as a decision to negate a relationship of reciprocal predictability and orientability, or to refuse to enter into one:

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violence as a deliberate negating of formal routine and a refusal to enter into relations of mutual expectability through the perpetration of ‘disorderly’ and unoriented behaviours which go beyond them. The keyword here is ‘routine’, while ‘violence’ is that which makes civil relations in socio-cultural milieux impossible.

Drawing upon an Existential legacy (Nietzsche, Camus), Edmund Leach theorized upon the fundamental role that doing violence to extant social-structural relations and norms plays in the constitution of human being. ‘[A]ll of us are criminals by instinct’, Leach suggested (1977:19), and it is ‘part of our very nature’, ‘the very essence of being a human being’, to resent the domination of customary social practices and imagine their creative rewriting: ‘[A] 11 creativity, whether it is the work of the artist or the scholar or even of the politician, contains within it a deep-rooted hostility to the system as it is’ (1977:20). Nevertheless, by distinguishing between the outward form of socio-cultural relations and their inward content, it is possible to prescribe an accommodation between the intrinsic, human—natural violence which Leach describes—ubiquitous, creative, individual, ‘democratic’—and another, ‘nihilistic’ kind, that which destroys the possibility of a creative engagement with social structure in an individual constitution of self, or indeed of any kind of ongoing (civil) socio-cultural relations.

Social structure may be described as a set of discursive idioms in terms of which individuals meet, for the purpose of expressing, constructing, fulfilling and extending their personal world-views (cf. Rapport 1993a). Meeting in terms of common, shared, often formulaic behavioural forms (verbal and non-verbal), individuals are able to make meaningful interpretations of their worlds and selves of great personality and diversity.

A.F.C. Wallace spoke of ‘the organization of diversity’ which social structure entails (1964: passim). Each individual may inhabit what amounts to a private world, and may rarely if ever achieve ‘cognitive communality’ or mutual identification with another. What is necessary for individuals regularly to engage in routine interactions with one another is mutual predictability. Individual A knows that when she perpetrates action a1 then individual B, in all probability, will perpetrate action b1, which will lead to her doing a2, et cetera. Meanwhile, individual B knows that when he perpetrates action b1, individual A responds with a1, which he follows with b2. In other words, individuals A and B need not concur on when precisely the interaction begins and whose action is perpetrated first—on who acts and who reacts—never mind concurring on the content of their interaction. Rather, Wallace’s image of the orderly relationships which constitute stable socio-cultural

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systems is of what he calls ‘equivalence structures’ or sets of equivalent behavioural expectancies. Social structures are jointly held notions of relations, and something which individuals establish for the mutual facilitation of their separate strivings.

What is crucial in the above, to repeat, is expectability. However different and diverse the interpretations of individuals who partake of the ‘contractual’ relations of exchanging common social forms— however creative and new—so long as each can predict, each can expect, certain behaviours from the other, then the relationship is able to continue—as can the underlying diversity. Expectability means that each individual is able to continue to find the behaviour of the other (s) understandable, meaningful. Even to the extent that had each understood the actual meanings of the other, then they might have felt violated.

A ‘democratic violence’ may be described, then, as one which does not deny or negate the possibility and ability of fellow-interactants to go on interpreting and meaning as they choose, even as the meanings which each construes in the interaction might be found to violate the others’. ‘Democratic violence’ enables individual creativity to live beneath an ambiguous surface of social-structural calm and within a form of behavioural norms which individuals continue to share. If the sine qua non of the social contract is individuals’ possession of mutual expectations which allow them to orient their behaviour to one another in a particular relationship or kind of relationship, then the stability of such expectations is not threatened by a violent diversity of individual interpretations which do not breach the civil surface of the exchange.

A ‘nihilistic violence’, on the other hand, may be described as behaviour which deliberately or unintentionally disorients others in the relationship such that the latter‘s acts of prediction and interpretation are made impossible. Nihilistic violence despoils the shared forms of behaviour, such that orientation towards it by others, and their development of stable expectations with regard to it, are prevented (cf. Johnson 1982:8).

In this conceptualization, violence might be morally neutral, a fact of the individual (creative) interpretation of social exchange. It is ‘a sort of constant’ (Aijmer 2000) around which the social is organized. Furthermore, violence need not be tied only to particular behaviours and excepted from others: violence does not correspond to brutality or physicality or the absence of empathy; violence is not precluded by the presence of empathy or the expression of love, for instance. Rather, it is violence of a particular, ‘nihilistic’ kind to which others cannot adapt: behaviour which others cannot expect or predict and find meaningful in some way. Only nihilistic violence makes mutual expectation and

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diversity impossible by violating any practicable norms of exchange and hence denying the possibility of a civil relationship of mutual predictability and orientability.

Such denial may take a variety of forms and degrees. Random sounds, silences and actions will preclude viable interactions of a routine and ongoing kind, and hence deny others the opportunity of making sense, of making meaningful interpretations of the particular exchange. But then maiming or killing will preclude viable interaction and meaningful interpretation henceforward and in general. Thus, a sliding-scale of nihilistic violence may be introduced, the severity adjudged in terms of the intended or received injury to others’ ability to make sense, to create meaning, at that time and henceforth.

‘Violence’ and schizophrenia

While ‘democratic’ violence gives onto diverse individual meanings, ‘nihilistic’ violence negates common forms of exchange; it entails the violating of existing or practicable norms of behaviour. If society is seen to encompass individuals’ coming together to constitute manifold types of relationship, using common cultural institutions both to communicate their relationships and to create and express their personal meanings, then there are some individuals who refuse such communication: they do violence to others’ possible perception of routine. Such individuals excommunicate themselves, placing their behaviour beyond the bounds of expectability, orientability and interpretation, and in the process render impossible or ineffectual the communication of others.

This portrayal recalls Bateson et al.’s conception of the schizophrenic (1974:32–4). He is the individual who fails to communicate because he does not ‘correctly’ (conventionally) label or channel his meanings, and does not correctly interpret the labels and channels of others’ messages. The difference is that the nihilistically violent individual may be described as arriving at such a situation by intention. Deliberately he negates and eschews those regularities through which relationships, as contractual equivalence structures, are possible.

See also: Form and Content, Interaction, The Unhomely

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It is perhaps ironical that at the same time as there has been an anthropological desire to deconstruct the central place given in the West

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to vision as a form of knowing (where ‘I see’ is synonymous with ‘I understand’) (cf. Ong 1969; Dias 1994), and to recognize an array of other senses and forms (Stoller 1989b), visual anthropology has also grown into a methodological specialism—albeit one seeking to redress a traditional (Western) emphasis on the written word as a form of representing anthropological knowledge. Nor has the irony gone unnoticed. Indeed, visual anthropology has been critiqued from two vantage-points: the ‘traditional’, in whose view anthropology must perforce remain a logocentric discipline because of the need to convey abstraction and theory, and there being no clear route from the particularities of the image to the generalities of a holistic social structure (cf. Bloch 1988); and the ‘post-colonial’, in whose view the technologies of filmic representation are unavoidably corrupted by their being Western practices with a history and continuing provenance of ideological control.

Notwithstanding this, visual anthropology, the employment of pictorial media as means to communicate anthropological knowledge, has continued to grow; it has challenged notions that anthropological knowledge must needs be seen either as holistic or as hegemonic. It has argued that there are important contributions to be made via pictorial media to the study of the audio-visual dimensions of human behaviour, of culture as manifested in visible symbols and audible sounds—as gesture, script, oration, dance, ceremony, ritual, art-work, craft and material artefact.

‘Pictorial media’ has come generally to mean film and video, although there have been significant anthropological forays into study of and by other visual forms such as photography (Bateson and Mead 1942; Pinney 1990) and television (Intintoli 1984; Liebes and Katz 1990). (The anthropology of artistic-cum-visual forms has tended to represent another specialism again, linked with issues of aesthetics (cf. Layton 1981; Coote and Shelton 1991).) Even here, however, and with film and video being such accepted representational genres outwith anthropology, definitional problems have arisen concerning what is truly or distinctively ‘anthropological’ or ‘ethnographic’ in the pictorial. How seriously are aesthetic, emotional and sentimental registers to be taken as filmic components? How should documentation be validated, and how balanced with narrational needs? What poetic, even surrealistic, strategies are to be permissible in the conveying of subjects’ inner experiences? In short, how, and to what extent, should ‘ethnography’ take precedence over cinematography? Through a number of celebrated films—Robert Gardner’s Dead Birds (1963) and Forest of Bliss (1985); Jean Rouch’s Jaguar (1965)—these

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