on Violence

"Case studies of individuals reveal suffering, they tell us what happens to one or many people; but to explain suffering, one must embed individual biography in the larger matrix of culture, history, and political economy."

- Paul Farmer, "On Suffering and Structural Violence," in the Anthropology of Politics, 2002

"Structural violence - the violence of poverty, hunger, social exclusion and humiliation - inevitably translates into intimate and domestic violence.... Violence can never be understood solely in terms of its physicality - force, assault, or the infliction of pain - alone. Violence also includes assaults on the personhood, dignity, sense of worth or value of the victim. The social and cultural dimensions of violence are what gives violence its power and meaning. Focusing exclusively on the physical aspects of torture/terror/violence misses the point and transforms the project into a clinical, literary, or artistic exercise which runs the risk of degenerating into a theater or pornography of violence in which the voyeuristic impulse subverts the larger project of witnessing, critiquing, and writing against violence, injustice, and suffering. 
...
Rather than sui generis, violence is in the eye of the beholder. What constitutes violence is always mediated by an expressed or implicit dichotomy between legitimate/illegitimate, permissible or sanctioned acts, as when the 'legitimate' violence of the militarized state is differentiated from the unruly, illicit violence of the mob or of revolutionaries. Depending on one's political-economic position in the world (dis)order, particular acts of violence may be perceived as 'depraved' or 'glorious.' ... Perhaps the most one can say about violence is that like madness, sickness, suffering, or death itself, it is a human condition. Violence is present (as a capability) in each of us, as is its opposite - the rejection of violence."

-Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Phillippe Bougois, "Introduction: Making Sense of Violence," in Violence in War and Peace, 2004