the construction of dominican state power and symbolism of violence

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The construction of Dominican state power andsymbolisms of violence

Christian Krohn‐Hansen

To cite this article: Christian Krohn‐Hansen (1997) The construction of Dominican state powerand symbolisms of violence , Ethnos, 62:3-4, 49-78, DOI: 10.1080/00141844.1997.9981552

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The Construction of Dominican StatePower and Symbolisms of Violence*

Christian Krohn-HansenUniversity of Oslo, Norway

Maurice Bloch has argued that, under certain circumstances, aspects of a particularcosmology can become an idiom for expressing and justifying the necessity of usingbodily violence in relationships of domination and subordination. This article seeksto develop this key idea with the aid of historically and ethnographically specificmaterial from the Dominican Republic. The author attempts to show that both hege-monic Dominican nationalist imagery and hegemonic Dominican masculinity ima-gery contain certain - different - ideas about conquest. These ideas have suppliedidioms for the legitimation and exacerbation of state violence and terror. The articlealso argues that symbolic and social complexes familiar to anthropologists under thelabels of 'religion', 'nationalism', and 'gender', can furnish idioms for the legitima-tion of the illegitimate. We should not primarily conceptualize and study forms ofpolitical violence as phenomena outside a daily and ritually constructed reality ofa particular kind, but, on the contrary, as practices and meanings which belong toa cultural, social, and political logic.

I n this article, I seek to support the claim that historically and socially situ-ated cosmology - taken very loosely to mean 'culture', i.e., a repertoire ofsymbols and meanings produced and transformed in, and as, practices -

supplies the idioms in which violence is explained and justified, or in whichthe illegitimate is legitimated.1 Under certain circumstances, I shall argue,particular features ofhegemonic cosmologie visions - features of religion, thepolitical collectivity's (for example, the nation's) history, and gender imagery- can become vehicles for communicating and 'sanctifying' the necessity of,or the life-giving strength and control believed to result from, the use ofbodily violence in relationships of domination and subordination. MaxWeber argued that the modern state is definable as that element of society

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50 CHRISTIAN KROHN-HANSEN

which has the legitimate monopoly of violence. We should ask the obviousquestions: how can massive and extreme violence be converted into legitimacy,into culturally sanctioned relationships of power? How can reason (understoodas the particular rationality of the social world achieved through certain rela-tionships of power cum meanings) and 'meaningless' violence co-exist? Whatis authorizedpowerto both dominant and dominated if not bottomless ambi-guity - like 'sacredness', or, as Taussig (1992^63) says, like a fetish, which issurrounded by worship and fear, love and awe, in equal measure?

I will discuss features of a specific historical and ethnographic case: theconstruction of Dominican state power in the second half of the nineteenthand in the twentieth century. The construction of Dominican state powerembraces a particular history of dehumanizing violence perpetrated by theDominican state - and 2. particular history of social and cultural productionof legitimacy among Dominicans. I shall in particular attempt to shed lighton certain connections between the construction of legitimacy in Domini-can society (or inside the imagined Dominican national community) and theDominican state's use of grotesque, massive violence in the (internationallyrelatively little known) Haitian massacre of 1937.

In addition to investigating the construction of Dominican state power interms ofDominican-Haitian violence, I shall also attempt to examine certainaspects of the Dominican state's use of terror against its own citizenry. Spe-cifically, I will discuss certain connections between masculinity imagery andstate repression.

It seems fair to claim that previously anthropology, with a number of ex-ceptions, did not typically study ethnographically connections between cul-ture/cosmology, state power, and state violence in different contexts.2 Nonethe less, anthropology has registered a considerable increase in studies of therelationship between culture and violence, and the discipline now possessesa body ofliterature which in particular discusses aspects of relations betweenmeaning formation, the construction of modern state power, and the perpe-tration and suffering ofbodily violence and terror (Taussig 1984,1987,1992a;Kapferer 1988; Feldman 1991; Coronil & Skurski 1991; Warren 1993; Daniel1994,1996; Malkki 1995).3

One work of central importance to the anthropology of state violence isMaurice Bloch's recent book Prey into Hunter (1992). This book contains auniversal theory of ritual which states that there is a central minimal structureor 'core' to ritual processes. It argues that a symbolism of violence or con-quest is built into the central minimal structure of rituals, and that in this lies

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The Construction of Dominican State Power and Symbolisms of Violence 51

the explanation for the circumstance that religion - or discourse on the sa-cred - so easily furnishes an idiom, and produces a legitimation, for actualpolitical violence in a whole range of societies. Bloch discusses linkages be-tween ritual symbolism and the possible legitimation of political violenceonly in historical and small-scale societies - not in direct relation to how toconceptualize connections between constructions of modern state powerand cultural constructions of state violence.

In its narrow sense, the argument in Prey into Hunteroffers an explanationof the symbolism of violence which is present in many religious phenomena.Rituals in a great many societies appear to deny the transience of life andhuman institutions. Bloch argues that rituals enact this denial by symboli-cally sacrificing the participants themselves, thus allowing them to partici-pate in the immortality of a transcendent entity. Such sacrifices are achievedthrough acts of ritualized violence, ranging from bodily mutilations to thekilling of animals. Ultimately, Bloch can be said to establish a connectionbetween a ritual construction and the universal human constraints connectedwith the processes of birth, growth, reproduction, ageing and death:

[The] irreducible structures of religious phenomena are ritual representations ofthe existence of human beings in time. In fact this ritual representation is a simpletransformation of the material processes of life in plants and animals as well ashumans. The transformation takes place in an idiom which has two distinguishingfeatures: first, it is accomplished through a classic three-stage dialectical process,and secondly it involves a marked element of violence or (to use a term less famil-iar in our society than in many of those discussed here) of conquest. I shall referto this process as the idiom of'rebounding violence' (Bloch 1992:4).

Central significance is attached to the symbolism of violence in the thirdstage of rituals, the one which concludes the entire transformative process bymarking the return to the here and now from the liminal or the transcenden-tal: 'the return to the here and now is really a conquest of the here and nowby the transcendental. In the case of initiation, the initiate does not merelyreturn to the world he had left behind. He is a changed person, a permanentlytranscendental person who can therefore dominate the here and now of whichhe previously was a part' (Bloch 1992:5). As Bloch sees the ritual process,therefore, the third stage is not a return to the condition left behind in the firststage, but an aggressive consumption of a sacred vitality which is differentfrom that which had been lost in the first part of the ritual. The importanceof this perspective is fundamental, because it in turn conditions both a cri-

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tique of anthropology's traditional ignorance of violence #/*</Bloch's ownanalytical connections drawn between religion, politics, and actual violence:

Van Gennep and Turner have little to say about violence.... They completely missthe significance of the... dramatic violence of the return to the mundane. For me,however, this conquering and consuming is central because it is what explains thepolitical outcomes of religious action. First of all, it needs to be violent, otherwisethe subordination of vitality would not be demonstrated. Secondly, this final con-sumption is outwardly directed towards other species. In many of the examplesdiscussed [in the book one may] see how the consumption of animals, for ex-ample, can be represented as merely a preliminary to expansionist violence againstneighbours (Bloch 1992:6).

In its broad sense, Bloch's argument therefore amounts to much more thanan explanation of the symbolism of violence present in religion. For he arguesthat, in the symbolism of violence built into the ritual core, there also lies theexplanation for the often-noted circumstance that religion so easily furnishesan idiom, and produces a legitimation, for actual violence in a whole rangeof societies. Bloch underscores the potential which sacred imageries of vio-lence have for a justified construction among elites and ordinary people of'dirty' wars - that is, for maintaining and explaining the most mundane formsof politics.

It is in this wide sense that his reasoning is of fundamental value to theanthropology of relationships of power. For while it seems unnecessary to ac-cept Bloch's specific claims about the quasi-universality of the central ritualstructure which he identifies, I do find the various connections which hedraws between particular meanings of religion and political violence con-vincing.

He emphasizes that the symbolism of violence is a necessary, but notsufficient condition for the legitimate construction of 'dirty' politics - forshaping a legitimation of what others consider to be the illegitimate. Forexample, in a chapter called 'Cosmogony and the state,' he links the religiousaspect ofjapanese Emperors to the aggressive idiom of some recent Japanesehistory, that is, to the movement towards the militarist and imperialist idiomwhich reached its apogee during the greater East Asia war: 'All this of courseis not to say that the existence of the symbolism of rebounding violence is inany way a sufficient explanation of the outbreak of real political or militaryviolence. Japanese militarist expansionism was very largely caused by contactwith Western imperialism. However, given these circumstances, the religious


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process naturally gave an idiom to such expansionism and may well haveexacerbated it' (Bloch 1992:64; italics added).

State Power and National Cosmology:War, Memory, and Expulsion of the National Self's Other

The basic view underlying Bloch's argument about the politics of religiousexperience is in perfect accordance with the Dominican case after 4 October1937, that is, after the 1937 Haitian massacre. This slaughter involved theDominican state (headed by General Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the countryfrom 1930 till he was assassinated in 1961) killing thousands of Haitian peas-ants in the Dominican-Haitian borderlands.4 By 1937 around 200,000 Hai-tians dwelt in the Dominican Republic's border areas and elsewhere in thecountry (Fiehrer 1990:11). The previous year Dominican president RafaelLeonidas Trujillo and Haitian president Stenio Vincent signed a treaty estab-lishing the official border between the two republics, the latter agreeing tostem the - in Dominican eyes - tide of illegal migration (Vega 1988). In Octo-ber, 1937, thousands of Haitian peasants were slaughtered with carbines andmachetes in the Dominican border areas by the Trujillo military state, and allHaitians were expelled from the country (with the exception of those work-ing on the sugar plantations owned by foreigners, who protected their sourceof cheap labour). High uncertainty exists with regard to the number of Hai-tians killed in the massacre. This is just one of many indications of how rela-tively little investigation has been undertaken in relation to the whole event.One scholar, Thomas Fiehrer, has asserted that 'the [1937] event has neverbeen explained satisfactorily by either participants or succeeding investiga-tors;' his own number for those who died in the massacre is 'some 9,000 to12,000 Haitian peasants' (Fiehrer 1990:1,12). Some have claimed the numberto have been as high as 25,000 (Garcia 1983:15). The most reliable figure ispresumably provided in a critical discussion of different sources by BernardoVega (Vega 1995:341-353). Vega estimates that between 4,000 and 6,000 Hai-tians died in the massacre (ibid.:347).

We do not know exactly what triggered the violent events of 1937, eventswhich in turn shaped the Dominican state's programme of'Dominicaniza-tion' in its border regions and today's social and political conditions in theDominican-Haitian borderlands (Galîndez 1958:197-201; Moya Pons 1990:517-518). What we shouldszy, however, is that a specific set of imageries of de-structive and evil forces and of violence, that were already present in a range ofDominican (popular and elite) discourses on Hispaniola's two peoples and

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5 4 CHRISTIAN KROHN-HANSEN

territories, served both to justify and to exacerbate the outcome ofthat ac-tual violence. For the time being, I take for granted that 'the politics of re-ligious experience' (Bloch's object of study) can, and should, be compared to'the politics of national cosmology/national identity.' I will return to thislater.

Since colonial times, the area corresponding to the Haitian-Dominicanborderlands has been a region between two states, or, more precisely, theseareas have been on the periphery of two states. The western part of Hispan-iola (colonized by France) gained its sovereignty and became the second in-dependent republic in the New World consequent to the Haitian Revolution(1791-1804). The eastern sector of Hispaniola (which was a Spanish colonyfor about three centuries from 1492, and which corresponds to around two-thirds of the island) became the Dominican Republic in 1844. In that year theinhabitants of the former Spanish colony liberated themselves from the Hai-tians, who had occupied the eastern sector and ruled the whole island fortwenty-two years, from 1822 to 1844. Haitian armed forces invaded thereafterthe Dominican sector several times in attempts to regain control of the entireisland. The Haitian invasions continued until the late 1850s. These yearsmark the period of the Dominican-Haitian wars.5 During the nineteenth cen-tury and the first few decades of the twentieth century, the Haitian state andits attendant economic market were more strongly present than the Domin-ican state in Hispaniola's borderlands. At that time Haiti was militarily, eco-nomically, and demographically the stronger of the two countries. However,in the course of the 1920s and 1930s, the Dominican Republic caught up with,and even surpassed, Haiti (Vega i988:38~39).6

Yet it was first with the protracted, violent regime of General Trujillo thatthe Dominican Republic firmly established itself and was 'constructed' in theDominican border areas. After the 1937 Haitian massacre, the border wasclosed (a situation that lasted until Trujillo's death in 1961), and the statelaunched a major 'Dominicanization' programme in the border provinces inorder to strengthen the political, cultural, and economic relations with therest of the country.

The Dominican Republic has a history of constructing its national identityin relation to Haiti; and the border has had, and continues to have, a principalrole therein, as the locus of the national collectivity's dignity and power. Atraditional and official Dominican historiography (dating from the 1860s and1870s and which still enjoys a powerful influence) has represented the Hai-tian domination as 'a death-like dream' (Hoetink 1970:99; Moya Pons 1986a;


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Derby & Turks 1993) - that is, a rule exercised by 'barbarians' which threat-ened to undermine and destroy the Dominicans' Catholic beliefs, Hispanicroots, and racial characteristics.7 Not until 1936 (or 92 years after the birthof the Dominican Republic) was the first mutually accepted Dominican-Hai-tian agreement about the demarcation of their common border, ratified. Afterthe 1937 Haitian massacre, the Trujilloist state embarked on a heavy propa-ganda campaign to demonize the Haitian other, representing the slaughteras incidents between Dominican border residents and Haitian livestockthieves, and the 'Dominicanization' as a necessary and legitimate attempt toconstruct a defence against the evil which was infiltrating from the other side.After more than half a century of anti-Haitian discourses in schools and in con-nection with national commemorations, most Dominicans today typicallyreproduce at least the dominant symbols from those discourses. More impor-tantly and more tragically, however, even before the massacre, Dominicans(in the border region and elsewhere) had shaped and maintained specificideas and practices (tied to constructions of history, magic and race) whichreproduced images of the Haitians as both a feared and a despised other(Derby 1994). To put it another way, while the massacre was state-sponsoredand directed from Santo Domingo, it came to make moral and political senseto the majority of Dominicans.

The myths of the nation forged and reproduced through Dominicanpatriotic history have interacted with, and been supported by, discourses andpractices among ordinary Dominicans. While the production of patriotichistory has been shaped by Dominican experiences of the Haitian twenty-two year rule and the Dominican-Haitian wars, Dominican concepts of magic(found in different but overlapping versions in most areas of the country, andin all social strata (Deive [1975] 1988; Davis 1987)) link the people from theother side of the border to a particular potential for carrying out destructivetransformations and evil. Devil-pact stories, which are widespread in theborder area, explicitly identify a Haitian community (the coastal town ofArcahaie) as a centre of demonic power (Krohn-Hansen 1995; Derby 1994:517-526). To put it in different terms, central discourses embedded in pat-riotic history and in magic have contained overlapping structures of reason-ing about Hispaniola's national boundary. These discourses share a numberof moral (not to say politico-cosmological) premises. Both those who haveshaped patriotic history and those who have reproduced magic have con-structed their arguments about the island's main identities by forming whatlooks like a geography of good and evil. History and magic together have


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5 6 CHRISTIAN KROHN-HANSEN

resulted in the reproduction of a set of Dominican (hi)stories of fear of theHaitian other.

An illustration: Concepts of magic in 'San Antonio' (a village on thesouthern Dominican border in which I carried out fieldwork in 1991-92) aretied to the locals' moral construction of relationships. People here thinkabout the effects of magical healing as much in terms of keeping out andgiving shape to evil as in terms of producing health. But no person, peopleclaim, should be said to be born bad. It all depends on your social way ofbeing. Locals' daily 'readings' of each other's interactions justify healing ornon-healing: Only those said to have a pure heart (or 'good faith') may pos-sibly be cured with the aid of the power of a saint or spirit. The explanationsof sorcery also have their point of departure in a real human possibility foraccumulating guilt from doing evil. Now, as villagers say, there are a numberof magicians on both sides of the border who know how to engender de-struction. People take it for granted, therefore, that guilt exists in many formsboth in themselves and in others. However, they still appear to skew theirown narratives of evil in the direction ofHaitian origins or roots. It is true thatthey also mention the existence of some extremely knowledgeable indivi-duals and potent sorcerers in their midst. In San Antonio, many have soughtout reputed sorcerers in the hills near the (Dominican) town of San Juan dela Maguana. But many have, in addition, crossed the border on errands ofmagic. People therefore incorporate those from the other side into an am-biguous understanding which states, like the discourses associated with pat-riotic history, that Haitians are both strong and inferior. For those from theother side not only belong to a stigmatized class of people, but are also breed-ers of dangerous and destructive magic; Haitians are both scorned and fearedas controllers of great sorcery.

The fact that so many Dominican arguments constructing Haitians as thepotent and feared other already existed and were in circulation in society,created the possibility for legitimating the illegitimate: for explaining the1937 Haitian massacre, the Dominicanization and the closing of the borderas necessary measures adopted against evil - or, as the state's restoration ofpolitical and moral 'order'. After the 1937 massacre, the state's discoursesabout the island's national boundary were shaped as vigorously anti-Haitian.

For example, the speech The meaning of a policy' (Elsentido de unapolf-tica, written by historian Pena Battle and delivered in the Dominican bordercommunity of Elias Piria in 1942, and generally known as the principal Trujillo-ist legitimation of the Dominicanization (Cassa 1976)) expressed the Do-


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The Construction of Dominican State Power and Symbolisms of Violence 5 7

minican need for a closed border in terms which justified the state's violenceas a fight against evil. As the speech goes,

Trujillo understood that the mathematical layout of a border line only solved one,the easiest one, of our neighbourhood problems... The clear-sighted statesman hasseen: On one side, the traditional desolation and abandonment, the total negationof a border policy. That is the Dominican side; and on the other side, the desper-ate reality of a people whose influence and negative forces infiltrate persistently andslowly, but certainly, the Dominican side... According to the words of the doctorArthur G. Holly, an eminent Haitian physician: 'these people are practitioners ofnecromancy, beings who use dead bodies for magical purposes'... The institute ofBrooklings [in the United States] ... recently carried out profound investigations ofthe social conditions in the Dominican Republic... I quote the following from thiswork: "There is here a wave of coloured people, which increases and will wrap upany group of whites which is not carefully prepared and protected. In many of theold communities, the blackening of the whites is almost total'... If we do not actresolutely and strongly, the moment shall come when the evil among us will beimpossible to cure, as it is on the other side. There is no government of the genu-inely cultivated and civilized world that would not adopt definite measures againstsuch a serious and vital threat. Is it possible that we Dominicans are censured when,forced by a simple dictate of self-preservation, we devote ourselves to the fight againstelements which subvert our very national essence? (Pena Battle 1954:63-65,68-70)

These Trujilloist discourses, with which Dominicans were bombarded fortwenty years, are rooted in a certain political cosmology. They not only arti-culate views about Hispaniola's division and two nations but also express athinking about political destruction. The post-Trujilloist state's discourses aboutwhat took place in 1937 have been only slightly modified compared withthose shaped before 1961.8 And even though many Dominicans today lookback at the massacre in horror, and although a series of critical works on thehardships of Haitian migrant labour have been written by Dominicans want-ing to change the Dominican-Haitian relationship, the very conceptualizationof the 1937 violence among Dominicans has been given scant attention.9

Among today's border residents, memories of the violence in the Domin-ican-Haitian relationship revolve around ideas about national 'order' - oraround a specific form of national classification. Such memories shape viewsof Hispaniola's division, for example, with the aid of images of purity. Apeasant said about his own participation in the 1937 slaughter: T wanted totake part in that task, which consisted of cleansing my own place, my repub-lic' Or in the words of another peasant, 'Yesterday we had trouble with the


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negros, but not today. Now it's a clean thing. We're not struggling with negros,for the negro is a bad nation.'10 u

The point is that the same social processes which have meant thatDominicans have pictured their neighbours in these ways, have guaranteeda potential'for Dominican use, and justification, of violence against Haitians.12

Two corollaries of this Dominican concern with purity and order have beendiscourses on 'infiltration' and uses of the 'disease' image. Needless to say, thedisease metaphor is a powerful one, an image with a strong resonance. It con-nects ordinary people's experiences of the body and the healing thereof toconcepts and images which shape perceptions and understandings of thenation/the body politic. The disease image used in politics helps constructthe Dominican state and nation as a living organism. Evil is portrayed as apain or danger 'inside' the body politic, and as an infectious agent spreadingdeath : 'If we do not act resolutely and strongly, the moment shall come whenthe evil among us will be impossible to cure, as it is on the other side' (PenaBattle 1954:70). The discourses on infiltration and disease share an importantfeature, one which has been illuminated by René Girard. According to Gir-ard, such discourses imply that 'active' and 'passive' roles become reversed:the legitimacy of violence is constructed while the discourses represent theactive ones, those inflicting suffering and death, as the original victims. Oncethe 'impure' attributes have been stored in the Enemy, the members of thelatter category who are placed 'on the inside' may logically appear as thesource of the 'trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. Theroles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims oftheir own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminentlycapable of destroying them' (Girard 1987:91). The same author has stressedthe tragic relevance of this for the comparative understanding of violence(and of possible legitimations of it):

At the time of the Black Death, foreigners were killed, and Jews were massacred,and a century or two later, 'witches* were burned, for reasons strictly identical tothe ones we found [and we presendy find] in our myths... The imaginary crimesand real punishments .of these victims are the crimes and punishments we find inmythology. Why should we have to believe, in the case of mythology only, thatif the crimes are imaginary, the punishments and the victims themselves cannotbe real? Every sign points the other way. The texts that document historical atro-cities - the judicial records of witch-hunts, for instance - offer the same fantasticcharges as myths, the same indifference to concrete evidence, and the same un-examined and massive conviction that everything is true (Girard 1987:86-87).

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Returning to the San Antonio peasants' conceptualizations of'before', 'dur-ing' and 'after' 1937 in terms of the production or restoration of a certain'order' and 'purity' ('I wanted to take part in that task, which consisted ofcleansing my own place, my republic'/'Yesterday we had trouble with thenegros... Now it's a clean thing'), we should hardly be surprised by the hid-eous power associated with such conceptualizations in eastern Hispaniola.These confirm and reinforce a political cosmology of a specific kind.

One dimension of the reproduction of this outlook ought to be emphasizedin particular. The appeal of the 'purity' metaphors used about the nation andthe state's violence must have been strengthened through the fact that thecategories of'clean' {limpio) and 'dirty' (sucio) are constantly drawn on in every-day life (see below). That appeal must in turn have been reinforced throughthe fact that the same 'purity' metaphors have been used to morally constructpersonhood and relations between kin and friends. The same symbols areeven basic ones which people use when practising or reflecting on rituals ofhealing and sorcery.

The Dominican ideas described here confirm the view that the very con-ceptualization of (a state's) violence is tied to specific cosmologie processes- to processes which ultimately feed on actors' 'thirst' for meaning as 'order'.Conceptual violation (or people's experiences of disorder tied to a signific-ant category, such as 'the Dominican fatherland as nothousing negros or haiti-anos') should be investigated as a potentially deep source of meanings forthose involved in political violence.13 Both the euphemistic and the primarymeanings of the term typically used by Dominicans in order to refer to the1937 events, el desalojo, can be seen as 'logical' in light of the above discus-sion. Eldesalojo ('the eviction' or 'the dislodging') suggests that someone wasthrown out after having violated an established house rule.

While many nationalist imageries revolve around a specific problematicof violence and evil (Kapferer 1988; Malkki 1995; Kugelmass 1995), it maynot be correct to say that violence is universally a part of nationalist imageries(Eriksen 1993:112). Nevertheless, the Dominican case at the very least sug-gests that where the nationalist ideas and arguments represent the nation asborn out of wars with a particular 'other', the very conceptualization of thewars with that other may be constitutive to the continued building of thenation. Or, to put it in different terms, we could say that a primary processof politics is the process of authorized naming. The making of popular andelite history can serve this purpose, as can, for example, the mapping of terri-tories and populations through censuses, reports, archives and literary fic-

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6o CHRISTIAN KROHN-HANSEN

tions.14 After the wars in the first half of the last century in Hispaniola, dis-courses and practices tied to history, magic, and daily interaction amongDominicans continued to 'name' the national struggle for Dominicanness bycasting the Haitians as that struggle's most dangerous other. These discour-ses and practices provided Dominican state production with a certain hori-zon and direction - or, to put it more clearly, with what Bourdieu (1977:164)has spoken of as a certain, limiting sense of social reality, that is, with a parti-cular set of ideas expressing le regard de l'autre, the definition of self by meansof the other. Attempts to fundamentally transform the Dominican state havetherefore to be related to the very words employed by Dominicans in con-ceptualizations of the Dominican-Haitian relationship.

It has often been said that nationalisms are like 'secular religions', and thatthey, like religions, strikingly easily appear to supply an idiom for the expla-nation or justification of intolerance and war. The explanation seems to beprecisely that symbolism of violence and evil present in so many imageriesof nations across the world. Some form of idiom signalling a creative con-quest, one which gives birth to or restores the nation, and thereby transformsits members (by naming them and/or protecting them), has to be widespreadamong the world's 'secular' nationalists. This is so simply because nationsdefine themselves, and are defined by others, on the basis of specific trans-formative processes, the result of which is a conquest (violent or otherwise)of particular, sharply bounded, geographical territories. At such a high levelof abstraction, it is therefore more than reasonable to trace connections be-tween religious processes and those anchored in the beliefs and practices ofnationalists. What is common to the two sets of phenomena is that they oftenreproduce specific imageries of both creative violence or conquest and de-structive evil, which can, under certain circumstances, develop into a deep andconvincing legitimation of actual battles and wars within relationships ofpower.15 Such a parallel between the politics of religious and nationalist ex-periences invites in turn at least four comments.

Firstly, we can draw further on Bloch's conceptualization of the ritual pro-cess (as the construction of a transcendental order) related to 'religion' inorder to attempt to summarize two distinct senses in which we should saythat violence (both symbolic and actual) was constitutive of the constructionof the Dominican national imagined community since the 1930s: In analogyto Bloch's reasoning about ritual, we can say that acts of (sacrificial) violenceallowed members of a Dominican community - that is, participants in na-tional rituals - to participate in the immortality of a transcendent entity (the


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nation) that denies the transience of life and human' institutions, that effectsa permanent transformation in participants so that they can 'dominate thehere and now of which [they] previously [were] a part' (Bloch 1992:5). In ad-dition, notions of purity - and boundary maintenance - were inextricablylinked to the creation-through-violence of this transcendental entity (thenation) (see also, for example, Malkki 1995), such that violence against thoseviewed as not of the transcendental entity - 'impure' Haitians placed 'on theinside', or resident on Dominican land - was ritually legitimated as non-vio-lence. The state's grotesque violence was conceptually transformed into 'themaintenance/construction of purity and order'.

My second remark has to do with our conceptualization of the very rela-tionship between the symbolism of violence and evil on the one hand, andmoments of actual uses of power and violence on the other. Bloch is right inunderscoring the potential of an imagery of violence for furnishing an idiomwhich may justify and exacerbate uses of military force by states and otherpolitical entities. However, what the Dominican case shows in addition tothis is that the historical 'birth' of the specific symbolism of violence orconquest which is drawn on in order to shape legitimation, may itself resultfrom experiences of actual bodily violence. Real defeats and victories - thatis, actual invasions and an actual territorial conquest in the first half of thenineteenth century - preceded and conditioned the creation of the discour-ses of Dominican, patriotic history on the Dominican-Haitian relationship.In that sense this should be seen as a representative case. To the extent thatnationalist imageries revolve around a symbolism of violence, they usuallydo this based on some experienced, actual violence. In the case of religions,it may well be different. Bloch argues that 'rebounding violence', which hesees as the core of sacred, ritual processes, is ultimately rooted in universalhuman experiences of the transience of life and groups. This may be so, butit seems worth reflecting on and investigating whether some religious orritual representations of a conquest and of evil may have roots in experi-enced, actual uses of political violence. To put this in another way, we shouldalways seek to investigate a particular symbolism in specific, historicalterms.

Thirdly, we should operate with an open, flexible methodology whentrying to analyse particular states. Bloch's book and those of others show therelevance of examinations of rituals. My own work among Dominicans hasconcentrated on thought embedded in secular products of history and litera-ture, in uses of magic and healing, and in routine forms of speech and inter-


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action. In addition it may be indispensable to examine symbolisms of vio-lence reproduced by mass media (Rowe 1989), cinema (Ferro 1984:97-103),or sports (Archetti 1992).

Fourthly, in addition to nationalism and religious phenomena, other pro-cesses (expressing particular connections between the exercise of power andfeatures of a cosmology) can help structure and transform states.16 Genderedprocesses provide an important example.

Gender and State Power: Masculinity and TerrorNotions of masculinity among Dominicans have played, and continue to

play, a central part in the everyday production of political legitimacy - insideand outside the political parties and the state.17 Ideas about masculinityamong Dominicans constitute a dominant discourse - or what is summed upin Bourdieu's notion of a 'legitimate problematic' (Bourdieu 1992:172; Bay-art 1991: 64). A legitimate problematic helps produce a field of what is poli-tically thinkable, and a particular set of power relations. Among Dominicans,the legitimate problematic of masculinity has entailed a particular confine-ment of society's hegemonic political imagination, i.e. the reproduction(though a changeable one) of a certain vision of what has constituted politicalreality. A number of verbal expressions that are used in daily life in Domin-ican society in order to classify and shape different forms of male behaviour(like 'courage', 'generosity', 'eloquence', 'seriousness', and so forth) representpolitical categories and expressions: relations between leaders and followers,or patrons and clients, are given meaning in terms of ideas about masculinity- far more than, for example, in terms of a version of thinking about Weberianbureaucracy.18

Here I will only deal with the categories and labels that Dominican menuse to construct differences between themselves as men. The issue of howthe man-woman relation might be said to feed into the masculine relationswhich I am considering here, lies beyond the scope of this brief discussion,as do the specifically female perspectives.19

Dominican men's categories for reflecting on and judging each other's and(local and national) politicians' maleness, may be discussed in terms of fivesets of ideas: notions (1) oivalentia or courage; (2) of a man's visibility inpublic spaces; (3) of the man as seducer and father; (4) of the power tied toa man's verbal skills; and (5) of a man's seriousness and sincerity. Here, how-ever, I will only consider (and only in order to rapidly illustrate) the first andlast of these items.


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A central image of masculinity is that of the hombre valiente, the spirited,courageous, and brave man. People here use two words, valiente and guapo,largely as synonyms. As a man in the village explained: 'The man who is guapois he who knows how to defend himself when he is presented with a problem.For example, it is not that I come threatening you, saying that "I'm guapo". Itis when you come to me, that I know how to answer you and that I preparemyself to die defending this [or what is mine]; then I am guapo. It is not theman who walks about talking nonsense, it's not that kind of man. He is aboaster [bocon]. The man who fights when it is necessary to fight, he is theguapo, the valiente; yes, the same man who is valiente, a man who is guapo, heis the one.'

The fact that people use the word guapo in this way underscores thatfighting is not viewed as necessarily destructive or evil. In Spanish, guapomeans 'beautiful' or 'handsome'; in short, some men engaged in fighting seembeautiful. There is an image here of the beauty of certain forms of male fight-ing and violence, the forms said by people to express valentia or courage.20

However, Dominicans do not assume that respect is derived simply fromgiving rise to or provoking a fight; what is cultivated is rather a man's abilityto defend himself fearlessly and actively if he is challenged or attacked by arival: 'He who is valiente waits for you to fall upon him. Then he will fight.'

The ideal which says that a man ought to be guapo or valiente is used notonly to shape views of actions of ordinary villagers and local leaders, but alsoto explain and justify the practices of national leaders and presidents. Theways in which leaders act when confronted with political conflicts and rival-ries - such as in election battles - are evaluated in terms of these categories.For example, villagers discussed the masculine strength of Juan Bosch andJoaquîn Balaguer. Bosch was the winner of the first presidential election heldafter the Trujillo dictatorship; but Bosch's government was overthrown by acoup after only seven months, in 1963. In 1966, Balaguer 'won' the presidentialelection (with the aid of the US, which had invaded Santo Domingo in 1965,and terror sown by the Dominican Army); Balaguer was 're-elected' until1978 (when an end was put to the military terror), and later in 1986,1990, and1994. Bosch has founded and headed two large national parties (the Domin-ican Revolutionary Party, and the Party for Dominican Liberation) whichhave struggled against Balaguer's party (the Reformist Party) in elections.21

A man explained that he had once been a follower of Juan Bosch, but hadchanged his political loyalty because, as he said, 'I was a follower of Boschin the 1960s. But I don't like Bosch, because Bosch cackles a lot, and politi-


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dans must beguapos, like the men in the pueblos... Bosch is supported by allthe good people of the pueblos, but he suffers from two things, that he isn'tvaliente and doesn't "turn loose the peso" [distribute money among hisfollowers].' In 1990, Bosch's party received more votes thanjoaquîn Balaguer'sparty; Balaguer only won the presidency with the votes received by sometiny allied parties. But Bosch and many others claim that Balaguer stole thevictory by fraud (Cabrera Febrillet 1991). For example, a San Antonio mansaid laconically, 'Bosch won in the ballot boxes, Balaguer won in the com-puters.' The same man that criticized Bosch above claimed that Bosch 'hadgone to sleep' on election day rather than practising ruthless vigilance (as theguapo would have done), and had let them take what belonged to him. As hechose to formulate it, 'There are moments for eating, and there are momentsfor sleeping.'

Another basic concept is that of the person as serio (or, if used aboutwomen, send), i.e. serious.22 To claim that a man isn't serious is to imply thathe is shameless. Used about men, the label sirrvergüenza or shameless mostoften connotes 'wrong-doer' or 'thief. Bosch and his followers consistentlyargue that the other political parties - in particular that of Balaguer - are inthe hands of men who lack seriousness and are siiruergiienzas or shameless.This discourse is a powerful one because it mobilizes key concepts used fre-quently in everyday life in all sectors of society; in saying that the otherparties' leaders 'rob' the state, this discourse (the Boschuta discourse) at-tempts to deprive them of any legitimacy. Another basic pair of conceptsused to characterize actions of both men and women is buenafe and mala Je,which mark a distinction between good and bad faith, or between sincerityand insincerity. This distinction, which expresses a thinking about good andevil, is also shaped in terms of differences in people's 'purity' or blood. Peopleand hearts are metaphorically spoken of as sucios (dirty) or litnpios (clean),implying evil or good; and the blood of evil and good persons respectivelyare said to be pesada (heavy) and Irviana (light), or agria (sour) and duke(sweet). The saints too are contemplated through such language. Some mys-teries (a common expression for 'saints' or 'spirits') are said to be sweet, andothers sour. The classification of persons' buenafe or malafe, their sincerityor insincerity, is reproduced in everyday encounters. Everything socialshould mature from the respect signalled by an acceptable greeting. As a manin the village said regarding the connection between sincerity in persons, andthe proper greeting, 'The person who greets you without knowing you, thatperson has good faith, but if he doesn't greet you, he isn't completely good.


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He should pay attention to you, that's good faith, for if he doesn't extend youthe greeting, damn! he isn't whole.'

The politics of masculinity is shaped in conjunction with the daily repro-duction ofthese most elementary notions that structure people's classificationsof persons as moral beings. Everyday classifications of men in terms of seri-ousness and sincerity are constitutive of the formation of relations betweenfriends and compadres (or the highly politicized links established betweenparents and godparents), and between local leaders and their followers -relations that in turn give unmistakable form to the public life, politics, andstate making of Dominicans.

The Dominican case suggests that, in addition to nationalism and religiousphenomena, gendered relationships may nurture an idiom which approximatesa representation of violence and which can, under certain circumstances,provide a legitimation for actual uses of violence in relationships of domi-nation and subordination - that is, in those everyday relations of powerwhich shape and build the state. A symbolism of conquest can be said to becondensed in the frequently employed words of valentia ('courage') andguapo ('courageous'/'spirited'). The ideas about male power built into theuses of valiente and guapo at the local and popular levels furnished Balaguerwith a measure of legitimacy after his 'illegitimate' election fight againstBosch in 1990. More importantly, the image of the man who commandsrespect because he has proved himself as guapo has been used to representselected aspects of the state's use of violence against its own citizens between1930 and 1961 as having produced 'order'.

The memories of the Trujilloist state mobilize ideas about gendered pow-er - ideas that help shape legitimacy. The reproduction of ideals such as thoseof autonomy and valentia means that the Trujilloist state, long after thegeneral himself had been killed, was still accumulating symbolic capital.Below is a brief example drawn from my conversations with a village leader;as he explained, 'They said that Trujillo was bad, but 88 per cent of Trujillowas a good president... And many times we say "Damn! Why isn't Trujilloalive?", [for example] when we see a delinquent act somewhere in thecountry. We are many who say "Because he was the man." Many old peoplesay that.' This feature of popular Dominican conceptualizations of powereven guarantees a feared man, such as a wielder of Trujilloist terror amongvillagers, a minimum of symbolic credit. The most feared man during theTrujillo regime in this southwestern part of the country (where I carried outfieldwork) was an officer named Alcantara. His name was synonymous with

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fear. In the words of two villagers: 'Alcantara was the one [of Trujillo's trust-ed officers] most familiar with this region, since he was raised in a frontiercommunity. He travelled frequently through all the areas here. He alwayscame... I [once] got to know him personally; and he was a man who wasfeared, and he spoke with you laughing. [He was] a man, very strong. Allthose crimes that he had committed and that he was committing, and I methim.' 'When he [Trujillo] wanted to set a pueblo straight, he sent Alcantara.And when the people knew that Alcantara was there, everybody walkedtrembling.'23

The minimum of symbolic credit awarded to a man like Alcantara can begrasped, for example, from the words used to characterize him ('a man, verystrong'). It becomes even clearer in the following words of a villager whoserved under him: 'He didn't mind sending the Guards to bed and leave aloneon a patrol, he alone confronting the people... he didn't fear that. It becamecommon knowledge that he was guapol Trujillo, like Alcantara, was enorm-ously guapo or brave. And as locals would say (for example when criticizingBosch) a politician should be guapo, like the men in the pueblos.

Like the symbolism of violence described by Bloch as 'rebounding vio-lence', and like symbolisms featuring national conquests of territories, theimagery of the guapo is based on the assumption that a stronger control ofsocial life is generated through winning a fight. The consummation of thefight is necessarily directed outwardly at one's rivals or competitors. Further-more, as Bloch underscores with regard to the symbolism in the ritual pro-cess, the symbolism shaped through the uses of the category of the guapo hasto be one which is understood by the actors themselves as, in a certain sense,an aggressive one, that is, as one expressing a veritable conquest, otherwisethe capacity of this symbolism to demonstrate that strengthened dominationover life and social relationships is what in fact results from successful, directconfrontation, would be highly limited.

Again, this is not to say that the existence of the imagery of masculinepower tied to the uses of the categories of guapo and valiente for purposes ofclassifying interaction is in any way a sufficient explanation of the uses ofactual violence, such as in the form of repression or fraud. In addition, it isessential that we remember that in this specific symbolism masculine respectis not gained through being the one who provokes a fight. What is cultivatedis the practice of fearless, active defence when challenged or attacked by apossible rival. However, such an idiom represents a. potential for the justifiedconstruction of relationships of power through actual uses of violence and

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military force. Given certain circumstances, the daily cultivation of whatcould be described as the 'sacred* image of the guapo or the valiente can fur-nish an idiom for the legitimation of real fights, with far-reaching implicationsfor the shaping of the state and nation. The production of this kind of legi-timation in turn reinforces and reproduces the 'sacred' image of the guapo/the valiente itself.

It is indispensable to speak of'cosmology' and 'belief. For there is alwaysa certain cosmology which frames and orients political practices, and nur-tures idioms of violence. In addition (and paradoxically, but only at firstsight), this same cosmology is connected with the generation of qualitieswhich are praised in many, perhaps even most, societies. The politics of reli-gious and nationalist experiences may shape feelings of renunciation of theself (among elites and masses). The religious rituals that Bloch speaks of arethose which have been, and indeed should be, approached by researchersin terms of an idea ofcommunitas (Turner 1977). National communities, fortheir part, may inspire political love, or what Anderson dares describe as 'thebeauty of gemeinschaß (in spite of a common insistence among progressiveintellectuals, particularly in Europe, on the near-pathological nature of na-tionalism). People throughout the world leave their homes and local com-munities to go and die for their national homeland, theirpatria or fatherland:'[T]he great wars of this century are extraordinary not so much in the un-precedented scale on which they permitted people to kill, as in the colossalnumbers persuaded to lay down their lives... The idea of the ultimate sac-rifice comes only with an idea of purity, through fatality. Dying for one'scountry, which usually one does not choose, assumes a moral grandeurwhich dying for the Labour Party... or perhaps even Amnesty Internationalcan not rival, for these are all bodies one can join or leave at easy will'(Anderson 1991:141-144).

The Dominican uses of masculine notions are associated with the produc-tion of opportunities to display one's personal integrity and dignity, and withthe formation of ties in which one may sense 'the beauty of friendship andleadership' (to paraphrase Anderson above). Precious relations of friendshipare converted into 'natural ties' in the form of compadrazgo; that is, they takethe shape of (fictive) kinships and may produce experiences of a kind ofatmosphere of altruism, perhaps not so very different from the halos of dis-interestedness which are, from time to time, felt to exist about religious soci-eties and nations.

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Conclusion: Power, Cosmology, and Idioms of ViolenceI have argued that inquiries into the making of politics and states should

be closely linked to examinations of particular cosmologies. Power not onlyengenders but is also itself a product of cosmological visions. Such visions in-clude notions of necessary and desirable ways of securing control over exist-ence - that is, of maintaining or constructing 'order', and of combatingdanger or 'disorder'. In order to grasp what Philip Abrams describes as 'thecardinal activity involved in the serious presentation of the state [or of pow-er]: the legitimating of the illegitimate'25 (Abrams 1988:76) - that is, in orderto interpret justifications of what some/others may consider to be 'the il-legitimate', it is crucial to examine cosmology. Specifically, I have attempt-ed to argue that - in the case of the socio-historical construction of the Do-minican Republic - particular hegemonic conceptualizations of answers toquestions about how to secure control over existence and evil have mediatedsocially between actual state violence or terror and popular and elite con-structions of legitimate state power.

Others who have written on state, nation, and violence - in particular,Taussig, Kapferer, Feldman, Malkki, and Daniel - have drawn attention to therelevance of a broad anthropological notion of cosmology (not to say clas-sical anthropological ideas about myth and ritual) to attempts to analyserelationships of power that structure modern social worlds - and their hor-rors. A set of overlaps exist between aspects of these authors' works and fea-tures of my own discussion.

For example, Kapferer's discussion of nationalism in Sri Lanka and Aus-tralia and Malkki's accounts of Hutus who fled the 1972 'selective genocide'in Burundi and found asylum in Tanzania deal, as I have done, with the pro-duction of nationalism in terms of cosmology making and in terms of history(in particular, collective-memory) making (see also, for example, Anderson1991:187-206; Trouillot 1995; Kugelmass 1995). Discussions of particularnational cosmologies in these works are, to a large extent, discussions offorms, contents, and transformations of particular collective remembering.Kapferer analyses nationalist ideas based on 'conventional' anthropologicaltheory of myth (ideas from Malinowski, Leach, Lévi-Strauss, and Sahlins),and is inspired by Dumont's comparative work on hierarchical and egalitarianvalues. Malkki, who quotes Tambiah in order to define 'cosmology', draws onwell-established notions in the discipline about symbolic classification, ritualliminality, conceptual disorder, and anomalies as conceptual problems, inher scrutiny of a certain Hutu nationalist thought. These anthropologists

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show, among other things, the potential inherent in social and cultural an-thropology's classical or core concepts and methods (typically developedthrough studies of'primitive' or non-Western, small-scale societies) for com-parative inquiries into state power, nationalism, violence and terror in dif-ferent areas of the world at the end of the twentieth century.

Or, to put this in different terms, culturally and morally varying notionsof'order' (and, logically enough, varying notions of'boundary-maintenance')should be viewed as principal objects of research for any anthropology ofmodern forms of domination and subordination. This is instructively broughtout in the following passage in Malkki's book, a passage where she attemptsto clarify her use of the term 'cosmology':

The designation of the Hutu refugees' collective narrative of their past as mythico-historical [the designation used by Malkki throughout her analysis] is not meant toimply that it was mythical in the sense of being false or made up... what made the re-fugees' narrative mythical, in the anthropological sense, was not its truth or falsity,but the fact that it was concerned with order'xn a fundamental, cosmological sense.That is the key. It was concerned with the ordering and reordering of social andpolitical categories, with the defining of self in distinction to other, with good andevil. It was most centrally concerned with the reconstitution of a moral order of theworld. It seized historical events, processes, and relationships, and reinterpretedthem within a deeply moral scheme of good and evil (Malkki 1995:55-56; italicsin the original).

As we have seen in previous sections, popular and national political culturein the Dominican Republic in this century - and local and national legitima-tions of the state's Haitian massacre in 1937 - reflected, and reflect, preoccu-pations with particular notions of order and pollution - or particular classifi-cations of (national, racial, and personal) purity and danger (Douglas [1966]1989; Corbin 1977; Taussig 1984,1987:3-135; Anderson 1991:141-154; Kap-ferer 1988:1-26, 183-208; Feldman 1991:147-269; Malkki 1995:1-8, 197-231). Politics is thus driven by, and embraces, actors' continual moral order-ing of the world. Specific conceptualizations of evil forces and destructivetransformations represent driving forces in all relationships of power (Parkin

1985)-Given such a broad perspective on articulations between forms of power

and cosmology, it is possible to grasp and examine specific cultural or sym-bolic 'logics' related to uses of violence or terror. For example, Malkki hasrepresented how Hutu refugees among whom she carried out fieldwork re-


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•JO CHRISTIAN KROHN-HANSEN

membered extreme violence and atrocity perpetrated by 'the Tutsi' - or whatshe calls their mythico-history of atrocity (Malkki 1995:91-104). Atrocitydiscourse contains a potential for legitimation of new violence or spirals ofviolence (see also Taussig 1984; Feldman 1991:59-84). The Hutu refugees'memories construct an essentialized and dehumanized category - the feared,cruel and monster-like 'other', 'the Tutsi' (with whom continued or futurecontact/mixture represents 'pollution' and 'disorder' par excellence in thissymbolic universe). As Malkki shows, such cultural constructions not onlyshape 'the other' as something less than human, but also as a possible legiti-mate object for own violence; atrocity narratives contain a dreadful potential.

My own general argument about possible links between (i) features of cos-mologie visions, (ii) symbolic and other dynamics, and (iii) a state's or an-other actor's use of bodily violence has consisted of stating that we shouldseek to investigate whether particular idioms of conquest or violence areparts of common cultural constructions in ritual and everyday life - that is,of constructions familiar to anthropologists under rubrics such as 'religion','memory', 'nationalism', 'gender', 'health', and 'self - in different historico-ethnographic contexts. We should examine whether, under certain historicaland social circumstances, a particular symbolism of conquest is transformedinto a legitimation, and acceleration, of the use of actual violence or terror inrelationships between actors. I emphasize that it is above all through ethno-graphically and historically specific arguments that one can make a generalargument. To put it in different terms, what is of greatest interest here is nota general claim (that a certain cosmology always frames and orients politicalpractices, and nurtures idioms of violence - one might ask, how could it beotherwise?), but rather demonstrations of how, under historically specificcircumstances, certain idioms and not others enter into particular constructionsof legitimacy. I have sought to show that a specific set of imageries of de-structive and evil forces; of the (sacred) Dominican national purity and order(with mutually dependent racial, religious, and personal purity/order), andof violent conquest, which were already present in a range of Dominicanpopular and elite discourses on Hispaniola's two peoples and territories,served to justify and exacerbate the outcome of the 1937 Haitian massacre- the grotesque slaughter carried out by the Trujilloist state. I have alsoattempted to indicate that an idiom of conquest is reproduced daily as partofDominican men's (heavily hegemonic) constructions of good or ideal maleconduct, and that this idiom of violence - or the 'sacred' image of the guapoor the valiente- has been, and is, used to attempt to make sense of, and justify,

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aspects of the state's terror, repression and fraud before, during, and afterTrujillo. The production of this kind of legitimation in turn strengthens andreproduces the conquest idiom - the image of the guapo or the valiente- itself.The production reproduces this particular symbolic potential for the legiti-mation of the illegitimate, for the justified construction of relationships ofdomination and subordination - and the state - through the use of realviolence.

Notes* I thank the anonymous readers and the Editors of Ethnos for their help with this

article.1. There is a whole range of types of ideas (reproduced through practices) which

have been called 'cosmology' by anthropologists. It would be beyond the boundsof this essay to try to classify them strictly; in this essay I am merely using the wordloosely. Indeed, a basic point that I shall stress in the discussion which follows isthat analysis should operate with a broad and open concept of cosmology. Sucha comprehensive concept ought to cover the most fundamental assumptions re-produced in everyday life about the cosmos, man's place in nature and society,and social relationships (Douglas [1966] 1989, 1982), and what is included in thefollowing definition given by Tambiah: 'Cosmologies ... are the classifications ofthe most encompassing scope. They are frameworks of concepts and relationswhich treat the universe or cosmos as an ordered system, describing it in termsof space, time, matter, and motion, and peopling it with gods, humans, animals,spirits, demons, and the like' (Tambiah 1985a:3).

2. A useful Annual Review of Anthropology essay - which covers a great part of themost directly relevant literature published until 1994 - is Carole Nagengast's'Violence, Terror, and the Crisis of the State' (1994). Stanley Tambiah ([1977]1985b) and Clifford Geertz (1980) presented relatively early anthropological workon so-called cosmic states. Tambiah has also written on political violence in SriLanka (Tambiah 1986, 1988). For a brief critique of Geertz's (1980) work Negara,see Thomas (1990:168-169). For more references to relevant anthropologicalwork on links between culture/cosmology, state power, and violence, see below.

3. For a relevant but controversial essay on culture and power (including its grimfaces), and on state and violence, written by a historian and published in PublicCulture, see Achille Mbembe's The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vul-garity in the Postcolony' (1992a); see also a set of comments by anthropologists,historians, and others which this essay provoked and which were published in thesame journal (Olaniyan 1992; Cohen 1992; Mudimbe 1992; Taussig 1992b; Butler1992; Trouillot 1992; Pemberton 1992; Coronil 1992; Borges 1992; Richman 1992;and Mbembe 1992b). During the last two decades Foucault's work has, to a con-siderable extent, inspired the anthropology of violence and terror (see, for ex-ample, Foucault 1979, 1980). None the less, there is an important difficulty inFoucault's thinking related to violence and state power, which Fernando Coroniland Julie Skurski have outlined as follows (and which, as we will see, should beviewed by the anthropologist, among other things, as an encouragement to work


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systematically in order to understand modern and other ethnographic complexity):'A myth central to modernity, whose paternity can be traced to Hegel and Fou-cault (1979), contends that as heirs to the Enlightenment, modern states establishtheir authority by embodying not divine will or force but reason. The modernstate, it asserts, having domesticated the bloody theater of violence of the ancienrégime [see also Giddens 1981:177], replaces publicly inflicted punishment witha myriad of disciplinary procedures that permeate the body politic and engenderthe modern soul. From this perspective, state violence as a reason of state marksthe premodern domain, in which the state writes its texts on the bodies of its citi-zens, presumably because premodern souls grasp its reasons concretely.' Coroniland Skurski write - and I agree - that we should question 'a viewpoint that divideshistory into neat ascending stages and is blind to the violence through whichmodern states secure their hegemony' (Coronil & Skurski 1991:332).

4. High uncertainty exists with regard to the number of Haitians killed in the mas-sacre. This is just one of many indications of how relatively little investigation hasbeen undertaken in relation to the whole event One scholar, Thomas Fiehrer, hasasserted that 'the [1937] event has never been explained satisfactorily by eitherparticipants or succeeding investigators;' his own number for those who died inthe massacre is 'some 9,000 to 12,000 Haitian peasants' (Fiehrer 1990:1, 12). Somehave claimed the number to have been as high as 25,000 (García 1983:15).

5. The slave revolution led by Toussaint Louverture between 1791 and 1804 notonly created Haiti and thereby the second independent republic in the Westernhemisphere, but also came to influence nearly all political life in Hispaniola there-after. It was a singular event, capable (if only in passing) of shaking the very con-ceptual framework of the slave-owning planters and the rest of the nationalistpioneers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in America. It istherefore not surprising that the freedom achieved by the Haitian revolutionarieshad to be militarily defended for a long period of time thereafter. Most of theHaitian military actions can only be understood in the light of the fact that theslave revolution and the first independent black state in the Western hemispherewas isolated and opposed from all sides - by colonial powers, the Vatican, and theUnited States (Trouillot 1990:50-58). The Haitians' notions of their lack of securi-ty in a world of imperialism made them, in turn, invade their neighbours' land (inorder to attempt to protect the revolution by controlling the whole island andthereby impeding European attacks from the easily conquered [because thinlypopulated and little productive] Spanish sector), and tragically shape the Do-minicans' fear of them. (For an illuminating discussion of the West's failure toacknowledge the Haitian Revolution, the most successful slave revolution inhistory, see Trouillot (1995:31-107).)

6. This circumstance was connected with the development of a large-scale productionof sugar for export in the Dominican Republic from the 1870s (Hoetink 1982:1-18, 64-93; del Castillo 1985; Bryan 1985; Baud 1987).

7. A number of the images connected with the civilization-savagery oppositionwhich has been appropriated in Hispaniola have a long history in the West(McGrane 1989; Mason 1990; Foucault [1967] 1991; Trouillot 1991; Baretta &Markoff 1978; Taussig 1987; Coronil & Skurski 1991; Sommer 1991).

8. Joaquîn Balaguer has dominated the post-Trujillo era and was Dominican presi-


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dent from 1966 to 1978 and from 1986 to 1996. Balaguer was among the Trujilloiststate's leading producers of justifications of the 1937 events and the Dominican-ization in the 1940s and 1950s.

9. For a comprehensive survey of the Dominican literature about Dominican-Hai-tian relationships, see Moya Pons (1992).

10. In popular Dominican parlance, a 'Haitian' (haitiano) is called a 'black' (negro), anda 'black' a 'Haitian'; popular Dominican discourse conflates race and nation (razaand nación) so that Hispaniola's national boundary is shaped as a racial one (orone between relatively 'light-skinned Dominicans' and 'black Haitians') (Krohn-Hansen n.d).

11. As Graziano (1992:140) has said in his chilling account of the Argentine 'dirtywar' from 1976 to 1982, Divine Violence (a study which reveals the in-built 'logic'of a military-junta mythology and how the Argentine junta 'emptied' the 'dirtywar' of its true contents as it mythologized it), when the 'others', in this case thedesaparecidos or the 'disappeared', are constructed as 'dirty', one's own / the state'sviolence can be cleaned and restored as production of 'order'.

12. Much the same can be said for the internationally condemned exploitation ofHaitians in the Dominican sugar industry, where the least humane labour con-ditions are those provided on the state's plantations (Chardon 1984; Moya Pons1986b; Plant 1987; Murphy 1991). To put it another way, having first producedrepresentations of people from 'the other side' as belonging to 'a land which doesnot know civilized life', it is then possible to treat them as if they were savages.

13. For a general elaboration of ideas which state that 'conceptual violation' can bea source of meaning for actors involved in (the remembering of) violence, seeCorbin (1977).

14. For an illuminating elaboration of the thématique of the politics of 'naming', seethe section entitled The symbolic order and the power of naming' in Bourdieu(1992:239-243).

15. For a rich collection of examples which show how nations' imageries of their ownpast design and reproduce specific events of 'challenge', 'defeat', 'revenge', 'finalvictory', and 'triumphant conquest', see Marc Ferro's book about how the past istaught and popularly consumed across the world, The Use and Abuse of History(1984).

16. An instructive example can be found in Nicholas Thomas's essay 'Sanitation andSeeing: The Creation of State Power in Early Colonial Fiji' (1990). Thomas re-veals how particular notions of 'visibility' and 'hygiene' can significantly help toshape state power.

17. A more detailed discussion of the politics of masculinity among Dominicans maybe found in Krohn-Hansen (1996).

18. For more information on the relevance of patronage and clientage to the shapingof Dominican political life, see Hoetink (1982) and Kearney (1986).

19. For some tentative answers to the question about what in Hispaniola's historymay account for the great relevance of daily-life notions of masculinity as a sortof shared 'language' for constructions of power and legitimacy among Dominicans,see the introduction to Krohn-Hansen (1996). None-t e-le ls, as we have seen,masculinity represents only one of the dominant discourses in Dominican poli-tics. Just as central to the definitions of 'the politically thinkable' among Dominicans


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has been the broad, national problematic focused on the Dominican fatherlandas a nation born to share an island with another nation, that of Haiti.

20. A villager once emphasized that a leader has to be the kind of man who acts asa seducer: 'If you arrive at a place where there are five or six girls and have a drink,soon you flirt with all of them. But if you don't drink and dance, you cannot dothat. Nothing. Nor do they as much as look at you. A man has to be a drinker anda dancer; if he isn't, he isn't valiente [no tiene valentía]. The man must be a spender,a drinker, and clean; he cannot be dirty.' Such a use of the word valentía directlylinks the hombre valiente or the hombre guapo (or the image of man as courageousfighter) to notions of male use of seduction and ideas about male beauty.

21. Balaguer stepped down from power in 1996. The 1996 election was won by thecandidate of the Party for Dominican Liberation, current president Leonel Fer-nandez.

22. The concept serio/a is used with different connotations according to gender: Theclassification of a woman as either seria or sinvergüenza (serious or shameless)typically focuses on the issue of her sexual/marital fidelity.

23. According to the local accounts, Alcántara distinguished himself during the 1937Haitian massacre and was thereafter one of a small group of exceptionally fearedofficers used by Trujillo in the different regions of the country.

24. Given both the terror and the other remembered dimensions of the Trujillo re-gime, there is little wonder that today's Dominicans' discourses on this regimeand the man who personalized it, appear notoriously ambiguous and even self-contradictory. Any specific discourse on Trujillismo should be understood as con-textually situated. San Antonio people express shifting ideas about the powerconstructed by Trujillo according to the memory's detailed context (which maybe one of drawing attention to 'ear,' 'order' or 'progress').

25. For discussions of the use of the concept of violence as necessarily contested use,see Riches (1986) and Krohn-Hansen (1994).

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the construction of dominican state power and symbolism of violence

Documents

extreme violence

exacerbation of state

use ofbodily violence

dominican republic

article seeksto

journal article views

modern state

relationships of domination