The Violences of Everyday

Life
By 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 Nazis 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
dont 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

The ad personifies the complex economic and political

circumstances through a simplifying picture of mother and
daughter, so it doesnt project the specifics of the social context
that make this historical situation distinctive
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
o

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 shocking
o 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. Facebooks 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.