Ethnographic Approaches to Violence: Some Critical Issues
The fundamental feature of ethnographic approaches to violence involves a more comprehensive definition of the concept that moves beyond direct acts of physical force and the “ethnographically visible” (Farmer 2004) to include those processes that contribute to social oppression and assaults on human rights and dignity (Bour- gois 1998, 2003a, 2003b; Farmer 2003; Green 1999; Scheper-Hughes 1992; Walter et al. 2004). In these accounts, violence is generally defined as normative, system- atic (or indirect), and at least partly hegemonic in nature. Relatedly, and as Paul Farmer (2004) points out, violence is deeply rooted in history and memory or, to be more precise, the erasure of history. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois (2004b) have proposed conceptualizing violence as operating on a continuum from the physical to the symbolic and structurally embedded.
As the concept of “violence” has expanded to include broader structural forces and their impacts on human health, a central issue has become the relationship be- tween violence and poverty. Farmer has been the strongest advocate of a materialist
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approach to violence, and his use of the term “structural violence” is widely as- sociated with the suffering and oppression that result from severe poverty. Farmer defines structural violence as that “exerted systematically—that is, indirectly—by everyone who belongs to a certain social order” (2004:318). His body of work draws extensively on the intersection between history, political economy, and biol- ogy to draw a direct connection between underdevelopment, poverty, racism, and the spread of AIDS (Farmer 1992, 1995, 2003).
While Scheper-Hughes retains a focus on the economically marginalized, her con- cept of “everyday violence” focuses on the individual and routinized experiences of violence (Scheper-Hughes 1992). Bourgois applies the concept of “structural vio- lence” similarly and, like Scheper-Hughes, links the embodied experience of violence to local constructions of gender, race, and individual morality (Bourgois 2003a). Both accounts demonstrate the significance of multiple forms of violence among the poor and disenfranchised while simultaneously avoiding a linear correlation between violence and poverty.
These accounts also begin to shed light on the complicated and contradictory relationship between violence and power. The need to focus on this complexity and the “‘micro logics of power’” is significant because various forms of violence are best understood in terms of different forms of domination and oppression. When this complexity is not drawn out, Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois (2004a) warn that violence becomes a “black box” where macrostructural forces are unknowingly transformed into local manifestations of suffering. A growing body of work focuses on these issues in terms of the multiple and mundane aspects of violence and their significance to social structures and cultural processes in general, often drawing on examples that are notably symbolic and cultural in nature and far removed from the shantytown setting (see, e.g., Das et al. 2000; Kleinman et al. 1997).
Questions of power also relate to the degree of agency attributed to individuals at the local level. In fact, it is difficult to find individual acts of agency in ethnographic accounts of violence. Farmer (1992, 2003) is particularly notable in this regard, leaving little if any room for individual agency and choice and suggesting that structural violence is part of an overwhelmingly dominant and hegemonic force when it comes to the world’s poor and disenfranchised. Applying this perspective to AIDS research, he has been a strong and consistent critic of those who tend to overemphasize individual agency by focusing on health education, individual behavior change, and cultural belief systems. Farmer believes that such approaches tend to “romanticize” the capacity of those who are most vulnerable to the disease by seemingly ignoring or downplaying the more fundamental correlation between AIDS, social inequality, and severe poverty. Subsequently, they tend to feed public health strategies that implicitly blame the victims of structural violence and those groups who, by association, tend to be most vulnerable to infectious diseases like AIDS.