The Violences of Everyday LifeBy Arthur Kleinman

The Problem

Suffering is the effect of the social violence that social orders – local, national, global – bring to bear on people

Types of violence are numerous – not just political violence E.g. poverty is structural violence Even in settings on obvious political violence, e.g. in the old Delhi streets where Hindus killed

Sikhs after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, there are many different forms of violence, e.g. communal violence, sometimes built into structural violence

While social force grinds most brutally on the poor, the violent consequences of social power also affect other social groups in ways that are often not so visible

Violences of Everyday Life: Bourgeois Varieties

While liberation theologians make suffering the core of moral practice and teleology, not all suffering counts

Liberation theology and Marxism privileges the oppressed The violence of oversubscribed time: “stress”

Violence of Images

Appropriation of images of violence by the media in turn performs moral, aesthetic and experiential social violence

E.g. advertisement in the New York Times for rescue funds for Bosnia – features a pictures of Jews being rounded up by Nazis and then a terrified mother holding her child in Bosnia, with the subtitles “Ethnic Cleansing, 1943” and “Ethnic Cleansing, 1995” respectively

o Because the Nazi’s “final solution” of the Jewish problem was to systematically kill them, non-historical parallels are being drawn which makes the reader compare the fate of the Holocaust Jews to the Bosnian Muslims. There was no real help for the Jews in the 1940s, so now we must help the Bosnian Muslims and ensure they don’t have the same fate

We are caught up in a confusing and morally dangerous process of commodification and consumption of trauma

o Would we be giving money to the Bosnians to feel good about helping refugees or to reduce our guilt about not being there?

o We require ever more detail of hurt and suffering to authenticate the reality of it

o The ad personifies the complex economic and political circumstances through a simplifying picture of mother and daughter, so it doesn’t project the specifics of the social context that make this historical situation distinctive

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It is the danger of normalising images of violence that is the matter, because this process transforms moral experiences, appropriating it for new uses – commercial, political – and for purposes of cultural control

Conclusion: Social Theoretical Implications of the Violences of Everyday Life

Anthropology lacks a social theory for framing comparisons of everyday violence in local worlds

The “violence of everyday life” is “multiple” and “normative” “Wheresoever power orients practices – and that is everywhere – there is violence”

My Notes

The violence of facebook?o Central part of the lives of millions of people around a world – and yet the clear

examples of social violence are shockingo E.g. Formspring, a Facebook app that allows people to ask anonymous questions,

often offensive and insulting; why do we subject ourselves to the oppression of this kind of social media?

o E.g. Facebook’s lack of censoring of explicit and sexual content, while they remove pictures of women breastfeeding on a page designed to offer support to first-time mothers, labelling it as “pornography”

Fashion – shoes, clothing etc.

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