Rachel Forman
February 12, 2009
Reading response for readings discussed Friday, February 6. (“On Suffering and Structural Violence: A View from Below” by Paul Farmer, “US Inner-city Apartheid” by Philippe Bourgois, “Two Feet Under and a Cardboard Coffin” by Nancy Scheper-Hughes)
What did they say?
This collection of readings illustratesseveral faces of the structural violence that Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois define loosely as the “violences produced in the structures, habituses, and mentalities of everyday life” (19), often taking the form “of class, racial, political self-hatred…as well as of useless (i.e. preventable), rawly embodied physical suffering and death” (19). Unlike the violence of state-on-state war or Holocaust-like genocide, structural violence tends to occur during peacetime, often for the sake of creating and preserving “domestic ‘peace’” (20). This definition of structural violence thus allows Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois to examine cases of unnecessary suffering as the result of deliberate action, inaction and indifference on the part of individuals, governments and communities.
Except for the anecdote in Paul Farmer’s pieceabout Chouchou Louis, who diedas a result of his being beaten by soldiers, it is not always obvious what violent act or circumstance is causing the subjects’ suffering.In the case of Acephie Joseph, the other subject of Farmer’s piece, Farmer is able to trace Acephie’s death from AIDS back to the structures of structural, government-induced poverty that essentially coerced her into a sexual relationship with a local army captain. Scheper-Hughes’s piece “Two Feet Under and a Cardboard Coffin” ties the high child mortality in Northeast Brazil to systemic indifference of the state, which “contributes to the routinization and normalization of child death by its implacable opacity…and its consequent inability to act responsively to the human suffering that presents itself” (280). By moving beyond conventional understandings of illness and responsibility, both authors reject the idea that the deep suffering and death that occurs in the world’s poorest areas is somehow natural or unavoidable.
The subjects discussed by Farmer and Scheper-Hugheseasily evokedsympathy and convinced me of the evils of structural violence (structures that lead to AIDS and kill babies are bad).Bourgois’s,on the other hand, moves in to murkier territory with his study ofPuerto Rican crack dealers. Bourgois describes the violent street culture that forced “local residents, especially women, the elderly, and the young, to live in fear of being assaulted or mugged” (304), but instead of simply blaming the drug dealers, Bourgois sees this street culture as an unfortunately self-destructive “culture of opposition—if not resistance—to economic exploitation and cultural denigration” (304). So while the drug dealers are still perpetrators of violence, they are also victims of the structural violence that has shaped the history of Puerto Rico and the racist policies that define the inner city.
How is this helpful?
When a person suffers from AIDS, it is convenient if one can blame the victim for being sexually deviant. Similarly, it is convenient to look at members marginalized communities like the Puerto Rican drug dealers as lazy and morally corrupt. In addition to absolving ourselves of any responsibility, these storylines reinforce the existing structures that allow non-suffering people to continue their lives. The concept of structural violence is useful because it rejects this easy, blame-the-victim mentality by providing aframework for understanding suffering as occurring because of something else that is outside the victim’s control. While the causes of suffering may take on seemingly harmless forms such as the provision of free baby coffins, the authorization, routinization and dehumanization that characterize genocide are similarly present in these mundane social structures that lead to unnecessary human suffering.
Critique
On the one hand, I understand that viewing suffering as a result of structural violence does the important work of placing responsibility on the parties that create and perpetuate the violent structures. On the other hand, I worry whether the discussion of violence, suffering, and victimhood is helpful when it comes to the “challenge of solution” (306). Does telling victims that they are victims make the situation any better? This view potentially denies victims of any agency they may have to change their circumstances. Moreover, it is possible that the suffering a mother endures when her child dies is easier to bear if the mother believes the death was a random natural act, not the work of a despotic government.
Another question I have about this idea of structural violence is how exactly it fits along a violence continuum that includes genocide. I understand and agree with Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois’s claim that a great “risk lies in failing to sensitize ourselves, in misrecognizing protogenocidal practices and sentiments daily enacted as normative behavior by ‘ordinary’ good-enough citizens” (20). But what, exactly does this continuum look like? Does all suffering carry equal weight? Does it matter whether a man dies at gunpoint because he is officially viewed as an inferior race or if he dies in a drug-related shooting that is part of the street culture resistance to exploitation? If these differentiations matter, than what does that mean for the sensitivity called for by Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois?