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- Convenors:
-
Sandra Fernandez
Nasim Basiri (Bucharest University)
- Stream:
- Relational movements: Crossroads, Places and Violences/Mouvements relationnels: Carrefours, Lieux et Violences
- Location:
- TBT 309
- Start time:
- 4 May, 2017 at
Time zone: America/New_York
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel seeks to explore the impact of political violence on how bodies move and are moved. The panel also examines the impact of the media on how violence is internalised, normalised and how some bodies are rendered visible or invisible.
Long Abstract:
Many governments around the world use what Fanon referred to as 'the language of pure violence' in order to intimidate their populace into acquiescence. Governments have also used violence or threats of force in self defense, to coerce other governments or conquer territory. Violence in this sense becomes a political tool in the hands of individuals, groups or governments.
This panel seeks to explore the impact of political violence as something that both moves and moves others and also examines this idea through bodies as moving in reaction to or against violence. In this sense violence is seen as a discourse of power; it can be equally uncontrollable and unpredictable. The body acts and is acted upon, and engages in a dialogue with violence. Violence creates victims, revolutionaries, terrorists, freedom fighters, witnesses and many other 'types of bodies'.
The panel also invites critique on how the media funnels and narrates events to shape how violence is consumed by the masses. As such, the same violent acts are held as almost global tragedies in some instances (France, Belgium) and almost go unnoticed in others (Ivory Coast, Yemen). How does the body experience violence? How does the body move with or against violent acts? How does the discourse of violence shape specific bodies? Whose bodies are rendered visible and invisible through acts of violence? How does the media play into the discourse of power with regards to internalizing violence?
This panel welcomes all papers related to the above questions.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Omer Aijazi (University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how gendered bodies move through violence. Using the biography of Amal, a devoted mother and mid-wife in Neelum valley, Pakistan administered Kashmir I offer insights on social repair and political becoming in spaces of protracted conflict and frequent natural disasters.
Paper long abstract:
What is the nature of violence as revealed by its lived and felt experiences? How does the gendered body move through violence? What do these responses reveal about the always-emerging nature of the political? To understand these concerns, I examine the biography of Amal: mother, midwife and resident of Neelum valley, Pakistan administered Kashmir. Amal successfully raised a family with her husband during the height of the Kashmiri liberation movement until his untimely death in 2014. Amal leaves for work every morning hoping that the spiritual rewards of her medical services will bless the soul of her deceased husband. In a volunteer capacity, Amal also advises pregnant women in their communities against a backdrop of lacking health services, difficult topography and other gendered features of life in the disputed region. By examining an ethnography of the everyday, I offer nuanced insights on processes of social repair, arguing that these delicate acts of self-creation and remaking of one's lifeworld not only unfold in the crafting of moral spaces within existing socialities but also in the creation of new socialities all-together, which may transcend the limits of our world. I also offer the framework of moral presence in territory, to understand Amal's life and bodily presence in Neelum as maintenance of place, integral to ongoing struggles for Kashmiri sovereignty.14 years of cross-border conflict and two natural disasters juxtaposed with the subject positions of wife, mother and health worker reveal what it means to be human and political in an overwhelmingly fraught world.
Luigigiovanni Quarta (Università di Bergamo)
Paper short abstract:
What is the relationship that reality and delirium have with truth? Towards an anthropological approach to mental illness and confinement experience, I reflect on the sense of telling-the-truth as an ethical exercise that produces an agonistic and intersubjective Self.
Paper long abstract:
During my ethnography carried out in an Italian High Security Hospital for mentally ill offenders I encountered a fragmented social space where dichotomies are fuzzy.
Mediation systems emerge from everyday micro-practices, building an unstable sense of identity mainly produced by autobiographical narratives. Affirming the truth of their experiences, patients rethink the past and create a possible future through a vision of the present. But, unlike other practices, telling-the-truth is hardly negotiable.
In my paper I will outline the truth of one patient, Edgar, who murdered his mother.
The rehabilitation needs a rationalisation process and the acceptance of only one reality principle. This means binding mental health to the acceptance of social norms and a collective sense of justice. Psychiatrists' truth becomes a consistent moral act because it is socially relevant. It is a political act.
Edgar's answer is a symmetrical inversion of faults and justice: "My mother visits me every night; therefore, I'm innocent. Give back my freedom".
I argue truth is not only a logic predicate of utterances. We can consider telling-the-truth as a reflexive practice and an ethical action: the origin of a self-reflexive moral system informing one possible Self, used by the subject to act in the world in a relational way. We are in front of a specific Dasein.
Even inside the delirium the subject, in his absolute Otherness, remains a relational being-in-the-world but we should think about his truth in contrastive terms and his actions have to be understood in an intersubjective ethical dimension.