Histories of Victimhood 9780812209310

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Histories of Victimhood

The Ethnogr aphy of Political Violence Tobias Kelly, Series Editor A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Histories of Victimhood

Edited by

Steffen Jensen and Henrik Ronsbo

u n i v e r s i t y o f p e n n s y lva n i a p r e ss phil adelphia

Copyright © 2014 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN 978-0-8122-4585-1

Contents

Introduction. Histories of Victimhood: Assemblages, Transactions, and Figures  1 Henrik Ronsbo and Steffen Jensen 1. Why Social Scientists Should Care How Jesus Died  23 Darius Rejali 2. Bodies of Partition: Of Widows, Residue, and Other Historical Waste  44 Ravinder Kaur 3. “Extremely Poor” Mothers and Debit Cards: The Families in an Action Cash-Transfer Program in Colombia  64 Stine Finne Jakobsen 4. How to Become a Victim: Pragmatics of the Admission of Women in a South African Primary Health Care Clinic  83 Frédéric Le Marcis 5. Negotiating Victimhood in Nkomazi, South Africa  104 Steffen Jensen 6. Between Recognition and Care: Victims, NGOs, and the State in the Guatemalan Postconflict Victimhood Assemblages  124 Henrik Ronsbo and Walter Paniagua

vi Contents

7. Recognizing Torture: Credibility and the Unstable Codification of Victimhood  144 Tobias Kelly 8. The Power of Dead Bodies  161 Nerina Weiss 9. Why Is Muna Crying? Event, Relation, and Immediacy as Criteria for Acknowledging Suffering in Palestine  179 Lotte Buch Segal 0. Departures of Decolonization: Interstitial Spaces, Ordinary Affect, 1 and Landscapes of Victimhood in Southern Africa  198 Pamila Gupta 1. Performances of Victimhood, Allegation, and Disavowal 1 in Sierra Leone   218 Andrew M. Jefferson 2. Victims in the Moral Economy of Suffering: Narratives of Humiliation, 1 Retaliation, and Sacrifice  239 Sofie Danneskiold-Samsøe pilogue. Histories of Victimhood: Assemblage, E Transaction, and Figure  257 Elizabeth A. Povinelli List of Contributors  265 Index  269 Acknowledgments  273

Introduction

Histories of Victimhood: Assemblages, Transactions, and Figures Henrik Ronsbo and Steffen Jensen

Human suffering presents the social sciences with a fundamental dilemma. As social scientists, we often withdraw from suffering or reduce the suffering bodies we face to the status of hapless victims—­or we look for agency and force of individuals who can beat the system they suffer or remake their own experiences of suffering in transcendental form. The present collection tackles this dilemma. It asks how we might recognize and acknowledge suffering without reducing affected communities and individuals to hapless and objectified victims. To work through this dilemma, we find it useful to invoke the notion of “histories of victimhood.” Through this phrasing, we pay attention to hardship, violence, and misfortune, while we, nonetheless, also explore what people do to survive, how they make sense of their own suffering, and how they are objectified, acted upon, or ignored by humanitarian agencies and states. The notion lets us see the temporality and contemporaneity of victimhood—­that victimhood is an ever-­negotiated, impermanent, and immanent state. To be a victim here and now is not the same as being one there and then. By invoking the notion of histories of victimhood, we suggest that suffering and survival, politics and interventions, are neither worlds apart nor simply complementary parts. Rather, they are actualized and made real through each other. This suggests that we need to distinguish between victims and victimhood. Whereas the presence of victims implies experiential suffering, victimhood is a political construction. It acquires materiality through contestation

2  Henrik Ronsbo and Steffen Jensen

and technologies of self and population. Victimhood and its emergence are empirical objects of analysis in themselves, not only concepts of suffering. While acknowledging this salience of victimhood, we also do not want to lose sight of the actual suffering that sometimes—­and sometimes does not—­ animate categories and discourses of victimhood. Nor do we want to ignore that some people—­sometimes—­employ the concept of the victim to understand their own predicaments. Hence, we need to include and take heed of the experiential forms of suffering alongside the political agency and the biopolitical categories that—­sometimes—­capture victimhood. In this book, individual contributions explore histories of victimhood in Colombia, India, South Africa, Guatemala, Angola, Sierra Leone, Turkey, Occupied Palestine, Denmark, and Britain, as well as in global flows of people and violence. The contributions tackle issues concerning illness, violence, occupation, torture, displacement, and war; and explore resettlement schemes, psychosocial interventions, reparation projects, refugee assistance, HIV treatment, interventions around trauma and post-­traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), social welfare projects, and state formation. The contributions broadly fall within three themes that, in different ways, provide avenues for working through the dilemmas of victimhood. Under these three themes, we explore instances of victimhood as assemblages, as transactions, and as figures against a ground. We flesh out these three approaches in the remaining pages of this introduction by drawing on available literature in philosophy, anthropology, political science, human rights, development, and psychology, as well as the contributions to this volume. In the first section, we explore victimhood through the lens of assemblages or genealogies. In what ways do people (as victims and as political agents) come together with governing rationalities and experiences of suffering to produce the terrains where ever-­changing histories of victimhood come into existence (De Landa 2006; Fassin and Rechtman 2009; Latour 1999; Young 1995)? In the second section, we explore victimhood through the lens of transactions, where the focus is on continuous negotiations and politics around the work of stabilizing some people as victims and others as benefactors. This politics of victimhood is concerned with the ways that people (in state agencies, political organizations, NGOs, INGOs, and among “beneficiary” communities) attempt to position themselves in terrains produced by victimhood as, inter alia, victims, martyrs, heroes, benefactors, state agents, patriots, and nationalists (Blundo and Olivier de Sardan 2006; Bourdieu 1991; Long and Long 1992; Mosse 2005). Third, we invoke the pair of

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Introduction 3

terms that linguists conceptualize as figure and ground (Talmy 2000), where the figure (of the victim) always emerges from within a ground. In the emergence of the victim—­resurfacing from the ground—­there is simultaneously a rendering obscure of the (back)ground. However, rather than seeing the figure and the ground in binary terms, contributors show how figure and ground shimmer constantly in and out of focus. While we separate the three themes for heuristic reasons, contributors to the volume illustrate that they are often present together, although in different ways. Together they help us understand that histories of victimhood are ever-­changing configurations of power where the identities of actors or actants (for example, victims, documents, benefactors, case files, categories, martyrs, state agents, patriots, and debit cards) are constantly brought into question as they exchange and transact with terrains that they inhabit and produce. In this approach, there is also an important political call to bracket or suspend the kinds of moral judgment that often seem—­implicitly or ­explicitly—­to pervade accounts of victimhood. Thus, the contributions counter the underlying moral assumptions according to which to be a victim precludes the act of maneuvering, while to act as a benefactor is seen as legitimate if it is done without ulterior motive. Rather than reproducing these unhelpful moral hierarchies, contributors explore how such come to be stabilized as elements in the politics and transactions of victimhood. Before we address these themes in turn, however, we first need to revisit debates over victimhood and the dilemmas they call forth.

Dilemmas of the Victim The last few decades have seen a surge in victim-­oriented politics (Cole 2007). We see politics centered on the notion of the victim in humanitarian interventions (Fassin and Pandolfi 2010); we see human rights regimes built entirely on notions of violation and victimhood (Goodale and Merry 2007); we see therapeutic work with afflicted persons, such as sufferers of HIV/AIDS, malaria or tuberculosis, recast as support for victims of marginalization, poverty, and inadequate health systems (Campbell 2005). Indeed, Western and wealthy polities have increasingly come to see themselves as (potential) victims of terrorist and criminal threats and attacks (Jensen 2010; Simon 2007). We inhabit worlds in which everyday forms of distinction are shaped by the notion of the victim and in which politics and collective action are animated

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by it. Yet, for many in the social and human sciences, to engage the human subject through the prism of the victim seems to constitute a disavowal of critical theory’s efforts to understand subjects as agentive, sensuous, and intentional. It is argued that, since the victim is an object, this status must necessarily negate the possibility of becoming. So how do we bridge these very different positions, vis-­à-­vis the victim and the very notion of victimhood? On the one hand, a normative disavowal of the concept of the victim; on the other hand, the empirical affirmation of its existence? How do we capture people’s real suffering, their struggles to maintain dignity, and the politics of recognition and disavowal—­all of which animate discourses about victims? One way forward is to treat “victim” as an emic category, with its own moral lives constructed by a host of different agents. Following Diana Meyers (2011), we might differentiate between at least two kinds of victims, heroic and hapless. In the first category, we find victims as martyrs and heroes, who, through their own agency, choice, or strength, are made into victims in the service of a greater good. Descriptions of these hero victims are prevalent in much revolutionary and religious discourse (for example, Fanon 1990; Guevara 2006; Khalili 2007). In the second category, victims of the sort Meyers (2011: 258) calls “pathetic” inspire equal amounts of “compassionate or contemptuous pity” and are seen as passively suffering bodies. This second kind of victim is especially found in discourses of humanitarianism (Fassin and Rechtman 2009; Pupavac 2001; Young 1995). While many contributors to this volume focus on the second form of victimhood, several contributions also illustrate the extent to which the two forms of victim exist in simultaneity. In fact, as Meyers (2011: 268) also shows, few victims are straightforwardly either heroic or pathetic. Rather, the categories themselves are parts of the kinds of moral hierarchies this volume also seeks to refute. We return to these issues below, when we discuss victimhood in relation to sacrifice and morality in more detail. For now, we focus on victims as components of a humanitarian discourse. Humanitarian victimhood is produced as a host of different agents, such as donors of international aid (Pupavac 2001), clinicians (Young 1995), and social movements and NGOs, deploy the victim as a way to forge solidarities and relatedness across different social and geographical spaces (Fassin and Rechtman 2009). Through the work of these and other such agents, victims come to our worlds as recognizable forms of life, upon whom we are asked to act, toward whom we are enticed to relate with feelings of support and solidarity, and with whom we enter into dialogues and transactions. But as

Introduction 5

Bayley (1991) argues, a set of moral dilemmas arises immediately here, because the “status as victim occupies a special place. It gives priority of concern to certain sufferers over others. If, because of zeal to render aid, we view certain sufferers as victims, we risk paternalistic devaluation of them forming self-­managing people to dependent, hapless people” (62). The arguments presented by Bayley are well known in the literature. On the one hand, victim status gives people priority over other sufferers, while on the other hand, it potentially devalues their agency too. This paradox is the subject of a growing body of literature in psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, and sociology (Ballinger 2004; Humphrey and Valverde 2007; MacDonald and Bernardo 2006; Stein 1998; Walklate 2005; Wessely 2005; Yates, Powel and Beirne 2001). In this literature, agency and morals are negotiated between different groups, shaping identities, communities, and modes of belonging. But dilemmas often arise, such as Ian Buruma’s (1999) questioning of his experiences in a visit he paid to Auschwitz. Going through the museum, he begins to interrogate his own Jewish ancestry in the light of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, trying to ascertain the probability of his own annihilation in the camp. Through these reflections, to his dismay, Buruma encounters a joyous celebration of being a victim, albeit vicariously, which then gives rise to a questioning of the dynamics through which an identity such as his Jewishness is shaped by “the sentimental solidarity of remembered victimhood” (Buruma 1999: 3). In a similar move, Classen (2005) explores how the notion of Germans as victims of Hitler (the Opfermythos) became constitutive of the formation of citizenship and belonging in the post-­World War II Bundesrepublik. What brings these authors together is the questioning of the acquired status of victim by exploring how remembered suffering is entextualized and circulated (Ronsbo 2006). In much of the current literature, in the figure of the victim resides an experience of a particular moral value that, as it becomes entextualized and circulates in conflicted social fields, gives rise to sets of questions and dilemmas. These include the commensurability of the status of different victims, the authenticity of the experience of being a victim, the ways such claims reflect on the agentive potential of the subject, and how they may deny other subjects access to recognition. Many of the contributions to this volume reflect such potential and actual dilemmas shaped by the victim status. Pamila Gupta, for instance, explores the memories of Angola’s refugees of Portuguese descent who cannot be recognized as victims because they were on the wrong side of the injustices of colonial pasts. What many of the contributions indeed

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seem to share is the view that to be recognized and known as a victim is at the same time both a powerful and an ambiguous event, which not only should be understood in the context of the group of victims in question but also in relation to those against whom such groups are interpellated—­other groups of victims, as well as perpetrators, caregivers, clinicians, and donors. Questioning one’s status as a victim seems inevitable. The moment one is addressed as a victim—­with or without consent—­a moral judgment has been passed by “the other,” and perhaps against one’s will, especially in cases where victimhood is of the passive kind where compassion goes hand in hand with contempt, as Meyers would have it (2011). As Judith Butler writes, “What binds us morally has to do with how we are addressed by others in ways we cannot avert or avoid; this impingement by the other’s address constitutes us first and foremost against our will” (Butler 2004, 130). In this sense, for instance, humanitarian victimhood prefigures any particular subjectivity—­it is solely subjugation: a self orchestrated by the other, a self shaped for survival as inarticulate biological life (Agamben 1998). In this way, the victim becomes one of the foundational categories of global biopolitics (Duffield 2007), and the dilemmas and ambiguities arising from notions of victimhood seem to be the effects of the biopolitical caesura—­a self constituted as object vis-­à-­ vis the interlocutor. This ambivalence toward the concept of victim—­ part heroic, part ­contemptible—­is also expressed by our interlocutors in the field. The ambivalence toward accepting the humanitarian offer of victimhood is evident in the implicit acceptance of the term in PTSD-­dominated Palestine simultaneously with stressing the martyrdom of Palestinian detainees explored by Lotte Buch Segal. Nerina Weiss’s account of a hero’s funeral in Turkish Kurdistan provides another example of how victimhood is far from only passive, as she relates the strenuous work of a grieving mother to retrieve her martyred son from the hands of the Turkish army. In other cases, it seems that people hesitate to label themselves as victims. This does not mean that they shy away from resources that are associated with particular curative or rehabilitative institutions, of course. Instead they claim these confidently by stressing injustices, grievances, and suffering, as in Andrew Jefferson’s discussion of an informant who says that “No one have ever suffered like the Liberian refugees.” It is not only from the standpoint of the sufferers that the notion of victim generates ambiguities and contradictions. In the world of development and humanitarian interventions, professionals seldom work explicitly with notions of victims. In the parlance of the corridors and offices of humanitarian-

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Introduction 7

ism, a variety of other expressions exist: people are “survivors” or “beneficiaries”—­or more recently, they have become “rights holders,” in an echo of the legal foundation for the recognition of the victim that has become dominant in the field of development interventions (Douzinas 1998; Jensen and Jefferson 2009; Lagoutte, Sano, and Smith 2007). However, the question is whether the agency assumed in notions of “beneficiaries,” “rights holders” and “survivors,” on the one side, and duty bearers and humanitarians on the other side, so typical of development, obscures the presence of another set of figures: the “victim-­object” and the “benefactor.” This is the argument proposed by Alain Badiou, as he ascribes primarily biological life to the contemptible object of rights and development: Who can fail to see that in our humanitarian expeditions, interventions, embarkations of charitable légionnaires, the subject presumed to be universal is split. On the side of the victims, the haggard animal exposed on television screens. On the side of the benefactor, conscience and the imperative to intervene. And why does the splitting always assign the same roles to the same sides? Who cannot see that this ethics which rests on the misery of the world hides, behind its victim-­Man, the good-­Man, the White-­Man? (Badiou 2001: 12–­13) Thus, not only the victim is under the spell of the victim category, but so is the one who passes judgment. Behind the victim-­man hides the good-­man, the White-­man. In short, the victim as an emic category is inevitably unstable. As subject-­ victims are molded, they are marked by the caesura of biopolitics and are thus objects of biopower, while the enunciating position becomes the good man, the white man, whom Nietzsche (1990) would call the “God-­man.” In fact, we suggest that much of the ambiguity expressed by the contributions to this volume derives from the status of the victim as the sacrificial object of the God-­man. The ambiguities that surround the victim, and the negative effects that victim status is perceived to have on the agentive potentials of subjects, seem to stem from similarities between the victim of suffering and the victim of sacrifice, as opposed to the heroic victim of self-­sacrifice.

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Assemblages and Genealogies of Victimhood One of the most fruitful ways to escape the moral and normative double bind suggested by Badiou is to evoke the Foucauldian notion of dispositifs or governmentalities and recent Deleuzian and Latourian reformulations of this notion through such concepts as assemblage and actor-­network. In his work, Foucault tried to understand how individuals and populations were objectified through technocratic description and intervention, exploring in turn the production of madness, sexuality, and delinquency. Foucault’s central insights regarding how power and knowledge coalesced, to form specific and specialized politics of the body, have informed a multitude of analyses aimed at exploring such diverse fields as single mothers on welfare in the United States (Cruikshank 1999), therapeutic citizenship (Pupavac 2001, 2004; Rose 2007), torture (Rejali 1994), and humanitarianism (Duffield 2007)—­to name but a few. The gist of the argument is that victim-­subjects are made through constellations of power, knowledge, and discourse. For example, in her analysis of single mothers on welfare, Barbara Cruikshank (1999) argues that the construction of single mothers as somehow lesser citizens, in fact, rests on the Tocquevillean distinction between citizens and subjects, where citizens are autonomous individuals, while subjects are encumbered by some external force, as is the case with victims. Cruikshank thus proposes to study the genesis of the single mother as construct, rather than pass moral judgment on those interpellated by governmental and biopolitical regimes. Cruikshank’s insights can also be extended to other victim categories, including the torture victim, the Holocaust victim, and the victim of child abuse. In “The Empire of Trauma,” Fassin and Rechtman (2009) explore such a genesis. They follow the emergence of the trauma victim as it becomes one of the most significant tropes for imagining (and acting on) suffering in the contemporary globalized world. Fassin and Rechtman argue that, because trauma is the way Palestinian affliction is translated for a global public, the work of diagnosis is transformed into an act of witnessing, shaping what they call humanitarian psychiatry (209). In humanitarian psychiatry, a clinical pragmatics has been shaped that builds less on nosological categories than on ethical, political, and emotional transactions emerging from the acknowledgment of victims. They argue that psychiatric work with soldiers and with victims of industrial disasters has merged with therapeutic and political work with traumatized refugees to form a powerful way of understanding affliction

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Introduction 9

that could travel to encompass and render suffering intelligible in a globalized political world—­an empire of trauma. Such an analysis illustrates the importance of paying attention to how categories are constructed and made real through particular historical practices, addressing, for instance, how single mothers on debit-­card welfare, as explored in Stine Finne Jakobsen’s paper on Colombia, become a particular point through which the Colombian internally displaced person (IDP) assemblage is territorialized. Many of the contributions to this volume likewise pay meticulous attention to such technocratic forms—­the case file in South Africa, the debit card in Colombia, and the spatial outlay of housing projects in India. These various paraphernalia of bureaucracy are particularly important because in the bureaucratic detail we can gauge in what ways and the extent to which victimhood categories are being molded in the everyday transactions of counseling, policing, and therapy. In this sense, categories of victimhood are expressive fields and sites of territorialization in the terrain of bureaucratic assemblages. In these fields, access is predominantly determined by paper work and other official artifacts: electronic cash cards in Colombia (Jakobsen’s contribution), medical reports documenting torture in British asylum procedures (Kelly’s contribution), files to document histories of displacement (Jefferson’s contribution) and documents detailing precarious rights to space inhabited for three generations in New Delhi, India (Kaur’s contribution). All these mediate access to resources promised by the categories of victimhood. As argued by Jakobsen, these material proofs of relation resemble what actor-­network theorists call “actants”: material objects that work on and influence the social world in ways resembling the acts of human actors (Latour 1993, 2005). Victimhood categories evolve in complex networks, then. As Steffen Jensen argues in his analysis of the local politics and negotiations of victimhood on South Africa’s rural battlefield of HIV-­related death, these networks often become people’s most important assets, giving them reason to stick with the interventions that are actualized through the victim category. These networks encompass other clients, health workers, health care providers, and even donors, enabling us to question the often repeated binaries of patient and health worker, foreigner and local, state and nonstate. It is in this sense that we find it useful to talk about victimhood as an assemblage: as a way of understanding how a variety of heterogeneous entities, objects, actors and relationships coalesce to form wholes of relative stability. A Colombian IDP assemblage where material objects accompany human

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agents, for example, is constituted by debit cards, rosters, poverty lines, documents and files, patients, local health workers, project evaluations, baseline studies, multilateral and bilateral development plans, and so forth. As De Landa (2006) points out, assemblages are defined by relations of exteriority. They are not stable totalities or essences. This is nowhere more clearly brought out than in Darius Rejali’s contribution to this volume. Here we follow how a seemingly transhistorical form such as crucifixion is continuously emergent within legal, moral, and religious assemblages in the Mediterranean world. Ronsbo and Paniagua’s analysis of reburials and exhumations in Guatemala also draws explicitly on assemblage theory to explain how victimhood is constituted in complex battles over meaning and resources. From our perspective, this implies that victimhood assemblages are under constant pressure to transform—­they are deterritorialized and undermined at the same time as they are also reterritorialized. This suggests that categories of victimhood are caught in ongoing transactions, translations, and exchanges.

Transactions of Victimhood To understand the transactional nature of victimhood, as well as the materiality of relationships, Susan Whyte and colleagues introduce the term “clientship” (Whyte et al. 2013) to describe how people are clients in both a medical and an anthropological way, where intimate relationships of exchange between (medical) patrons (for example, the antiretroviral (ARV) project) and (medical) clients (for example, the infected) are also modes of unequal reciprocity. At stake in these unequal relationships are patient time, compliance to the treatment regiment, dramatic stories of success, job opportunities for the lucky few (but a hope for many), and the recognition that comes from belonging to a powerful organization or its projects. To analyze these ongoing transactions in non-­normative, nonmoralistic ways requires attention to the ethnographic details of people’s everyday struggles to navigate the terrain set out by victimhood. Lotte Buch Segal’s contribution to this volume does exactly this. Drawing on Stanley Cavell, she argues that the existing language of Palestinian suffering resonates with a global, psychological discourse of trauma. This systemic discourse (or totality) tends to eclipse and obscure the everyday suffering of wives of detainees, because their suffering is reduced to secondary victimization, dependent on the “real” suffering of the Palestinian male martyr (the heroic victim). In such cases, a different, subaltern language

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Introduction 11

has developed. There is evidently a politics both controversial and complicated concerning who can be recognized as victims in situations of war and conflict. In such situations, victimhood becomes part of the metanarrative of resistance and loss, and counternarratives will invariably be seen as problematic, even treacherous (Thiranagama 2010). Buch Segal identifies a resonance or convergence between the Palestinian metanarrative of victimhood and global discourses of trauma (see also Fassin and Rechtman 2009). Although it is spontaneous, such resonance is far from automatic, however. As Frédéric Le Marcis (this volume) shows, global discourses of female victimhood in the face of the HIV pandemic are out of tune with local understandings of sexual morality. In his evocative analysis, he shows that, rather than being seen as victims, young girls in South Africa’s townships are widely accused by nursing and health staff of engaging in amoral sexual activities in order to generate a living. These moral understandings draw on old, colonial stereotypes of black sexuality, rather than current discourses on gender and HIV. Hence, to be victim in one register does not in any way guarantee that victim subjectivity is universally recognized. In fact, as Le Marcis shows, it is the zones of contestation that produce the ever-­changing histories of victimhood. These remarks suggest that victimhood delineates a field of colonizing, contradictory and contentious practices where we cannot a priori determine who will emerge as dominant. In these contestations, development and humanitarian institutions and discourses are not sure to prevail, as it often would appear in postliberal accounts of biopower (for example, Duffield 2007; Pupavac 2001; Rose 2007). Buch Segal’s contribution describes the frustration and the “tired atmosphere of a car full of therapists” as they make their way back from community visits on the West Bank. There is nothing triumphant or powerful about this image. Clearly, these therapists are not the only “representatives” of the assemblage. In fact, it was a donor demand that these visits be included in the treatment program. As several other papers indicate (Jakobsen’s and Jensen’s), at the interfaces where clients meet the protagonists of victimhood, there are no certain outcomes, only contestation and maneuvering. When we evoke the term “transactions,” it is clear that this should be understood as encompassing more than financial exchange, although that is important too, as several of the contributions show. In her contribution, Sofie Samsoe-­Danneskiold explores a moral economy where humiliation, retaliation, and sacrifice constitute the currency of victimhood across religious and

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political divides among Iraqi refugees in Denmark. She suggests that the humiliations that refugees suffered at the hands of the Iraqi regime translate into a moral surplus if this suffering is seen as being a sacrifice rather than something for which they seek to retaliate. Hence, they turn their status of seemingly hapless victimhood into an act of heroism. Nerina Weiss’s contribution argues similar points when she explores the heroic victimhood of a Kurdish mother struggling to retrieve her son from the Turkish military by using his martyrdom as the currency that helps to pave the way for his body’s release. Both contributions also illustrate the point made above that victimhood often has religious connotations that disrupt the secular understandings of NGOs, humanitarian interventions, and human rights discourses and practices. We return to this below. Law is central to transactions around victimhood. People become refugees through the legal recognition of their plight, and they are, therefore, entitled to assistance. Law is often seen as the apolitical codification that allows for an unambiguous judging of practices. However, in his analysis of torture, one of the strongest and most undisputed victim categories in law, Tobias Kelly (this volume) argues that “the legal recognition of torture survivors is not so much a technical process of codification but a series of largely arbitrary judgments played out on the unstable boundary between fact and law.” The reason for this, Kelly suggests, is that law requires evidence, something in notoriously short supply in cases of torture (and trauma). As Kelly says, “There is therefore an evidence-­shaped hole at the center of our notion of torture.” The same dearth of evidence characterizes many other victim categories (see, for example, Fassin and d’Halluin 2007). Kelly’s analysis suggests, more or less explicitly, that even legal categories of victimhood are products of political contestations that are exterior to the suffering that gave rise to the category. He expands on this point in a recent book (Kelly 2011) where he argues that the problem is not the inability of torture victims to speak but their inability to convince official audiences in British immigration authorities and courts of law. A similar process is detectable in Jefferson’s contribution. He explores how a group of Liberians, whom he has followed and assisted over a period of several years, oscillate between victimhood status as refugees and the status of bandits and hooligans. Ironically, the second status was first ascribed by the UNHCR, stalwarts of victim protection, as the Liberians were accused of trashing the UNHCR offices in Sierra Leone. Jefferson’s and Kelly’s arguments echo those of other contributions in this volume, as they all illustrate a fundamental ambiguity surround-

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ing victims. Even at the moment of recognition, their status is shrouded in doubt: the HIV-­positive girl is licentious; the Liberian refugee is a rebel; the South African NGO is in it for the money; the Palestinian detainee released from Israeli prison is perhaps a traitor; and the tormented refugee is a liar. Central to these implicit accusations is often the haunted issue of victims playing the victim card for ulterior motives: survival, ambition, greed. This is also clear in Erica James’s analysis of Haitian torture victims. She demonstrates that, because resources flow toward the torture victim, some people come forth as brokers and others as victims, reorienting lives and narratives toward reaping the benefits of an emotional political economy (James 2004). Not only victims engage in such transactions. As explored in a number of recent analyses of development (for example, Blundo and Olivier de Sardan 2006; Jones 2009; Mosse 2005), state and nonstate agencies also partake in the political economy of victimhood, molding structures exterior to the suffering that animates intervention. While several contributions to this volume explore the importance of transactions, they all refuse the implicit moral condemnation that also informs much current literature and current debates on the welfare state in times of financial pressure. Moral condemnation is a function of the alleged purity of real victimhood. Following this logic, one cannot be a real victim if one has ulterior motives. Likewise, one cannot be a proper benefactor if one works for one’s own survival or the survival of one’s organization. In this sense, the moral imperative model echoes Bourdieu’s notion of (the religiously based) “oracle effect’: “It is when I become Nothing—­and because I am capable of becoming Nothing, of abolishing myself, of forgetting myself, of sacrificing myself, of dedicating myself—­that I become Everything” (Bourdieu 1991: 211). Hence, if victims do not abolish themselves as anything but Badiou’s haggard animal, reduced to biological life, they cannot be real victims. In the same vein, if those intervening have other agendas than helping, they become nothing but self-­interested agents. As Cole (2007) argues, they engage in victimism. Meyers’s analysis of the problem of the “impure victim” (Meyers 2011) speaks to the same concern. Rather than accepting these moral imperatives, the contributions view such accusations about transactions as stable elements in the contestations and politics of victimhood, in much the same way as corruption and corruption allegations are stable elements of other forms of politics (Olivier de Sardan 1999).

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Figure and Ground of Victimhood A third way to engage the notion of victim and field of victimhood is through the conceptual pair of the figure and the ground. The conceptual pair originates from cognitive semantics (Talmy 2000), where the two are thought not as figure and ground but as primary and secondary objects, with a focus on the spatial relations between the two in closed systems of representation. To begin to unpack this, it might be useful to start by looking at how the figure of victim is configured within specific histories of victimhood and what kinds of visibility and legibility this creates. This entails exploring how victims are figured and refigured against a community, a ground, or alternatively nonfigured through technologies of deceptive coloration, mimicry, and camouflage—­ and also how they might choose to disappear against the background of the ordinary or highlight their own suffering as a central element of their identity. These remarks call forth, we argue, three different figures of victim—­the haggard figure of humanitarian or human rights intervention, the figure of sacrifice or the sacrificial lamb, and the figure of self-­sacrifice. We begin with the first two. Speaking of the figure of sacrifice, Bataille suggests this figure is created when, prior to the sacrifice, the victim is torn from the order of things and people. This gesture “gives him a recognizable figure, which now radiates intimacy, anguish, [and] the profundity of living beings” (Bataille 1991: 59; our emphasis). According to Bataille, the sacrificial victim acquires profundity as she is set aside and removed from the midst of the social order. This is the moment when she becomes the condensation of anguish and intimacy and the object of emotional investment. This sacrificial figure is both visible and invisible, as Elizabeth Povinelli’s discussion of the baby in the broom closet suggests (Povinelli 2011). In her analysis, the hidden-­away and suffering baby guarantees the happiness of the community. While we normally do not see or recognize the existence of the sacrificial lamb, it (he or she) is nonetheless crucial for our continued happiness. We know of the misery of the sacrificial lamb only through our own happiness. Compare this figure to the figure of humanitarian intervention or human rights—­the haggard body on posters and television screens. While both figures speak of anguish, profundity, and human existence, the figure of humanitarian and human rights intervention is recognized and visible, whereas the sacrificial lamb recedes into the background. This produces in us a lingering sensation that one class of victims renders others invisible: that victimhood as the figure of humanitarian disas-

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ter and human rights intervention in fact displaces the forms of social suffering experienced by the figure of sacrifice, rendering this an indistinct background. The suffering experienced by figures of sacrifice is reduced to what Povinelli calls “quasi-­events,” singular gestures within the “ordinary, chronic and cruddy” (13). Quasi-­events constitute the backdrop, the sounding board, the ground. Inevitably, they recede into obscurity as the individual figure of recognized victimhood comes into focus. Parallel to the recognized figures of humanitarian disaster or human rights violation on the one hand and the figure of sacrifice on the other, there is, we argue, yet another figure, the figure of self-­sacrifice: the one who through its sacrifice reaches another, transcendental level (Bloch 1992). One evident example of this is the martyr and its most prominent instantiation, the suicide bomber (Asad 2007; Moghadam 2011). This is also the heroic victim Meyers explores (2011). While the body might perish in the ultimate form of sacrifice, the martyr reaches a transcendental level because he or she dies or suffers in the name of a greater cause. In this way, the martyr takes it upon himself or herself to become a victim. However, it is a very different, much more agentive victim than the haggard, hapless victim of humanitarian intervention or the broken body of human rights violations. This figure of self-­sacrifice can be found with political, revolutionary, or religious discourses (for example, Fanon 1990; Illeto 1979; Khalili 2007; Tiatco and Bonifacio-­Ramolete 2008). In several contributions to this volume, the figure of self-­sacrifice provides an important sounding board for the analysis. This goes for Danneskjold-­Samsøe, who explores how Iraqi refugees in Denmark turn the humiliation suffered at the hands of Saddam’s regime into self-­ sacrifice by not seeking revenge. Weiss’s analysis of the heroic mother of the acclaimed martyr-­son also points to the importance of seeing how figures of self-­sacrifice evoke and embody their victimhood proudly. Jefferson’s analysis of how Liberian refugees claim recognition on the back of self-­sacrifice also speaks to this figure. While we can think of the three figures separately, they are not worlds apart. Rather, the contributions illustrate that they are made real in and through one another. Take Danneskjold-­Samsøe’s analysis, for instance. The figure of humanitarian disaster and human rights violations exists alongside the occluded figure of sacrifice and the heroic victimhood of self-­sacrifice. In fact, one way of coping with being a figure of intervention is to stress one’s own heroic sacrifice. The same holds true for the Liberian refugees in Jefferson’s analysis.

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While we have been inspired to think of victimhood through the lenses of the figure and the ground, we also have reservations that are grounded in the complex images conjured up by the contributions to the volume. In much language theory, and indeed also in Talmy’s reading (2000), language seems to be approached as a closed system of logical operations. We do not share this view of language, at least not as being applicable to the histories of victimhood presented in this volume. As we review the contributions, the overarching impression is one in which the figure and the ground—­the victims and the suffering, the events and the quasi-­event, the primary and secondary objects—­are constantly changing places, moving in and out of focus, akin to the sensation generated by looking at a painting by Asger Jorn (see jacket to this book). Masks, figures, and ground incessantly change places, dispelling the illusion of figure over ground or in the binary perception generated as one watches the faces in the Rubin vase. This sensation is clearly brought out in Buch Segal’s contribution, where a therapist is asked to enact the suffering of a client but, in so doing, manages to escape the standing language of Palestinian suffering to forge an alliance with the suffering woman. Likewise in Pamila Gupta’s paper, we understand how Angolan/Portuguese/South African identities shift constantly in and out of focus once we follow her interlocutors across the borders of victimhood. Ravinder Kaur’s evocative analysis of Partition-­era widows who have spent sixty years as an impurity, as a wasted fragment of Indian nationalism, also dispels the notion that identities as quasi-­or real victims could be permanent. The same shimmering sensation is left after reading Jefferson’s contribution on his own hesitancy in finally stabilizing UN and refugee identities. Finally, Weiss’s analysis of Kurdish victimhood leaves a strange sensation after we learn that the Kurdish martyr in question wanted to be a Turkish military officer and that Kurds and Turks share a deep hatred of Armenians. In this sense, the figure and the ground are always present as we engage in ethnographic description of suffering, but as problematique rather than as convention. As when Veena Das asks us to consider how we may understand the figure of the mourning widow as a fragment of myth (2007: 103ff.) she also ask us to consider how we might approach the suffering figure of the mourning widows in ways that move these figures beyond the recognizability of the victim. The relation between victim-­figure and ground thus becomes not only a question of the relationship between forms of suffering that are realized as figure versus those that are unrealized and unrecognized; it also becomes a question of the relationship between the suffering realized in the

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figure and the self-­righteous claims emerging from the shadows of the ground, the ways this figure’s emergence bestows a moral obligation on the white man, the good man, the God-­man to provide care and to rule the world, or at least to allow the heroic victimhood of the martyr as relevant. As we start to question the relationship between figure and ground, we become able to question the apparent unity, humanity, and individuality of the victim.

Concluding Remarks: Beyond Moral Judgment What does the focus on the histories of victimhood entail for a politics more in tune with the lived experiences and dilemmas of those interpellated by categories of victimhood? The basic argument of this volume is that, to explore suffering and how it is lived, experienced, and acted upon, we need to focus on particular histories of victimhood: that is, victims in their nonessentialized and ever-­changing form. We need to focus on the temporal and spatial specificities of any given situation for all the actors that form part of what we have termed the victimhood assemblage. Furthermore, we need to distinguish clearly between victim and victimhood. Where the first for us speaks to suffering and hardship, the second category relates to the ways in which suffering is entextualized and acted on. In many ways, Ravinder Kaur’s contribution on residual human matter as a specific history of victimhood is exemplary for this approach. She traces a group of women, widowed in the Partition and put into a widow colony. They stayed in the colony for sixty years, trying to make a life, having children, and moving on. Despite the wall that surrounded the colony, during those sixty years of settlement, they were never really out of sight for the Indian state and Indian dominant society. Originally an impurity in the Indian nation (in their capacity as widows), their families were fragmented as their sons attained a different kind of status, leaving the elderly women, in the final moment, as the waste of Indian nationalism. As in many of the other contributions, the women in Kaur’s analysis are never absolutely stabilized as one kind of victim figure. They are, at one and the same time, heroic, invisible, and entextualized. While all the different figures are present in most of the analyses, some contributions focus more on those interpellated and seeing themselves as victims (Weiss, Jefferson, Kaur, Danneskjold-­Samsøe, Gupta, Rejali), where others focus more on the relationship between humanitarian and human rights interventions (Jensen, Ronsbo, Le Marcis, Buch-­Segal, Jakobsen, Kelly). Both

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approaches are crucial for understanding histories of victimhood, and the contributions, in different ways, attend to dimensions within the victimhood assemblage. From this ethnographically and historically informed point of view, we might discuss how to approach the problem of victimhood. As Meyers (2011) rightly notes, discussions about this are inherently normative where a victim figure of humanitarian and human rights interventions cannot be seen as having different agendas. Innocence and passivity are prerequisite of victim status. Similarly, the heroic victim must be agentive but should never have other interests at heart and must not be morally reprehensible (Meyers 2011). Such moral imperatives also extend to those involved in humanitarian intervention. To be a real benefactor, for instance NGOs, state officials, or others must not be in it for the money or other gains. In his contribution to this volume, political scientist and philosopher Darius Rejali provides one of the key arguments for why the study of victimhood continues to haunt us with the moral and political foundations of the modern social sciences. He draws to our attention how, to exist, victims must have suffered an inhumane treatment, and instead of simply studying the victim he traces the genealogy of inhumane violence that starts with crucifixion in circum-­Mediterranean legal and religious discourses. In doing so, he shows us how, by naming some forms of violence humane and others inhumane, we are identifying not only victims but also constituting the members of the political community to whom we extend protection against inhumane violence. One way in which this debate continues in the volume is through the Foucauldian postliberal critique of which Elizabeth Povinelli is a prominent protagonist. She suggests that events (of recognized victimhood for example) also take place on the back of quasi-­events within the “ordinary, chronic and cruddy” (Povinelli 2011: 13). Quasi-­events constitute the backdrop that inevitably will recede into obscurity. This is not all bad, Povinelli suggests, because quasi-­events are pregnant with potentiality. She says, “If events are things that we can say happened such as they have objective [or objectified] being, then quasi-­events never quite achieved the status of having occurred or taken place. They neither happen nor not happen” (13). This state is, she argues, the description of potentiality. Drawing on Agamben, she states, “They [people caught in quasi-­events] can be or not be. And it is in these maximally intensified zones of oscillation and indeterminacy that new forms of life and worlds will emerge” (10). We agree with Povinelli’s notion of the potentiality that can be found in the obscurity of quasi-­events. Hence, to be

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part of the ground might free one or prevent one from being consumed within the biopolitics of humanitarian or human rights victim assemblages. While we are sympathetic to this form of resistance in obscurity, it also seems to us that it ignores the fact that people sometimes want to be victims, and indeed chose victimhood categories, be they as figures of intervention or heroic figures. That they are interpellated by biopolitics does not mean, however, that they are not actively wheeling and dealing within the terrain laid out by victimhood—­renegotiating and contesting the given boundaries of political communities. We do not see that the subjectivity of the quasi-­event is a particularly pure position. In fact, we would object to purity being a parameter at all. Diana Meyers suggests the evocative term “burdened agency” (2011: 269) to capture this sense of labored morality that we also find in, for instance, Andrew Jefferson’s analysis of his own hesitation in the face of the suffering of Liberian refugees and the actions of the UNHCR. Jefferson works hard to defer moral judgment and make this hesitancy constitutive of his politics. Jensen’s analysis of a women’s crisis center also shows all the navigation needed to survive and to be something for the people one wants to help. In both cases, morality is bracketed but made part of the burdensome actions of those who both form part of and act within the victimhood assemblage. This, we believe, is the only viable avenue for a politics of victimhood beyond moral judgment. References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Asad, Talal. 2007. On Suicide Bombing. New York: Columbia University Press. Badiou, Alain. 2001. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Trans. Peter Hallward. London: Verso. Ballinger, Pamela. 2004. “Exhumed Histories: Trieste and the Politics of (Exclusive) Victimhood.” Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans 6, 2: 145–­59. Bataille, Georges. 1991. The Accursed Share. New York: Zone Books. Bayley, James E. 1991. “The Concept of Victimhood.” In To Be a Victim: Encounters with Crime and Injustice, ed. Diane Sank and David Caplan. New York: Plenum. Bloch, Maurice.1992. Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Blundo, Giorgio and Jean-­Pierre Olivier de Sardan. 2006. Everyday Corruption and the State Citizens and Public Officials in Africa. Cape Town: David Philip. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. London: Polity. Buruma, Ian. 1999. “The Joys and Perils of Victimhood.” Review of The Seventh Million, by Tom Segev. New York Review of Books, April 8. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso.

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20  Henrik Ronsbo and Steffen Jensen Campbell, Catherine. 2005. Letting Them Die: Why HIV/AIDS Prevention Programmes Fail. Cambridge: James Currey. Classen, Christoph. 2005. “Back to the Fifties? Die NS-­Vergangeheit als nationaler Opfermythos im frühen Fernsehen der Bunderepublik.“ Historical Social Research 30, 4: 112–­27. Cole, Alyson M. 2007. The Cult of True Victimhood from the War on Welfare to the War on Terror. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Cruikshank, Barbara. 1999. The Will to Empower Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Das, Veena. 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press. De Landa, Manuel. 2006. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London: Continuum. Douzinas, Costas. 1998. The End of Human Rights. Oxford: Hart. Duffield, Mark R. 2007. Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples. Cambridge: Polity. Fanon, Frantz. 1990. The Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin. Fassin, Didier and Estelle d’Halluin. 2007. “Critical Evidence: The Politics of Trauma in French Asylum Policies.” Ethos 35, 3: 300–­329. Fassin, Didier and Mariella Pandolfi. 2010. Contemporary States of emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions. New York: Zone Books. Fassin, Didier and Richard Rechtman. 2009. The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Guevara, Che. 2006. Radical Writings on Guerrilla Warfare, Politics and Revolution. London: Filiquarian. Goodale, Mark and Sally Engle Merry. 2007. The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law Between the Global and the Local. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Humphrey, Michael and Estela Valverde. 2007. “Human Rights, Victimhood, and Impunity: An Anthropology of Democracy in Argentina.” Social Analysis 51, 1: 179–­97. Ileto, Reynaldo. 1979. Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840–­1910. Manila: Ateneo University Press James, Erica C. 2004. “The Political Economy of ‘Trauma’ in Haiti in the Democratic Era of Insecurity.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 28, 2: 127–­49. Jensen, Steffen. 2010. “The Security and Development Nexus in Cape Town: War on Gangs, Counterinsurgency and Citizenship.” Security Dialogue 41, 1: 77–­97. Jensen, Steffen and Andrew M. Jefferson. 2009. State Violence and Human Rights: The Role of State Officials in the South. New York: Routledge-­Cavendish. Jones, Ben. 2009. Beyond the State in Rural Uganda. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kelly, Tobias. 2011. This Side of Silence: Human Rights, Torture, and the Recognition of Cruelty. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Khalili, Laleh. 2007. Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lagoutte, Stephanie, H. O. Sano, and Peter S. Smith. 2007. Human Rights in Turmoil: Facing Threats, Consolidating Achievements. Leiden: Nijhoff. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ———. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

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Introduction 21 ———. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-­Network-­Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Long, Norman and Ann Long. 1992. Battlefields of Knowledge: The Interlocking of Theory and Practice in Social Research and Development. London: Routledge. MacDonald, Ross B. and Monica C. Bernardo. 2006. “The Politics of Victimhood: Historical Memory and Peace in Spain and the Basque Region.” Journal of International Affairs 60, 1: 173–­96. Meyers, Diana. 2011. “Two Victim Paradigms and the Problem of ‘Impure’ Victims.” Humanity 2, 2 (Fall): 255–­75. Moghadam, Assa. 2011. The Globalization of Martyrdom: Al Qaeda, Salafi Jihad, and the Diffusion of Suicide Attacks. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press Mosse, David. 2005. Cultivating Development: An Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice. London: Pluto. Nietzsche, Friedrich W. 1990. The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals. First Anchor Books ed. New York: Anchor. Olivier de Sardan, Jean-­Pierre. 1999. “A Moral Economy of Corruption in Africa?” The Journal of Modern African Studies 37, 1: 25–­52. Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2011. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Pupavac, Vanessa. 2001. “Therapeutic Governance: Psycho-­Social Intervention and Trauma Risk Management.” Disasters 25 (4): 358–­72. ———. 2004. “War on the Couch: The Emotionology of the New International Security Paradigm.” European Journal of Social Theory 7, 2: 149–­70. Rejali, Darius M. 1994. Torture and Modernity: Self, Society and State in Modern Iran. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Ronsbo, Henrik. 2006. “Displacing Enigma and Shaping Communal Hegemony: Towards the Analysis of Violent Experience as Social Process.” Dialectical Anthropology 30, 1–­2: 147–­67. Rose, Nikolas S. 2007. Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-­First Century. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Simon, Jonathan. 2007. Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stein, Arlene. 1998. “Whose Memories? Whose Victimhood? Contest for the Holocaust Frame in Recent Social Movement Discourse.” Sociological Perspectives 41, 3: 519–­40. Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Thiranagama, Sharika. 2010. “In Praise of Traitors: Intimacy, Betrayal, and the Sri Lankan Tamil Community.” In Traitors: Suspicion, Intimacy and the Ethics of State Building, ed. Sharika Thiranagama and Tobias Kelly, 127–­49. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Tiatco, Sir Anril P. and Amihan Bonifacio-­Ramolete. 2008. “Cutud’s Ritual of Nailing on the Cross: Performance of Pain and Suffering.” Asian Theatre Journal 25, 1: 58–­76. Walklate, Sandra. 2005. “Imagining the Crime Victim: The Rhetoric of Victimhood as a Source of Oppression.” Social Justice 32, 1: 89–­99. Wessely, Simon. 2005. “Victimhood and Resilience.” New England Journal of Medicine 353, 6: 548–­50. Whyte, Susan Reynolds, Michael A. Whyte, Lotte Meinert, and Jenipher Twebaze. 2013. “Therapeutic Clientship: Belonging in Uganda’s Mosaic of AIDS Projects.” In When People Come First: Anthropology and Social Innovation in Global Health, ed. Durham João Biehl and Adriana Petryna. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

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22  Henrik Ronsbo and Steffen Jensen Yates, Roger, Chriss Powel, and Piers Beirne. 2001. “Horse Maiming in the English Countryside: Moral Panic, Human Deviance, and the Social Construction of Victimhood.” Society and Animals 9, 1: 1–­23. Young, Allan. 1995. The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-­Traumatic Stress Disorder. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

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Chapter 1

Why Social Scientists Should Care How Jesus Died Darius Rejali

In this chapter, I reconstruct the story of how we came to have the concept of humane violence. Humane violence is a critical concept when one debates violence today. Inhumane violence needs justification, and, failing that, it marks one as a victim of injustice. Humane violence does not. How one decides the humanity of violence then indexes one’s claims to victimhood. If violence is humane, how can one be a victim really? Some stories tell us that humaneness has shaped how our societies exercise pain over time. Not surprisingly, politicians, caregivers, and activists hotly contest any particular history. And, not surprisingly, these debates depend on identifying the inhumanity in any particular practice. With so many positions on what counts as inhumane, it is tempting to think that what is or is not humane is simply subjective. There is a story that captures this subjectivity quite well. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Japanese government faced a problem of penal reform. It was trying to modernize its penal system, especially in Japanese-­occupied Korea. Traditional Japanese interrogation involved practices like “Hugging the Stone,” in which guards required a prisoner to kneel on a platform of three-­cornered stones, his arms tightly braced by ropes, and then heavy slabs were gradually piled on his knees. Criminal execution took various forms including slowly removing various bodily appendages, the “Execution of Twenty-­One Cuts” (Murdoch 1926: 337–­38 n1; Innes 1998: 150–­53). Japanese rulers had become sensitive to criticism that these punishments

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were inhumane. Still, they were unsure what this new phrase “humane punishment” meant and sought examples to understand what kind of capital punishment they were looking for. Western governments were eager to help. Each promoted its own particularly humane punishment. In 1904, the Americans arrived with the electric chair, the device that to this day is a uniquely American way of death. The French arrived with the guillotine. And, of course, the British recommended hanging. The Japanese, for their part, had to invent a new character in their language to represent this idea of “humane punishment.”1 This story reminds us that the concept of humane violence is a historical inheritance for some societies and that it traveled globally, including, among other ways, through imperialism in the nineteenth century and multilateral treaties in the twentieth. In this chapter, I consider a moment where some societies made this portentous decision, distinguishing humaneness from inhumaneness in violence and codifying victimhood literally in the kind of violence visible on bodies. And this requires a trip to the ancient world. Greeks and Romans prescribed one kind of violence for “humans” and another for “nonhumans.” I want to follow this thread forward to our present. Clarifying these ancient practices helps explain what the concept of humane violence means. It also illuminates why it has become so controversial in modern times. This story is intimately tied to the practice of crucifying people. Ancient peoples regarded crucifixion as an extreme form of violence reserved for those who could not claim full human status. In this respect, crucifixion furnished practical criteria for judging inhumaneness in violence and continues to do so today, long after the ideological supports distinguishing human from nonhuman vanished. Crucifixion functions as a hermeneutic horizon for successors to cultures of the Greek and Roman world, Muslim, Christian, and secular. And this is the reason social scientists should care about how Jesus died. I present this story in three steps. First, I discuss the Greek and Roman period where crucifixion, torture, and the distinction between humane/inhumane violence had fairly tight and clear relationships to one another. Then I describe the complicated process by which these relationships came apart and how the distinctions became unmoored from any specific practical considerations on how violence should be done. I describe, in other words, the process by which the distinction became apparently subjective. In the last step, I return to the crucifixion showing the way it still functions as a hermeneutic horizon to any discussion of humane and inhumane violence today, as

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well as discussing the risks and dangers presented should the distinction become even more unmoored than it is.

Humane and Inhumane Violence in the Greco-­Roman Period What do we mean when we speak of humane violence or humane punishment? What we mean at the very least is that we treat humans differently from nonhumans when applying violence. The Greeks and Romans understood the matter in this way as well. Nonhumans could be tortured and crucified, but humans were not supposed to be treated that way. A great deal, then, turns on who is or is not human. For their part, Greeks believed one was not a full human being if one did not live in a free polis or a republic. So, for them, treating barbarians inhumanely was unproblematic. Within a polis, humans achieved their highest potential as self-­governing citizens. But not everyone in a polis was a citizen, and treating these people inhumanely was not problematic either. For example, only slaves could be tortured. Indeed, the torture of slaves was not merely customary but compulsory in matters of law (Todd 1993). There was reason in this. Slaves, of course, knew the lives of their masters intimately; they were everywhere. But why not torture citizens as well, especially those of the less savory type? Historians offer several reasons why citizens were not tortured while slaves were. All of them are concerned not so much with slavery, but with the rights and privileges of being a citizen. The slave was “an absolute outsider” against which citizens measured themselves. “Every citizen, even (or perhaps indeed especially) if he does not himself own slaves, is aware that there is somebody worse off than himself in every respect” (Todd 1993: 172). Even poor citizens had privileges, and a key privilege was the opportunity to give evidence. In ancient Athens, this was not a right but a civic privilege. Indeed, when citizens brought other citizens as witnesses, courts were more interested in knowing who the witnesses were who supported each side (Todd 1993: 97; Johnstone 1999: 89). It was more about who could speak than about what they said. If testifying in court was a privilege, then slaves could not testify. But this was inconvenient because slaves knew and saw a great deal. Torturing slaves allowed Athenians to admit slave testimony without casting doubt on the privilege of the poorest free citizen to give evidence. It was an “institutionalized

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humiliation” of an absolute outsider (Todd 1993: 172) and “a mark of the fact that [the slave] was not in himself a free agent entitled to support from one side or the other” (Harrison 1971: 147). And so even poor citizens were immune from torture (150). Philosophers offered a different reason for civic immunity from torture. Even the poorest citizen was moved by his honor, and could give an oath to certify the truth of what he said. And unlike the slave, he could suffer from the dishonor that would follow from being tortured; it was below his status to be tortured (Peters 1996: 13). By contrast, slaves did not respond to matters of honor. They felt no shame in this sense and there was no inner compulsion to speak the truth. They only knew how to obey pain and pleasure. In fact, Greeks believed that, while citizens possessed reason, slaves did not. Like other animals, they could understand orders but could not generate them. As Aristotle says, “He is by nature a slave who is capable of belonging to another (and that is why he does so belong), and who participates in reason so far as to apprehend it but not to possess it; for the animals other than man are subservient not to reason by apprehending it, but to feelings” (Politics 1254b). In this sense, Greeks did not torture slaves simply because slaves were knowledgeable about hidden matters. Rather, they understood torture to be useless for citizens but a tool quite proper for getting the truth from slaves. Because citizens can reason, under torture, they may lie. But slaves cannot. “Slaves are bodies” (duBois 1991, 52). Their loyalty to their master lies in their bodies, not in acts of reasoning. They understand commands faithfully, as dogs do, but cannot reason; therefore they lack the capacity to lie (52, 61, 66, 68). They act naturally, and if they disobey it is only out of fear of their master. This is why, centuries later, the Younger Pliny could torture two Christian slave girls to investigate what Christians believed (Hengel 1977, 2). Slaves spoke the truth, just as dogs sniff out a murderer. Even today, we believe, animals do not lie, especially when their master is absent. Now whether the Greeks followed this line in practice is another matter. We do not have much documentation of the judicial torture of slaves. But orators did not hesitate questioning a slave’s truthfulness when it harmed their legal case (Harrison 1971: 147). What is more, in cases of public danger, courts heard slaves bring denunciations without torture, discarding the alleged incapacity of slaves to speak the truth. Indeed, “if the slave won the case, he was rewarded with his liberty” (Todd 1993: 187). On the flipside, in cases of public danger, foreign citizens could be tortured even if they were free men (Harrison 1971: 150).

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Regardless of the belief, then, the practice was inconsistent. The most common reason we think Greeks tortured slaves for truth appears in court cases. Here, sometimes, the accused would issue a torture challenge: if you do not believe me, torture my slaves (Johnstone 1999” 71–­92; duBois 1991: 50, 59, 60–­61; Peters 1996: 15–­16). But, in point of fact, there is not a single recorded instance of the challenge’s being accepted and slaves tortured (Harrison 1971: 147). Prejudicial daring seems to have been a way for those accused to negotiate a settlement and avoid further litigation, not a way of gathering truth. The accused might offer his slaves, knowing his accusers would not risk the financial cost of reimbursing the accused if they were wrong (Johnstone 1999: 72). If the accusers felt the advantage, they would demand the slaves be tortured, knowing the master would refuse and so lending credence to their accusation. When in this weakened position, masters sometimes freed their slaves, giving them civic immunity from torture and so avoiding successfully any coerced testimony that might harm them (Harrison 1971: 150). In this sense, the alleged necessity of torturing slaves but not citizens for truth was not so much a deeply cherished belief as a useful legal fiction in a dangerous game between citizens (Johnstone 1999: 86, 91, 92, 95). None of this is to say that slaves were not tortured in ancient Athens. Athenians treated their slaves brutally, as did the Romans who followed them. The important point pertains to the practices regarding citizens, not slaves. The Greeks and the Romans took great pride in their way of life. They were very self-­conscious about the privileges accorded to them as citizens. The citizens of a polis were the only people who lived freely and according to reason, so only they were subjected to humane punishments. This is what they defended. The unfortunate Persians, Egyptians, and Babylonians were mere slaves. They lived under despots, and they knew nothing other than the fear and pleasure of the despot, just as Greek slaves feared their masters. When Greeks and Romans tortured slaves, they thus rendered visible differences that otherwise were impossible to see. The slave’s broken body; the citizen’s fine, unscarred one: such evidence served to render visible to the naked eye the ambiguous relationship to a class of people who looked and talked like citizens but who really were two-­footed stock (duBois 1991: 63; Hunter 1994: 181–­84). All this is what made tyranny such a calamity for Greek citizens, who find themselves suddenly experiencing inhumane punishments not appropriate to their status as citizens of a polis. For a tyrant places himself above the law of a polis. Such a ruler treats others as slaves. This might not be a misfortune

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in Persia, where every man knows he is property of the Great King, to do with as he pleases. There is no indignity to whatever Persians suffer. But tyranny in a free city was miserable. We glimpse this misery in Polus’s speech in Plato’s Gorgias. In the Gorgias, Socrates implies that being a free, successful tyrant was no different from being an oppressed citizen because fear, insecurity, and passion enslaved the souls of both. Polus challenges Socrates with a particularly horrifying example that was probably based on the political realities of the time: If a man is caught in a criminal plot to make himself tyrant, and when caught is put to the rack and mutilated and has his eyes burnt out and after himself suffering and seeing his wife and children suffer many other signal outrages of various kinds is finally crucified or burned in a coat of pitch, will he be happier than if he escaped arrest, established himself as a tyrant, and lived the rest of his life a sovereign in his state, doing what he pleased, an object of envy and felicitation among citizens and strangers alike? (473bc) Socrates rejects the dichotomy asserting that, of two miserable creatures, one cannot be happier. He then asserts that the successful tyrant is unquestionably more wretched than the miserable tortured and crucified prisoner—­a reply that draws scornful laughter from Polus (473d–­e). The example of tyranny underlines once again the particularly important idea that citizens had a kind of punishment rightfully accorded to them that would be absent to slaves, noncitizens, and barbarians. To them belonged inhumane punishments, such as torture and crucifixion. For example, in a biblical story, Roman soldiers arrested the Apostle Paul. As they tied him up to be thrashed with whips, he challenged the centurion nearby, saying, “Is it lawful for you to scourge a man who is a Roman citizen, and uncondemned?” (Acts 22: 26). And when the investigating tribune realized Paul was born a Roman citizen and had not bought his citizenship, everyone withdrew instantly, and the tribune was afraid because he had clapped a Roman citizen in irons. Now Paul was not born a Roman citizen, so the story is implausible, but it does capture a Hellenistic sensibility.2 By invoking one’s citizenship, one receives treatment suited to citizens, rather than far more horrible punishments. The distinction between humane and inhumane punishments, thus, persists from judicial torture through penal torture, and here is where

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crucifixion’s importance lies. Crucifixion was not just one of the punishments reserved for the nonhuman, but a punishment of such notorious reputation and scandal that tasteful Romans could not even write about it even if they practiced it regularly. We do not encounter it, for example, in the writings of Julius Caesar, though historians record instances where he ordered crucifixions. Crucifixion mainly requires that practitioners attach the body to a stake. Beyond that, the variations were endless. The body might be dead or alive. The stake could be in different shapes. The process could and often was preceded by extensive torments. The body might be hooded but not always. It could be impaled or nailed or attached by metal rings to the wood. In general, the Romans followed a standard crucifixion process: whipping, followed by the victim carrying the beam to the execution site and being nailed to it with outstretched arms, and the beam raised up and seated on a small wooden peg. But even among the Romans, the form varied greatly. As Seneca says, “I see crosses there, not just of one kind but made in many different ways; some have their victims with head down to the ground; some impale their private parts; other stretch out their arms on the gibbet” (Hengel 1977: 25). There is not even any agreement on how crucifixion kills (Zugibe 2005: 100–­163).3 Assuming the victim is crucified head upward (and, as we know, there were many other variations), the long-­held thesis is that the victim asphyxiates on the cross (Barbet 1953: 73–­80). The start of the process was the collapse of the shoulders under the body’s weight. As the victim’s shoulders gave way, the victim would feel a great crushing feeling on the chest. He would feel asphyxiated. To relieve his chest and breathe, the victim searches for leverage, the only one available being the nail in the feet. So supporting himself against this, he can raise himself up briefly to breathe. But then that pain becomes too much, and he collapses again. After that, the cycle repeats until he dies. In this view, it makes no sense to nail the victim in the palm, as the iconography of Jesus’ crucifixion suggests; the soft tissues of the hand, such as the ligaments, tendons, fascia, and skin, would not support the weight of a human body, and the hand would rip off the nail. Rather, to create the asphyxiation effect, the crucifiers would need to drive the nail through the two bones beneath the wrist, and place a piece of wood between the nail and the flesh to make sure the wrist was pinned tight. A nail at this juncture would not only hold the body up securely; it would also impinge on the ulna nerve, causing excruciating pain. Recent experimental data suggest that elements of the asphyxiation

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hypothesis are implausible. The alternative is the shock hypothesis (Zugibe 2005: 129–­36). In this view, the victim dies slowly of traumatic and hypovolemic shock in the stages leading to crucifixion. Scourging produces “traumatic wet lung” with fluid accumulating in the lungs, which are ruptured by blows to the chest. The victim suffers further shock due to loss of blood and exposure to extreme heat. When nails are driven through the wrists, the victim suffers from causalgia, an extreme aggravation of the nerves. Trauma is further compounded each time the victim moves, as even slight movements irritate the flesh around the nails. Death follows from irreversible cell and organ injury. However it happened, everyone seems to agree that crucifixion was a terrible way to die. Even the ancients held that crucifixion was worse than hanging, and the only other execution that was closely comparable was being torn apart by wild animals. In fact, ancient societies judged it so cruel that they reserved it for extreme crimes. Crucifixion was and remained a political and military punishment. Persians and Carthaginians imposed it primarily on high officials and commanders as well as rebels. Greeks, who emphasized their civility, said they did not practice crucifixion. But they had a practice called “nailing to the plank” that for all intents and purposes was crucifixion. Here, like the Persians and Carthaginians, Greeks imposed it for crimes of high treason. Among the Jews, the Greek-­influenced Hasmonean rulers also employed crucifixion for treason, but they abandoned the practice once they came directly under Roman rule. Herod, for all his other acts, did not crucify, and historians speculate that this has less to do with a gentle nature than with a popular understanding that by his time crucifixion had come to be identified as an oppressive Roman practice. The Romans were innovators in crucifying. They used it to punish but also in war. They used it on highways to demoralize brigands and foreigners. They applied it to rebellious slaves, as they did on Spartacus’s army. And they expanded the range of crimes to which it applied to include military desertion, the betrayal of secrets, inciting rebellion, murder, prophecy about the welfare of rulers, nocturnal impiety, magic, illegal transfer of Roman property, and serious cases of the falsification of wills. It is generally believed that crucifixion was limited solely to noncitizens, foreigners, and slaves. On rare occasions, Romans also applied crucifixion to their own citizens, though only to those of the lower class (humiliores) (Bauman 1996: 109–­10; Hengel 1977: 34, 39–­40). This portentous decision prefigured a later one in

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the sixth century, where humiliores also became the first class of free citizens to be subjected to torture (Peters 1996: 25). The upper class honestiores could count on punishments suited for human beings (including beheading, exile, and the opportunity to commit suicide, as in Seneca’s case; Bauman 1996: 110, 129–­36). Humane punishments increasingly became a mark of class justice, rather than civic justice. But this was a slippery slope, as ever more people became eligible for crucifixion, so we finally have one instance where someone requested the death penalty, in the form of crucifixion, for a senator who was a member of Roman nobility. This was in the trial of C. Rabirius in 63 B.C.E, instituted by Julius Caesar. The tribune T. Labienus, a supporter of Caesar, was prosecutor, and Cicero led the defense. Labienus accused Rabirius of murdering a people’s tribune thirty-­seven years earlier. He demanded crucifixion, with reference to the old practice of hanging those convicted of high treason. When Cicero made his plea against crucifixion, he had already successfully defended Rabirius from death, but he wanted to raise the issue of the manner of death, nonetheless. He wanted to show that Labienus was neither the people’s friend nor a Republican restoring old-­fashioned values, but really Caesar’s stooge, seeking to restore tyrannical practices. Cicero says, How grievous a thing it is to be disgraced by a public court; how grievous to suffer a fine, how grievous to suffer banishment, and yet in the midst of any such disaster we retain some degree of liberty. Even if we are threatened with death, we may die free men. But the executioners, the veiling of the head, and the very word “cross” should be far removed not only from the person of a Roman citizen but from his thoughts, his eyes and his ears. For it is not only the actual occurrence of these things or the endurance of them, but the liability to them, the expectation, indeed, the very mention of them, that is unworthy of a Roman citizen and a free man. (quoted in Hengel 1977: 42)

Humane and Inhumane Violence Unmoored Humane violence was born, then, from a curious conceit that Greeks and Romans had regarding their own citizenship, which they identified with being fully human. Later ages took this conceit seriously, for it was motivated

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by a genuine concern with reducing cruelty in our lives as we go about our civic activities. There were violent practices appropriate to citizens/humans and others appropriate to subjects/nonhumans. At the same time, the various elements in this Greco-­Roman package have different subsequent histories, and the distinction was deployed in ways the Greeks and Romans would not have anticipated. We glimpse these histories by following the practices of crucifixion and, subsequently, torture through later centuries. Rome maintained its power through terror, slavery, conquest, and torture—­including brutal gladiator games and military processions often culminating in the execution of prisoners. In that context, one can debate whether crucifying was truly the most exceptional way of death or whether “the brutality of crucifixion was not exceptional in the order established by Rome” (Elliott 1997: 169). What seems certain, though, is that crucifixion played an indispensable part in the Roman rule of terror. And what seems equally certain is that the states that inherited Roman provinces did not continue the practice. To put it another way, while Rome did not survive, the notion of a distinction between humane and inhumane violence did, albeit along different paths in different regions. In 337 C.E., the emperor Constantine abolished crucifixion as a means of capital punishment. In its place, executioners adapted the Roman furca, a wooden frame used for whipping, into that device we now call the gallows (Fosbroke 1825: 268; Smith 1875: 562–­63). This was not an arbitrary choice on their part. “Hanging on the ‘barren tree’ ” (arbor infelix) was an archaic Roman punishment, probably a remnant of sacrificial rites for the gods of the underworld (Hengel 1977: 39). It could be applied to Romans in cases of serious crime and high treason. By the second century B.C.E., “this punishment was evidently interpreted as crucifixion.” Though “hanging from a barren tree” was rarely imposed, the practice was known. The jurist Julius Paulus, for example, “gives crucifixion (furca = gallows, the word that replaced the ‘holy’ word cross in legal literature after Constantine)” as one punishment for deserters and for betrayers of secrets (Hengel 1977: 39; Bauman 1996: 151).4 Reflecting three centuries later on this decision, Isidore of Seville explained the logic of the new Roman way of death: “hanging is a lesser penalty than the cross. For the gallows kills the victim immediately, whereas the cross tortures for a long time those who are fixed to it” (Hengel 1977: 29). When Muslim rulers inherited large sections of the Roman Empire, they followed this Roman practice. While the Qur’an recognizes salb as a form of

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punishment, Muslims practiced salb in the same manner as Christian Romans. Most commonly, salb designated executing a victim by strangling him by rope from a pole, what we call hanging (Lange 2008: 62–­63). It also referred to the practice of exposing a corpse after execution. In this, Muslim rulers differed little from Christian emperors. And, in some cases, salb was not even lethal like Roman practice. Chroniclers use the word salb to describe exposing someone for a period, usually on a trunk or pole, after which the prisoner was released. Nor was salb a common punishment. For instance, in the whole of the eleventh century, historians record only one death by hanging, in 450 A.H./1058 C.E. (Mez 1937: 373). Generally, Muslim rulers favored beheading when it came to executing criminals, a practice so common that, unlike salb, most chroniclers do not think it merits mention. Beheading did not reflect a mild streak in Muslim rulers. Like Christian rulers in medieval Europe, they did not lack imagination when dispensing with their opponents. Chroniclers document how they had victims stoned, burned, cut apart, trampled by animals, thrown from heights, and buried alive. What is striking in these lists is that nailing victims (tasmir) to a wooden plank or cross does not come up (Mez 1937: 367–­72; Lange 2008: 62). Politicians sometimes said their rivals used this practice, implying their enemies were inhumane. But historians do not document the practice even in accounts describing attacks on churches and Christian communities (Mez 1937: 53–­58; Lange 2008: 62). Today, the Islamic Republic of Iran has salb written into its penal codes, but it does not crucify in that sense, though it certainly hangs criminals quite frequently, just as the Christian Romans and modern Europeans did. And this is a state where officials also do not hesitate to execute prisoners by public stoning. The Qur’an also narrowed the range of crimes to which salb could be applied. Salb is one of four punishments for highway robbery, alongside cutting off a hand and foot on opposite sides, exile, and execution (Surah 5:33). In this, the Qur’an sharply narrows Roman practice. It also limits salb to a specific class of highway crime, where robbers kill their victims after they rob them. And jurists, particularly those of the Hanafite school, strongly resisted efforts by tyrannical rulers to extend hadd practices like this by analogy to other crimes (Lange 2008: 247–­48). A different pattern emerged in the Christian world. Here too the Roman practice of crucifixion disappeared. Not even Vlad Dracul “the Impaler” (1395–­1477) practiced crucifixion as far as anyone knows, though he did not hesitate to burn, boil, skin, roast, hack, hang, pierce, and, above all, impale his

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Muslim Turkish and Christian peasants. In 1462, papal legate Nicoloas Modrusa drew up a detailed list to illustrate that Vlad missed “no form of cruelty,” but, strikingly, crucifixion is missing from it (Florescu and McNally 1973: 77). In the Christian world, too, the notion of a distinction between human and inhumane violence survived. What unquestionably helped it survive in Europe was the revival of Roman law and civic humanism in the twelfth century and, with it, distinctions between practices appropriate for humans and nonhumans that were built into these theories. But contrary to what one might think, there was a dark side to this survival. By the sixteenth century, for example, imperial theologians of the Spanish court used the distinction between humans and nonhumans to justify the violent treatment of Indians in the Americas. Indians, they argued, had no civilization, no polis; so it was acceptable to take their property as well as to treat them with the violence appropriate to barbarians and animals. The Spanish were aware, of course, that some Indian civilizations had governments and other institutions. But they argued that, since these governments practiced cannibalism and other “crimes committed against human society,” the Spanish had every right to uproot these governments and deprive Indians of their property and liberty (Pagden 1987: 91). Thomist theologians opposed this, maintaining that the Indians were rational and hence subject at least to natural law and, after the conquest of the Americas, free subjects of the Castilian Crown. The Spanish Crown had little legal right to dispossess the Indians of the Americas of their properties. As such, all the violence—­the dispossessions, massacres, and tortures—­were unjustified and inhumane. Anyone who has seen the movie The Mission knows the outcome of that debate. As Indian populations rapidly declined and the number of souls to be saved grew smaller, the missionary ambitions of the Thomists disappeared too. Roman legal procedure and civic humanism had a similarly consequential effect, in very practical terms, on Europeans. With their revival, torture too returned as a method of criminal investigation in both civil and ecclesiastical courts (Peters 1996: 44–­54). As in the past, citizens of good standing did not expect they would be tortured. But, in fact, the class of citizens to whom torture could be applied grew larger than before. Two important legal changes contributed to the increase in the category of victims to whom inhumane punishments could apply. The first was the doctrine of dignity and infamy introduced in Roman times (6, 61), the second was the changing understand-

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ing of what were called “exceptional crimes,” crimina excepta (12, 15, 26, 30–­ 31, 44–­50). In the Greek model, all citizens had dignity, but they could also fall into ill repute, mala fama. This notion soon found its place in medieval legal theory. Some Italian city-­states, for example, promulgated laws that prohibited torture of citizens unless they were of notorious reputation. Ill repute may have originally covered a class of well-­known offenders (prostitutes and thieves) who were also citizens. And torture may have been seen as especially appropriate for thieves and brigands because there was often no other way to gain evidence even when everyone knew that “Gino was a thief.” Indeed, some Italian law codes listed the families of bad reputation in the region, indicating that torture was appropriate for such individuals (Peters 1996: 259). Increasingly, however, ill repute came to have political connotations, as politicians were anxious to pillory their opponents in Renaissance republics as people of ill repute. Judging by the legal efforts to curb unjust torture, it would appear that Italian podestas that were responsible for law and order were often quite quick in their use of torture on local citizens, even if these citizens were of good repute. For example, in Vercelli, a statute decreed in 1241 prohibited torture unless the person in question was a notorious criminal or had an evil reputation. A later addition reemphasized that good citizens should not be tortured and particularly forbade the podesta from circumventing the decree (Pennington 1993: 42–­44, 157–­60). The doctrine of infamy had implications that stretch through the centuries to the racist practices of police in the twentieth century. Indeed, in societies with sharp divisions in wealth or ethnicity, police torture commonly follows judgments that this or that group has a notorious reputation and cannot be trusted. Many kinds of modern racism follow on the old legal doctrine of infamy. The second factor driving the expanding realm of torture is the changing nature of crime and the democratic context in which it was understood. In the medieval world, heresy and treason were different from all other crimes. When someone betrayed the king, this was not an attack on a single person but rather on a person who embodied the social order itself. The king was the head of the physical body of the state, as the church was its soul, and no body could live without its head any more than without its soul. Historians have argued that medieval subjects understood their kings to have two bodies, a physical body that dies and an immortal body that passes on to the next king (Kantorowicz 1957). “The King is dead; long live the King” expresses this

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sentiment. Kings were also said to have a healing touch like saints; for example, they could cure scrofula. This was because they had powers of the immortal body, the body that was the state. What is important for my purposes is that, seen in this light, an attack on the king, especially a physical attack, is also an attack on the entire social order. And it had to be answered, then, with the greatest violence the public trust could bring to bear. Not surprisingly, those guilty of treason or heresy drew torture as their just punishment. But what happens to concepts like treason and heresy when a whole people is the sovereign: their own king, so to speak? What happens when sovereignty is contiguous with all citizens, as becomes so in the age of mass democracy? Not surprisingly, treason and heresy undergo important changes as crimes. Unconnected to a single person’s body (the king), the charge can land on anyone for any betrayal of “society.” So jurists and politicians started counting acts as political crimes that never were considered treasonous before. In different countries, this process took different roads (Peters 1996: 116–­ 32). In Nazi and revolutionary jurisprudence, for example, impeding industrial projects was considered not merely sabotage but a crime against the people and the state. Because it affected the welfare of the whole people (the sovereign king), faulty engineering was no small crime. A crime against one was a crime against all. Under this new understanding of sovereignty, more crimes became exceptional in scope, so more people became eligible to be torture victims. By the late twentieth century, revolutionary law—­whether East or West—­became a tool for revealing hypocrites and coercing confessions to major crimes. And torture fell on anyone for anything officials deemed to be critical for the survival of the state. The doctrines of infamy and exceptional crime were particularly potent when they were combined: for example, when a group was stigmatized for an exceptional crime. The crime of “terrorism” carries this burden today. Implicit in most democratic justifications for torture against terrorists is the belief that terrorism is an exceptional crime, one that requires an exceptional response to those one judges to lack all honor. How one defines such groups, then, puts extraordinary pressure on legal protections, especially that violence not be cruel or unusual. As Justice William Brennan observed in Furman v. Georgia, however, there can be cruelty far worse than bodily pain or mutilation. The Eighth Amendment concerned not just the presence of pain but also the treatment

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of “members of the human race as nonhumans, as objects to be toyed with and discarded.”5 And it is striking how current legal redefinitions of what constitutes cruel or unusual punishment have so much in common with statute and case law that reconstructed the identity of slaves (Dayan 2007: 51–­ 57). From eighteenth-­century slave codes to twentieth-­century prison cases to twenty-­first-­century Bush torture memos, lawyers created a new class of nonhumans. Whether slaves, security threat groups (prison gangs), or unlawful combatants (Taliban, Al Qaeda detainees) and security detainees (POWs in Iraq), lawyers set these classes apart from humane treatment.

Human and Inhumane Violence Revisited These, then, are some legal and social categories that drive the ever-­expanding scope of torture and, with it, the ever-­expanding population of victims, over the centuries. It is not surprising, consequently, that, after all these debates as to who could be tortured, what counts as a exceptional crime, who is a victim, what counts as inhumane, and what is a frivolous lawsuit about a humane practice—­that, after all this, moderns tend to think that what is humane in violence lies in the eye of the beholder. And this is the reason we should keep our eye fixed firmly on the practice of crucifixion, for perhaps more than any other violent practice, this manner of execution still furnishes the background model against which modern debates make most sense. Why was crucifixion considered so inhumane? First, those who practiced it had no laws (barbarians such as Celts and Scythians) or used law to hide greed and ambition (tyrants). Second, crucifixion came with a demand for popular retribution, with the hunger for revenge. It enjoined inhuman feelings in bystanders that broke across the boundaries of civility. It conjured elements of human sacrifice. It transformed the audience into an inhuman mob. Third, it extended the punishment for days, that is, it provided a pain far in excess of the final result demanded by justice (death). Fourth, the victim was displayed publicly and nakedly, without honor. Fifth, it prevented the practice of civic rituals, most important, the burying of the dead. The dead were food for wild beasts and birds of prey. This is what makes violence inhumane, and this understanding is not just a feature of Christian civilization. It can rightly be called part of Islamo-­ Christian civilization because the Muslim world also embraces it. Consider, for example, this story from the early history of Islam. In battle,

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Ali, son-­in-­law of Mohammad, was about to deliver the death blow to an idolater, Talha. At that moment, Talha’s pants fell down, exposing his genitals. Ali averted his face and lowered his sword. Mohammad asked why, and Ali replied that the man was nude and asked that his life be spared. This ancient parable, then, teaches Muslims what qualities to expect of anyone who exercises violence—­and those who do not are tyrants. More important for our purposes, it repeats criteria also invoked in ancient criticisms of crucifixion. It evokes the expectation of humanity in violence, often demanded but rarely delivered over the centuries. Humane violence expresses what is just, not what serves one’s interests. It encourages maturity, civility, and honor in those exercising violence, as Ali’s behavior demonstrates. It limits pain to what the law requires. It does not add humiliation to suffering, nakedness to pain. And if life must be taken, one returns the body swiftly to families for the proper burial rituals. One allows the bereaved to observe civic and customary rights. Inhumane punishments, by contrast, are those that are driven by politics, not law; that foster inhumane feelings that break the bounds of civility; that provide pain in excess of what is required for the result; that add humiliation to punishment; and that prevent the performance of ordinary civic rituals. We can now look back at specific recent incidents and see this complex background notion operating. What, for example, made the violence at Abu Ghraib so outrageous to Iraqis? After all, had not Saddam Hussein practiced far more horrific tortures? Many Americans were puzzled at the Iraqi reaction. But in light of the criteria I have just outlined, this reaction is less surprising. At Abu Ghraib, soldiers exposed the men publicly and added humiliation to injury. They fostered inhumane feelings, both sexual and violent, that broke the bonds of basic human society. They wrapped the bodies of the dead in plastic and ice and left them exposed and photographed. They applied pain in excess of what was permitted or necessary for their duties. They acted in the manner of ancient tyrants. What is important here is that such behavior would be violating this background understanding of humane violence whether it happened in a prison in Arizona or Iraq. Or consider again the example with which I began, the curious case of North Atlantic powers parading death devices before Japanese audiences in 1904. Again, the background notion of the crucifixion helps one understand why one might argue these devices are humane. What made the modern gallows, guillotine, and electric chair humane devices, according to the coun-

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tries that used them, is that they reduced death to a single moment, delivering no more pain than justice required. The Japanese practices did not. But in reality, these methods were problematic too. Hanging, for example, had always been a difficult art. Isidore of Seville may have thought the new Roman practice was humane, but it hardly lived up to its justification. If the rope was too short, the condemned strangled slowly. If the drop was too long, the rope would tear the head out, as in the case of the hanging of Saddam Hussein’s half-­brother Barzan Ibrahim al-­Tikriti in 2008. The prisoner’s head would land several feet from a pulsating body under the platform. Few today would call this death humane, even for a tyrant. In 1870, William Marwood solved the problem of excessive cruelty in hanging by devising precise tables to enable the hangman to approximate the drop of a body from the platform (Potter 1993: 101–­2). He drew up mathematical tables based on the weight, age, development, and muscular strength of the prisoners. The correct calculation snapped the neck without any additional pain, precisely the sentence that had been issued; anything more or less was actionable. Today, a metal device on the platform allows the hangman to calculate in advance the length of the drop, from six to ten feet, to the closest half inch. Thanks to the new tables, nineteenth-­century English police chiefs went to bed at night comforted with the thought that those executed suffered neither more nor less than what justice had demanded. Of course, what in practice constitutes an inhumane execution is continually disputed. William Kemmler, the first person to be executed by electricity, challenged this penalty before the Supreme Court. He maintained it was cruel and unusual punishment. Today Amnesty International argues that any form of death penalty constitutes inhumane punishment. And some argue that animals too should not be subjected to inhumane punishments, including death and torture. It is likely that we will always debate when rights have been violated, and what rights one has will depend on how persuasively some make the case and how attentively others listen. But my point here is simply that, in all these debates, proponents and opponents do not disagree as to whether the line between humane and inhumane exists. They only debate where and how it should be drawn. Let me spell this out more precisely. Those who favor inhumane punishments for some also believe that those they torture are somehow less than human or beyond humanity due to the grave crimes they have committed, such as terrorism. In effect, they say, “You are a rat! But you are the worst kind of rat, the kind of rat that pretends to be

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a human being, and only through torture do we learn what an execrable specimen you really are; only then do we see you in your true ratness.” Those who oppose such inhumane treatment maintain the opposite, namely, that not even a rat deserves that kind of inhumane punishment, much less a prisoner of war. Indeed, behind arguments against cruelty to animals are also the background values of humane treatment rooted in the criticism of the crucifixion. We may assert that the reason that treatment is inhumane is that violators are motivated by politics and greed, for instance when treating animals cruelly for purposes of factory farming, shampoo testing, or fox hunting. Or when we see a rider whipping a horse, we may condemn this as dishonorable treatment, humiliating a noble animal. We may assert that whipping counts as excessive pain or encourages in humans savage feelings. We could say similar things for training cocks and pitbulls to fight, except we may point out broadly how these practices encourage savage feelings among all animals involved, feelings they would not normally have. These objections all invoke values implicit in the criticism of crucifixion. The distinction between punishment for humans and nonhumans is alive today, then, with all its implications for the different ways in which people and even animals are to be treated. Yet it is also transformed. Moderns have pushed the boundaries of who should be treated humanely in ways that the ancients would never have done. Scholars usually credit the natural law tradition for this. Over the centuries, revolutionaries and philosophers have argued that all human beings were endowed with reason, and so with certain inalienable rights and, among these, to be free of cruel and inhuman punishment. Our capacity for sentience and reason made us human and so placed a demand on the powerful to treat us humanely. And if one day we conclude forests and rivers are like us, we will also describe our current practices as violent and urge humane treatment of them as well. Yet, while the natural law tradition furnished important arguments against torturing anybody, it also played a critical role in reviving violent Roman practices, including torture. And, here again, those who favored torture distinguished between those who were human and those deserving of torture, the inhuman or nonhuman. Torturers drew on the same distinction as their opponents and still do. It is a distinction that apparently neither side can do without. Their opponents may console themselves that they are more consistent, but torture has not disappeared before reason’s forward march. We are missing something here. I have emphasized practice rather than

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law, or perhaps the Christian element of natural law. But I have not referenced the Christian reformulation of crucifixion’s meaning. I want to close with this briefly, emphasizing its complex inheritance. Christian formulations do not simply assert that Jesus was crucified. They assert that he died on the cross and was reborn. The ancient world knew of suffering gods, like Prometheus, but not gods who died. It knew of heroes torn to pieces by animals but in distant myth and read allegorically. Christians uniquely insisted that God decided to become human and suffer fully along with other humans, that God really died (and did not simply fake it) and that he really suffered (and did not fake it). This story may be told in two ways. One references the practice and, with it, the reasons for its inhumanity. Jesus’ crucifixion embeds within its telling certain broad moral prejudices against violence we have inherited. So, when we judge that pitbull training for dogfights is inhumane, we may be saying that it makes animals savage and referencing the horrors of mobs at the crucifixion. Or alternately, we may be referencing God’s membership in humanity. For God assumed a place with the lowest members of human society, dying alongside common criminals. On this telling, even the lowest member of society was a member of God’s city and so fully human and worthy of better treatment. The Christian view extended political membership far beyond what the Greeks and Romans ever did. Animals, in time, also came to belong to God’s polis, subject to its natural laws of humane treatment. So, when we judge pitbull training as inhumane, we may also be referencing a natural order. Call these biological laws, God’s order, or Gaia: these are the laws of the cosmopolis against which we judge the trainer’s inhumanity against its members. Distinguishing humane from inhumane violence in this way allowed us to criticize many things, including torture. Yet this theoretical elaboration can also lead down slippery slopes to greater violence. Humans may be worthy of humane treatment, but history furnishes many examples of how these ideas were abused. Often this identification turned on the thorny, controversial language of what was natural. In this way, humanist theories were easily co-­opted into racial or civic injustices. And what made the Greek treatment of slaves troubling was that Greeks accorded to slaves a certain place in a natural order, justifying treating some humans cruelly for the sake of others who were considered more deserving. Likewise, if one accords higher value to some creatures, trees, or nature itself than to a human being, one may also ironically hold that the humane treatment of nature requires the inhuman

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treatment of specific humans. At this point, one may wonder what remains of the concept of humane treatment as well as the original desire to reduce and eliminate cruelty in our lives. We might keep these more dangerous variants of the natural law tradition at a distance if we move our eyes away from the heavens of theory and look at what we are doing. We may no longer need to believe in the Greek polis, Christianity, God’s cosmopolis, natural laws, or androcentric doctrines to commit our societies to just punishment, human rights, or ecological thought. But to understand what we mean by humane violence—­that is, to criticize a kind of violence as inhumane, to decide whether someone has been vicitimized, and, more generally, to claim whether a period was humane or that we are progressing toward humanity in violence—­for all this, we still need to keep a firm eye on the horror of crucifixion. References Barbet, Pierre. 1953. A Doctor at Calvary. New York: P.J. Kenedy. Bauman, Richard. 1996. Crime and Punishment in Ancient Rome. London: Routledge. Dayan, Colin. 2007. The Story of Cruel and Unusual. Cambridge, Mass.: Boston Review. duBois, Page. 1991. Torture and Truth. New York: Routledge. Elliott, Neil. 1997. “The Anti-­Imperial Message of the Cross.” In Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society, ed. Richard Horsley. Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press. Florescu, Radu and Raymond McNally. 1973. Dracula: A Biography of Vlad the Impaler 1431–­1476. New York: Hawthorne. Fosbroke, Thomas. 1825. Encyclopedia of Antiquities. Vol. 1. London: John Nichols. Harrison, A. R. W. 1971. The Law of Athens. Vol. 2. Oxford: Clarendon. Hengel, Martin. 1977. Crucifixion. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Hunter, Virginia. 1994. Policing Athens. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Innes, Brian. 1998. The History of Torture. New York: St. Martin’s. Johnstone, Steven. 1999. Disputes and Democracy. Austin: University of Texas Press. Kantorowicz, Ernst. 1957. The King’s Two Bodies. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Koester, Helmut. 1982. Introduction to the New Testament. New York: De Gruyter. Lange, Christian. 2008. Justice, Punishment and the Medieval Muslim Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mez, Adam. 1937. The Renaissance of Islam. Trans. Salahuddin Khda Bukhsh and D. S. Margoliouth. London: Luzac. Murdoch, James. 1926. A History of Japan. Vol. 3. Rev. and ed. Joseph Longford. London: Kegan Paul, Trench Trubner. Pagden, Anthony. 1987. “Dispossessing the Barbarian: The Language of Spanish Thomism and the Debate over Property Rights of American Indians.” In The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pennington, Kenneth. 1993. The Prince and the Law, 1200–­1600. Berkeley: University of California Press. Peters, Edward. 1996. Torture. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Why Social Scientists Should Care How Jesus Died  43 Potter, Harry. 1993. Hanging in Judgment. New York: Continuum. Smith, William. 1875. A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. London: John Murray. Todd, S. C. 1993. The Shape of Athenian Law. Oxford: Clarendon. Zugibe, Frederick. 2005. The Crucifixion of Jesus: A Forensic Inquiry. New York: M. Evans.

Notes 1. My thanks to Alexis Eastwood Dudden for this reference to the Horitsu Shimbun (1904). 2. It is doubtful Paul was a Roman citizen, so the restrictions on punishments would not have applied in his case. How Paul died is an open question today. See Koester 1982: 97–­99, 144–­45. 3. Besides the two theories mentioned here, Zugibe (2005) reviews and rejects two others: the “Heart Attack/Ruptured Heart Hypotheses” and the “Blood, Water and the End of the Swoon Theory.” 4. Modern scholars also sometimes confuse it, as Bauman observes (1996: 203n33). 5. Furman v. Georgia, 1972, 408 U.S. 238.

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Chapter 2

Bodies of Partition: Of Widows, Residue, and Other Historical Waste Ravinder Kaur

The Wall—­2001 Two and a half meters high surface painted in bright yellow paint—­a color often associated with government buildings—­peeling off at some places and spotted randomly with green fungus at others. The signs of disrepair, damage and neglect are apparent. A blue painted gate made of iron bars breaks the monotony of the yellow wall. A chipped board affixed besides the gate identifies the place as Kasturba Niketan—­the official name of what is popularly known as “widow colony” in the neighborhood—­where the widows of India’s 1947 Partition violence were “rehabilitated” by the Indian state. The wall continues to fulfill its original function as intended by the state—­a protective boundary within which young widows and their children were to live their everyday lives under its watchful eyes. It is also symbolic of exceptions that constitute everyday life in the colony—­of widows, their now adult children and grandchildren—­separating it from the “normal” world outside. The Wall—­2010 Broken bricks, concrete slabs, dust, shreds of green plastic sheets, empty bottles, and rubble outline the area once occupied by the wall. The surface was probably hammered by heavy machinery to speed up the process of demolition, or perhaps it was manually disassembled by the laborers deployed by the municipal contractors. The details are lost, or more likely, they don’t matter. The colony is finally leveled with the “normal” world, open to the gaze from the outside.

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Residue: Something that remains after the main part has gone or been taken or used. Oxford Dictionary, 1999

Introduction A “historical wound,” it has been noted, is a sign of misrecognition of injury that locates the past as the site of the original slight and its redress in the present as a condition for rearrangement of the social compact (Attwood, Chakrabarty, and Lomnitz 2008). Dipesh Chakrabarty further suggests that to publicize the wound, or to speak in its name, is “to be already on the path of recovery” (Chakrabarty 2007: 77). A somewhat less explored aspect of the relationship between publicity and recovery of the wound concerns the historical residue as waste—­residual matter, a leftover of the wound, in a constant state of decay that neither regenerates nor disappears—­that remains essential to the public spectacle of woundedness even as it is deemed irrecoverable in the present. The historical residue suggests a suspended condition where victims sometimes fail to recover and do not become “survivors” who “get over” and “move on” with their lives as expected. Their utter destruction and failure remain in full public glare—­as symbols of collective woundedness and, therefore, valued as such—­with little prospect of recovery. It is the edged nature of organic residue—­ healing and renewed residual double-­ production—­that this chapter sets out to explore. Echoing the introduction to this volume, I will explore transformations of the victimhood assemblage to illustrate how it is produced through struggles, historical mutations, and governmental categories. I use the concept of “wound” to stress the organic and embodied aspects of Partition victimhood. To the extent that territorial division and mass population displacement can be read under the sign of historical wound, India’s Partition in 1947 signifies in the popular domain a grievous injury to the nation’s body—­an injury transposed to, and to be witnessed upon, the actual bodies of victims of mass violence, rape, and forced displacement. The recovery of these wounded bodies to rehabilitate a wounded nation became the prime task of the postcolonial Indian state. The dispersed groups and individuals were assembled together by the Indian state in the mid-­1960s under the bureaucratic category of “residue”—­organic matter considered beyond the scope of recovery and rehabilitation within the social order.1 This chapter asks what recovery means

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for subjects of suffering who are classified as beyond repair by the state and who live their life in a permanent condition of adjournment. Veena Das suggests looking for signs of recovery not in grand gestures but in the register of the ordinary—­acts, objects, relations that constitute the everyday—­rooted intimately within the recesses of the event (Das 2007: 7–­8). A part of the inquiry, then, is to ask how the ordinary might look like within the world inhabited by the irrecoverable, as well as within the world of bureaucratic fantasies that made such a classification possible. In what follows, I offer an ethnographic account of the everyday from one such residual site of history—­a “widow colony” in Delhi established in late 1947 to house young women with dependent children who had been widowed in the Partition violence. These women were often those who had been denied space within their extended families and whom the state considered incapable of living an independent life like the rest of the refugee population. In this chapter, I locate widow colonies as exclusive territories within the landscape of displacement, where the human mass that could not be absorbed within the social fabric was discarded, abandoned, and isolated from public view. The notion of “residual” material—­which has outlived its usefulness and is left in isolation to decay and degenerate—­allows us to rethink the history of Partition for two reasons. First, thinking through residue opens an alternate historical trajectory that, instead of routing us through the familiar and stable path of becoming (from refugees to citizens), enables us to see the fractious processes of unbecoming (from refugees to residue). And, second, residue dramatically accentuates the calamitous, catastrophic, and ruinous nature of the event through unbecoming material—­an organic memorial to the “tragedy” of Partition. The popular narrative of the event rests upon the imagery of such human residue—­actual lives that were wrecked in the upheavals of history, irreparably and beyond recovery by the state agency—­that constantly labors to highlight the negative outcome of territorial and communal divisions. I argue that “historical residue” is central to our understanding of the wound and its public life: a profoundly unsettling signifier of terminal injury. The value of the residue lies precisely in its negative expendability and wastefulness and its ultimate destruction through history as a living sign of collective loss. In this chapter, I follow three interwoven meanings of residue in Partition’s aftermath that become legible within the recesses of the ordinary: impurity, fragment, waste. These three meanings designate a process where the residue of Partition begins as the impurity of a gendered world (the widow),

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then becomes fragmented as some are evacuated from the category of impurity (their sons), finally to being designated as irrecoverable waste (the part of the widows’ families that cannot be inscribed in the social order of things). Through ethnography of everyday life in the widow colony, I seek to describe the continuous sifting of the human mass that separates the coarse from the refined and the recoverable from the irrecoverable. These processes become spectacularly apparent when viewed through a long-­standing conflict the residents had with the municipality from 1950 to 2010. The struggle to gain ownership rights, and a status similar to that of other refugee localities in Delhi, escalated in 2007 and, in its course, somehow also revealed the internal sifting taking place. While emotive arguments about historical woundedness were used liberally to secure property rights, the very argumentation also determined the proper subjects of recovery. A new hierarchy of victimhood was disclosed when the irrecoverable subjects were eventually ejected from negotiations with the municipality. In the following pages, I trace these various stages of unbecoming, possibilities of regeneration, and ultimate destruction of the residue.

Widows of Partition The visitors to the Central Market, a crowded marketplace in the Lajpat Nagar area of south Delhi, often pass by a derelict area—­occupied by low mounds of rubble, hawkers selling their wares in the shade of a solitary tree, and laborers taking a break from their work. It is the kind of place that appears as an urban eyesore—­an empty spot in an unbecoming state—­amid a row of shiny new houses and shops selling coffee and Internet access to youthful customers. The visitors often remark on the vast length of the “empty” space in middle of the city and how its potential is regrettably wasted by the municipality. In a city where real estate is a precious commodity and out of reach for many, a space such as this elicits a mix of envy and disgust. Local residents, however, have a more utilitarian view of the place the neighborhood knows as the “widow colony.” The semi-­open ground serves alternately as a convenient dumping spot for rubbish, a parking lot for private cars, a storage space for local traders, and even a site for brisk roadside business. This space is also home to many displaced families of the Partition who have lived there for more than six decades. I became acquainted with this place in 2002 while working on an

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ethnographic history of Partition refugees in the resettlement colonies located in south Delhi. The houses in these colonies had long been transformed into four-­storey modern constructions, far removed from their original design of one room, a kitchen and open verandah in a small 100 square yard plot allotment. As I wondered aloud during an interview how the colony might have looked at the moment of its inception, my interlocutors immediately suggested that I visit the widow colony that lay a mere few minutes’ walk away. It was described to me as the “original” colony from 1947 with houses and layout intact in its pristine form and inhabited still by its primary occupants. Here, I was told, I could encounter the aftermath of Partition more or less in a state of museum-­like preservation. Two characteristics separated this space from other refugee resettlement colonies across the city. First, all its senior residents were widows of Partition violence who had turned to the state for shelter and support. And, second, the colony had, to a large extent, retained its originality, unlike other refugee settlements that had been transformed beyond recognition into shiny blocks of houses since the 1960s. It was a residual space of Partition’s violence and displacement in its natural state of decay that could be neither wholly obliterated nor altered: a distorted mirror of historical trauma. The description of the colony as “original” in a wider context of dramatic urban and social transition is telling. “Original,” here, suggests the material remains of the aftermath in a condition of unchange—­the leftover substance resistant to or unfit for transformation. Its popular depiction in the neighborhood as a “museum” simultaneously isolates the colony and its residues from the ordinary life surrounding it, while marking it as an exceptional space located within another temporality. At first glance, the notion of a museum almost seems apt here, with its allusion to an authentic vision of the past rendered impossible elsewhere in the city. The derelict boundary wall, houses in slight disrepair, and undisturbed vast open grounds reorder time and space to reveal objects and structures that no longer belong to the present. Yet what is on display is not merely unaltered buildings and layouts. The unassimilated human mass of Partition upheaval—­of those who failed to become productive citizens—­is also disclosed in the process. Within Partition historiography, these surplus bodies encountered in the processes of unbecoming pose an unresolved conceptual challenge, as they defy the usual progression anticipated and hoped for in postconflict situations. The very narrative of displacement is predicated upon the presumption that victims of violence and displacement possess an innate capacity to “overcome” seemingly insur-

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mountable adversities. There is little space left, if at all, for the possibilities of human failings, deficiencies, and decay. In this universe of residue, the marginalized figure of the widow is a particularly complicated one, as it inhabits both the material and the moral domains. The construction of this figure was revealed in the nineteenth-­century social reform debates in colonial India around the question of sati, or widow burning. The widow in these debates appeared as a discarded subject—­of social exclusion, of Hindu tradition, of the sympathy of reformers, and of a maze of colonial legislation. A singular event—­the death of one’s husband—­ was potentially powerful enough to displace the woman to social margins. The reformers framed widow burning as one of the “social evils” plaguing Indian society—­bringing together the problems of propriety and property simultaneously. While the colonial and native reformers sourced religious-­ moral arguments from Vedic scriptures to oppose sati, they imputed its continued practice to the more material motives of relatives unwilling to bear the expense of maintaining the widow, as well as wanting to ward off her legal rights to property.2 The orthodox supporters of sati argued against its ban not only because it contravened Hindu traditions (derived mainly from scriptures) but because ritualized death on the whole was found to be a better option than the life of a widow. The idealized life of a widow, or ascetic widowhood, was said to be a lifelong labor under austere conditions, whereas sati, in comparison, involved only “short-­term suffering” that would earn the widow “heavenly blessings.”3 A widow’s life, in this worldview, meant a life shorn of all marks of active married life—­colorful clothes, jewelry, bodily adornments, and participation in auspicious occasions—­in order to guide her away from worldly temptations and toward a virtuous and chaste life. Many nineteenth-­century widows in Bengal were known to have committed sati—­described as “ritual suicide”—­decades after their husbands’ deaths to escape their economic and social circumstances in what was viewed as the “final and the lowest stage in the life of a woman” (Yang 1989: 26–­27). Though the widow was legally entitled to succeed to her husband’s estate, her succession was conditional on the chastity and purity in which she held her husband’s memory.4 The right to succession, in fact, seemed less an affirmation of the widow’s subjectivity as active agent in her own right than her designation as a guardian of her late husband’s legacy, to be passed on to their children. The provision of remarriage was offered as a way out by the reformers, but that also meant ceding any claim to the previous husband’s property. The concentury widowhood was, dition of late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­

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therefore, to a large extent a condition of “social immobility” brought about by decline in social status and a decrease in conspicuous material consumption following a husband’s death.5 The fact that, in the aftermath of Partition violence, the figure of the widow was placed within the bureaucratic category of “residue” by the Indian state is hardly a coincidence. The English word residue began appearing in official documents relating to refugee resettlement in mid-­1960s when the government of India began an assessment of the status of Partition refugees. The assessments were recorded in annual reports and compiled as an official narrative in 1965 when the resettlement work was deemed overall to be completed successfully (see Rao 1967). The success of the state’s program was predicated on large-­scale provision of permanent housing in urban areas, distribution of agricultural land to peasants, professional training schemes, easy availability of business loans, and reservation of jobs, among other interventions. The ideal subject of recovery, in this view, was not dependant on the state for financial support but had shown personal courage and enterprise to earn his living and dignity (Kaur 2009). Barring Bengal, where the flow of migration was far from stabilized, most of India, particularly Punjab and Delhi, was classified as a resounding success on these terms of resettlement. The effective recovery of Punjabi refugees in official accounts was even poetically compared to the rise of the mythical phoenix out of the ashes.6 This celebratory account was marred only by the fact that some groups could not be “weaned” off the state support despite all efforts (Saxena n.d.). These state-­ dependent groups—­widows, “rescued” women, orphans, and the physically disabled—­formed the “residue” of Partition in bureaucratic parlance: in other words, the human remains of mass violence and of well-­intended state interventions, whose lives bore little resemblance to the Partition history—­a history that is primarily an account of becoming. The seemingly disparate bureaucratic category of the residue and the figure of the widow are, in fact, bound up in a shared ontology. Residue in the Hindi language translates to at least two overlapping meanings: joothan, or what is left over, half eaten, and therefore rendered impure; and adhura, or incomplete. The partial sense of being visible in these descriptions of the residue mimics the being of the widow—­the leftover of history traced in the leftover of man. It is to this dual sense of impurity and incompleteness that I now turn by exploring everyday life in the widow colony.

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Impurity Not every woman is a Savitri who can bring her dead husband back. I must have committed some “paap” or evil in my last birth; otherwise, why would God punish me like this? The widow colony is in many ways a remarkable example of the Indian state’s attempts to isolate, discriminate by gender, and relocate the human matter displaced during Partition. First, the inhabitants of the widow colony belonged to a broader category called “unattached women”—­usually in the reproductive age group—­who had been ejected out of the family system in the aftermath of violence. A common feature defining this category was that the women were known to have been sexually active, whether in lawful marriages, unrecognized interreligious marriages, or coercively through rape and abduction. In other words, they had been “attached” to a man either lawfully or unlawfully, and the knowledge of this fact had made them impure and unfit for another man. While the unmarried women among them were encouraged to marry and “settle down,” the widows, on the other hand, did not always have this option, especially if they had dependent children along with their inauspicious histories. These young widows were grouped together and placed in the specifically demarcated colony. Second, the architecture of the colony was designed to isolate the women from ordinary social interaction and keep them beyond the public gaze. The colony was marked by high security walls with barbed wire tracing the circumference of the housing complex, while the movement of people and goods through the small entrance was controlled by security guards. This isolation had two intertwined ­purposes—­to keep control over any possibility of undesired sexual activity outside the marital union, which would further defile the dead husband’s memory, and to limit the contaminating effect inherent in the misfortune of widowhood. The unpropitious condition of widowhood is often seen as an outcome of one’s own bad karma, or fateful actions, and therefore the accruing misfortune is the responsibility of the widow herself. In short, the widow colony was the end point for gendered deposits of leftover human matter that could no longer be utilized within the social order. The following is a strand of the life story of Rajrani—­one of the first inhabitants of the colony—­where she recounts the process of ejection from her joint family and then the life of isolation in the widow colony. Her narrative is also a narrative of how residues as impurities are produced and negotiated in everyday life. Rajrani had been displaced from Lahore, where she lived with her husband

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and two young daughters, after the mass violence began in May 1947. Her husband had died that summer due to causes unrelated to Partition violence. However, the ongoing violence meant she had to leave together with her children and extended family, as their lives in the city became increasingly threatened. They arrived in Delhi via Amritsar in the care of her mama, her mother’s brother, as her husband’s family had distanced itself from her. They soon took refuge in a government-­allocated evacuee property in Delhi city, where Rajrani found space in the extended family setup. She was grateful to have shelter and the support her mama’s family provided and spent her days trying to be as helpful in household chores as possible. She barely had any financial resources of her own, and the only way to be valuable to her benefactors was by doing physical labor. She described her life as one of willfully chosen invisibility: “sir sut ke,” or to lower one’s head and work quietly. Yet that invisible life was not enough to secure her from barbed comments from her mama’s wife and other family members—­about there being too many mouths to feed, conflicts over sharing household chores, and the burden placed on her mama to protect the honor of young women in his care. The fact that her uncle had daughters of marriageable age only added to the tension, as Rajrani increasingly felt isolated from the ongoing marriage negotiations for her nieces. Her status as a recent widow meant that her participation in auspicious events was not always invited, lest she cast the dark shadow of her misfortune on the happy moment. After a few months, the situation had become unbearable, as the wife of her mama beseeched him constantly to do something about Rajrani and her daughters. This often meant suggesting that he arrange a second marriage and thereby a respectful departure for Rajrani, a prospect she knew was not viable as that would mean leaving her daughters behind. She understood well enough that a widow seeking remarriage was already a bad proposition, and a widow with two daughters was an even greater liability. Her prospects were, therefore, minimal. Rajrani remembered her state in her mama’s home as that of lachari, or helplessness, where she had neither voice nor autonomy over her life any more. Her husband’s sudden death, together with Partition violence and displacement, had created a double tragedy for her. Not only had she become a widow but the traditional structures of family support had been uprooted and weakened, too. She sympathized, she said, with the extraordinary situation that her mama was in at that time—­with little financial or practical support in a new place. In such circumstances, the space offered by the widow colony seemed like the only viable solution to her. She vividly remembered the original design of the colony:

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It was like an ashram with a main building that had a common kitchen, school for children, workshop, and the office. The houses you see today were built around it. Widows with fewer than five children got one room accommodation, while those with more than five got two rooms. We were not allowed to cook separately—­three times a day, a bell would ring to announce meals and we would all run and queue up in the kitchen. We took turns in cooking and serving on a weekly basis. In the morning, children were sent to school while the mothers would go to the workshop to learn knitting, stitching, and other handicrafts. Rajrani’s choice of words to describe the camp as “ashram” is quite remarkable, as refugee settlements were rarely described as such during my conversations in other settlements. They were more likely to be remembered as chaotic places where life had turned into a long unsettling pause. Ashram literally means a home where one may seek refuge from maya or material desires, a place sought by ascetics seeking an austere life, denying themselves material comforts and desires in search of ultimate transcendence—­and limiting consumption to what is barely necessary to keep the body alive. An ashram, thus, is a tranquil oasis where one may resign from the seductions and passions that make up everyday life. While a life of austerity and self-­denial is usually a voluntarily chosen practice, in this case, the state had decided on behalf of its subjects the ways in which they should lead their lives. The invocation by Rajrani of “ashram” as a natural description of the place suggests the disciplines—­social, moral, and corporeal—­that framed the residents’ lives in the colony. The prescription of frugality and abstinence for the widows seemed like a natural state that had remained largely uncontested. In this setting, the denial of individual cooking facilities to the residents is critical to the ways in which agency and gendered subjectivity were produced in the colony. Within Indian joint families, the right to a separate kitchen, or rasoi, is often seen as a step toward autonomy and control over one’s economic and social being. The fragmentation of the joint family is marked in the emergence of separate kitchens, even within the same premises, that ultimately pave the way for independent family units. The act of creating one’s own kitchen and organizing one’s nuclear family around it is, thus, an act of separation from the family patriarch—­an essential severing that needs to be experienced to become a sovereign being. Though widely practiced by most refugee families, this option was denied to widows, as they were not

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recognized as “household heads” by the state. The families in ordinary refugee camps were given weekly rations of lentils, rice, flour, oil, and milk for children that could be cooked in the camp homes—­widows, however, were offered cooked and ready food. The practice of lining up three times a day to receive food was hardly seen as an exceptional act for adult women to perform. The protocols of abstinence and denial framed not only the resident’s movements inside the colony but also their interactions with the outside world. We could not go out of the colony without permission of the Behenjis (female social workers). The whole compound was barricaded with high walls and barbed wires for the protection of women. No men were allowed in. The male visitors could only be received in the visiting room at the entrance where a guard and Behenji would watch over. A food and cloth ration shop was established within the colony so that we didn’t have to go out. For Rajrani, the high walls and barbed wires appear as a much-­needed protective measure that the state was helpfully providing. It was not particularly interpreted as a restrictive condition confining the widows’ mobility and their opportunities of gaining education and employment outside the colony. The world outside was only experienced through the filters of a state apparatus—­the social workers, the guards, and a regulated regime that constituted such interaction. The restrained conditions under which they could meet visitors were another measure of control over female sexuality and any reproductive activity. A large number of the residents were young women of child-­bearing age and therefore represented a danger to a social order predicated on widow celibacy. Female desires were to be fulfilled within marital limits alone, and marital lapse through death or separation foreclosed any other possibilities. The meetings were, therefore, supervised clearly to discourage expressions of intimacy or any other bonds that might develop with the opposite sex. The young widows under the wardenship of the state were probably even more secluded than what was possible within a joint family system—­ the state as patriarch had constructed not only physical barriers, such as walls and barbed wire, but also surveillance mechanisms that kept their interaction with the outside world to the minimum. The isolation was effected by bringing the outside—­for example, shops selling everyday necessities—­to the inside for

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the “convenience” of the residents so that they did not have to leave the boundaries for anything. Rajrani narrated these protocols of abstinence as simple “facts” that governed the lives of those within the compound for several decades following Partition. She was not particularly bitter or angry at the way her life had unfolded. The fault lay with her, as she often noted in our conversations, as she was not bhagyavan, or the fortunate one. She had been unable to keep her husband from the hands of death, unlike Savitri, a central character from the Hindu epic Mahabharata, who had taken up a successful struggle with Yama, the god of death, to save her husband’s life. “Every woman is not a Savitri,” she would sometimes remark to contrast her own fate. The story of Savitri is well known and serves as an ideal for Hindu women to emulate. Savitri, a young woman about to marry Satyavan, is told by the gods that he is fated to die within a year of their marriage. This prediction does not deter her from marrying him and only strengthens her devotion and obedience toward her husband and her resolve to keep him alive. When the predicted day of his death arrives, she accompanies her husband to the forest and keeps watch over him. Unaware of the unfolding circumstances, Satyavan begins chopping wood and while doing so becomes unconscious. Savitri realizes that the moment of confrontation has arrived when the sound of chopping wood dies away. She rushes to her husband and places his head in her lap while praying to Lord Yama. He arrives as destiny had planned to take Satyavan away to the netherworld, but Savitri persuades him to listen to her prayers. Impressed by her devotion, a reluctant Yama grants Savitri a boon that could be anything but the life of her husband. Savitri displays not only deep devotion but also the quick presence of mind to ask for Yama’s blessing so that she can become the mother of a hundred sons. Yama grants this wish. Its only when Savitri thanks him and then asks him to revive her dying husband’s body that he realizes the web of words in which he has been trapped. Savitri explains the paradox—­how could she even dream of begetting a hundred sons in the absence of her husband? Yama is bound by his own words and is thus compelled to infuse life back into Satyavan’s lifeless body. Through devotion and purity, Savitri thus brings her husband back from the mouth of death. In this story, the life of a man is connected to the devotion, purity, and chastity of his wife. The moral prowess to infuse life into a dead man is invested in the wife’s virtuous conduct. Conversely, this means that the fate of a widow is her own doing—­something she could have averted had she been

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more vigilant. In the very power invested in the woman lies her powerlessness: her misfortune and stigma as a widow become matters of her own choosing. Moreover, Savitri’s framing of her wish as a desire to have children makes her husband’s life an essential precondition to having her worldly desires fulfilled. The death of her husband also becomes a foreclosure, then, of all the worldly pleasures one gains from family and children. In other words, the widow is an embodiment of impurity—­signifying the lack of devotion, character, and will—­that bears neither functional nor symbolic value to society anymore. This impure matter is best amputated from the society and kept in isolation as far as possible so as not to cast its ill-­fated shadow on others. The widow colony thus appears as a space where the unwanted human matter of Partition was lodged and, for a long while, forgotten—­until it began resurfacing in a local conflict over the contested ownership of widow homes, fragmenting victimhood yet again.

Fragment A consistent feature of Rajrani’s narrative was a matter-­of-­fact acquiescence to what she alternately called her kismet, her fate, and her phoote karam, or actions destined to fail. It was never laden with bitterness or regret that her life had largely been shaped through social norms and state interventions. Yet this seamless narrative was disrupted once she began speaking about the children of the widows who had grown up in the colony: When the children had grown up and boys had become men, the rules in the colony for male visitors had to be changed. We could not have thrown out our grown-­up sons. And if they could live here, then how could they stop our male relatives from visiting? The rules had to be changed. Now we were allowed to cook and go out on our own. As the children began attaining adulthood, the established order and protocols governing the everyday life of the colony were slowly breached. The becoming of boys into men is an important milestone for Rajrani in the history of the camp—­the young men assumed the role of mediators between the two worlds on either side of the boundary wall. Their very being and presence were read as signs of normality in this exceptional place, on the one hand, but, on the other, as a signifier of disruption to what had always been deemed

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normal in the camp. The guards and the social workers could no longer control these transgressions from within and, in due time, stopped enforcing the rules altogether. For Rajrani, this is not a moment of triumph to be relished after a long struggle, but an expected reassertion of a kind of natural order after a long pause. The male bodies are seen as bearers of sovereignty and authority—­an attribute that had been lacking within the colony—­and their presence had somehow broken the exceptionality of the colony. In the official scheme of things, male bodies figured the contours of a family encompassing women and children within. The widows had never been deemed heads of households and, therefore, could not bring up their families in “normal” refugee settlements. Once their young sons attained adulthood, the headship of the family passed directly to them, bypassing the mothers. The families headed by young sons, it seemed, were ready to settle down in the ordinary world. At this moment, we witness two simultaneous processes inherent in the production of residue that become visible in this generational shift. First, there is the process of regeneration, where residue feeds into the production of valuable matter, in this case, the young men who now appear ready to break the exceptionality of the widow colony. And, second, in this process of fragmentation, grown-­up sons bypass their widowed mothers to assume leadership of the family, thereby leaving their mothers precisely in a state of stagnation as before. The regenerative value of residue is once again extracted from it, leaving the unusable waste behind. Though the appearance of young men in the colony was seen as a sign of normality, it revealed other problems connected with the exceptional character of the widow colony. The “curse” of widowhood, as the condition of being without a husband was sometimes ruefully described, reappeared when Yashwanti, a neighbor of Rajrani, tried to arrange a marriage for her twenty-­five-­ year-­old son Sunil. Her efforts were met with an unexpected difficulty. There were hardly any families that were ready to send their daughters to live in a place known as a widow colony. Yashwanti understood their dilemma well: “How could the parents willingly send their daughters to live in the shadow of widows?” Here, the condition of widowhood was not only that of social disgrace but also fears of facing a similar fate. Newlywed Punjabi brides are often kept away from the parcchanwa of widows—­literally, their shadow or effects—­to avoid the same misfortune the widows embody. At marriage ceremonies, widowed relatives are tactfully made to keep their distance from the bride when she is being blessed and felicitated. Sometimes, widowed mothers even

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step back from their daughters and daughters-­in-­law so as not to curse them with their shadow or touch at auspicious moments. Invisible boundaries maintain the isolation of widows from all that embodies worldly pleasures and comforts. Yashwanti understood these worries and, therefore, did not contest them. Sunil was eventually engaged to a girl from a similar refugee family but on condition that they would move out before the wedding took place. In 1967, the newly built two-­room apartments for refugees were still available for allotment in a limited scheme offered by the state to those with grown-­up sons. Sunil’s mother readily accepted a small apartment in lieu of their accommodation in the widow colony—­and paved the way for her son’s marriage. A number of families whose paperwork was in order moved out of the colony around this time to escape associations with widowhood. The ones left behind were mostly the less resourceful, who now had to seek alternate ways out of the colony’s exceptionality; they constituted the waste where no recovery was possible.

Waste In the 1970s, the city of Delhi was witnessing massive construction activity, with the urban limits expanding far beyond their pre-­Partition contours. This was also the time when the temporary resettlement colonies housing Partition refugees were being reconstructed en masse. Temporary structures such as military barracks or hurriedly assembled shelters were being demolished to make way for modern concrete houses. In many cases, the concrete flats and one-­room houses built immediately after Partition were being redesigned to provide individual bathrooms and flush toilets, instead of the communal facilities. The single-­story structures were being expanded vertically to create smart three-­story townhouses. The entire city, it seemed, was undergoing a facelift. To the residents of the widow colony, this seemed an apt moment to rebuild their own dilapidated one-­room homes. The residents formed a committee and filed a collective petition to the municipal corporation for permission to rebuild. The petition was refused as the “widow colony” was deemed an exceptional case—­the residents did not have any claim to ownership of their homes as in other refugee resettlement colonies. The widows had never been given any rights to ownership as the male refugees had been but had merely been allowed to inhabit the colony on a temporary basis. The

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municipality, therefore, could not allow the occupants to make any changes to the state-­owned houses. This refusal became the beginning of a long conflict between the descendants of Partition widows and the municipal corporation. While the residents emotively invoked their history of loss, and the wound of Partition and then discrimination at the hands of the state in relation to other refugees, the municipality remained firm on the decisions made decades ago. The conflict continued for many years without success, until the mid-­ 2000s when the municipality suddenly seemed keen on a resolution. The reasons, as it turned out, had less to do with newfound empathy than with a realization that “the large ground occupied by the widow colony was far too valuable to be kept khali, or empty,” as one resident reported. The description of the colony as khali is instructive, as it suggests both physical emptiness and lack of any value: a wasteland. The fact that many families inhabited the place and lived their everyday lives in it counted for little in this view. Several residents were of the opinion that the influential builder lobby in the city was eyeing the colony to build private luxury apartments and shopping malls. Otherwise, it was widely speculated, it was hard to explain why the municipality had become more responsive to the residents’ wishes to rebuild their homes after all these years. Significantly, the municipality’s proposal was not to allow reconstruction of the existing free-­standing houses with open spaces, but instead to allot plots measuring forty square yards, 60 percent less than what the residents currently possessed. Moreover, the cost of reconstruction had to be borne by the residents themselves through loans offered by the municipality or banks. The residents’ committee, led mainly by male members—­sons of widows and now parents of grown children themselves—­ accepted this offer, as this represented a real chance to own property, even if a smaller piece of land than what they had. The municipality asked the committee to reidentify and help draw up a list of original claimants who would be offered new accommodations. In this process of identification—­of verifying original claims of victimhood—­we witness the process of filtering where regenerative waste is systematically separated from unproductive residue. I met Shashi, a woman in her early forties, in unusual circumstances in late 2010. She was standing outside the remains of what used to be a home for a large joint family. The boundary separating it from the neighbors’ home had been bulldozed and the outer walls had been razed, exposing the kitchen and the eating area to the passersby. The bedroom that used to open onto the dirt-­ layered courtyard now opened directly onto the street. But then, privacy was

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probably not the most important consideration for Shashi at this point. Her house stood alone amid dozens of broken houses—­there were no peering neighbors, and not many passed by the street anymore. The entire area of what used to be the widow colony was dotted with partially destroyed homes like Shashi’s within a vast expanse of bulldozed and empty houses. The light bulbs twinkling in a stretch of rubble and overgrown bushes indicated those families that had been left behind. Many residents of the colony had moved to the smaller homes that the municipality had offered three years before. The new smartly constructed homes were gathered in one corner of the widow colony, and a boundary wall signified the truncation of whatever connection there was between the old and new areas. From the vantage point of the new colony, the old area looked precisely as it had been described by the municipality—­khali, an empty wasteland that had been piled with rubble and all kind of refuse. I asked Shashi why she had not chosen to move to the new colony. It was not a matter of choice for her, she said. The choice had been made for her through the long bureaucratic process of verifying the true inheritance of victimhood. The original claimant to this home had been her husband’s widowed grandmother, Kartar Kaur, who had moved to the colony in 1947 with a young daughter. The daughter grew up to marry a young man who was of a similar refugee background. They began their life moving from place to place, wherever the man could find work as a manual farm laborer. Their children often lived with their maternal grandmother in the widow colony while the parents were on the move. In the 2000s the family returned to live permanently with the grandmother, as she could no longer look after herself. Around this time, the residents’ plea had begun gathering momentum. The family became hopeful that they too would have an inherited home in their advancing age. What they did not know was that their right to inheritance had been taken away in their absence during the verification drives initiated by the municipal officials, aided by resident committee representatives. Influential committee members had informed the municipality that Kartar Kaur was lawaris. The expression lawaris describes objects and people who are without an identifiable owner or guardian to protect them. This expression is usually reserved for children who have been orphaned or sometimes even for vagrants who have nowhere to go. However, in this case, the word was used to describe an adult woman who lived independently in her own home and was not only a mother but also a grandmother of several children. How could she be termed lawaris? And to what purpose? The bureaucratic implication of this usage was that Kartar Kaur was registered as

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someone who not only lacked a guardian, but also had no successors. Lawaris, here, denoted both an empty past and an empty future—­her person had been bureaucratically amputated from her children and grandchildren and whatever regenerative possibilities she might have signified. As it turned out, her fate had been no different from that of many other widows who had only produced daughters. The ones seen as true inheritors of their parent’s legacy were the sons and the grandsons. The human leftover in the rubble of the old colony, then, was a curious mix of “unfit” subjects of recovery who had failed to show their value in one way or another. They were either the female successors of widows or the very old or frail who could not undertake the burden of reconstruction and move into a new home. In some cases, the occupants were physically handicapped and could not possibly move their wheelchairs in the space provided in the new accommodations designed as matchbox duplex houses. In short, able male bodies and other matter of value had moved to the new colony, leaving the waste behind.

Conclusion In this chapter, life stories emanating from the widow colony narrate the journey of the residue manufactured by the Indian state—­from impurity, to fragment, and, finally, to waste. These personal histories are of a kind that activists and social scientists looking for signs of recovery find difficult to resolve. Individually and collectively, the various voices represent loss and failure at several levels without much redemption to counterbalance the hopelessness. And the narrative we hear is that of an unbecoming where the condition of temporariness is never really overcome—­the refugees do not become valuable, self-­reliant citizens, as expected by the Indian state. What we are confronted with, in fact, is the historical “other” of value—­waste—­that surfaces as the organic form of collateral damage in the histories of violent rupture in societies. This is an aspect of the afterlife of victims and victimhood that is yet to be explored fully. The account of the everyday life of the irrecoverable in the widow colony shows the ways in which historical waste is produced and regenerated, its value extracted and then discarded once again. What function does this wasteland of unbecoming perform in the history of violence and victimhood? Or, put differently, how do societies deal with excess, superfluity, and stubborn remnants that refuse or are refused a way to transform into extractable value even after repeated interventions? In this

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study, widows emerge as organic waste with a specific function—­their bodies and biographies serve as living reminders of the extent of loss and destruction the violent upheaval of Partition effected. This corporeal manifestation of collective loss is at once sacred to the narrative of the nation’s origins and thus cannot be fully violated or destroyed, while at the same time it is not deemed to be central to the functioning of the society. Shades of Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer here: the one who is removed from the continuum of social life but cannot be killed. The victims, thus, are often dismissed or even despised for failing to recover from their woundedness, and precisely this destructive quality is what makes them valuable as symbols of the collective loss experienced by the society. This exceptional state of the victims of momentous historical events also asks us to rethink the relationship between publicity and recovery. In this case, it is clear that the plight of the victims has been a matter of much publicity through the decades, yet their lives have failed to trace the expected path of becoming. The wound of Partition, which is central to the making of modern India and its imaginary, is widely recognized even as that recognition has not always translated into recovery for the victims. These histories of irrecoverability amid the glare of publicity need to be confronted. References Caroll, Lucy. 1983. “Law, Custom and Statutory Reform: The Hindu Widow’s Remarriage Act of 1856.” Indian Economic and Social History Review 20 (October–­December): 363–­88. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2007. “History and the Politics of Recognition.” In Manifestos for Historians, ed. Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan, and Alan Munslow. London: Routledge. Das, Veena. 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kaur, Ravinder. 2009. “Distinctive Citizenship: Refugees, State and Postcolonial State in India’s Partition.” Cultural and Social History 6, 4: 429–­46. Mani, Lata. 1987. “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India.” Cultural Critique 7 (Autumn): 119–­56. Randhawa, M. S. 1954. Out of Ashes: An Account of the Rehabilitation of Refugees from West Pakistan in Rural Areas of East Punjab. Chandigarh: Public Relations Department, Government of Punjab. Rao, U. Bhaskar. 1967. The Story of Rehabilitation. New Delhi: Publications Division, Government of India. Saxena, Mohan Lal. n.d. Some Reflections on the Problem of Rehabilitation. Delhi. Spivak, Gayatri. 2005. “Scattered Speculations on the Subaltern and the Popular.” Postcolonial Studies 8, 4: 475–­86. Yang, Anand. 1989. “Whose Sati? Widow Burning in Early 19th Century India.” Journal of Women’s History 1, 2: 26–­27.

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Bodies of Partition  63 Notes I am thankful to Steffen Jensen and Henrik Ronsbo for encouraging me to write this chapter. It has also benefited from detailed commentaries offered by Veena Das, as well as discussions at the Copenhagen workshop on “Histories of Victimhood.” The work is based on extensive fieldwork conducted in 2000–­2002, 2005, and 2010 in Delhi. 1. The word “residue” had begun appearing within the official documents in mid-­1960s when the rehabilitation work was deemed to have been largely fulfilled. The bureaucratic category of residue was used to classify all that could not be successfully rehabilitated by the state. 2. The ambivalence of the colonial discourse on sati is well described in Mani 1987. 3. “The Petition of the Orthodox Community Against the Suttee Regulation,” January 14, 1830, quoted in Mani 1987: 142. 4. For detailed discussion on various legislations, deliberations, and conflicts around the rights of Hindu widows, see Caroll 1983. The conflict at the heart of colonial lawmaking was the acceptance of what was taken as “Hindu Law” where the Hindu wife was seen as the “half of body” (the other half being the husband). While the trope of half body was interpreted as reason for granting succession rights of husband’s property to his widow, it also posed a problem as that right could only be enjoyed on the condition that the widow (the living half) remain faithful to her husband’s memory. Any remarriage would make the woman half of another man, and thereby she would forfeit any rights to property of her previous husband. 5. Shades of Gayatri Spivak’s aptly described condition of subalternity here: “where social lines of mobility, being elsewhere, do not permit the formation of recognizable basis of action.” See Spivak 2005: 476 6. For example, see Randhawa 1954.

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Chapter 3

“Extremely Poor” Mothers and Debit Cards: The Families in an Action Cash-­ Transfer Program in Colombia Stine Finne Jakobsen

One morning when I had walked through Villa Hermosa to visit Blanca’s house to talk with her, I found that she already had a guest. A young social worker from the local nongovernmental organization (NGO) País (Country) was making house visits to give a talk about hygiene. I sat and observed the encounter. The social worker touched on three main themes: (1) garbage handling: how to separate organic and nonorganic garbage and always to use a garbage bin with a lid; (2) water: how to avoid diarrhea in children by boiling water and adding a few drops of chlorine to purify it and to use water economically by collecting rainwater to water plants and flush the toilet, while making sure that water taps closed properly; and (3) hygiene: always to keep food covered to avoid contamination by rodents and insects and using nets and Baygon (insect repellent) to ward off flies and mosquitoes. A while into the visit a neighbor arrived, took a seat, and also listened to the conversation. Blanca and the NGO worker included her in the dialogue. Blanca: They are from País, and they are here today to give a talk about food and garbage . . . NGO worker: You know that to take care of the water, many times we . . . ​there are times when we forget . . . ​Do you boil the water? Neighbor: Sometimes.

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NGO worker: You know the water comes from the tap, and you don’t give it any treatment? Do you have the water tanks in the kitchen covered with lids—­and in the refrigerator? Neighbor: The fridge is broken. NGO worker: Well . . . Neighbor: It broke down. NGO worker: Well, what do you then do with the water? Do you buy ice cubes? Or you have it in a container that is properly closed? (Observations, FA beneficiary, Blanca’s house, Cartagena, February 22, 2008) This dialogue reveals interesting instances of a mismatch between the NGO’s hygiene agenda and the harsh reality of a life in poverty in peri-­urban Cartagena, Colombia. The women are advised to collect rainwater to flush the toilet, but in this squatter settlement many of the makeshift dwellings do not have toilets. Being told to remember always to keep the garbage under a lid is good advice, but there is no garbage collection system in the barrio (settlement); thus, garbage ends up in an open heap nearby. Make sure the tap is closed properly, the NGO worker cautions, but no one here has access to running water. The advice to keep water in closed containers in the refrigerator assumes that the women have fridges, which is not self-­evident at all. And, needless to say, insect repellent, mosquito nets, and ice cubes for cooling water are luxuries unaffordable to most people who live here. As I sat observing the encounter, I could not help speculating what it does to these women to be told so bluntly that their very way of life is unhygienic, dangerous for the health of their children, and in need of being reformed, while their limited resources make it so difficult for them to do anything about this. The home visit by the NGO worker took place within a large-­scale social service program, which I came across while conducting nine months of fieldwork in the settlement Villa Hermosa in 2007–­2008 (for more details see Jakobsen 2011). Called Families in Action (Familias en Acción, FA), this is a national cash-­transfer program emanating from the presidency and directed to families living in extreme poverty (Acción Social 2010a). The program offers beneficiaries a bimonthly subsidy calculated on the basis of the number and ages of the children in the household; different subsidy tariffs apply to children under seven and to school children from seven to eighteen years.1 The payment of the subsidy is attached to compliance with certain criteria related to health care and education for the children, as well as home visits, as

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described above. I was intrigued by Villa Hermosa residents’ very strong interest in this program and began to explore how they went about meeting the bureaucratic challenges related to gaining access to it, such as supplying the required documents and turning up at the right place at the right time. The FA program is interesting for a number of reasons. It is one of the largest development programs run by the Colombian state. Launched in 2001 to counteract the consequences of the economic crisis of the 1990s for the poorest families in the country, it has grown to cover 2.9 million families in 2010 (Acción Social 2010b).2 The objective is to expand the program’s coverage to encompass all municipalities and all families living in extreme poverty in the country. Another reason for paying attention to the FA is that it is a conditional cash-­transfer program—­a development model championed globally for its putative efficiency in reducing poverty and strengthening human capital. Several countries in Latin America have implemented similar conditional cash-­transfer programs during the last decade, though with varying results (de Janvry and Sadoulet 2004). Theoretically, the FA cash-­transfer program helps extremely poor families to move out of poverty by investing in the human capital of their children, in particular their nutrition, health, and education. In the longer term, this is supposed to contribute to an improvement in the families’ incomes, their involvement with the labor market, and their general life conditions. Payments are conditional on the fulfillment of specific criteria: for children under seven, adherence to the national vaccination program and regular medical examinations; and for school-­age children, enrollment and regular attendance in school. Normally, the subsidy is paid directly to the mother (at times to the father or a grandmother if there is no mother or she is away working) on a bimonthly basis, covering ten months of the year, excluding school holidays. School and health professionals keep a register for each child and report lapses, such as school fees not being paid in time, to the program’s central administration in Bogotá, which can suspend the subsidy payments. Moreover, the participating mothers have a logbook in which the social workers write and place stickers to document completion of required actions. The agenda of the program is empowerment, encouraging people to take responsibility for their own situation and make use of all available services and options for assistance. For the potential beneficiaries to enter the program, several types of identification papers need to be in order, an obligatory update of children and adults’ personal documents, which is regarded as one of the program’s positive side effects. Information, resources, and ability are prereq-

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uisites for potential and actual beneficiaries to fulfill program requirements. How, then, did potential beneficiaries acquire information about the program? What resources are required to comply with the program prerequisites? How do beneficiaries go about meeting these requirements? The analysis that I develop in the rest of this chapter pursues these questions in greater detail. The section that follows introduces the concept of victimhood and attempts to lay out a few theoretical features of the network approach I apply in the analysis. Then I look at inclusion and exclusion in relation to the program’s specific target groups: internally displaced persons (IDPs) and the “extremely poor.” The following section focuses on the actual implementation of the FA program, its main activities, and its empowerment agenda. An important innovation in the program has been the distribution of debit cards to the program beneficiaries. I follow one woman in the process of acquiring the card and record her reactions to its newness and other thoughts about it. I show how the card enters as a new actor in the network and generates a series of actions. Finally, I discuss some of the political implications of the FA program and the particular type of victimhood it reproduces.

Victimhood and Networks The categories “internally displaced person” and “extremely poor” are central to the FA program and define the potential beneficiaries who strive to enter and fulfill the requirements. I use the concept of victimhood to explore analytically the particular configurations of institutional power (Roseberry 1994; Wolf 1990) that distribute access to different services based on definitions, labels, and categories such as those just mentioned. In this regard, there is a particular political economy attached to victimhood (James 2004). But victimhood is also a form of action. It is enacted by those labeled by the categories, that is, as a pretext for pursuing specific quests and accessing limited resources. Established victim categories, such as those pertaining to the FA program, thus simultaneously entail the inclusion of some people and the exclusion or marginalization of others who are silenced, abandoned, and not recognized (Biehl 2005; Das 2007). In these processes, we can find configurations of marginality and victimhood and explore the ways in which victimhood shapes institutions and molds subjects. The concept of networks is used in this chapter to explore relations among

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people, materiality, and ideas (Latour 2005). Networks work on a binary logic of inclusion and exclusion. They process flows and incorporate interactions between individuals, as well as interactions between groups or institutions (Castells 2000). Nonhuman items, ideas, or tools may also be important actors in a network if they contribute to the network’s goal, for example, by enabling other actors to do certain things (Latour 2005). Relations within a network are not inherently amicable or solidaristic but are equally prone to generating instances of inclusion and exclusion, such as by allocating scarce resources differentially or by constraining or enabling individual agency (Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994: 1418). There may be a series of other flows in any given network—­nonmaterial ones such as circulations of news, views, and sentiments, as well as material ones of resources, assistance, and security—­that may be mapped and explored. To understand how actors are made through networks, one of the questions this chapter explores is precisely what kinds of ties and connections people draw on in the process of entering into the FA and in seeking to comply with program requisites. The following section looks at the FA target groups and, thus, the types of victims who can enter the program.

Inclusion/Exclusion The FA began to function in Cartagena in 2006 exclusively for displaced families—­one of the program’s three target groups. (The other two are families categorized as level 1 in the socioeconomic indexing system SISBEN and indigenous families residing in selected municipalities of the country).3 In the squatter settlement of Villa Hermosa, several hundred displaced families were potential beneficiaries; however, many of them had never sought or obtained official registration as IDPs and were thus excluded.4 In October 2007, FA coverage in Cartagena was expanded to include “extremely poor” families as well, classified as SISBEN 1, which opened the door for the rest of Villa Hermosa’s inhabitants (both displaced and nondisplaced) to access the program. Inclusion in the FA was possible at specific dates, and particular kinds of documents and identification papers had to be in order for new beneficiaries to be admitted. The expansion was announced in the local newspapers, and the already existing local representatives, known as mother leaders (madres líderes), were responsible for disseminating the information in their locality.

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Having the right information, being present at the correct time and place, and bringing the required documents were, thus, prerequisites for the possibility of admission into the program. The baseline was the SISBEN database on August 2006, which had registered 55,000 families classified as “extremely poor” in Cartagena. When registration opened, 39,000 new families entered the FA. Thus, almost one-­third of the potential beneficiaries did not access the program, either because they were not informed properly or chose not to enter or went but failed to qualify. At the end of this process, the total beneficiaries of the FA in Cartagena were some 45,000 families, including those earlier registered as displaced families (Interview, leader of Cartagena=local FA office, March 4, 2008). As for the official IDP registration, not all families have the SISBEN 1 classification in order. The classification is based on a survey and short interview with each family on its life conditions (employment, housing, and so on), and it is used in a range of public service provisioning initiatives, of which the most important is the general social health insurance system (for more details, see Montenegro and Bernal 2013). For Villa Hermosa’s residents, access to social health care is a top priority, and the local leadership has worked hard to achieve full coverage by inviting survey teams to the barrio. However, a number of households and individuals remain unsurveyed and, thus, stand outside the social health insurance system and also the FA subsidy. The divide between those who are and those who are not properly registered is often an amorphous line running through families and households. The main reason some individuals remain unsurveyed—­and thus excluded from receiving ­assistance—­is the lack of identity papers. This appears to be a problem particularly for the youngest members in the family. Small children need an official birth certificate (issued by a notary on the basis of a medical “born alive” attestation); school children, an ID card (issued on the basis of the birth certificate); and adults, a certificate of citizenship (issued on the basis of birth certificate and/or ID card). Acquiring these ID documents is a complicated bureaucratic process that can take days to accomplish. Moreover, personal documents need to be kept up to date. Even after the household has been surveyed and has qualified for the general social health insurance, the family registration form can be outdated due to changes in the household, such as new members, births, couples breaking up, or youth leaving to establish their own households. The result is that, at any given time, only some family members may be covered, while others remain uninsured. The challenge to acquire official documents is described by Maria, a single mother of four:

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Maria: Carlos [a local leader] told me that, right now, in these days, they are opening for new participants. . . . ​Well, what I was told is to go and get the SISBEN. You know here the SISBEN says Mandela [the name of a neighboring barrio], and I have to go and lose a day there so that they fix it and it says Villa Hermosa.[5] I have to go and get the original registrations, and I have to get issued the . . . ​what is it called? . . . ​the identity cards for the kids. But I have to lose a work day, and that is difficult for me. It is complicated to go out and do these errands [vueltas], and you know that, when you go and they will not attend to you immediately, you have to wait and maybe return. So you must have patience, just stay there, and wait and see what God says, because you know that there is a new subsidy here in the barrio, and they told me also, and I have to get the papers. Stine: Yes, clearly, that is important, because that is money! Maria: Yes, it is a help for the children that are studying. Well, I will do the vueltas and see; I will have to go tomorrow, but it is not easy. Imagine, for the two kids I have to get the identity cards, and I do not know how to do it or where to go . . . ​well, I have to go . . . ​but I think it needs a photo, and, right now, I do not have any money, no money. (Interview, Villa Hermosa, Cartagena, January 23, 2008) Maria has been informed about the new subsidy by Carlos, who has been engaged in the FA since its inception in 2006 as representative for the settlement’s displaced people, and she is eager to be registered. However, the criteria that have to be fulfilled are troubling her, and she is not quite sure how and where to gain the required documents. What she does know is that the bureaucratic procedures for the children’s ID cards are time consuming and that she will need money to pay for photos, photocopies, documents, and bus fares. It is, therefore, easy to understand how potential beneficiaries remain excluded, despite the attractiveness of a bimonthly subsidy, because they are unable to meet the inclusion criteria of the program.

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Families in Action Program Pillars In addition to the cash transfer, the FA program contains a series of empowerment and participation initiatives. One important pillar or crucial component in the implementation of the program is the participation of local representatives: the mother leaders and a few men known as father leaders, such as Carlos. These people function as the connection between the local FA office and the many thousands of beneficiaries. Ideally, for every twenty-­five participating families, there is one elected representative. During the expansion of the FA program in Cartagena, I participated in a meeting arranged to select additional madres líderes for new beneficiaries from the twelve barrios in the sector where Ville Hermosa belongs. Some 250 beneficiaries, mostly women, assembled in a local basketball hall. On the floor stood the local leader of the program and some FA employees. Those volunteering as mother leaders for each barrio were called to step out on the floor and deliver a brief speech arguing why they would be good mother leaders. Then everybody voted, and the twenty candidates who stepped out on the floor were all elected. One candidate from Villa Hermosa was Victoria, with whom I later talked about her decision and her motivation for becoming a mother leader. She told me it was not planned but that the compañeras urged her to represent her street, so she stood forward and was elected. To my question about how she felt giving a speech in front of so many people, she answered, “I got really nervous, but I did well because, with the words I said, that is what one needs to say when you get vinculado [attached/connected] and take responsibility for things, for helping other mothers” (Interview, Victoria, February 25, 2008). Victoria was elected, and she now represents twenty families living in the vicinity of her house. Contact between the local office, the mother leaders, and the beneficiaries is maintained by means of mobile phones. Victoria had to give a mobile phone number to la doctora, as the local FA leader is called by the women, and was told that they would contact her whenever there is a meeting or an activity in which she had to participate. As mother leader, Victoria had to collect the required information, papers, and photocopies from the mothers she represents, take them to the local office, and circulate information about program changes and activities from the office to her group. The home visits introduced in the beginning of the chapter are another central pillar of the FA, forming part of a support strategy called Juntos (Together), which was launched to reinforce the effects of the cash transfer in the families. The support strategy is focused on information, counseling, education, and

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registration of beneficiaries. The actual implementation of the strategy has been subcontracted to local operators—­in Cartagena, the NGO País.6 Not all FA beneficiaries are covered by Juntos, but the goal is to include all 45,000 beneficiaries in Cartagena during the next two years (Interview, leader of Cartagena local FA office, March 4, 2008). On the national level, Juntos covers a million of the 2.9 million participating families.7 In addition to Blanca, whom we met earlier, another informant who was selected to benefit from Juntos was Ana, together with some eight other families in her sector of the barrio. Ana had already had three home visits and participated in a few meetings in her sector, and she hoped that more substantial assistance, for example, a proper toilet, would materialize. Ana had been encouraged to register her children, and she had started working toward this by having their pictures taken. Getting personal documents and ID papers in order, including birth certificates, ID cards, citizenship certificates, and military service cards, is an important element in the Juntos’ strategy, called construction of citizenship (construcción de ciudadania). These supplementary actions to the cash transfer thus focus on empowering and making people conscientious in order to make the most out of the available options. The objective is that, after two years, the participating families will have moved out of a life in extreme poverty and into a more dignified life, albeit still a poor one. The local FA leader formulates it like this: One of the things that I have realized is that the majority of the poor people of Cartagena do not have a life project; they do not have a reason to live, you see. What happens is that, when you take these people and work with their entire self-­improvement, their personal growth and development, to let them know they are persons with . . . ​that should have a high self-­esteem, and if you only raise their self-­esteem, immediately the person has potentialities and desires to improve the incomes of the house, the home. You will see all this immediately, that they will feel encouraged to do many things to improve their quality of life. (Interview, FA leader, Cartagena, March 4, 2008) Thus, it is anticipated that giving the participating families a life project will motivate them to work their way out of extreme poverty. The transfer of information taking place through encounters between NGO workers, project functionaries, and beneficiaries is, thus, anchored in an agenda of empowerment and self-­help. In its insistence on self-­help, the discourse and goals of the program resonate closely with the liberal arts of government and the “will

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to empower” that Barbara Cruikshank (1999) explores in her study of social programs for single mothers in the United States. Cruikshank argues that, when citizenship and self-­government are put forward as solutions to poverty, powerlessness, and political apathy, these are, in fact, less solutions to the problem than they are strategies of governance for the targeted populations. Within welfare programs, it is in the social construction of particular groups as being in need of intervention that we can study the genesis of victim categories, which are made real through a host of interventions. In the encounter with the program discourse, interventions, and stated objectives, the participants see themselves cast as responsible for their extreme poverty and as holding in their own hands the key to an improved quality of life. In a calendar handed out to all FA beneficiaries, some central elements in the stipulated “self-­government” are spelled out (Acción Social 2007a). For each month, one message is communicated in simple language and with colorful drawings. Some of the messages from this calendar concern the adequate care of the family and home, as well as the welfare of children: for example, to be supportive of their schooling, to encourage them to study and read, to show love and affection in the family, and to let children play. All the information material underlines that fulfilling agreements and requirements is essential because the cash transfer depends on compliance. One pamphlet handed out to the newly elected madres líderes spells out the program objectives and the work ethic involved in being a leader (Acción Social 2007b). The central pillar or core ideal is self-­governance, and the argument is that only by learning to govern oneself can one become a leader for others. All participating families are imagined as being united through strong bonds, even when they are not physically close: “the beauty of being madre líder is to help create unifying bonds, to animate the creation of confident bonds between ourselves in order to have a strong network” (6; my translation). Thus, through the program, beneficiaries are included in a network where trust, respect, and help should flow among the members. Yet the idiom through which network members are to understand themselves is also a part of the network itself. The pamphlet stresses that “it is important that we know our Constitution and the norms that guide us, because only the people who know and understand their rights can demand them and intervene in the municipal public life and in this way contribute to improving our lives” (Acción Social 2007b, 11; my translation). Other central actors in the larger FA network are, thus, el Estado (the state), el Gobierno (the government), el Alcalde (the major/mayor), and the municipality, along with the

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local service providers (teachers, health professionals, and so on) who interact with the beneficiaries in the service delivery. The attitude and actions of these social workers are, in fact, crucial for the FA beneficiaries whose subsidy payment is dependent on having the right signatures and stickers in their personal logbook. If a mother, for example, has a medical appointment but the health workers are on strike that day, she receives no tick in her book and risks exclusion from the following payment. In this way, people’s compliance with the requirements is not entirely in their own hands, and there is a constant sense of contingency in the program. Beneficiaries are aware that the subsidy may disappear from their lives as suddenly as it appeared.

Debit Cards: New Actors in the Network Alongside the process of expanding the program’s coverage to include all families classified as SISBEN 1, debit cards were distributed to participants to ease the subsidy payment process and enable them to withdraw cash from a cash machine or ATM (cajero). Hitherto, the subsidy had been distributed by means of a check, which each beneficiary had to collect at the local office and take to a bank to cash. With the debit card, the long queues and considerable waiting time would be avoided—­a technical solution facilitating the subsidy payments for both program managers and beneficiaries. A device such as this that represents official recognition—­a debit, a document, or a certificate—­ becomes interesting in Latour’s conceptualization of a network because it may enable the individual to do something or to act. Networks are flat, star-­ shaped webs connecting all objects that participate in a particular action; objects and entities all appear as equally important alongside the individual (human) participants (Latour 2005). Thus, an object like a debit card may be one connection point in the network, a link between the individual and a particular set of institutions that generates and transmits specific flows. Drawing on Latour’s ideas, the remainder of the chapter explores the FA debit card and the flows generated around it. During my time in Colombia the actual distribution of the cards to each FA beneficiary took place in a huge sports facility over the course of eleven days. People were called in according to their ID numbers and, thus, had to check which day they were required to be present. For many of the women, this was the very first time they had a debit card (or any bank card) in their possession. The card’s “newness” created feelings of nervousness and anxiety,

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mixed with importance and pride. Such instances of technological “newness” are, according to Latour, interesting to study because “in those encounters, objects become mediators, at least for a while, before soon disappearing again through know-­how, habituation, or disuse” (Latour 2005: 80). Thus, the novel experience of possessing and handling a debit card produced a situation where the card as a mediating object led to a series of connections, associations, and translations unfolding around it. Before Cristina took possession of her debit card, I talked to her about her expectations. She had already seen a neighbor’s card and heard about the procedures for receiving it, but she had never herself had one before: “I imagine that it is like a mobile phone when you have to introduce the key [code or PIN] from the [prepaid] card and then it works. . . . ​I will pay a lot of attention [to the explanations]. This is something that we never have had to go through, but now we have to do it because the technological development is running over us” (Interview, FA beneficiary Cristina, Cartagena, February 25, 2008). The following day, I met with Cristina outside the stadium where the cards were distributed. She arrived with a few other women from the barrio who had taken the bus together. We joined the long queue of people waiting to enter. (The guards at the entrance would not let me in at first since I was not an FA beneficiary, but the explanation that I was a journalist following one of the participants convinced them to let me pass.) Inside, all the women, and a few men, sat on benches in order of appearance on the stadium’s cement stands. We had to wait for a few hours until it was our turn; in groups of around forty, we were then guided into an adjacent room. Here we were seated on white plastic chairs to listen to FA employees give a talk about issues including how to use the card, in which ATMs it worked, and what the costs were for the user. Subsequently, the group broke up, and those interested in more specific instructions could go to another room with an ATM simulator. The rest passed directly to the tables placed in the middle of the sports arena where the bank employees sat and handed out the debit cards and the envelope with the four-­digit key.8 To confirm having received the card, people had to sign. I waited for Cristina to pass through this stage and asked her right after how she felt: Cristina: What a shock! Stine: Why a shock? Cristina: Well, yes I got frightened. . . . ​What happens is that I never

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went to school, and, when I have to write my signature, I get really nervous. And if my nerves attack me, my mind gets completely blank and I cannot think. Stine: And then you cannot even sign? Cristina: Then I cannot even sign. When I have to do it, I tell them to be patient with me because otherwise . . . ​to be patient . . . ​that it is not in me [I do not have the capacity]. Stine: And it scares you more? Cristina: Yes, writing my signature scares me more than the thing about going to the cajero, because I am not used to that, it gives me the nerves. . . . ​Thank God, now I just want to get out of here. (Interview, February 26, 2008) While appearing quite confident of being able to handle the technical part of using the card in the cajero, Cristina is terrified of writing her signature on an official document. “I am not used to that,” she says. So why is having to sign as a proof of receiving the debit card the worst part of this whole unfamiliar process? Writing one’s signature on an official document evokes a series of associations and worries, particularly when one cannot read what the document says. The official nature of the act also links up to images of the state, of laws and regulations that may be violated, and the possibility of being accused of doing something wrong. Cristina expresses that she is relieved to have passed through all the steps in the process and finally to have the card. She explains that, since she was first told about the debit card, she had begun to worry. First she thought about missing the day she was supposed to appear, then of not having the money to pay for the bus ride to the stadium and back, and then of the long queues she would have to endure: “Thank God, my [oldest] son came yesterday night, and I said to him that I was going to the stadium and that I did not know whether I would have to stay there all day, and he gave me two thousand pesos and my husband gave me four thousand pesos. But in my youngest son’s class, they are saving money, and every week each child has to bring one thousand pesos, so I took out one thousand for him to take to the school.”9 Thus, with five thousand pesos in her pocket, Cristina’s trip to the stadium was safeguarded. She got the money through her family network (her oldest son and husband). It was not her first trip to this stadium, but, still, she went accompanied by a few other women from the barrio. While Cristina’s children are school age and can take care of themselves, other women with

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small children depend on having someone looking after their children while they are away from home. Card in hand, the women left the sports stadium satisfied but exhausted after the hours of waiting. I asked Cristina where she would keep the card and how she would guard the four-­digit key: Cristina: I will hide it well, like my ID card, in the same way will I take care of this card, like my ID card and my EPS [health plan] card, which is that which gives me the medicine. Those two documents I hide well, and I do not bring them to the street; I take photocopies and hide the originals. I only take them out when I need to. Stine: How will you do to memorize the key? Cristina: Well, the key I will begin from now on to learn it by heart; it is only four digits and thus no problem, I will memorize it, until I know it by heart, or maybe I will write it on the wall in a corner of the house so I do not lose it. And I will record it inside, in my head. That is the best . . . ​to memorize it. Memorizing the key and taking proper care of the card are Cristina’s two strategies for handling this new object. She regards it as being as precious and important as her ID card and her health plan card. She felt that the process had gone smoothly and that all her previous worries had vanished. The only really difficult part for Cristina was when she had to sign upon receiving the card. For Cristina and the other women, the next challenge was how to manage the cash machines and actually withdraw the subsidy.

ATMs and Someone to Trust At the stadium, it was stressed that the card is personal, that neither it nor the PIN code should ever be handed over to anyone else. If new cardholders needed assistance the first time they went to withdraw cash, they should be accompanied to the ATM by a trustworthy person. As we saw above, Cristina had no particular concerns about the actual withdrawal but still planned to go accompanied the first time: “I will go with my son, the oldest one, who knows a lot about these things. He will help me and teach me, since my son is trustworthy. Well, I think I can trust in him to get this money out,” she

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says—­revealing a slight worry that she may be violating the proper code of conduct for debit card management by resorting to her son’s assistance. For Ana, though, finding someone trustworthy who can assist her the first time is a worry. Ana is in her thirties, a mother of four, and lives with her husband, who sells fish as a street hawker. Along with the others at the stadium, she received the information about how to manage the cajero and a handout with instructions, but she is worried that it will be difficult to follow the instructions on the ATM screen: Yes, they explained to me [about the cajero]; they gave me a small paper, and, in the paper, it says that I have to learn the key by heart. . . . ​ They explained how it works, but I did not really understand anything, since there were so many people talking, and I do not like to ask questions. . . . ​I have no idea how a cajero works. I don’t even know what I will do. In the paper it says that, if you go with someone, it has to be a trusted person [alguien de confianza], that you cannot give the card to anyone . . . ​because they may record the key and, when you go to get your money, then the person has already taken it all. . . . ​Thus, I need to find a trusted person that can help me to do it. (Interview, Villa Hermosa, Cartagena, February 28, 2008) Ana understood that the key and the card are personal and should not be shared with anyone, but, without knowing how a cajero works and unable to read the instructions on the screen, she is still obliged to go with someone the first time. She just does not know whom to ask who would know how ATMs work while also being trustworthy. To Ana, the new debit card actually made receiving the FA subsidy more difficult; she preferred the old way by means of a check: “I liked it when they gave it to you like that [by check],” she says. Another problem for Ana in relation to the new payment method is that the cardholders are notified by a call to their mobile phone when the money has been deposited and is ready for withdrawal. Thus, she had to give a phone number where she can be contacted, but Ana has no mobile phone, nor has her husband. So, she had to ask a neighbor for the favor of “borrowing” a phone number and of receiving the notification calls for her whenever the subsidy is available on her account. Thus, to use the debit card and to get notifications, Ana has to draw on a network of (she hopes) trustworthy helpers. She finds this problematic and would prefer the “old way” where she could handle the process of accessing the subsidy by herself.

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This ethnographic exploration of participants’ experiences with the Families in Action program has shown that, while the debit cards were introduced as devices that would simplify bureaucratic procedures around the subsidy payments, in actual fact, the individual beneficiaries depend on mobilizing personal networks to access their money. The women draw on personal contacts to borrow money for the bus fare, to have their children looked after, to find their way onto the correct bus, to “borrow” a phone number, and to manage the cajero. As a new actor in the network, the debit card generates a series of effects, and much energy is mobilized; people must activate their networks both to acquire and to utilize the card. For the women for whom owning a debit card is a new experience, the card has a special significance. It is an unfamiliar technological device, which is intimately linked to consumerism. There is an air of mystery and secrecy attached to the card, which is vested with almost magical powers, and they guarded it meticulously. It is not only in relation to using the debit card that the women depended on networks. The women also depended on information sharing for coming to know of the program, how to meet its admission criteria and other related procedures. Information was often channeled through local representatives, such as the displaced people’s representatives in Villa Hermosa who had been active for some time. Thus, any potential beneficiary who is not connected to this network may simply miss the opportunity. So, it is crucial to be part of a network where information circulates, as well as to have a web of contacts that one trusts and upon which one can draw. The cash-­transfer program of the FA is massive in its outreach, and, at first sight, it appears relatively easy for the target groups to qualify as beneficiaries. However, a closer look at the actual processes and procedures involved, as described here, shows how participants have to draw on a complicated network of relations and contacts to access the program and fulfill its many requirements.

Conclusion The FA represents the (temporary) attention of state institutions toward beneficiaries, a contingent act of care for the everyday survival of families living in extreme poverty. By examining the FA and programs like it, we are able to explore the interface between beneficiaries and professionals, questioning the ways in which victimhood categories such as “extremely poor” and “IDP” enable larger assemblages of welfare services to cohere. State efforts to improve

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the nutrition, education, and health of children draw the members of extremely poor families into the field of agencies and NGOs. In this force field, it could be expected that different logics are at play for the beneficiaries and the state agencies and programs, but do we see resistance to state intrusion in the private sphere, to home visits, and to talks on hygiene and registration? Is victimhood a point of contention? Or do the self-­governing techniques infuse into beneficiaries without meeting resistance so that, as Cruikshank (1999) contends, subjugation is transformed into subjectivity? The FA program’s objectives, discourses, and methods all converge in self-­ government as the key technique of productive citizenship (cf. Cruikshank 1999). Beneficiaries are cast as responsible mothers and conscientious parents who can work their way out of extreme poverty with the right dose of self-­esteem and a helping hand. The FA is a subsidy, not a right, and it does not fundamentally recognize extreme poverty as part of the state’s responsibility vis-­à-­vis the citizens. In the admission process, the victims-­cum-­ beneficiaries consider and evaluate the project based on the potential outcome of the time and energy they may have to invest to qualify as participants. The interest in joining the FA program was massive as compared to other official assistance programs I came across during my fieldwork, such as humanitarian assistance to IDPs and reparation schemes for victims of the armed conflict (see Jakobsen 2009). One explanation may be the relatively short span of time that it takes from the moment time, energy, and money are invested in accessing the program to the moment something—­the subsidy—­comes back. For example, registration for the expansion was done in October 2007, and the first cash transfer arrived in December that year. The vast outreach of the program may also influence the interest because the potential participants may know someone who has already received the subsidy and, thus, be reassured that the promised outcome will materialize. Still, in Cartagena, almost one-­third of the families classified as SISBEN 1 or extremely poor did not enter the FA. Some may not have been interested, while others may have moved away or did not apply in time, missed receiving the information, or did not qualify due to problems with the required documents. The analysis of the FA has shown that, in spite of being directed individually at mothers, particularly the interaction between the program and the beneficiaries, a whole range of other actors are also mobilized, leading us to approach the field of relations through the concept of assemblage. The mothers depend on their networks of family, friends, neighbors, and leaders for information, support, and money in order to communicate with the program

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and comply with its requirements. Possessing a debit card is, for these women, a source of worry and insecurity at the same time as it is proof of their inclusion (albeit temporary) in the ranks of consumers. The debit card condenses a whole series of images, aspirations, longings, hopes, and joys for these women. Are the people targeted by the FA, labeled as extremely poor or internally displaced, thus victims or not? As we approach the individual relations and actions, the concept of victim or victimhood appears slippery; we may argue that it even disappears—­displaced as it is by the sensuous presence of the debit card and its ambiguous messages of inclusion and exclusion. I argue, however, that we are able to understand exactly this contingent and transitory character of relations through the notion of assemblages of victimhood. References Acción Social. 2007a. Almanaque 2008. Bogotá: Familias en Acción, Acción Social. ———­. 2007b. La Ética de la Madre Líder. Bogotá: Biblioteca de la Madre Líder, Acción Social. ———­. 2010a. “Familias en Acción.” http://www.accionsocial.gov.co/contenido/contenido.aspx?catID=204&conID=157&pagID=264, accessed June 27, 2013. ———­. 2010b. “Informe de Estado y Avance, Primer semestre de 2010.” Bogotá: Presidencia de Colombia.http://www.accionsocial.gov.co/documentos/docs_FA/5132_Informe_de_Gestion_BIRF_7619_1er_semestre_2010.pdf. Biehl, João. 2005. Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment. Berkeley: University of California Press. Castells, Manuel. 2000. The Rise of the Network Society. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture 1. Oxford: Blackwell. Cruikshank, Barbara. 1999. The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Das, Veena. 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press. de Janvry, Alain and Elisabeth Sadoulet. 2004. “Conditional Cash Transfer Programs: Are They Really Magic Bullets?” Agricultural and Resource Economics Update 7, 6: 9–­11. Emirbayer, Mustafa and Jeff Goodwin. 1994. “Network Analysis, Culture, and the Problem of Agency.” American Journal of Sociology 99, 6: 1411–­54. Jakobsen, Stine F. 2009. “Sharing Hierarchies of Victimhood Through Professional Transactions: From Internally Displaced People to Victims of the Armed Conflict.” Paper presented at World Conference of Humanitarian Studies, Groningen, Holland, February 4–­7. ———­. 2011. “Inside the Outskirts: Struggles for Survival in an Urban Squatter Settlement in Colombia.” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Society and Globalization, Roskilde University. James, Erica C. 2004. “The Political Economy of ‘Trauma’ in Haiti in the Democratic Era of Insecurity,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 28, 2: 127–­49. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-­Network-­Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Montenegro Torres, Fernando and Oscar Bernal Acevedo. 2013. “Colombia Case Study: The

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82  Stine Finne Jakobsen Subsidized Regime of Colombia’s National Health Insurance System.” UNICO Studies Series 15. Washington, D.C.: World Bank. Roseberry, William. 1994. “Hegemony and the Language of Contention.” In Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel F. Nugent, 355–­66. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Vélez, Carlos E., Elkin Castaño, and Ruthanne Deutch. 1998. “An Economic Interpretation of Colombia’s SISBEN: A Composite Welfare Index Derived from the Optimal Scaling Algorithm.” Bogotá: Inter-­American Development Bank. Wolf, Eric R. 1990. “Distinguished Lecture: Facing Power—­Old Insights, New Questions.” American Anthropologist 92, 3: 586–­98.

Notes 1. The Social Service Beneficiaries’ Identification System (Sistema de Identificación de los Beneficiarios de los Servicios Sociales, SISBEN) is a socioeconomic indexing system developed in 1994 and widely used by subsidized social programs in Colombia, in particular, the general social health insurance system (Vélez et al. 1998). Subsidies for SISBEN 1 families with children living in cities include a nutritional subsidy for families with children aged 0–­7, which is 50,000 pesos/month (independent of the number of children), and an educational subsidy for each child aged 11–­18 enrolled in school: 15.000 pesos/month for primary school, 25,000 pesos/month for secondary school grades 6–­8, 35.000 pesos/month for grades 9 and 10, and 40,000 pesos/month for grade 11 (in 2013, $1 USD = approximately 2,000 pesos). Acción Social homepage, http://www.accionsocial. gov.co/contenido/. 2. FA was launched by the government of President Andrés Pastrana (1998–­2002) through Acción Social. It is supported and cofinanced by the World Bank and the Inter-­American Development Bank through loan schemes. More information on this is available at the Inter-­American Development Bank web site, http://www.iadb.org/es/proyectos/documentos-­del-­proyecto. 3. In 2010, of the 2.9 million beneficiaries, 340,000 families were internally displaced and 70,000 indigenous families (Acción Social 2010b: 36). 4. The displaced families need to be registered in the Information System for Displaced Peoples (Sistema de Información de Población Desplazada, SIPOD) managed by the Acción Social. 5. Maria refers to a problem with the SISBEN registrations in Villa Hermosa, which at first was considered a sector in the huge neighboring barrio Nelson Mandela. This was later changed, and Villa Hermosa is now considered an independent barrio. This is important because the FA program has assigned each barrio with a specific number of beneficiaries who can enter. 6. The NGO País is a social organization under the Jesuits of the Catholic Church. 7. Presidencia de la Republica, Colombia, Noticias, May 3, 2010. 8. A public tender for handling the debit cards and payments was won by the commercial bank Banco Popular. 9. Bus fare cost 50 U.S. cents.

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Chapter 4

How to Become a Victim: Pragmatics of the Admission of Women in a South African Primary Health Care Clinic Frédéric Le Marcis

The day after Treasury Minister Trevor Manuel announced South Africa’s 2003–­4 national budget, the nurses at the Primary Health Care clinic where I was working with an HIV support group made much comment at the staff ’s morning meeting. They had mixed feelings about this budget. They all agreed it would decrease poverty, as the old age grant had been increased from 650 to 700 rand a month, but they thought the child support grant for unsupported mothers, which would now reach 150 rand per month, would encourage young women to become pregnant just to be eligible for it.1 As taxpayers, the nurses did not want to have to pay for this. Moreover, they commented that these young women would become an occupational burden for them, as the numbers of their patients would increase. These comments reflect a particular reading of young women in the townships: women who were “opening their legs in front of men,” as the head of an AIDS NGO commented when she discovered that a young HIV+ woman volunteering in her association was pregnant. During their interactions with pregnant women in antenatal care, some nurses would also say, “You were not shy when you were in front of your boyfriend.” Opening the legs is associated with the notion of phanding. This English neologism is formed out of the isiZulu verb ukuphanda, which designates the action of a chicken scratching the soil for food. It is used in townships to refer to young

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women having multiple partners and involved in what social scientists have termed “transactional sex.”2 This practice is criticized by the nurses, and their judgments about young mothers are quite palpable in the ways they interact with them. This was sometimes translated into the reluctance expressed by some health workers to provide nevirapine to HIV+ pregnant women because they were seen as having chosen phanding instead of working—­and, thus, deserved to have AIDS—­or because society would have to take care of their children, once they became orphans. This was explained to me by a young woman volunteering at the Department of Health, who was in charge of pre-­and post-­HIV test counseling. In this chapter, I explore how these different notions of victimhood and guilt held by health professionals and clients have emerged historically in a larger scenario of mining, migration, and displacement in South Africa. I demonstrate how such an assemblage of capital and lives reorganizes victimhood and guilt as the postapartheid state extends welfare and health benefits to hitherto neglected populations. By paying meticulous attention to the workings of the clinic and the interactions between staff and clients, we are able to see how victimhood is woven into larger institutional setups, thus enabling us to think about it not just as a kind of moral shadow play between client and professional. A discourse such as this is in sharp contrast, of course, with the international figuring of women as victims of AIDS, deserving of care, and as targets of AIDS policies. Such figures are, in fact, subject to local negotiation, during which legitimacy is often redefined. It is thus worth building on William Roseberry and Jay O’Brien’s call for a denaturalization of social forms so as to understand the categories employed by the nurses (Roseberry and O’Brien 1991). Indeed, far from being permanent, these categories, which are observable through the “pragmatics of admission” that nurses enact in dealings with female patients, are the products of local histories, international figures, and present issues that combine to create the condition of care and its logics. These social relations and processes, although often naturalized by social actors (including social scientists), need to be seen as constructions and understood as such (2). In combining the discussion of the figure of the female AIDS victim as produced in the literature of the World Health Organization (WHO), along with the analysis of local history and contemporary debates in South Africa, I follow Roseberry and O’Brien as they argue that “we need to pay more attention to the processes of [their] construction within ongoing processes of contention and struggle, the uneasy relationship between the

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simple constructions and more complex experiences, and the tensions and contradictions they simultaneously express and conceal” (17–­18). In doing so, my aim is to understand the ways in which it becomes evident to actors who deserves what kind of care. In sum, I aim at understanding how the univocal and international figure of the female AIDS victim becomes a concrete recipient of care, showing a more blurred and complex picture that is neither well defined nor static. Roseberry and O’Brien’s assumption is useful, then, for analyzing how health workers engage with women in the context of the clinical encounter. What kind of interactions take place between the international figure of the female AIDS victim, the naturalist construction of the migrant female as threatening, and the South African context at the beginning of the 2000s? To understand this interaction, one needs to link constructions produced in the international discourse on female AIDS victims to both the history of relations of power within the patriarchal family in the region and the resistance of women in the context of intense labor migrations. This assemblage of factors on different scales and temporalities (from global discourse to local representations, from long-­term processes to questions of the present) leads to different forms of engagement toward female patients. These forms of engagement, embodied mainly by female nurses, tell us as much about South African society as they do about the clinical encounter. After summing up the construction of “female AIDS victims” in international discourse, I will turn to the analysis of the translation of this motive into concrete actions of care, mobilizing the notion of the “pragmatics of admission,” and then situate these concrete actions of care into a sociohistorical context that allows for understanding the way female sexuality is seen and apprehended in the Health Services.

Female AIDS Victims as an International Rhetoric Writing about the universalizing pretensions of human rights, the French anthropologist Jackie Assayag states, These rights cannot remain completely abstract. We must clarify how they are experienced, practiced, amended or rejected. To discover their meanings, and the idiom in which they are understood in various cultural venues, is part of the universal itself. If we do not want

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universal law to be reduced to the imposition of Western culture throughout the world, we must understand that the universal is the subject of ongoing development, of periodic reformulation in a context defined by the “cultural translation.” (2010: 222, my translation) Offered at a general level, this claim finds exemplification in the development of international AIDS policies at the beginning of the pandemic. Whereas the discovery of the first clinical case of AIDS occurred in 1981, it was only in 1990 that Michael Metson, then director of the World Health Organization’s Global Program on AIDS, publicly acknowledged that fighting AIDS was inextricably linked to the process of empowering women (Booth 1998). Karen Booth, writing the story of the development of policies about women and AIDS at the WHO, situates this milestone in the midst of the contradiction between an organizational ideology of “internationalism” and a new politics of “globalism.” The WHO as an institution conformed to organizational norms defending national sovereignty, while some of the experts called on to draft policies toward women came from a global vision of social and political change. The question Karen Booth was grappling with was “Can there be a global feminism?” She reminds us of the two international conferences on AIDS held in 1989: A discursive distinction between the “national mother” and the “global whore” emerged, reflecting the persistence of the familiar Western double standard of femininity, and demonstrating how much an accepted part of UN ideology this double standard had become. But the dichotomy also mirrored a conflict over whether internationalism or globalism would define AIDS control activities. (1998: 116) Reviewing critiques of the “women in development” (WID) movement in the United Nations during the 1970s and 1980s,3 and articulating these with critiques of the international discourse on AIDS,4 Booth shows us how Western feminists unilaterally construct the “third world woman” as “homogeneous, ignorant, passive, and downtrodden.” She adds, “These critics argue that the liberal notion of individualism, which is unlikely to be widely shared by women of other classes, races, or nationalities, limits the vision of most feminists located in development bureaucracies” (118). Though limited, the construction of the figures of the national mother and global whore was inspired by an increasing body of knowledge showing gendered inequalities in the risk

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of HIV contamination (Farmer, Connors, and Simmons 1996). It is surprising to see how late it was that knowledge of these inequalities infused policy making, whereas Marxist anthropology had shown decades before how the place of women in society was related to a gendered division of labor. In 1975, Claude Meillassoux, in his groundbreaking Maiden, Meals and Money wrote, “Marx is therefore right to believe that women probably constituted the first exploited class. All the same, it is still necessary to distinguish different categories of women in terms of the functions they fulfill according to age by which they are not in the same relations of exploitations and subordination (Meillassoux 1981: 78) Here we see how Meillassoux points out the differences in autonomy and power between a woman reaching puberty and one reaching menopause. Meillassoux’s remarks are relevant for researchers working on women and AIDS and willing to analyze critically the notion of the victim. At the start of the pandemic, studies on AIDS gave precedence to the functions of individuals (as men or women), rather than their statuses, instead of attempting to understand their interactive effects. Vulnerable women (barmaids, prostitutes, petty traders, and so on) were, therefore, identified without taking into account their prior situation within established power relations. As Didier Fassin (1996) has shown, this was partly related to the epidemiological lead in the first research on AIDS and to the need to identify targets for prevention. It was also related to what Gilles Bibeau and Duncan Pedersen (2002) have described as a scientific racism, reproducing old mythologies about African sexuality.5 This discussion draws our attention to the fact that victims are not equal, that their experience, the legitimacy of their status of victims (and, therefore, the attention they deserve) is always negotiated and relative. If international victims are not necessarily legitimate victims locally, then how do these international figures actually translate into actions of care? How are these figures recognized or excluded? According to what logics? This amounts to interrogating the ideal part of the real (Godelier 1978), the ideological underpinnings informing actual practices of caregivers. It helps assess which categories lay behind the engagement or disengagement of health professionals toward “victims.” If women are globally recognized as “structural victims” subject to regimes of exploitation because of their place in society, and as a consequence are exposed to a higher risk of HIV contamination,6 their legitimacy in specific networks of care is still to be appreciated and contextualized over a long period. Looking back on history offers a way to understand how the place of

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women in situations of care fits into a history of power and resistance in South Africa. As Karen Booth has written, In the case of AIDS, motherhood is an international problem, figuring as it does in the transmission of HIV around the world. Once framed as integral to the pandemic, HIV in mothers becomes an arena for international debate. However, motherhood is fundamentally domestic; its control and its protection are private matters subject to the sovereign—­whether he be the nation or the father. (1998: 125) To understand more fully the forms of engagement emerging in relations of care, a close scrutiny of concrete actions of care now follows, viewed through the notion of the “pragmatics of admission” as proposed by Nicolas Dodier and Agnès Camus.

A Pragmatics of Admission It seems apt to consider Roseberry and O’Brien’s call for the denaturalization of social forms together with Dodier and Camus’s notion of the “pragmatics of admission,” as proposed with reference to pragmatic sociology. Working in the French context, Dodier and Camus analyze the genesis of the hospital, from its religious origins to the more contemporary notions of social assistance and medicalization. They remind us about the evolution of “admission” in Western hospitals from the logic of assistance (and segregation) to the logic of hospitality, and they highlight its contemporary logic of exchange. Looking at the assessment of patients on admission to hospital emergency rooms, the authors observe what they call the evaluation of patients’ budgetary value or the impact of the patient on the department’s budget. This financial evaluation of the patient combines at least three dimensions: the medical (is it a severe illness, implying significant nursing care?), the social (does the patient have kin who will support him or her?), and the economic (does the patient have private health insurance, and what is his or her occupation?). This evaluation in terms of value is such that multiple metaphors of the market are operating at the hospital. The authors thus attempt to understand the contemporary logics of reception through the lens of this history. To do so, they propose an ethnography of the “pragmatics of admission,” aiming at revealing the “mobilizing value” of the patient:

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If a hospital is a good example to capture, in the midst of their complex interactions, the different strata in which the most instituted devices of the management of misfortune were formed in the contemporary societies, this is because it refers simultaneously to two important characteristics of these societies, although they are barely thought of together. First, they are biomedicalized societies. . . . ​Secondly, they are societies in which the social question gained legitimacy in such a way that it arises, under varied historical forms, as a recurring problem, part of which, at the very heart of societies, is that access to care for sick people is for a long time an important aspect. The issue regarding the selection of requests for care from patients coming to hospitals is interesting in this respect since it calls for the analysis of vastly contrasting, though coexisting, practices on how to manage patients’ problems. Indeed a wide-­ranging spectrum of complaints, some nonmedical, has to cohabit with drastic selection policies according to how patients might or might not fit the different care units. (Dodier and Camus 1997: 733; my translation) Thus, the authors aim to “give an account of how different forms of engagement combine themselves, with a desire to grasp their presence in the details of their activities” (741). Of course, the description of the history and the context of the French hospital does not totally fit the South African context. One cannot say that biomedical discourse is, in this context, the sole legitimate discourse on misfortune. Nevertheless, it is true that “health for all” was one of the main objectives of the democratically elected government of South Africa after independence in 1994. Moreover, even if the clinic in which we did fieldwork was not a hospital per se (it was a primary health care clinic), the logic of triage that we observed within it is close enough to hospital practice for it to relate to Dodier and Camus’s proposition.7 Nevertheless, to this framework mainly focused on the value of the patient as it is understood in economic terms, I want to add a moral perspective: namely, how moral values related to history and to issues of the present also play an important role in the forms of engagement deployed by health workers. The appreciation of the patient has a moral dimension as well. In the comment reported at the beginning of the paper, young pregnant women were seen as not playing the game of reciprocity—­that is, as receiving from the new South Africa without giving anything in return—­and, thus, posing a threat to the morality of the nation. Before becoming local (and

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thereby seen as concrete recipients of care in the Health Services), AIDS victims are seen through the lens of international discourse and are thus negotiated according to this logic. This logic appears through a pragmatics of admission. Thus, to understand the treatment received by patients, especially women, with HIV in South Africa, one should leave the strict framework of the epidemic. If the action of health workers and caregivers is inscribed in a global political framework (such as the increasing incidence of Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission, or PMTCT), the way they translate the framework into actions of care relies on categories that have a local dimension that may also contradict the suppositions of that framework. These categories imply a particular form of engagement; they are neither eternal nor limited to health professionals. Their emergence is the product of history and of specific social and economic conditions. In contrast, the discourse of victimhood not only silences women’s voices and homogenizes their experiences, but it also ignores the local construction of the legitimacy of the recipient of care.

Clinics of History The clinic where these nurses made their comments is located in Soweto. It is situated in a relatively better-­off part of the township but caters to a mixed clientele, comprising the old inhabitants of the area as well as newer residents living in nearby squatter camps or backyard shacks. Soweto—­South Western Township—­was created ex nihilo in the 1950s by the National Party government to host people removed from the Johannesburg inner city, in line with apartheid policy (Bonner and Segal 1998). During the 1980s, Soweto saw the development of a black middle class composed mainly of teachers and nurses, supported by the Nationalist government in order to counter the rise of black opposition in the townships. The nurses working in the clinic are the products of this history (Marks 1994). After the abolition of influx control in 1986, Soweto witnessed the arrival of many migrants from former homelands, looking for jobs. After being welcomed as ANC supporters in the beginning of the 1990s, migrant populations (staying in backyard shacks or in squatter camps built in empty spaces in or around townships) have been subjected to forced removal and often offered alternatives in new sites around Soweto or Johannesburg—­such as Roodeport or Orange Farm. As Mark Hunter has argued, writing about Mandeni township in Kwazulu-­Natal, “the rise of shacks is a manifestation not only of a housing crisis but of a set of complex, socio-­

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spatial trends that consist of reduced marital rates, smaller households, and the greater movement of women, all of which are deeply political processes connected to poverty and inequalities and which have important implications for sexual relations” (2010: 30). Thus, if political economy has demonstrated the tremendous impact of apartheid policies on African family structures, together with the introduction of Christianity and migrant labor, this “interacts with a relatively new set of dynamics: the reorganization of rural households into more geographically flexible institutions with an expectation that women as well as men will migrate in circular patterns to urban/informal areas” (Hunter 2007: 695–­96). The increase in women’s migrations associated with the decline of marriage (Hunter 2010: 30) can be seen in the way that migrants, especially women, are seen as a threat to both morality and health. For instance, the clinic where we did fieldwork was surrounded by a squatter camp. In January 2002, the camp was dismantled and its population sent to an old mining hostel outside Soweto. The camp was said to host foreigners, thieves, and sick people and was said to be a threat to the tranquility of the quiet neighborhood. One of the inhabitants of a matchbox house8 facing the camp showed me his cell phone during the forced removal, saying, “Now I can walk safely again since they are leaving.” The illegitimacy of migrants (be they from neighboring countries or from the bundus, the remote provinces of South Africa) has to be understood in a context where the identity of Soweto inhabitants is constructed against both these categories: against those living in the remote homelands, who are seen as backward and not well educated, and against those seen as flooding to South Africa from countries north of South Africa to benefit from the fruits of a struggle in which they did not take part. These notions are imbued in the care provided to women at the clinic; however, they are also subject to contemporary logic that has to do with policies introduced by the democratically elected government that aim to reduce inequalities inherited from the apartheid regime. A Clinic Reflecting Current South African Issues Regarding Health Service Delivery Two significant changes occurred in the South African welfare system following Nelson Mandela’s election in 1994. First, a grant system was put into place for all South Africans (including a disability grant and a grant for single

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mothers), and, second, free health care services were granted at the primary health care level. The health system in South Africa lacked resources (infrastructure and personnel) and suffered from an inequitable distribution of services and allocation of resources, both of these being consequences of the unequal development of services inherited from apartheid. Beyond these structural factors that limit the ability of health services to deliver (Blauuw 2004; Schneider 2004), other less visible factors play an important role as well. They have to do with what Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss (1965) called the question of social value, that is, all the capabilities that an individual can contribute in the service of society and depending on which access to health services is granted by the medical body. We have seen how Nicolas Dodier and Agnès Camus also built on this concept in the French context, but in relation to the market. The assemblage of factors relating to apartheid times (migrations, disintegration of family ties, inequalities) and their impact on the way people live together in South Africa is particularly perceptible in everyday health interactions.

Everyday Health Care As already mentioned, the cases presented here have been observed in a Primary Health Care Clinic in Soweto. There, a matron is in charge both of managing the health workers and of doing the administrative work. She heads a team of twenty “chief professional nurses,” five “senior professional nurses,” four “professional nurses,” six “enrolled nurses,” eleven “enrolled nursing auxiliaries,” and “three health promoters.” One dentist and his assistant are periodically present in the clinic. A social worker comes one day a week. Although the patients and the health professionals are all black South Africans, they distinguish themselves along class lines. The health workers earn salaries, unlike most of their patients, and they do not share the same housing conditions. According to the matron, the clinic receives 6,000 to 8,600 patients a month: that is, 250 to 300 patients per day. They reach the clinic early in the morning, the first few queuing outside from 6 a.m. When the clinic opens its doors, they receive their files for the consultation at a counter and then sit on a bench next to the room they want to attend. The first consultations begin after the 7:30 staff meeting, which begins every day with a prayer. Around 10:30 a.m., the consultations pause for tea time and usually start again around 11, to break again for lunch, between 1 and 2 p.m. The afternoons are usually devoted to

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“admin work,” and no patients present themselves after 11 a.m. unless they require an urgent consultation; they all know they would be sent back home and asked to come back the following morning. The time devoted to access the consultation appears disproportionate compared to the time of the consultation itself. For a simple consultation, if one adds the time of the triage consultation to the time of the consultation in the room devoted to the identified ailment, the total consultation time is five to ten minutes only, compared to the three to five hours often necessary to access this interaction. Waiting is thus a part of the experience of being cared for in the public health services. The consultations we were observing took place in two rooms. One was devoted to family planning; the other was called the “orientation room” and was used for triage consultations. From this room, patients were sent after a rapid diagnosis to nurses in charge of specific ailments. No doctors work at this level. If it is felt to be necessary, patients are sent to the next level. Before being received in the orientation room, patients are seated on a bench in the central corridor of the clinic. The door of the room remains open. A nurse at her desk waits for the patient and never stands up. Patients, on the other hand, hardly ever sit. The consultations usually start with “next” (ngena, meaning “enter” in isiZulu) addressed to the crowd in the corridor. Next! A young woman complained of urinary problems to the matron (that day the head nurse of the clinic was in charge of the triage room). She was sent to the nurse in charge of sexually transmitted diseases and told not to change her story with the nurse she will meet (such as announcing that she has no more menstrual flows). The matron was, in fact, reacting to tactics developed by young women to avoid moral judgment about what is seen as premature sexual activity and its consequences: teenage pregnancy. The wish to avoid bitter comments by the nurses during consultations makes sense when linked with consultations in family planning. There, nurses do not hesitate to comment when young women present themselves with a late period and express the fear of being pregnant. Thus, a young woman wearing a red dress was introduced. Her period is delayed, and she asked for a pregnancy test. The nurse in charge asked her if she wanted to be pregnant or what she was planning to do if she were. She replied she would do nothing. The test came back negative, but, since she had had unprotected sex, she received the morning-­after pill. A nurse working in an adjacent cubicle commented loudly, “Hey, we do not encourage that!”—­but no information was given on sexually transmitted diseases and AIDS. Moral judgment appeared to be more important than prevention.

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Next! An obviously poor young woman, wearing old clothes, presented herself. She complained of itching on the skin (one of the manifestations of a sexually transmitted disease). The matron asked her if she had a boyfriend. The young woman replied in the affirmative. The matron asked if she was using condoms. She said, “From time to time.” The matron told her to use them except when she wanted children. She grabbed the young woman’s arm to check for skin rashes (another sign of a sexually transmitted disease) and added, “We cannot always treat you for the same thing” and then referred her to the relevant consultation room. The matron did not talk about AIDS. The economic condition of the woman, appreciated through her dress, implied for the nurse that she was probably involved in phanding. This was condemned by the nurse as confirmed by her comment after the consultation. The idea that young women, knowing the risk of HIV, could deliberately become pregnant to become eligible for a child grant (at a rate of 240 rands per month) or to receive a disability grant (HIV positive people can apply for a disability grant on the grounds of AIDS if their CD4 count, or level of T4 cells, is below 200)9 is widespread among nurses: I don’t know how to put it, but I think we are not getting anywhere with this HIV/AIDS issue! Ja, people . . . ​no, I don’t know because Whites do understand it is there. Indians do understand it is there, but our black and coloured people seemingly they are not with it. They are being taught, but when you look at the statistics of HIV/AIDS and the teenage pregnancy. . . it means people are not prepared to take whatever they are being told about this HIV/AIDS. Because if people were aware and they are prepared to prevent it, these teenagers wouldn’t be falling pregnant, you see. It means now the government maybe has enticed them by saying there is nevirapine, there is money. They are excited about nevirapine and the grants that they are getting. In this context, women supposed to be recipients of care as victims of AIDS are looked at with suspicion and blamed by health workers. In the process, their own agency and will are often denied. The nurse said about a woman member of the HIV/AIDS support group of the clinic: “Another woman coming for contraceptives belongs to the support group at the clinic. She told me she was pregnant. I could not understand how she fell pregnant knowing her status, and she had to terminate the pregnancy.” But the nurses’ moral values are not the only categories structuring their

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engagements with patients. These are also linked with other categories such as race and class. “Race” here refers to the naturalized notion that received legal recognition during apartheid: black, Indian, white, and coloured, and also ethnic modes of identification such as Sepedi, Zulu, and Sotho. Though no longer part of government identification tools—­being black does not now bar you from entering certain places, and being Sotho does not predetermine your settling in one specific district or homeland—­these categories are still operative in day-­to-­day interactions in South Africa.10 Not surprisingly, they are active in interactions concerning care. Along with xenophobia, the use of these naturalized notions underlies some forms of engagement with patients from bundus or neighboring countries. Foreigners, derogatively named makwerekwere,11 are, thus, accused of settling in South Africa to enjoy the fruits of a struggle to which they did not contribute. The nurses’ attitudes and comments must also be seen as expressing a social status linked to the specific development of the nursing profession in South Africa. During apartheid, nursing and teaching were the highest professions accessible for Black women. Promoted by the then government (the training was even paid for), the development of a body of African nurses was even part of a strategy to develop a Black bourgeoisie expected to have a conservative political orientation and to be proapartheid (Marks 1994). The entanglement of racial, social, or moral categories appears in the verbal exchanges between nurses and pregnant women; it also underlies some of the exchanges between nurses. Thus, a nurse putting away hospital gowns in a cupboard in the antenatal consultation room commented on the tone of a joke to one of her colleagues: “Our patients do not have gowns. The salt-­of-­ the-­earth type are wearing gowns, sisters of the earth.” In her comment, the nurse is referring to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, reported in the Bible by Matthew.12 Women attending antenatal consultation in the public services are asked to undress and to queue on one side of the main corridor of the clinic to be weighed and to be seen by a nurse. Some women wear nightgowns, but the majority of them simply have a towel tied around them. They come mainly from the township where the clinic is located. Among them are some newcomers recently arrived from former homelands or neighboring countries (Mozambique, Botswana, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, and Lesotho). Some have never been to school; others have a bachelor’s degree. Some speak English, while others do not. This information feeds the production of stereotypes about patients and justifies, in the eyes of the nurse, the fact of not providing them with gowns. These categories are related to others regarding race, with

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reference to the former apartheid racial frame of reference, as the following example illustrates. It is an exchange between a Sotho nurse and a coloured pregnant woman. The pregnant woman had shown some signs of nervousness with regard to conditions of admission in the consultation. The nurse told her rather abruptly in Afrikaans, Jy bly complain! Hoekom gaan jy nie by Noordgesig nie? Julle like complain julle coloureds. The Sisters daar by Noordgesig hulle like smoking Stuyvesant. [You keep complaining. Why don’ you go to Noordgesig? You like to complain, you coloureds. The nurses there at Noordgesig like to smoke Stuyvesant.] The nurse was comparing the clinic where the pregnant woman was received (in Soweto, a formerly black area during apartheid) to the clinic in Noordgesig, a formerly coloured area near Soweto). She was associating Noordgesig clinic to stereotypes attached to coloured people and describing it in a derogatory tone, in a mix of English and Afrikaans, as a place of work where nurses could smoke, a sign of loose morals. Most of the nurses who work in the clinic do not live in its vicinity. They come by car, living in middle-­class housing often situated between Soweto and Johannesburg; during their weekends, they socialize in newly constructed shopping malls. Their interaction with the kind of people they care for in the clinic is limited to the consultation time. Although they often have family members living in the same conditions, nurses do not recognize themselves in their patients, as illustrated by the reaction of a nurses when one of her patients died. When I asked if she wanted to come with me to express sympathy to the patient’s grandmother, who had been taking care of him until the end, she replied to me, surprised, “You are going there? You are right; they do like when we visit them.” Her use of “we” to associate herself with me and of “they” to distinguish herself from them confirmed to me how little she related to her patients. On our way to the grandmother’s house, a few blocks away from the clinic, she explained to me that she did not know the area and that she hardly ever came to the township. Starting from the ethnographic description of nurses’ forms of engagement with their patients, and thus analyzing their pragmatics of admission, it is possible to unravel the threads entangling various logics that are embodied in nursing practice here: threads relating to South Africa’s apartheid past, to

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relations of power and resistance of different kinds, such as those between the apartheid government and black South Africans or within black families along gender lines. These factors need to be articulated with the identity of nurses who, as we have seen, distinguish themselves from patients both in terms of class identity and on the grounds of morality. Central to these logics is migration. It has a concrete dimension, which is seen in the construction of shacks and squatter camps, in the massive arrival of new city dwellers, and in the transformation of family ties. But it also has a subjective dimension, as it feeds fears about moral decay. This has strong implications in interactions concerning care, as a nurse’s professional identity is not exempt from a moralist dimension. Thus, the categories that are mobilized by nurses and expressed through concrete interactions of care need to be understood as much as a consequence as a reflection of this assemblage. For a deeper understanding of nurse’s forms of engagement in care, it seems relevant to turn to the history of the production of the category of migrant women as threats to morality.

Women and South African Colonial History Apartheid experience echoes in contemporary discourse produced on women, especially with regard to their health and sexual life, where AIDS is at issue. Since the colonial encounter, the body of the African woman has been the subject of fantasy, racism, and fear—­especially fears of fecundity linked to the swart gevaar or the Black Peril, which legitimated the use of Depoprovera, the injectable contraceptive, on black women. This discourse and associated practices also need to be understood in relation to the continuing decline of the institution of marriage, of increased urban migration, and of the introduction both of grants and of free primary health care. Concrete actions of care toward female AIDS victims need to be understood with this local context in mind. The universal figure of woman as victim of AIDS and as a legitimate recipient of attention from the health professional appears blurred as it is rearranged with a long history of the construction of migrant women as menacing because of their involvement in transactional sex. This fear is expressed in the notion of loose women. The category of loose women involved in phanding, which was at stake in the interaction between health workers and patients described above, has a long history that traces back to the nineteenth century, when Africans started to migrate to work, first on the farms of white settlers, and then in the mines

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on the Rand. The genealogy of phanding and of its connotations can be traced as well to the experience of those who have been called the Moshoeshoe women—­Sotho women named after Moshoeshoe, king of Lesotho, known for his role in building the Basotho nation in the nineteenth century, against European colonial ambitions. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the category of Sotho women defined as loose, independent, fickle, or even prostitutes took shape (Bonner 1990; Coplan 2001, 2003; Eldredge 1993; Epprecht 2000; Gay 1980). Analysis of the emblematic figure of the Moshoeshoe woman in relation to political economy, cultural analysis, and history allowed for the unraveling of the constraints faced by individuals, their resistance, and the vitality of the cultural processes active in this context. This detour through history is salutary in that it shows on what grounds the universal notion of women as victims has to be inscribed in the South African context. Moreover, it reminds us that experiences and subjectivities are often erased by labeling. During the second half of the nineteenth century, women started to leave Lesotho to work on farms in the Free State and then on the Rand (Epprecht 2000: 80–­81). The beginning of the Anglo-­Boer War stopped this kind of migration and initiated new patterns of mobility, toward cities (Bonner 1990). It was only in the beginning of the twentieth century, however, that Basotho women started to be associated strongly with migration in South Africa and prostitution in the cities. This was linked to different factors: the discovery of minerals on the Rand and migration by male mineworkers, the problem of access to the land in Lesotho, epizootics, and severe droughts. All these factors implied a redistribution of productive duties in Lesotho and the fact that going for adventure to the Rand became a serious option for women who involved themselves in beer brewing and sometimes prostitution (Bonner 1990: 222; Eldredge 1993: 111). Along with the colonial administration, traditional authorities in Lesotho tried to stop this migration, but, in the 1930s, women’s mobility had reached durable and important proportions. Despite numerous attempts to impede it (including the implementation of pass laws), migration became a central feature of the lives of women in Southern Africa (Gay 1980: 282). David Coplan notes, “Given economic and social conditions in Lesotho, it is hardly surprising that large numbers of isolated, deserted, and destitute Basotho women followed their men to the Witwatersrand despite the coordinated efforts of chiefs, the colonial administration and the South African authorities to prevent it” (2001: 68). We can add, following Epprecht (2000), that, if these migrations obeyed a logic of economic survival

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and if their conditions were terrible, they also had the taste of adventure. Through them, women could find a way for their emancipation. Central to the opposition to the migration of women is the tendency of those in power (colonial or traditional) to consider women as posing a threat to social order. At the beginning of the twentieth century, African women of all origins were involved in beer brewing on the Rand (Bonner 1990: 227; Bozzoli 1991). Sometimes brewing beer goes along with prostitution, but this is not inevitable, nor specific to Basotho women. Nevertheless, “from the late 1920s the phrase ‘Basuto women’ was almost invariably paired with the opprobrious epithets ‘undesirable,’ ‘unattached,’ ‘immoral’ and ‘loose’ ” (Bonner 1990: 231). Concerns over the presence of women migrants settled in urban areas were expressed in a report by the South African Committee for Indigenous Affairs in 1921 and quoted by Judith Gay: “The town is a European area in which there is no place for the redundant Native, who neither works nor serves his or her people but forms the class from which the professional agitators, the slum landlords, the liquor sellers, the prostitutes and other undesirable classes spring” (Report of the Native Affairs Commission for 1921, cited in Gay 1980: 286). Social scientists contributed to the production of stereotypes of migrant women. Detribalized, unmarried, independent, they were seen as vectors of anomie. Thus, Laura Longmore wrote about the notion of the Shoeshoe women (another realization of Moshoeshoe women): Ukushweshwa, it is said; is derived from the Xhosa and means that a girl goes to live with a man without her parents’ consents, as she has run away from home. It seems to be some confusion about the practice. Many Africans argue that ukushweshwa never existed in tribal areas; what was known there was irexa, or nyatsism. Ukushweshwa, they maintain, is a practice of urban areas, and some associate the practice with the Shoeshoe women because they flocked to the urban areas in great numbers in the very early days when their menfolk first started leaving the reserves and came to town to seek work. (1959: 74) After mentioning the prostitution of shebeen queens, women whose function in the shebeens is to encourage men to drink and in some cases to have sex with them, Longmore adds, There is another form of prostitution whereby a woman makes love to a number of men. Usually such a woman is unemployed and has no

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fixed abode. She sleeps with a different man every night but is astute enough to arrange that they live far removed from one another. She will visit one man one day and sleep with him at his place, telling him that it is her day off from work. The next day she visits another man and tells him the same story, and so it goes on. From each of these men she collects money and presents and may amass quite a fortune by leading this type of life. (1959: 143) In the above description, the amorality of African women is associated with the disintegration of tribal societies. To the woman seen as a threat to patriarchal power (as described above), one should, according to Leclerc-­Madlala (2001), add the woman seen as a threat in metaphorical terms, in the sense that, in Zulu culture, women are linked with the notion of umnyama (dirt), which refers to menstruation but more generally to the danger they embody. This representation, which preexists the AIDS pandemic, is widespread in southern Africa, linking women, blood, sexual fluids, and contamination.

How to Become a Victim The language of female AIDS victims, because it is cast in a grammar of the universal, ignores the fact that they can be understood as legitimate or illegitimate victims within a local assemblage as well. Beyond universal notions, women are locally situated, and the legitimacy of their access to care is subject to negotiations that are themselves fruits of a complex historical assemblage according to which victims are recognized, misrecognized, or denied. This assemblage influences the conditions of inclusion or exclusion of individuals in a community of care. As anthropologists, we should bypass the universal discourse of victimhood and, rather, give an account of the experiences of victims in their relationships with others, in a context that is economically and historically constructed and empirically grounded. The analysis of the pragmatics of admission within a primary health care clinic in Soweto shows how health workers seem to deny (or think illegitimate) a female sexuality that is seen as a threat to health and to morality. When this analysis is broadened to incorporate several factors, mixing scales and temporalities, the pragmatics of admission appears to be fully understandable only when linked to social history.

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How to Become a Victim  101 References Assayag, Jackie. 2010. La mondialisation des sciences sociales. Paris: Téraèdre. Bibeau, Gilles and Duncan Pedersen. 2002. “A Return to Scientific Racism in Medical Social Sciences: The Case of Sexuality and the AIDS Epidemic in Africa.” In New Horizons in Medical Anthropology: Essays in Honour of Charles Leslie, ed. Mark Nichter and Margaret Lock, 141–­ 71. New York: Routledge. Blauuw, Duane. 2004. “Transformations de l’état et réforme de la santé : Le cadre historique et institutionnel de la mise en œuvre des actions de lutte contre le sida.” In Afflictions: L’Afrique du Sud de l’apartheid au sida, ed. Didier Fassin, 111–­38. Paris: Karthala. Bonner, Philip L. 1990. “ ‘Desirable or Undesirable Basotho Women?’ Liquor, Prostitution and the Migration of Basotho Women to the Rand, 1920–­1945.” In Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945, ed. Cherryl Walker, 221–­50. London: James Currey. Bonner, Philip L. and Lauren Segal. 1998. Soweto: A History. Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman. Booth, Karen M. 1998. “National Mother, Global Whore, and Transnational Femocrats: The Politics of AIDS and the Construction of Women at the World Health Organization.” Feminist Studies 24, 1: 115–­39. Bozzoli, Belinda. 1991. Women of Phokeng: Consciousness, Life Strategy, and Migrancy in South Africa, 1900–­1983. Johannesburg: Ravan. Coplan, David B. 2001. In the Time of Cannibals: The Word Music of South Africa’s Basotho Migrants. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. ———­. 2003. “Dire la race et l’espace dans une zone frontalière de l’Afrique du Sud.” Politique Africaine 91: 139–­54. Dodier, Nicolas and Agnès Camus. 1997. “L’admission des malades: Histoire et pragmatique de l’accueil à l’hôpital,” Annales HSS 52, 4: 733–­63. Eldredge, Elizabeth A. 1993. A South African Kingdom: The Pursuit of Security in Nineteenth-­ Century Lesotho. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Epprecht, Marc. 2000. “This matter of women is getting very bad”: Gender, Development and Politics in Colonial Lesotho. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press. Farmer, Paul, Margaret Connors, and Janie Simmons, eds. 1996. Women, Poverty, and AIDS: Sex, Drugs, and Structural Violence. Monroe, Me.: Common Courage Press. Fassin, Didier. 1996. «Idéologie, pouvoir et maladie. Éléments d’une anthropologie politique du sida en Afrique.» In Les maux de l’Autre: La maladie comme objet anthropologique, ed. Michèle Cros, 65–­93. Paris: L’Harmattan. Gay, Judith S. 1980. “Basotho Women’s Options: A Study of Marital Careers in Rural Lesotho.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge. Glaser, Barney and Anselm Strauss. 1965. Awareness of Dying. Chicago: Aldine. Godelier, Maurice. 1978. “La part idéelle du réel. Essai sur l’idéologique.” L’Homme 18, 3–­4: 155–­88. Hunter, Mark. 2002. “The Materiality of Everyday Sex: Thinking Beyond Prostitution.” African Studies 61, 1: 99–­120. ———­. 2007. “The Changing Political Economy of Sex in South Africa: The Significance of Unemployment and Inequalities to the Scale of the AIDS Pandemic.” Social Science & Medicine 64, 3: 689–­700.

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102  Frédéric Le Marcis ———­. 2010. “Beyond the Male-­Migrant: South Africa’s Long History of Health Geography and the Contemporary AIDS Pandemic.” Health & Place 16, 1: 25–­33. Leclerc-­Madlala, Suzanne. 2001. “Demonising women in the era of AIDS: on the relationship between cultural constructions of both HIV/AIDS  and feminity.” Society in Transition 32, 1: 38–­46. Le Marcis, Frédéric. 2004. “L’empire de la violence: Un récit de vie aux marges d’un township.” In Afflictions: L’Afrique du Sud de l’apartheid au sida, ed. Didier Fassin, 235–­71. Paris: Karthala. Longmore, Laura. 1959. The Dispossessed: A Study of the Sex-­Life of Bantu Women in Urban Areas in and Around Johannesburg. London: Jonathan Cape. Marks, Shula. 1994. Divided Sisterhood: Race, Class and Gender in the South African Nursing Profession. New York: St Martin’s. Mbembe, Achille. 2008. “Passages to Freedom: The Politics of Racial Reconciliation in South Africa.” Public Culture 20, 1: 5–­18. Meillassoux, Claude. 1981. Maidens, Meal and Money: Capitalism and the Domestic Community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. First French ed., Femmes, greniers et capitaux. Paris: Maspero, 1975. Roseberry, William and Jay O’Brien. 1991. “Introduction.” In Golden Ages, Dark Ages: Imagining the Past in Anthropology and History, ed. Jay O’Brien and William Roseberry, 1–­18. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schneider, Helen. 2004. ”Le passé dans le présent: Epidémiologie de l’inégalité face au sida et politique de justice sociale.” In Afflictions: L’Afrique du Sud de l’apartheid au sida, ed. Didier Fassin, 75–­110. Paris: Karthala. Wojcicki, Janet. 2002a. “ ‘She drank his money’: Survival Sex and the Problem of Violence in Taverns in Gauteng Province, South Africa.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 16, 3: 267–­93. ———­. 2002b. “Commercial Sex Work or Ukuphanda? Sex-­for-­Money Exchange in Soweto and Hammanskraal Area, South Africa.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 26, 3: 339–­70.

Notes 1. The unemployment rate in South Africa is extremely high. The aggregate rate of 26.7 percent hides strong gender and racial inequalities: at the time of fieldwork, 22.6 percent of men were unemployed, compared to 31.5 percent of women (Statistics South Africa, Labour Force Survey, September 2005). In this context, family income often relies on grants, the nurses complain. 2. For a discussion of transactional sex, see Hunter 2002; Wojcicki 2002a, b; Le Marcis 2004. 3. Booth refers to Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 1–­47; and Naila Kabeer, Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought (London: Verso, 1994). 4. Booth refers to Nancy Scheper Hughes, “AIDS, Public Health, and Human Rights in Cuba,” Lancet 342 (October 1993): 965–­67. 5. Bibeau and Pedersen question as well the reductionist approach consisting of highlighting heterosexual contamination as the only way of HIV contamination, forgetting other ways such as iatrogenic contaminations (injections, blood test), injecting drug users, or men having sex with men.

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How to Become a Victim  103 6. Numbers of studies have shown the inequalities of different kinds faced by women with regard to risk of HIV infection. See for an overview Farmer, Connors, and Simmons (1996). 7. The research on which this paper is based was funded by the French National Agency for Research on AIDS and Hepatitis (ANRS). I thank Mashape Todd Lethata with whom I collaborated during fieldwork (2001–­2004). I am grateful to the staff of the clinic and their patients who accepted our presence in the consultation room. 8. Nickname of four-­room homes in Soweto. 9. Someone in good health is supposed to present a T4 cell count of 1,500 cells/mm3 of blood. 10. Nevertheless, one should note that the notion of race is still used by the South African government in the context of affirmative action to redress former inequalities. Achille Mbembe (2008) has discussed the limits as well as the necessities of this policy in South Africa. 11. Makwerekwere is a pejorative term for African immigrants in South Africa. This is an onomatopoeia supposed to imitate the sound of their language. 12. Matthew 5: 13 (King James version): “Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.”

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Chapter 5

Negotiating Victimhood in Nkomazi, South Africa Steffen Jensen

Victimhood is a moral category. True, victims are construed as carrying little blame for their predicament and, therefore, deserving of our attention. However, to echo the Introduction to this volume, the morality of the victim is negotiated, and victimhood cannot be explored as a substantive category of objectifiable suffering only. Rather, victims become victims and are made real through a complicated web of entextualized discourses entering into programs; narratives; prioritizations of actors such as donors, states, and civil society groups; and the everyday survival practices of those interpellated as victims. In this chapter, drawing on fieldwork in rural South Africa between 2002 and 2008 and a long-­standing collaboration with a local women’s crisis center, I want to explore the conditions under which some people are recognized as victims while others are disallowed as such, maybe even turned into perpetrators. In doing so, I focus on local homeland politics, the appropriations and everyday survival practices of organizations and people, the local rumor economy, and the practices of the international community and postapartheid state formation, as well as how actors and processes interrelate and resources are exchanged. While such an argument might sound overly cynical, this is not the intention. One useful way of exploring these complicated negotiations without falling prey to cynicism is through the Deleuzian concept of “assemblage” as outlined by Manuel Delanda (2006). Delanda notes that what characterize assemblages is their relations of exteriority, by which he means that no given

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system is purely self-­referential or can be closed around itself. For instance, what counts as victimhood in Nkomazi crucially depends on the tax system of Northern countries. While this might be taken to suggest that everything is connected, the point is deeper than this. Deleuze and Guattari (1988) suggest that these relations of exteriority constantly undermine and deterritorialize the formation of, for example, victimhood. Take the example of HIV/ AIDS in Nkomazi. Today, Nkomazi is rightly identified as one of the epicenters of HIV/AIDS in South Africa. In donor, state, and local discourse, victimhood is structured through the lens of the pandemic. This was not always the case. Until the late 1980s, victimhood was seen through the lens of apartheid’s forced removals. With the war in Mozambique, this changed to an increased focus on migration and displacement. From 1994, development foci changed to livelihood, and, in turn, residents became poor. Parallel to the focus on livelihood, gender violence gained momentum with the consequence that some (women) became victims and some (men) transmogrified into perpetrators. While each of the victimhood categories might be relevant, their rise and fall means that victimhood is reconfigured, discursively reclassified, in ways that shift interventions as much as they alter how “beneficiaries” understand themselves. And so does who qualifies to be a victim. A young male refugee in Nkomazi is a victim under the aegis of refugee victimhood but also a perpetrator in victimhood organized around HIV/AIDS. To explore the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of victimhood in Nkomazi, I focus on one particular actor in the assemblage, a small but effective women’s crisis center with which I have collaborated through a number of years. Trying to understand how this organization and its staff members navigate the assemblage provides a privileged entry point into understanding how victimhood is configured in Nkomazi. Understanding the negotiations, maneuverings, and reconfigurations of discourses and everyday and institutional practices of victimhood, as an assemblage, signals a departure from more traditional institutional approaches that focus on relations between state, donors, civil society, and beneficiaries. While such analyses have yielded important insights (for example, Igoe and Kelsall 2005; Merry 2006), these models tend to be relatively formalistic, presuming as unproblematic the identities of all actors. They also work through spatial and hierarchical models of international, national, and local, with NGOs positioned somewhere between the national and the local. In place of these hierarchical binaries, my material suggests the need for an analysis that

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focuses on the contradictory political practices of the (NGO) political landscape of Nkomazi and on the blurred boundaries between especially the local state, the beneficiaries, and the NGOs—­an ambiguous situation where individual actors act according to a host of different rationalities (relations of exteriority, as Delanda would say) and not only according to their identity as state, donor, or NGO. This world is better captured through the concept of the rhizomatic assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 1988). We need to follow individual trajectories and aspirations, accusatory practices and corruption, and donor and state polices and politics. In this assemblage, categories of civil society, state, beneficiary, and donor are important institutional fantasies rather than unproblematic identities, constantly deterritorialized and remade through people’s practices. I begin my analysis of the victimhood assemblage by tracing in more detail the shifting meanings of victimhood in Nkomazi. This analysis also allows me to introduce and position my main interlocutors from Masisukumeni Women’s Crisis Centre and, to a lesser degree, Thembalethu, a home-­based care organization working with issues of HIV/AIDS. The purpose of exploring these two organizations is not to compare. Rather, I analyze the two organizations as occupying parallel, contemporaneous, and inherently conflictual positions, in which particular people are stabilized as victims in different ways. In the three following sections, I explore the two organizations’ relations of exteriority to donors, state, and local population. While these sections might be construed as reifying the institutions, the analysis illustrates how these institutional identities are constantly compromised, deterritorialized, and sometimes remade. While the analysis can never capture all the relations of exteriority that constitute the victimhood assemblage in Nkomazi, it illustrates the extent to which victimhood is indeed negotiated and how often surprising relations matter for its production. It also shows that, despite the inherent cynicism of the argument, most of the actors involved act in ways they consider moral. This morality is exactly premised on the relations of exteriority actors are caught in.

Shifting Meanings of Victimhood on the Frontier Like a poor, unhealthy, and marginalized appendix to the New South Africa, Nkomazi is squeezed between Mozambique to the east, Swaziland to the south, and the Kruger National Park to the north. Today, it is the home of

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some five hundred thousand people resettled there during apartheid. Nkomazi was populated in three waves of migration. The first was during the first forced removals in the 1950s. It is from this group that most of the present-­ day elite emanate. The second wave came in the mid-­1970s when all remaining towns were declared white. Finally, thousands came in relation to—­sometimes because of—­the Mozambican civil war. The latter constitutes the lowest social group, often hunted by the police, lacking in papers and resources (Jensen 2007a). NGOs have played an important role in the social life of victimhood here. The first NGOs in Nkomazi emerged out of the Mozambican refugee crisis. From the committee Hlanganani (“Let’s come together”) emerged many of the civil society organizations of the following years. After 1993, they no longer worked specifically with refugees, as they allegedly had all returned. One member of Hlanganani was approached by a researcher doing fieldwork among Mozambican women regarding sexual violence during the war. The encounter between Tina Sideris (the researcher) and Rachel Nkosi (from Hlanganani) was the birth of Masisukumeni Women’s Crisis Centre. Another active member of Hlanganani formed an organization that worked with economic empowerment and skills training for local (SMME) businesses, along with helping them to develop business plans. In 1999, the woman, Sally McKibbin, realized that she had to change direction: “I realized that there was not really any reason for me to stay here if I did not work with AIDS.” Sally asserted that her change of direction was a direct result of the spread of the pandemic, and she formed the home-­based care organization Thembalethu. While both Masisukumeni and Thembalethu may point to objective changes, the changes also illustrate the development of a local history of victimhood. The former refugees were reconfigured first into victims of socioeconomic marginalization and gender inequality, only to be reconfigured into victims of a disease. The perpetrating agent, thus, shifted from political repression through economic structures to a biological actant (Latour 1999), the HI virus, working through men and a patriarchal system. Importantly, while both organizations targeted women, the women were construed in parallel but potentially conflictual ways, which constitutively undermined the idea of univocal, objectifiable suffering. While this double nature of victimhood might be a case of “two sides of the same coin,” it also speaks to the shimmering of the figure of the victim introduced in the Introduction to this volume. It is the contemporaneity of these figures that permanently destabilizes the victimhood assemblage in Nkomazi.

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In Masisukumeni’s analysis, political freedom was compromised as women were threatened by gender-­based violence reaching pandemic proportions. In an early research report from the organization, the authors suggest the following about the situation in Nkomazi: [Nkomazi] contains all the necessary ingredients that make up the recipe for domestic violence, rape and sexual assault—­poverty, high levels of unemployment, poor living conditions, patriarchal gender relations and practices. Rape and domestic abuse are not acceptable to the people who live in the rural villages that make up the Nkomazi, yet the experience of sexual violence has become pandemic. (masisukumeni.org.za/background-­and-­history) During the 1990s and into the 2000s, the organization created a model of intervention around the notion of “breaking the silence.” This involved training lay counselors, educators, and health workers, and talking to chiefs and police, who are often those authorities that will come into direct contact with victims of gender violence. Masisukumeni has over the years developed a rights-­based approach. Tina Sideris, one of the founding members, reflects on the limitations of the rights paradigm, suggesting that apart from the issue of implementation, there are also problems of understanding gender rights. In academic papers, she reflects on how the act of domestic violence is interpreted within the family and how these rights-­based interventions are seen as antimen—­often leading to higher levels of violence within the family, as men attempt to assert their authority (Sideris 2007). As a consequence, Masisukumeni engaged in research on how men navigate the reconfigured gender roles of rural South Africa (Sideris 2004). The other organization, Thembalethu Home-­Based Care Centre, was established by Sally McKibbin in 1999 in response to the AIDS pandemic. Thembalethu has grown over the years to become one of the largest organizations in Nkomazi, not least because home-­based care became an important mode of intervention in the HIV/AIDS crisis in South Africa. The model is based on the analysis that the public health system cannot cater for the millions infected by the disease, and that these need to be treated and cared for at home. Thembalethu has often participated in public debates. Other organizations, politicians, and government agencies have accused Thembalethu of boosting the numbers of victims to “cash in” on the pandemic at the expense of African dignity (see also Posel 2005). Hence, throughout the time of

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fieldwork (between 2002 and 2008), Thembalethu was involved in numerous conflicts with state agencies, other organizations, the general public, and politicians—­conflicts that involved accusations of racism, corruption, politicking, and incompetence. Despite the fact that Masisukumeni has been able to stay clear of these local political agendas, it is also caught in the politics of victimhood and the necessity of navigating a complex terrain in order to represent their beneficiaries as best they can while securing institutional survival. In what follows, I explore how the organization, and to a lesser extent Thembalethu, navigate the assemblage by tracing relations and transactions with other important actors like state, donors, and population. These are, as it will become evident, not univocal actors. Rather, one can think of them as densities or concentrations within the assemblage—­what we with Deleuze and Guattari (1988: 208–­ 31) might call molar concentrations of power and predictability. These densities are constantly compromised—­ deterritorialized—­ by molecular forms of life. Molecular forms of life can range from the personal ambitions of individual actors to large societal processes animated, for instance, by the war on terror that sees development priorities turned towards the security of Northern countries (Beall et al. 2006). Within this assemblage of molar territorialization and molecular deterritorialization, we can gauge the production of victimhood as an ever-­negotiated entity, rather than as a category animated by the suffering of people in Nkomazi. I begin by tracing it in the relation between Masisukumeni and its “partners” in the global North.

Global Flows of Victimhood Donor-­NGO relations in rural South Africa are framed by global structures of development. In this section I pay particular attention to how the transition from apartheid and changes in the world of development intervention impacted on the possibilities of victimhood. After the fall of apartheid, most donors shifted their attention to the transformation of the apartheid state. As a consequence, civil society almost perished in the period between 1994 and 2000. Apart from the lack of funding, now being channeled into the state, the decline in civil society also came about as the African National Congress (ANC) moved in and became the main representative of the people—­a role previously occupied by civil society groups (Seekings 1996). Until 2000, only groups focusing on issues of security had any significant strength (Jensen

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2005). With the Treatment Action Committee (TAC) and the antiglobalization and antiprivatization groups, this was to change to some extent (Buur 2007; Rasmussen 2007). However, despite the newfound strength of civil society organizations, the general trend was still that development aid was increasingly aimed at the state, and it was increasingly targeted at the threat of HIV/AIDS, where massive amounts of funds began to enter the country after the turn of the century. The refocusing toward the state correlated with changes in the development world where there was an increased focus on good governance and strengthening state actors to enable them to assume responsibility as duty bearers. Until the early 1990s, strengthening the NGO sector was seen as a way to make aid more accountable and effective (Ottaway and Carrothers 2000). However, from the early 1990s suspicions regarding the role of civil society began to surface (Igoe and Kelsall 2005). With the introduction of new public management, the demands for documentation and administrative skills increased. For instance, the Paris Declaration from 2005, signed by one hundred of the largest donors in the world, focused on ownership, alignment, and harmonization of aid interventions to make aid more effective and in line with beneficiary priorities (Andersen and Therkildsen 2007). However, the ideals of partnership expressed in the Paris Declaration were often undermined as other priorities impacted on what could be supported. Beall et al. (2006) argue that security issues became more important after 2003, and Engberg-­Pedersen (2007) shows how national Danish priorities informed the creation of a new strategic agricultural program in Mali. These technical discussions of development aid, far from Nkomazi, illustrate the complex nature of the assemblage and the importance of relations of exteriority that include aid policy circles and Northern taxpayers. In Nkomazi, these developments—­evidencing the relations of exteriority—­ animated local negotiations of victimhood. One of the biggest donors, the German GTZ, worked primarily with government institutions. However, as one GTZ employer suggested, although she had to work with government, it was often a depressing experience. She was much more motivated by her infrequent and indirect relations to civil society groups: When I come out of these meetings [with NGOs], I feel motivated again, I feel strengthened again, because I can see these people they’re coming together and they are discussing things and they actually work in that environment there today. When I come out of a meeting

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with provincial government employees, I can be very demotivated because they’re career driven very often. (Interview, June 2006) Both Thembalethu and Masisukumeni are among the organizations this GTZ worker enjoyed working with. They also both relied heavily on external donors. Cofounder of Masisukumeni Tina Sideris said in 2008, “The funder in London [Comic Relief] is crucial for our survival. Without them we would collapse.” Reflecting on the state of funding, she complained that fewer and fewer funders were interested in funding core expenses: “Donors are increasingly funding for shorter and shorter periods, they are not funding for core expenses, which makes community-­based organizations very unsustainable and very insecure organizations.” In her analysis, the main problem was that donors were becoming too technocratic and that they were increasingly distant from the process of intervention: “A much bigger problem than demands to be able to measure outputs is that funders do not have any relationship with the projects they fund. They have very little contact with the local level, no sense of context.” The founder of Thembalethu, Sally McKibbin, agreed that funders are central: We are donor-­driven to the point where, when a donor phones you up and asks you, as an example, who is sitting on your board and what is the membership on your board. And maybe there’s three working for the NGO and who are sitting on the board and are part of the executive, and they say: “no, that’s not right.” So they want to reconstitute your board, and they will give all the reasons why like accountability. (Interview, May 2006) In the same interview, Sally goes on to talk about the requirements for receiving funding: The disparity comes in when your capacity as grassroots is not as required by the funder. For example, take funding, take money out of it, and just look at the reporting requirements from certain funders. They are requiring post-­graduate type reports. Now if you work here with people, who don’t even have matric [high school], who are struggling to speak English, how are you going to write those reports? So the stress is going to end up with one person, who happens to have all those abilities.

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Both Masisukumeni and Thembalethu construct the notion of the “good funder” who takes care to know the organization they fund and who establishes long-­term relationships with them. The “bad funder” is distant, meddling, only there shortly, focusing overly on requirements and setting the agenda for what the organization should do. Furthermore, as Sally indicated, the relation to donors depends on only a few persons in the organizations, in this case, exactly Sally and Tina. Reflecting on this dependency, Tina remarked in 2008, “It always strikes me how [staff] do not understand who these donors are, what they look like, what their agendas are, why they are donating, what they need. I would think there is very limited translation of knowledge. I would think it is much more transactional exchange.” Hence, with the exception of a few organization staff members (including the other founder of Masisukumeni, Rachel Nkosi), the world of donors evades most people working in the organizations, who see donors only as money machines, something resented by donors across the board. The relationship is then left to the ones with the education and social capital to locate, converse with, and convince donors. As only few organizations possess the social capital necessary to engage global donors, the large majority of organizations in Nkomazi can never hope to access funding in this way. However, even among those who have the capital, there is a hierarchy. Tina related the story of one incident involving an NGO in the regional capital, which had approached them to partner up on a project. Subsequently, the regional NGO used its greater access to funders (who rarely make it to Nkomazi) to access resources by using Masisukumeni’s name and credibility. This illustrated the rather conflictual relationship between different segments of civil society, depending on where in the networks of power they are. In this section, I have explored how victimhood is assembled in Nkomazi and the abilities of organizations like Thembalethu and Masisukumeni to tap into donor flows from the global north. Victimhood in Nkomazi is animated by relations of exteriority like global politics, hierarchies of power, social capital, and state formation politics. Furthermore, negotiations of victimhood are also determined by individual trajectories. The GTZ worker we met above is a good example of this. She came to the provincial capital Nelspruit in 2004 as a young woman employed by the GTZ. In Nelspruit, she became part of a social group (to which I used to belong) of expats, journalists, and NGO people who were not from the province of Mpumalanga. One of the defining characteristics of this group was a rather profound resentment toward the

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Swazi (state) elite and the provincial government in Mpumalanga. The elite were entrenched in exclusionary, local party structures and had ties to unsavory elements among former homeland elites and the lords of yesteryear, the Afrikaner rural elite. Although surely not far off the mark, this understanding of the local state arguably informed donor practices and perceptions of state and civil society of people like her (and me), and whenever she could, she would forge alliances with her friends in the NGOs, offering them small projects against the grain of the dominant GTZ-­state relationship.

States of Victimhood In local negotiations around victimhood, the South African state is central for individual residents. After the fall of apartheid, the social security systems were revamped entirely. Shrouded in conflict since their inception, social security grants as poverty alleviation have been the most important source of income for countless families without jobs and resources. According to a survey we conducted in 2006, 42 percent of income in Nkomazi originated from the social grants (child support, disability, pensions). The state was equally central for the survival of home-­based care operations and other civil society groupings to the tune of millions of dollars. Both the establishment of the grant system and the support of civil society groups have been immersed in ambiguities, shifting priorities, and politics (Ferguson 2007). Let me concentrate, however, on the support for home-­ based care. The provincial government supported former president Mbeki’s denial of the link between the HI virus and AIDS (Posel 2005), which finally ended when Jacob Zuma assumed the presidency. Nonetheless, during the period of national government denial, the provincial government still supported the home-­based care system, especially its relationship to the increasing number of orphans. As Tina Sideris comments, “The South African government provides a good illustration of the ambiguities. On the one hand, they deny the existence of AIDS, and, on the other hand, they are among the biggest funders in South Africa in relation to AIDS.” The ambiguities led to a high level of unpredictability in Masisukumeni’s relationship to the state. One staff member of Masisukumeni, noted in 2008, “We can never say that a specific department is a good department. It can change. It can depend on who you know in the department. Some are good, and some are bad.” Another staff member continued, “Now we got a big

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donation from the state, from social services, for furniture to the office, but tomorrow we don’t know.” Tina concluded, “We feel more pressure from the state than we do from the people, the donors or the global world. . . . ​We need to build links to the state structures as a matter of urgency.” Nonetheless, Masisukumeni did not rely entirely on the state for its survival. Also, Thembalethu has fallen victim to the unpredictability of the state and the shifting priorities. Sally noted, First it was care workers. Then the next year, it was to do with food gardens. And we received funding for that. After two years, that was it. And now they’re funding what they call drop-­in centers. So, for anyone, suddenly you have to start a drop-­in center in order to get funding from them. So they’ll find out that drop-­in centers won’t work, or will work or won’t work or whatever, and then that is going to be thrown out the window. The next thing that is coming in is child care forums. So, yes, they’re changing all the time. Sometimes the shifting priorities were simply matters of changing the names of programs or of realigning the projects in different departments. Sometimes, the changes in priorities indicated substantial reorientations. Unlike Thembalethu and Masisukumeni, the myriad smaller home-­based care centers or organizations do not have the capacity to react to these changes. In some villages in 2006, we counted up to four different home-­based care organizations, all vying for the support of the state. They found it hard to understand why they would receive funding one year and not another—­or why one organization would get it all. To some extent, this was due to a strategy on behalf of the state to counter dependency. Thembi, the person in charge of selecting the home-­based care centers for the provincial government, explained in 2006 that continued support produces unhealthy dependency and inhibits exit strategies. Furthermore, government officials are hugely suspicious of the ability of the small home-­based care organizations to administer the funds and of their commitment to caring for orphans rather than to the money. On top of this, the state had very little control over the money it paid out because its financial control was weak and compromised. In this way, institutionalized practices of suspicion and mistrust have replaced financial control. Arguably, allegations of corruption are ever-­present undercurrents in negotiations of victimhood, to a degree where corruption is an important organizing principle (Blundo

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and Olivier de Sardan 2006; Olivier de Sardan 1999). State employees accused NGOs of misappropriation of funds in every interview I did on the subject of home-­based care and NGO work in Nkomazi. Often the accusation was that the home-­based care organizations “invent” patients. Sally from Thembalethu had her share of corruption allegations leveled at her. It began with a conflict with a doctor who, according to Sally, was not satisfied with the fee he was offered. Subsequently, he went to the mayor of Nkomazi to complain that Thembalethu was not being transparent and that the organization was misappropriating funds. In a prolonged struggle, which Sally thought related to the control of Thembalethu, accusations of corrupt practices and improper motives (only being in it for the money) went both ways, often broadcast on the local radio. Sally was not alone in accusing the local state of corruption. Staff members from Masisukumeni also told stories of state corruption: We went to this meeting about funding, and there was this person from the provincial department of health who told me, “You must do one, two, three to your proposal, submit it directly to me, so I can get my 10 percent.” I said, “No thanks, we have our fundraiser in Joburg,” but she was going on in two different cell phones: “Yes, you must submit the proposal.” (Interview, September 2008) Another Masisukumeni staff member continued, “You can only succeed if you have political relations to the ANC.” This indicates the extent to which political connections with the ruling party are important in relation to obtaining funding from the state. However, what complicates the matter is that the ANC, and subsequently also the state, in Nkomazi is far from a monolithic entity. The story of Mr. Khosa provides an apt illustration of the extent to which the state is deterritorialized. Khosa worked as a financial manager in one of the regional hospitals and was active in the ANC Youth League. He was also involved in a tug-­of-­war with the ANC faction of the mayor of Nkomazi, which unsurprisingly was fought primarily through accusations of corruption and in the political networks that encompass the state and the ruling party. While he was quick to denounce the corruption of his opponents, Mr. Khosa had put up his sister as a front in the establishment of a home-­based care center in the village where I conducted fieldwork. The home-­based care center had managed to secure funding from the state to the tune of around million Rand over a number of years, to no small degree because of Mr. Khosa’s connections in the district

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administration. When this came to light, along with his financial mismanagement, he was fired from his job, only to be “evacuated” by allies in his faction of the ANC to a higher position in the provincial government. Apart from being a relatively substantiated account of state corruption, the story also illustrates the unsurprising point that neither state nor party can be analyzed as monolithic entities. Rather, they must be analyzed as entangled networks of power and influence through which institutions and people need to navigate to survive. In these negotiations, the separation between NGOs and the state also collapses. Mr. Khosa clearly straddled the boundary between civil society, state, and party. But so does the staff at Masisukumeni! Due to the financial instability, low wages, and lack of security of employment in the NGOs, almost all staff members attempt to secure jobs in the state apparatus in an attempt to defend their livelihood and secure a better future. This raises questions about the possibility of refusing corrupt relationships and further undermines the distinctions between state and civil society.

Local Politics of Victimhood Masisukumeni and Thembalethu construct ideas of who the people of Nkomazi are in ways that legitimize their continued work (Bourdieu 1991). While these ideas are different, they often concern the same people. Hence, Nkomazi’s population is defined by HIV/AIDS, or Nkomazi’s men and women are victims of a violently struggling patriarchy. While the statements are similar in form, and in who is the beneficiary, they each evoke a particular understanding of victimhood. Bourdieu notes that the success of those representing the people (for example, sick or battered women) depends on power relations in the political field and the extent to which the represented might recognize themselves in the representation. Masisukumeni and Thembalethu have faced difficulties in both regards but have dealt with the issues very differently because they occupy different positions within the assemblage, not least because they have different cases to present. In this way, recognized victimhood enters into a contested, local political field in which political actors strive to survive and where molar identities are yet again deterritorialized and compromised. I begin with Thembalethu. On its homepage (Thembalethu.org), medical practitioners are quoted at putting the infection rate as high as 50 percent of the population. This figure

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translates into 250,000 infected persons in Nkomazi. This kind of narrative continuously has gotten Thembalethu into trouble. In 2004, community residents and the ANC Women’s League protested outside the offices of Thembalethu against the claims that more than 30 percent were infected and that the organization was misappropriating funds by exaggerating the infection rates. Thembalethu itself suggested that the demonstrations were staged by one local community politician and reflected the jealousy of that woman. Despite the obvious differences, both sides spoke in the name of the People (Agamben 2000), and both agreed that HIV/AIDS threatened the People—­ just disagreeing on the extent of the pandemic. The end of my work in Nkomazi coincided with the government rollout of antiretroviral medication in Nkomazi, bringing to an end the denialist position that had been one of the important obstacles to treatment of HIV/ AIDS in Nkomazi. However, Thembalethu was not only fighting against the resistance of the government. Much more important was the general population’s resistance to seeing the virus as affecting them personally. I will not explore the reasons why or how people navigate around the issue of HIV/ AIDS in this paper. Suffice it to say that the people we worked with did not deny the existence of the disease in general but “refused” to acknowledge that they personally might be infected (for elaboration, see Jakobsen et al. 2008; Jensen 2007b). At the same time, damning rumors about different people and their status were pervasive. Certain (especially “Western”) illnesses would be particularly associated with HIV/AIDS, such as asthma or tuberculosis, which meant that such diseases would also be denied. None of the families that were part of the research admitted openly to having infected members, although we thought a number of them positive. In a follow-­up visit a year later, four of them had died. Instead, people sought the help of both traditional healers and the biomedical system for a number of other diseases. The denial pervasive in the general population was, of course, the object for intense advocacy on the part of Thembalethu to change perceptions of the virus and of how to act around it. In this way, the population of Nkomazi was constructed as fundamentally ill and as in denial. This is also the message Thembalethu sent to the general population in its programming and in their public performances. Thembalethu did little to frame its messages and interventions in terms of local cosmologies or fears—­apart from attempting to dispel or change them. One reason for this is clearly that the agenda of HIV/ AIDS has a very strong presence in general and that the victimhood organized around the virus is recognized broadly, also among community

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members. Hence, the denial we found in our research was not about HIV/ AIDS as such: only that individual residents were infected (Steinberg 2008). The interventions around the victimhood category of HIV/AIDS were also very well funded and, therefore, less dependent on being recognized by the target population. In fact, the denial of individual victimization even produced better funding opportunities. Masisukumeni works with local, gender-­based violence, which positions the organization in particular ways within the assemblage that, while contemporaneous to Thembalethu, nonetheless is different. Like Thembalethu, the organization is faced with serious contestation from parts of the target group they want to serve, namely, vulnerable women. Also like Thembalethu, a large part of the work is concerned with changing perceptions. Right from its inception, a crucial element in the work has been to “break the silence” around gender-­based violence. Masisukumeni lectures about gender violence in the schools; police officers and other officials are work-­shopped to change their behavior and their sensitivity toward gender violence; the organization assists police and social workers in providing documentation to secure, for instance, successful prosecutions; it makes movies and participates in public debates; the paralegal officers assist women in court. Furthermore, Masisukumeni has established a number of strategic alliances with health and social workers, police officers, and some of the traditional authorities. Despite the increasing donor and state focus on HIV/AIDS, the organization has also managed to maintain a focus on gender violence. In 2008, Tina Sideris noted that donors are “consumed with AIDS. And of course, it is a reality for our work. That is not simply being encouraged by donors to take it up. We have taken it up largely in terms of women being able to access the rights to particularly services and linked this to the issue of violence and HIV—­for example, how to access ARVs [Anti-­Retro Viral medication] for postexposure.” Hence, rather than changing priorities, Masisukumeni successfully appropriated the issue of HIV/AIDS for his own end, and every year hundreds of women come to the organization for assistance and counseling. Unlike Thembalethu, however, Masisukumeni is not in a position to alienate the society in which it works. One reason for this is that Masisukumeni challenges local patriarchal power relations. The organization is also (has had to be) more locally grounded. The organization has focused on Nkomazi, and gender-­based violence is not as prominent a global issue as HIV/ AIDS, which to some extent “insulates” Thembalethu from the impact of local politics because the latter, so to speak, has friends in far-­flung places.

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There is an irony to this. In a way, Thembalethu can engage in local politics differently because it is not territorialized in the same way. For all these reasons, Masisukumeni not only deals with gender-­based violence but has extended its work to women’s issues more broadly. Hence, it helps Mozambican families, also men, get ID cards that enable them to access to the grant system. It helps people in a range of other social issues concerning housing, grants, and health. In the annual report sent to the main funder, Comic Relief, in 2005, it is noted that about half of cases relate to social problems and grants. This suggests that Masisukumeni, to a larger extent, needs to take into consideration the target population’s demands for assistance. While Masisukumeni takes the target group’s wishes seriously, it has still faced trouble in getting the target group—­and those in the state that are mandated to assist them—­to accept Masisukumeni’s victimhood category organized around gender-­based violence. Tina again: “The people who have to support women through the process [of, for instance, a court case] will experience contradiction at every step of the way in terms of being embedded in that society and, you know, how far you can challenge your own internal discourse.” This “internal discourse” relates to the pervasive, although threatened, patriarchal structures that insist that women must obey their husbands, that posit that women and their children are “possessions” of the husband’s family, and that present violence as acceptable below a certain threshold. Patriarchy is not only embedded in cultural beliefs but also institutionalized in customary law and the rule of chiefs, of whom most residents in Nkomazi are subjects. It takes skills to maneuver in this field. As an illustration hereof, a staff member of Masisukumeni accompanied me to a hearing in the tribal court. Let me explore this in more detail, as it is an entry point to understanding how the local politics of victimhood is organized and contested. Furthermore, tracing the biography of the Masisukumeni staff member illustrates how people negotiate categories of victimhood and how life, as molecular lines of flight, constantly undermines and deterritorializes molar categories. The facts around the case were in many ways trivial in places like Nkomazi. A man, wealthy by Nkomazi standards, had died, and his wife and his family were fighting over the “loot” (houses in Johannesburg, KwaZulu-­Natal, and Nkomazi; cars; and pensions). The dead man’s family members realized that they could not win the inheritance case because that fell under legal codes that privileged the wife. However, the family, with the assistance of the tribal court, turned their attention to the wife’s refusal to honor her husband by wearing a black dress, which is a matter traditional authority feels

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mandated to police. After hours of humiliation of the wife and her family, the court decided to dissolve the marriage. Outside the tribal court, a member of the wife’s family came to me and my companion and asked, “Did you see that? Can they really do that?” My companion, ever the shrewd and skillful negotiator, said, “I don’t know anything,” looking at the tribal secretary who was watching us, and then in a low voice, “But if you go to office number 100 in the Magistrates Court, you don’t have to pay.” My companion paid tribute to the traditional authorities while alluding to the alternative, formal bureaucratic system, where the wife would get satisfaction. The case is revealing of the patriarchal structures from where the “internal discourse” that Tina mentioned above draws its strength. If it had not been for my companion, the case would have gone no further, and the wife would have had to pay substantial sums to the family and the tribal authorities. For an organization like Masisukumeni that employs women from the local community, it is more than merely a question of maneuvering treacherous waters; for most staff, their personal lives are circumscribed by patriarchy. Take my companion in the court case. While she was sitting in the court room, she was twitching and turning in the chair. This case was deeply personal to her. She had lived through the same situation recently when her husband died. At one point, she whispered, “If they get her to wear the black dress, she will die, because they are going to put that poison on it.” Somewhat taken aback, I asked, “Does everyone know that in the room—­also the chief?” “Yes,” she said, “even the chief—­and the wife also knows it.” Suddenly, I realized how frightened my companion had been a few months before. She and her husband had shared a good and loving relationship. After a beginning with violence and insistence on customary ways, the marriage had improved, also financially. She is a skilled economic operator, able to turn profits out of almost anything. He worked on the mines and was doing well. Then catastrophe struck; he was killed in a traffic accident in the car he had just bought for her. To add insult to injury, his family, with whom my companion was living, accused her of bewitching her husband. The following weeks, she had to stay home to honor her husband and to protect her belongings from theft by her in-­laws—­what they saw as the legitimate retrieval of their possessions. They also tried to turn her children against her by accusing her of murder, and they involved the traditional authorities. For weeks, she feared for her life. Another Masisukumeni staff member managed to “evacuate” her possessions. This was the culmination of a long and continuing conflict that she had had with the in-­laws. Not least because of her connections

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to Masisukumeni, she managed to emerge “victorious.” My companion had stayed long in the organization and knew that she was the victim of patriarchal structures. Her entire life had been one long heroic battle against it, and Masisukumeni had provided her with a language to resist. However, other staff members did not dispute patriarchy and the right of men to rule “within limits” in their everyday lives. And further, as Tina said after the event, “What about the countless women in Nkomazi who [do] not have the support that [my companion] had!?” In this section, I have explored the local politics of victimhood and shown how victimhood is negotiated, recognized, and made real through local political contestations. Whereas Masisukumeni was absolutely dependent on making local arrangements, Thembalethu was less vulnerable to local politics because of its globally sanctioned work on HIV/AIDS. Ironically, exactly because Thembalethu was situated differently within the victim assemblage that encompassed local politics and global aid flows, the organization had less need of the local state and community and could engage in local politics in more confrontational ways. However, to understand the assemblage, we needed to go beyond the political and the organizational. The two cases involving my companion to the tribal court illustrate the difficulties of distinguishing unambiguously between Masisukumeni staff members and its target population, as the former is quite literally caught up in a specific form of patriarchy that cannot be easily evaded.

Revisiting the Assemblage—­Beyond the Morality of Victimhood In this chapter, I have explored the conditions under which victimhood is negotiated and rendered possible and impossible in Nkomazi, South Africa. Following the conceptual notion of victimhood assemblage as introduced in the Introduction to this volume, I argued that victimhood is produced through a series of negotiations where the actors and practices are influenced by what Manuel De Landa (2006) calls relations of exteriority. These relations of exteriority constitutively undermine, unsettle, and deterritorialize what might be imagined as the stable identities of victims, perpetrators, and benefactors. Hence, what counts as victimhood is affected by politics in the global North, by state formation on the rural South African frontier, and by relations to patriarchal structures in Nkomazi’s villages. Hence, we need to pay

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attention to the complex networks of power where it is hard to determine beginning and end, center and periphery, inside and outside. Take patriarchal structures. They constitute one node of power: in the words of Deleuze and Guattari (1988), a concentration, with its own histories and trajectories. While they are undermined by the democratic transition and the formal law in room 100 in the Magistrates Court, individuals inside the state and in the NGOs and potential victims still need to count them in. NGOs threaten the rule of men, but their own staff members live in situations that are defined by traditional rule—­and they have to survive there. In this way, victimhood is not only a function of whether it be recognized or disallowed; it is the function of intense local political struggles in which state transformation processes and global trends in development coalesce—­sometimes—­with local political dynamics in a complex assemblage that is ever shifting and reconfigured through the relations of exteriority. Focusing on these relations of exteriority, and on the transactions and negotiations that are their inevitable results, might be construed as cynicism and as undermining the moral claims of victims. However, again following the lead of the Introduction, I have tried to account for the relations of exteriority inside the victimhood assemblage in a way that focuses on structural relations and dilemmas, rather than on moral or normative ideas of what civil society should be and what categories of suffering they must address. Only through focusing on dilemmas and paradoxes stemming from these negotiations can we appreciate the true value and valor of NGOs like Masisukumeni. References Agamben, Giorgio. 2000. Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Andersen, Ole Winckler and Ole Therkildsen. 2007. “Paris-­erklæringen og den internationale bistandsdagsorden.” Den Ny Verden 39, 3: 9–­18. Beall, Jo, Thomas Goodfellow, and James Putzel. 2006. “Introductory Article: On the Discourses of Terror, Security and Development.” Journal of International Development 18, 1: 51–­67. Blundo, Giorgio and Jean-­Pierre Olivier de Sardan. 2006. Everyday Corruption and the State: Citizens and Public Officials in Africa. London: Zed Books. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. London. Polity. Buur, Lars. 2007. “The Intertwined History of Security and Development: The Case of Development Struggles in South Africa.” In The Security-­Development Nexus: Expressions of Sovereignty and Securitization in Southern Africa, ed. Lars Buur, Steffen Jensen, and Finn Stepputat, 109–­31. Cape Town: HSRC. De Landa, Manuel. 2006. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. New York: Continuum.

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Negotiating Victimhood in Nkomazi, South Africa  123 Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1988. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. New York: Continuum. Engberg-­Pedersen, Lars. 2007. ”Dansk indenrigspolitik, Paris-­erklæringen og udvikling—­en harmonisk relation?” Den Ny Verden 39, 3: 45–­56. Ferguson, James. 2007. “Formalities of Poverty: Thinking About Social Assistance in Neoliberal South Africa.” African Studies Review 50, 2: 71–­86. Igoe, James and Tim Kelsall. 2005. Between a Rock and a Hard Place: African NGOs, Donors, and the State. Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press. Jakobsen, Stine, Steffen Jensen, and Henrik Rønsbo. 2008. “Diary Studies: Methods for Understanding Poor People’s Coping with Crisis After Conflict.” Praxis Paper 7, RCT, Denmark. Jensen, Steffen. 2005. “The South African Transition: From Development to Security?” Development and Change 36, 3: 551–­70. ———. 2007a. “Policing Nkomazi: Crime, Masculinity and Generational Conflicts.” In Global Vigilantes, ed. David Pratten and Atreyee Sen, 47–­68. Oxford: Hurst. ———. 2007b. ”Sundhedssystemer og Sundhedspraksisser i Nkomazi.” Den Ny Verden 39, 3: 69–­78. Latour, Henri. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Merry, Sally Engle. 2006. “Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle.” American Anthropologist 108, 1: 38–­51. Olivier de Sardan, Jean-­Pierre. 1999. “A Moral Economy of Corruption in Africa?” Journal of Modern African Studies 37, 1: 25–­52. Ottoway, Marina and Thomas Carrothers. 2000. Funding Virtue: Civil Society Aid and Democracy Promotion. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Posel, Deborah. 2005. “Sex, Death and the Fate of the Nation: Reflections on the Politicization of Sexuality in Post-­Apartheid South Africa.” Africa 75, 2: 125–­53. Rasmussen, Jacob. 2007. “Struggling for the City: Evictions in Inner City Johannesburg.” In The Security-­Development Nexus: Expressions of Sovereignty and Securitisation in Southern Africa, ed. Lars Buur, Steffan Jensen, and Finn Stepputat, 174–­92. Cape Town: HSRC Press. Seekings, Jeremy. 1996. “The Decline of South Africa’s Civic Organizations, 1990–­1996.” Critical Sociology 22, 3: 135–­57. Sideris, Tina. 2004. “ ‘You have to change and you don’t know how!’ Contesting What It Means to Be a Man in a Rural Area of South Africa.” African Studies 63, 1: 29–­49. ———. 2007. “Post-­Apartheid South Africa, Gender, Rights and the Politics of Recognition, New Avenues for Old Forms of Violence.” In The Security Development Nexus: Expressions of Sovereignty and Securitization in Southern Africa, ed. Lars Buur, Steffen Jensen, and Finn Stepputat, 233–­50. Cape Town: HSRC Press. Steinberg, Jonny. 2008. Three Letter Plague. Cape Town: Jonathan Ball.

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Chapter 6

Between Recognition and Care: Victims, NGOs and the State in the Guatemalan Postconflict Victimhood Assemblage Henrik Ronsbo and Walter Paniagua

What is the relationship between the recognition of victims and the reproduction of modern forms of state power? What are the relations between care for victims and the perpetuation of legitimacy? Is the victim somehow beyond language and resistance, displaced to a space of silence as suggested by Scarry (1985)? Or is the victim the locus for the generation of power, as suggested by Bataille (1991) and Sofsky (1997)? Fassin and Rechtman (2009) argue that, indeed, there is a relationship between power and victimhood and that this relationship should be understood in registers of veridiction and morality, in a formation they conceive of as a “regime of truth-­telling.” According to them, “truth” about violence is now enunciated in the discourse of “psychological trauma,” and, together with the emergence of a modality of everyday sensibility toward the wounded, a new “condition of victimhood” has emerged. This new regime of veridiction shapes relationships with the past and the present, because the notion of trauma enables an understanding of the self in relation to a wounded presence. In a sense the language of “psychological trauma has enabled us to give a word to this relationship” (2009: 276), in such a way that trauma is becoming “denaturalized and the victim repoliticized” (xii). It is this they refer to as “the empire of trauma” and “the condition of victimhood.” But what is the scope of this empire? Is it global, or is it merely French? And what is its nature? Is it tightly integrated, or is it

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merely a loose articulation of connections, transactions, and interbeddings? By exploring the case of psychosocial assistance to survivors of the Guatemalan genocide, we intend to engage these broader issues while simultaneously answering the more specific question regarding the relationships between recognition and care. This analysis suggests that Fassin and Rechtman overstate the power and salience of the empire of trauma, at least in relation to the case of Guatemala. The Guatemalan case of psychosocial work with survivors of genocide is paradigmatic in three ways. First, the psychosocial apparatuses of veridiction (to remain within the confines of Foucauldian parlance used by Fassin and Rechtman) that unfolded in Guatemala represent a specific Latin American branch of psychosocial interventions (Ronsbo, Jessen, and Modvig 2011), different from, though historically related to, those explored by Fassin and Rechtman. Second, the Guatemalan postconflict intervention in which psychosocial assistance appeared has been one of the most comprehensive and best funded of its kind, and, as a consequence thereof, it enables us to explore the full gamut of relationships between rule and care. Finally, the Guatemalan case enables us to explore the relationships between rule and care in a postcolonial setting where issues of race and political representation are constant concerns defining what is a “wounded presence.” In short, the Guatemalan case enables us to explore a particular history of victimhood, thereby allowing us to answer more general questions regarding the relationship between rule, on the one hand, and care, on the other. Our ethnographic research has explored, described, and documented psychosocial discourse and practice in a variety of different ways. These include the ways in which beneficiaries of postconflict reparation navigate and understand the benefits they may access, how psychosocial workers produce knowledge regarding their beneficiaries, and how they facilitate and support the social recognition of loss, traumatization, and illness in postconflict Guatemala. We have paid attention to how psychosocial practices and interventions shape a larger network of NGOs, state institutions, and civil society organizations, and how visibility and presence are generated for victims from the Guatemalan genocide. In these different fields, we define psychosocial practices as those practices that accompany forensic, political, development-­ oriented, and legal work that target the relationship between the psychic and the sociopolitical environs, whether this takes place in the space of the subject, the family, the community, or the nation. In Guatemala, such work includes therapeutic, rehabilitative, or reparative work that addresses the

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trauma and loss generated by the genocide, focusing not only on individual symptoms per se but on the social consequences of traumatic experiences within mostly indigenous communities. These include alcoholism, increased levels of violence, the isolation of particular individuals, and communal silence regarding who committed atrocities and abuses. They also focus on the psychic consequences of the social, economic, or political phenomena characteristic of postconflict Guatemala, such as continued racism, impunity for the actual and intellectual perpetrators of the genocide of Mayan peoples, and the widespread poverty that continues to mark the lives of the majority of Guatemalans. While these activities characterize psychosocial interventions globally, the Guatemalan organizations are keenly aware that they practice psy-­work in an ominous postcolonial context characterized by continuing racism and authoritarianism. It is these practices and different actors—­also including a range of nonhuman actants—­that we propose to term the Guatemalan postconflict victim assemblage. As outlined in the introduction, we see the notion of assemblage as useful for understanding victimhood politics because it enables us to understand how a set of actors are formed historically; following this, we have structured the analysis in three parts. First, we explore the emergence of psychosocial care in the aftermath of violence in Guatemala. Then, in the second part, we trace the practices and strategies of those who supposedly benefit from postconflict care. In the final section, we follow those who care and explore the implicit, internal structuring of their work through an analysis of a conference, which constitutes an important node in the global production of victimhood. The analysis shows that, although the postconflict care should inaugurate a new pluri-­ethnic Guatemala, it reproduces many of the racial and social structures it set out to change.

The Emergence of Psychosocial Care As the Guatemalan conflict drew to a close during the middle of the 1990s, it became clear that it had been one of the bloodiest conflicts in the Western Hemisphere in the twentieth century. More than 200,000 persons had been killed, more than 500 indigenous communities annihilated by Guatemalan security forces, and as many as a million individuals displaced. The history of the internal conflict stretches back into the expansion of commercial coffee production in the late nineteenth century. Throughout the

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Highlands, indigenous landholding communities were dispossessed as non-­ indigenous Spanish-­speaking Ladinos took control of local government and agricultural land (McCreery 1994). By the 1940s, a reformist military junta started an agrarian reform process, abruptly brought to a close by the 1954 U.S.-­backed military coup (Handy 1994). Responding to the rolling back of agrarian reform, a group of young army officers started an insurgency in eastern Guatemala, which, by the early seventies, was defeated by the militarized state. Meanwhile, the central and western parts of the country, dominated by a largely indigenous population, underwent rapid transformations in social relationships, which created massive support for different social movements, spanning from political parties to religious organizations and trade unions. These pressured for civil and political rights for the large group of indigenous Guatemalans, leading to the start of a new insurgency, this time in the heavily indigenous Highlands of western Guatemala. The participation of indigenous communities in the insurgency is still matter of fierce debate among social scientists, some arguing that indigenous communities were caught in the crossfire between the army and ruthless guerrilla forces exploiting the camouflage provided by civilian populations (Stoll 1993). Others argue that rural communities participated in the social movements of the seventies, albeit that they may have changed their historical narratives subsequently, and that the inability of changing military regimes to accommodate demands for social change—­in a regional context of massive social turmoil including impeding revolutions in El Salvador and Nicaragua—­led the army to plan and execute a scorched earth counterinsurgency war in which the extermination of indigenous communities was a key element. In many cases it seems that indigenous communities themselves were fractured along religious, socioeconomic and generational lines, some sectors favoring the insurgency, while others drew support from the military (Schirmer 1999). By the end of the 1980s the Highlands had been “pacified” but at tremendous human cost: more than 200,000 killed and more than a million displaced (ODHAG and Proyecto Interdiocesano 2000). The displacement had a massive impact on the country’s indigenous culture, leading to the emergence of a pan-­Maya identity fueling the emergence of a vibrant postconflict civil society (Wilson 1995) with numerous NGOs and community-­based organizations organizing communities and individuals affected by the internal conflict. As international donor money became available under the MINUGUA mandate (the UN mission to Guatemala, 1994–­2004), work for the material,

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social, and psychological reconstruction of indigenous communities began. Psychosocial interventions in Guatemala started already during the late 1980s as small experiments with group therapy under the tutelage of the Catholic Church in the Highlands of Guatemala.1 These were experimental groups, where members worked with therapists through their individual and collective experiences from the conflict, working through feelings of guilt and fear to reconstitute communities and enable people to recognize their own suffering in that of their neighbors. The intervention model was still not clearly defined, but the Jesuit social-­psychologist Ignacio Martín-­Baró—­killed by the Salvadoran armed forces during the November 1989 offensive in San Salvador—­was one of the key inspirations, his work building on the liberation pedagogy of Paolo Freire.2 But these early experiments with psychosocial interventions also echoed other interventions, notably the group-­based catechist activities of the 1960s, the period when liberation theology and the “option of the poor” was the basis for the dioceses’ work (Manz 2004). By the middle of the 1990s, this modality of group interventions had become an integral part of the work of the Catholic Church’s Truth Commission. It was through these groups that the thousands of narratives that went into the REMHI (Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica, Recuperation of Historical Memory) project were collected, detailing losses and atrocities. Later, when the REMHI report had been published, these groups became the foci for the devolution of the narrative. At this point, other NGOs (secular, professional, victim-­based, political, and Mayan) also assembled teams with psychologists, social workers, and mental health promoters, which started to work with victims from the internal conflict. This group of NGOs provided psychosocial accompaniment (acompañamiento psico-­social) and assistance to communities, groups, and individuals as exhumations and reburials (Sanford 2003) were undertaken along with legal proceedings, so as to provide support for witnesses and victims. NGOs focused on issues such as the local authoritarian traditions epitomized in the Patrullas de Autodefensa Civil3 (Civil Defense Patrols), or they focused on local healers with knowledge of Mayan symbolism (cosmovision Maya), seen as an important resource in processes of healing (Consejo Editorial ODHAG 2008) and remaking the social fabric (tejido social). Psychosocial accompaniment was seen as a form of intervention that bridged between the cosmovision Maya and the psy-­technologies. Foreign donors4 supported this view and committed funds to the development and implementation of these interventions, assisting in the long-­term support of

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key NGOs such as the FAFG (Fundación de Antropología Forense de Guatemala) and ODHAG (Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala), to mention two. By the turn of the millennium, this new configuration of techniques, known as psychosocial interventions (intervenciones psico-­ sociales), gained increasing momentum through a postdoctoral program in social psychology and political violence at the University of San Carlos and a two-­year education program for promoters of mental health, both supported by Swedish Save the Children (Rädda Barnen). The publication of scholarly works, as well as intervention manuals and CDs providing audio-­visual documentation of particular interventions, strengthened the dissemination of this concept of intervention. Rather than understanding this as an imperial discourse of governance, we suggest that psychosocial interventions proliferated in postconflict Guatemala because they were able to link a social psyche of loss with archives on birth and death, with technologies for the production, transcription and processing of narratives, and with field-­and laboratory-­based forms of collecting and describing human remains. Each of these technologies was already in existence; but, as they all appeared in a coherent plane of expression, they came to mold affects, encode positions of perpetrator and victim, and open up spaces of victimhood, thereby unfolding a larger postconflict assemblage. In the following section, we will provide a short outline of how this particular history of victimhood developed in the Ixhil Area in western Guatemala, which was particularly affected by the war. We will pay particular attention to how the National Program of Rehabilitation (Programa Nacional de Resarcimientos) came to play a pivotal role in the unfolding of a postconflict assemblage, as did the work beneficiaries had to perform to access the program, in terms of acquiring paper and dead bodies to prove their legibility. All these different elements were brought together, partly through coincidence, partly through design, to constitute what we call the postconflict victimhood assemblage.

Bureaucracy of Loss: Labor and Dead Bodies The Programa Nacional de Resarcimiento (PNR) occupies a large three-­story building just five minutes’ walk from the main square of Nebaj, a town of some 18,000 inhabitants in the Western Guatemalan Highlands.5 The importance of the PNR is underlined by the fact that its building, together with the

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colonial church, the municipal building, and a hotel that caters for foreign tourists, is among the tallest in town. With its three stories, it hovers above the surrounding houses, all built in the typical Central American style of one-­ story houses with white chalked adobe walls and red tile roofs. Nebaj is the economic and administrative center of the Ixhil Area (northern Quiché), whose population of around 100,000 persons is settled in the three municipalities of Nebaj, Chajul, and Cotzal. The population serviced by Nebaj is overwhelmingly indigenous in origin—­as many as 90 percent speaking one or more American Indian language. Around 70 percent live in rural areas. This area was the hardest hit during the conflict in the late seventies and early 1980s. From the mid-­1980s onward, it became a recipient of massive militarized government investments in infrastructure and resettlement programs, and, from the mid-­1990s, MINUGUA had an office functioning in the town to monitor the human rights situation and mitigate conflicts. In line with the continued importance the area had in the development of a postconflict intervention model, Nebaj became a test area when the Programa Nacional de Resarcimiento (National Reparation Program for Victims of the Internal Conflict) was being piloted in the late 1990s. The staff at the PNR office in Nebaj is made up by a group of Ixhil-­speaking professionals. Some were employed by the MINUGUA mission; others have worked with NGOs or victim associations, and a few come straight from a university with degrees, such as primary school teachers or promoters of mental health. PNR’s key mission in Nebaj is to help survivors deposit their declaraciones with the office, which subsequently sends these for evaluation in Ciudad Guatemala. The declaraciones are two-­page statements with key data on the circumstances of the death, personal data on the deceased, and data on the family members who claim the benefits, accompanied by certified photocopies of the relevant personal documents, known as la papelaría or the paper work. Attending the beneficiaries is largely carried out through the mobile teams and only on rare occasions do meetings take place in the offices in Nebaj. Typically made up of three to five case workers, these teams visit the communities of the region to collect claims from individuals living there. In the communities as sites of massacres, a bureaucracy of loss developed. On the basis of lists of massacres drawn from the truth and reconciliation commissions, the PNR has drawn a large map of the region with a prioritized list of communities, in which priority is given to the most severely hit. Severity is understood as deriving from the number of civilians killed in a given

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locality. Each of these rural communities, identified through a local case number, is then rated with an indicator from one to four, representing the certainty with which the described event happened. Adjacent to these numerical forms of classification, we find descriptions that incorporate the place names, the alleged perpetrators, the legal definition of the violation (for example, extrajudicial killings and massacres), and, in cases where this exists, the verified names of victims but also information regarding nonidentified individuals and short iconic statements regarding the event, such as “executed twenty persons,” “threw bodies on fire,” “united 69 persons, brought them in front of the church and executed them.” In the communities selected through this classification scheme, members of the mobile teams are supposed to inform the elected community leaders (autoridades) about the intervention of PNR in terms of purpose and target. PNR provides information about the process and the criteria for inclusion and exclusion in the reparation program, a key criterion for inclusion being that one has the death certificate of the deceased family member and that the beneficiaries can demonstrate first degree—­ immediate—­ kinship relation with the victim. When the criteria had been fulfilled, payment would be forthcoming. Yet payment did not come simply as a result of the suffering experienced. Much of the program’s impact in the everyday lives of people in the Ixhil Area was in the time and costs incurred in producing the required papelaría. In many cases, the deceased were not registered either with birth or death certificates in the civil registries. In other cases, people had migrated into the region in the decades prior to the internal conflict and were, therefore, not registered in the municipalities of the Ixhil Area. Each of these situations required that beneficiaries spend entire days traveling from remote communities to the municipal centers of the region and then waiting in line in the understaffed offices for days before the clerk returned an answer, and then such answers were often frustrating: the person did not belong to this municipality, the request form had been filled out incorrectly, and it would cost an additional 30 quetzals to do the work. This work is known as “trabajar la papelería,” literally to work the papers: work that for many people had costs so elevated that these in themselves became an exclusion factor. Throughout our interviews with clients of the PNR, the notion of “paper” was constantly associated with the notions of working, searching, asking and paying for. In these transactions money often changed hands, 10, 30, and as much as 1,000 Quetzals for the right photocopy of a family member’s entry in

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the civil registry certified by a municipal clerk.6 But the work rarely ended there. In many cases, certified photocopies were returned from the PNR with comments regarding their inadmissibility, that the papers did not demonstrate first degree family relations, as one person put it: “They threw my paper-­work in the dust bin.” This suggests that benefits are, in fact, difficult to secure, even if one is entitled to them. This seems to have been ignored in much literature on the PNR. For marginalized rural dwellers in the Ixhil Highlands, inclusion in the national reparation program often came at high costs of personal investment in terms of time and money. One informant put it this way: I was working for my five family members, but when they [PNR] told me that they could not accept that many, I said to myself: “why should I then spend on them when it will work out?” so I left one of my sons [a killed son] to my nephew, who was going to work his parents and he asked me for help with them, and I’ll do it, but he will reimburse all my costs and this I am working on right now. By couching the relationship of state-­victim relationship in the language of work, it seems that the beneficiaries reject the state’s efforts to claim legitimacy through the PNR. Their references to the abuses and misunderstandings they encounter in the meetings with the PNR add to this interpretation, suggesting that, while beneficiaries accept the monetary compensation, they do not see it as part of a larger moral transaction between themselves as citizens and the PNR as a state entity. Some beneficiaries were even unclear about the state-­ness of PNR as an entity. A different way of exploring the larger postconflict assemblage in the Ixhil Highlands is by analyzing forensic exhumations of clandestine graves from the internal conflict. For many potential beneficiaries of the PNR, one of the easiest ways to access benefits was through findings from exhumations of the graves of family members, when ID cards or DNA gave proof to family relations. Despite the problems in implementing the PNR program, largely due to political in-­fights, the number of forensic exhumations undertaken in the Ixhil Area rose significantly from the mid-­1990s onward (see Figure 1). From 1992 to 2010, there was a marked rise in the number of bodies exhumed, with peaks around the end of the 1990s and in the middle of the 2000s. Both peaks reflect the dynamic donor situation in which NGOs worked. The early peak

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coincides with single donors (USAID, GTZ, NORAD, DANIDA) supporting single NGOs and PNR pretrials in the region. The peak around 2005 corresponds with support for broader postconflict interventions, through basket funds managed by the UNDP in which the former single donors now contributed. Finally, and not the least important, the data on exhumed bodies seem to reveal that, as the postconflict NGOs passed from working with UNDP-­ managed basket funds to working as directly subcontracted NGOs under PNR (after 2007), activities quickly went into steep decline. It seems that, as donors reached their end goal, a single bureaucracy of loss organized under the Guatemalan state in the form of a strong PNR, the structure almost collapsed. But the functioning of the program was influenced not only by the beneficiaries’ ability to work the papers and the ability of the PNR to manage operations. The overall reach of the reparation program was also influenced by previously implemented compensation schemes for ex-­members of the Civil Self20Defense Patrols, known as the ex-­PACs. During the period 2005–­2006, a large program had paid monetary compensation to thousands of men who had participated in the PACs. These men were now excluded from claiming benefits as victims. 300 250 200 150 100 50 0

92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 0

1 2

3

4 5

6 7

8

9 10

Figure 1. Bodies exhumed in Ixhil Area, 1992–2010, annual and two-year moving average.

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The implementation of the two large state programs, one for perpetrators and one for victims, created a distinction within communities that in some places failed to resonate with the local development of the conflict and the subtle ways that perpetration of violence and the suffering of loss were entangled during the years of internal conflict. Many males who lost family members had been forced to participate in the PACs and had quite legitimately claimed their compensation. Now they were excluded from the PNR compensation scheme for this reason. Further dimensions of conflict were being molded inside extended families that did receive economic reparation. Since reparation was designed to follow the deceased, survivors would have to find ways to acknowledge one another’s demands, making agreements on how to divide the 25,000 Quetzals paid by the state. There were many cases where one family member claimed the entire payment, rather than sharing it among the legally designated beneficiaries. As we outlined in the Introduction, it is a widely shared assumption that psychosocial work shapes a larger structure of governance. We may even understand this as an empire or a structure of veridiction. Our cursory analysis of the work of the PNR in the Ixhil Area has served to demonstrate that there is nothing smooth and striated about the unfolding of large humanitarian or human rights-­oriented interventions in complex rural societies. Individuals, localities, and the region as such is stratified, talked about, and stabilized through the systematic enumeration and recognition of human rights abuses, in a move we may refer to as one of vertical inclusion. However, it is clear from our analysis that the terms of such inclusion are immediately and concomitantly shaped by emotions, expectations, claims, and counterclaims as they unfold in the multiplex relations among beneficiaries themselves and between beneficiaries and the state institutions. It seems that such policies of vertical inclusion deposit at base, or seen from the opposite angle, in the space from which it arises, neither a singular unitary discourse on loss or trauma nor a shared language of a victimhood condition. Rather what emerge are complex fields of affects and conflicts as derivatives of the NGO-­driven recognition of victims. What is being shaped seems to be a coherent plane of expression in which substances such as bones, other human remains, human rights narratives of loss, the hard work creating papers, the monetary exchanges between clerks and citizens, and the effects of anger and fear are co-­ present. This is what constitutes the postconflict victimhood assemblage in the Ixhil Area. If, however, we accept the analysis that such an assemblage is a mêlée of

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affects, conflicts and tensions, then the subsequent question seems to be how has it been possible to maintain the notion of a unified mode of implementation. Put differently, if the verticality of recognition and care shapes conflictive affects at the level of beneficiaries and local politics, how has it been possible to maintain the notion of a nationally encompassing psychosocial project? To answer this question, we have to engage the encompassing narrative of psychosocial transformation developed as it was, far from the Ixhil Area.

The Encompassing Narrative of Psychosocial Transformation The opening session at the First World Conference on Psycho-­Social Accompaniment to Victims of Forced Disappearances, held in the city of Antigua, Guatemala, in 2007, provides a useful starting point for looking at how the field of psychosocial interventions has given rise to an effect of encompassment, stability, inclusion, and totality. The conference has around 150 participants, more than one hundred from Latin American countries (among these a very large group from Guatemala), and the rest from Europe, Asia, and Africa. In many ways, the conference was an important space for Guatemalan psychosocial organizations to demonstrate their accomplishments to their global peers and donors, a performative space in which the encompassing psychosocial narrative could be enacted. More than any other place during the conference, the opening session fulfilled the function of accounting for the “Guatemalan experience.” The session started with three European psychologists working as program managers in some of the key organizations in the area of psychosocial assistance in Guatemala. The subject of their talk was “the Latin American experience” with exhumations and psychosocial accompaniment. Following their talk came a presentation by a Ladino forensic anthropologist from FAFG, the organization that undertakes all exhumation of victims from the internal armed conflict. The final panel in the opening session saw five Maya mental-­health promoters present their individual learning processes, underlining the importance of the institutional training they had received at the Diplomado de Salud Mental Comunitaria and how this had influenced their work with their own and their neighboring communities. The three sessions represented key figures and movements in the

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narrative of Guatemalan psychosocial transformation. Each of them fulfills a role, each actor is supposed to make particular gestures and moves in the sequence that accompanies (acompañar) the traumatized and divided locality (comunidad) on the road from the search for the anonymous dead to the encounter of the living, as the title runs on a recently published book on Guatemalan exhumations and psychosocial work Tote suchen Leben finden (Looking for the dead, finding the living). In this process of transformation, the individual resident of a locality and member of the indigenous community is authorized and validated, through recognizing the embeddedness of the survivor within a territorial communal world. This locality reached out to claim recognition as a community in the pluri-­ethnic nation that Guatemala will be in the future. The end of the narrative thus coincides with the recognition of the subject of the indigenous community as on one hand an individual survivor, dependent on her community and her cosmovision Maya for the realization of her participation in the nation, and also the recognition of the cosmovision Maya and the indigenous community as a political subject and survivor of the genocidal and racist Ladino state. We can only observe the psychosocial intervention as it operates through the techniques of exhumation, group therapy, identification of the remains, and the reburial of dead family members. However, the psychosocial intervention is plausible and credible only because of the references and gestures toward and authorization received from the state institutions that frame the national politics of postconflict, the pluri-­ethnic Guatemala-­in-­the-­making. It is from this seesaw movement—­between the local techniques of intervention (excavation and group therapy) and the gestures toward an imaginary space of a reconciled nation that builds on the life force of the authentic indigenous community—­that psychosocial interventions draw their raison d’être and their telos. The question is how the notion of post-­traumatic stress can produce a new authentic citizen in pluri-­ethnic Guatemala when combined with the archeological techniques of excavation and the forensic techniques of identification applied in a particular site. What claims and gestures are made in this process? When we pose the question this way, it is clear that two related leaps of faith are required of the persons involved in this process. One regards the transformation of dead bones into murdered citizens, and the other involves the production of the community as a site that can be generative of the pluri-­ ethnic nation. For constructs such as traumatic experience and traumatic stress to be productive of national citizens, they must be inserted into institu-

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tions. They must be brought to the point where they can be seen as regulating practices and sequences of practices. To understand how this takes places through the narrative of psychosocial intervention, we have to revisit the opening session at the conference in Antigua. As the three Europeans leave the podium, a Guatemalan forensic anthropologist takes over. He is the technician of hard, dead human tissue, not the soft tissue we are told, which is the area of coroners; forensic anthropologists only do skeletons, clothes, and other artifacts found in and around the grave. This is technical and meticulous work. It takes time and requires concentration, but is detached from the survivors. The technicians go to a mass grave (fosa), work some weeks, travel back to a hotel, maybe then go to a different excavation; they work in the national space of massacre sites as defined by the truth commissions. Their findings are published in their journal; each excavation is described in terms of the preconflict history of the locality, the massacre that took place, the number of graves, their positions, the positions of the bodies and artifacts within the graves, the number of identified bones, the names of these and the numbers of the unidentified, and, in some cases, even the number of individuals not found. At the conference, other forensic anthropologists suggest that, on the basis of patrones de muerto (causes of death), we may be able to predict the location of undiscovered bodies. If AA was disappeared from place 32 at so-­ and-­so time, she will most likely have ended up in place 43. Genocide is mapped through geographical information systems (GIS) and thus rendered predictable. Other physical anthropologists—­working on urban sites and populations—­suggest that a totally different methodology must be employed in these spaces. They argue that the model that emerges from the exhumations in Guatemala’s indigenous communities is a very particular one linked to the face-­to-­face community and that the death suffered in non-­indigenous areas is different. It is obvious, hence, that a national archive of cases and DNA material deposited by survivors has to be established to handle these noncommunal forms of death. The forensic anthropologist, through his work on the artifacts in the graves, produces the basis for the psychosocial intervention. He produces the artifacts that subsequent affects are attached to. He is the trickster of the psychosocial narrative; in his hands appear the bones to which pain, memory, rumor, and oral history become attached. He is the agent of ritual transformation. It appears almost as if he can talk to the bones, he can hear what they say; from his handling of the bones, potential life emerges, yet he is himself

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unable to nurture and create it. While he may be able to locate bones and artifacts, he is unable to manage the excesses of affects attached to them. The physical anthropologist appears in the limbo between the anonymous victims of massacres and the deceased citizens recognized and mourned by their kin and neighbors. As the Maya women begin their presentation, we are drawn out of this limbo. We are moved from the intervention on death to the intervention on life. The four women represent different “Mayan experiences” and “cosmologies,” each of them trained as a mental health promoters in the San Carlos Diplomado de Salud Mental Comunitaria. They speak with tension and tremor in their voices; they talk about individual losses but also about professional accomplishment. Unfamiliar with the large audience of academic professionals, they make their way through their individual presentations, seconded by the head of the program, a middle-­aged Guatemalan Ladina. They talk about the accompaniment process, how the recognition of the dead enables the living to move on and how they moved on as they accompanied others. Members of the audience are deeply moved, some having tears running down their cheeks. How should we understand this presentation? What is the role of psychosocial knowledge in a postconflict nation? It seems to make two different but related claims. The first claim is about absence and negativity: never in the colonial and independent history of Guatemala has there been a project that enables “indigenous peoples” to realize themselves as individual, communal, and national subjects. Meanwhile, it also makes a positive claim, which is that, through the bureaucracy of loss, anthropologist and psychologist can facilitate that subjects speak truth to the state. The psychosocial project and the attendant disciplines of anthropology in the forensic, linguistic, and social compartments hold the promise of generating a truth not only of the thirty-­six years of civil war, including the artifacts deposited from this, but also about the five hundred years of violence that preceded it. The promise of the presentations is that only through these particular epistemologies and their ability to read the artifact and the affect they generate through field work in localities can proper citizenship be created in Guatemala. We should, however, ask ourselves what kind of citizenship these epistemologies are talking about. What is the relationship between the individual and the state that is being recreated by the NGOs? The organization of the panel gives us some hints in this regard. First of all, it is a world that is segregated in terms of linguistic resources, religious

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and other beliefs, attributes that segregate the practitioners in terms of proximity to the matter that is being worked. It is no coincidence that the sweeping continental statements regarding psychosocial interventions and the Latin American experience were being made by the European organizers of the conference. From their professional vantage point, they were able to claim authorship to universal truth. Within this larger vision, the Ladino technician working the artifacts and the Mayan promoters working the affect had each their role in the production of the truthful story of the Guatemalan history. Pluri-­ethnicity is, thus, not only a recurrent word in the programmatic and didactic material being circulated: it is also a principle that organizes professional practices. One may ask why linguistic competence becomes the key principle in the segregation of practitioners working in Guatemala. Most professions tend to exteriorize the issue of translation, posing it as a problem that can be solved independently of the technical intervention in consideration. That was the case in the TRC process in South Africa (Buur 2000) and is in general considered to be the norm in psychosocial assistance globally. In fact there are recurrent references in the literature to the danger of using “native therapists” in the rehabilitation work with torture survivors. They represent uncontrollable dangers of transference and countertransference, are gates of possible contamination, yet in the case of Guatemala it has been considered pivotal that the promotores are “native speakers.” They stand for and represent the Mayan localities in the psychosocial project of an encompassing pluri-­ethnic nation building, speaking the language of the survivors, helping them live and grow through the trauma they have suffered, whereas the forensic anthropologist is a Ladino, a technician working the artifact of the past. This racialized segmentation process has interesting effects on non-­ Mayan Guatemalan psychologists, who overwhelmingly identify themselves as mestizos rather than ladinos, indexing that they are “closer” to the indigenous project and its creation of life, than they are to the ladino project of exhumation and death. The organization and content of the opening panel thus presents on one hand what we see as the founding narrative of psychosocial interventions. Its scope is all encompassing, and its structure is one of transformation: from the ossified human remains in mass graves, through excavation and therapy, to the national and all-­encompassing production of a pluri-­ethnic citizen-­ survivor. It is as if, in this narrative, the gaps between different scales in the specter of state territoriality are miraculously closed. The narrative becomes

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the vehicle that links the locality as a site for the production of truth regarding affect and artifact and an imaginary national process defined as healing, recognition, and empowerment. Ironically, it does this on one simple premise: do not disturb the racial structure of the republic! We still encounter a rigid separation between racialized professional groups that fulfill very different functions within the psychosocial apparatus. Indigenous people are authorized to speak their own histories by Ladino and mestizo psychologists, who, in turn, are authorized by the Continental European outlook that is able to point to the crucial findings in a decade-­long history of interventions in Guatemala and beyond. Foundational for the maintenance of this structure is the policing of racial boundaries as these take place in the everyday work of organizations, in which Mayan psychologists have to dress as mestizos to be recognized as psychologists and Mayan promotores of mental health feel their attachment to professional organizations is always premised on their ethnic bodies and, therefore, more tenuous than that of their mestizo co-­workers.

In Lieu of Conclusions The Guatemalan case is paradigmatic for understanding how histories of the victimhood condition are generated within the postconflict assemblage. First, Guatemala received massive international aid and professional assistance in the implementation of the program that followed the Peace Accords. Second, it built its intervention model not on imported forms of knowledge but on modes of intervention developed over three decades of work. Despite these favorable conditions, it was clear from the analysis that conditions in the Ixhil Area during the first decade of the twenty-­first century were far from resembling what has been termed an empire of trauma or alternatively a form of therapeutic governance. Instead, we argue that such terms seem to overemphasize the stability of the formation in question. What emerges instead is akin to an assemblage of conflicting and competing histories and elements, where the outcome is not given. By exploring postconflict psychosocial interventions in Guatemala in general, focusing on the work of the PNR in the Ixhil Area, we have argued that the formation of a particular form of victimhood could be explored and understood much better as interbeddings of two opposite forces, which we explored in subsequent sections of this chapter. First, we explored what we have called the bureaucracy of loss, which we understood through the ana-

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lytical lens of the verticality of the state as the state’s ability to create itself in a distance to society, to assert its legitimacy against and above social relations. However, people did not see the relationship with the PNR as a victim-­ benefactor relationship or as a state-­citizen relationship. Rather, beneficiaries saw their relationship to the PNR in ways that resonate with an unpredictable patron, one involving work, manipulation, and even elements of humiliation. Likewise, we suggested that it was doubtful that benefactors appreciated or shared the logics of the bureaucracy of loss with which the PNR and its related NGOs worked. Irrespective of the subjects’ ability to perceive of a nonintentional logic, it could be argued that the sheer materiality and size of the bureaucracy of loss made it generate its own dynamic, a nonintentional logic nested in particular modes of veridiction, the exhumations of illegal graves, leading to identification of victims and creating demands for reparations. But as a simple proxy such as the number of exhumations in the Ixhil Area seems to suggest, the regime of veridiction was far less efficient than would otherwise be assumed. In fact, the larger postconflict apparatus seemed to function in a highly uneven process, with massive expansions and rapid declines during the decade in question that followed global funding flows quite closely. The overarching framework of the intervention was provided by a narrative of psychosocial transformation that gestured toward an omnipresent postconflict apparatus, transforming victims and survivors into citizens of the pluri-­ethnic Guatemalan state. Our analysis of this formation explored the racialized grounds upon which it rested, in particular, the imagery of a unified postconflict Guatemala in which different people collaborated to create a new a pluri-­ethnic democracy. The reality behind these images was more contradictory, however. The pluri-­ethnic imagery through which psychosocial interventions rendered themselves understandable was, in many cases, rejected by people within the organizations that practiced these same interventions. In this sense, NGOs became containers of a past racial structure, while simultaneously pregnant with new forms of life, as in the case of younger Guatemalan psychologists who refer to themselves as mestizos, unlike the earlier concept of ladinos, signaling a closeness to the country’s indigenous cultures. By contrast with the stability implied in concepts such as a regime of veridiction, or governmentalities, we understand the formation we have explored in this paper as an assemblage, a feeble conjoining of surfaces, akin to what Nancy has called a mêlée: “There is mêlée, crisscrossing, weaving, exchange, sharing, and it is never a single thing, nor is it ever the same . . . ​there

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are meetings and encounters; there are those who come together and those who spread out, those who come into contact and those who enter into contracts, those who concentrate and those who disseminate, those who identify and those who modify (2000: 150–­51). The notion of assemblage enables us to highlight the transactional character of the field of victimhood, the feeble relations between different state practices, the forms of knowledge produced and maintained by NGOs, and the often diverging and subterfugal forms of engagement that clients have with these forms of creating legitimacy. It explains why, in a short, dense period of time, it seemed as if everything in the Ixhil Area was related to victim politics. However, it also enables us to understand how quickly such assemblages unravel and are substituted by new strata of expression. If it is an empire, it is one that is constant de-­and reterritorialized, rather than a stable configuration. Finally, while it appeared as though the victim politics of the PNR inaugurated a different future for Guatemala, paying attention to how the assemblage unfolded allowed us to see how this postconflict victimhood assemblage reproduces the Guatemala of old, where racial hierarchies are still valid and the relationship between indigenous people and state is still constituted through their labor and their dead, ethnic bodies. References Anckermann, Sonia, Manuel Dominguez, Norma Soto, Finn Kjaerulf, Peter Berliner, and Elizabeth Naima Mikkelsen. 2005. “Psycho-­Social Support to Large Numbers of Traumatized People in Post-­Conflict Societies: An Approach to Community Development in Guatamala.” Journal of Community and Social Psychology 15, 2: 136–­52. Bataille, Georges. 1991. The Accursed Share. New York: Zone Books. Buur, Lars. 2000. Institutionalizing Truth: Victims, Perpetrators and Professionals in the Everyday Work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Department of Ethnography and Social Anthropology, Aarhus University, Denmark. Consejo Editorial ODHAG. 2008. “Caminar en Grupos: Experiencia de trabajo psicosocial con grupos de reflexion.” Report, ODHAG, Guatemala. Fassin, Didier and Richard Rechtman. 2009. The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. Handy, Jim. 1994. Revolution in the Countryside: Rural Conflict and Agrarian Reform in Guatemala, 1944–­1954. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Kernjak, Franz. 2006. Tote suchen Leben finden: Exhumierungen in Guatemala. Historische Aufarbeitung und psychosoziale Arbeit. Innsbruck: StudienVerlag. Langer, Maria. 1989. From Vienna to Managua; Journey of a Psychoanalyst. London: Free Association Books. Manz, Beatriz. 2004. Paradise in Ashes: A Guatemalan Journey of Courage, Terror, and Hope. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Between Recognition and Care  143 McCreery, David. 1994. Rural Guatemala, 1760–­1940. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Nancy, Jean L. 2000. Being Singular Plural. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. ODHAG and Proyecto Interdiocesano de la Recuperación de la Memoria. 2000. “Memoria, verdad y esperanza: Version popularizada del Informe REMHI ‘Guatemala: Nunca Más.’ ” Audiovisual Material. Guatemala: ODHAG; Proyecto Interdiocesano de la Recuperación de la Memoria. Programa Nacional de Resarcimiento. 2007. “Informe de la evaluación conjunta del programa nacional de resarcimiento y de los programas de apoyo al PNR de GTZ y PNUD.” Report, Guatemala, December 14. Ronsbo, Henrik, Tatiana Jessen, and Jens Modvig. 2011. “An Exploratory Literature Review on Community Interventions in Four Latin American Countries.” Unpublished. Sanford, Victoria. 2003. Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press. Schirmer, Jennifer. 1999. “The Guatemalan Politico-­Military Project: Legacies for a Violent Peace?” Latin American Perpectives 26, 2: 92–­107. Sofsky, Wolfgang. 1997. The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Stoll, David. 1993. Between Two Armies: In the Towns of Guatemala. New York: Columbia University Press. Wilson, Richard A. 1995. Maya Resurgence in Guatemala: Q’eqchi’ Experiences. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Notes 1. Psychosocial interventions in Central America have a much longer history than what is presented here. Already during the late 1970s, psychosocial work was organized for Sandinista combatants in exile in Mexico (Langer 1989). 2. See Anckermann et al. 2005 for a later description of the method 3. These groups are known as PACs, They were introduced as part of the Guatemalan military’s counterinsurgency strategy from 1981 onward. All male community members were forced to participate and were, thus, brought under the direct control of the military. They remain powerful in most places where they were organized, as they were during 2006 and 2007 when we undertook field work in the Ixhil Area. 4. These included the UN Development Programme, as well as most national development corperations from North America and northwestern Europe and larger religious and civic NGOs in these countries. 5. That a form of rehabilitation for the victims of the war should be paid by the Guatemalan state was envisioned already in the 1996 Peace Accords. And following the work of the Commission for Historical Clarification and several pilot interventions carried out in the late 1990s, the PNR was created in 2003 as a mixed entity governed by state and NGO representatives. The history of the PNR is long and complicated. An abbreviated version of this may be found in Programa Nacional de Resarcimiento 2007 with additional references to the historical documents that provided the basis for the creation of the program. 6. The 2007 exchange rate was 7.3–­7.4 Quetzals to $1 U.S.

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Chapter 7

Recognizing Torture: Credibility and the Unstable Codification of Victimhood Tobias Kelly

This chapter explores the conditions under which people can gain legal recognition as torture victims. Torture survivors are often, formally at least, singled out for specific attention, as deserving of particular respect for what they have suffered. How, then, can legal regimes recognize when torture has taken place? Literary critic Elaine Scarry (1984) has famously argued that the distinctive nature of torture lies in its ability to destroy the capacity to communicate. However, the idea that the pain of torture is a fundamentally private experience denies the ways pain is itself a social relationship. As such, the problem of torture is not a failure of language, but as Das has argued (1997: 193), a failure of recognition. The issue is not so much that victims cannot communicate their suffering but that lawyers, doctors, and other practitioners find it difficult to recognize when and where cruelty has taken place. We need, therefore, to pay attention to the ways legal and other practices shape and produce, rather than simply distort, understandings of suffering. In singling out torture as a universal human rights violation, specific political conflicts are fitted into a universal template. Those seeking recognition and protection must place their claims within the same frame. As with many legal processes, important questions are raised about the ways the law translates complex experiences rooted in very specific histories and life trajectories into the universal legal category. Some critics see legal processes of recognition as transforming fundamentally political issues into a form of passive victimhood (Brown 1995). However, such arguments are in danger of creating

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too rigid, neat, and precise a picture, ignoring the ambiguity and indeterminacy of legal processes. They also ignore how victimhood is never taken for granted and claims are always subjected to second guesses and institutionalized forms of suspicion. The central argument of this chapter is that the legal recognition of torture victims is not so much a technical process of codification as a series of largely arbitrary judgments played out on the unstable boundary between fact and law. The heavy irony is that, although torture may be a legal category, the very processes of legal assessment mean that the recognition of torture victims is unpredictable and erratic. The vast majority of claims about torture in UK courts are made during asylum claims. Although not singled out in the Refugee Convention, torture, with a few notable exceptions, will nearly always qualify as a form of persecution. Article 3 of the European Convention of Human Rights explicitly extends protection to victims of torture. The UK Border Agency has also given torture survivors special status in its assessment of claims for protection.1 However, despite their formal legal and administrative protections, the crucial issue for the vast majority of people claiming protection as torture survivors is not law but evidence. Most cases fall not on a point of law but on issues of credibility. Put simply, they are not believed. Far from being treated as passive and fragile victims, those claiming protection are seen as active agents who are always capable of manipulation. In this context of generalized suspicion, legal processes provide a technique for assessing claims, thereby trying to move from uncertainty to a measure of certainty. Attempts to produce legal certainty are filtered through rules of evidence. There is a relatively low formal standard of proof in asylum and human rights claims. Yet the lower standard of proof and relatively relaxed rules of evidence can actually make winning cases more difficult and less predictable. There is, of course, always an element of chance in all legal proceedings, and no lawyer worth his or her salt would wish to predict firmly which way an individual case will go. In asylum and human rights cases, however, uncertainty over the facts is magnified. In all legal judgments, recognized uncertainty has to be transformed into practical certainty. Yet, in the asylum process, the path from uncertainty to certainty is shot through with hesitations and doubts. The focus of this paper is on a single claim by an Iranian male. It views the process from the perspective of the lawyers, bureaucrats, and judges who have to assess and process the claim. It is here that the precise implications of what we mean by “torture” take shape and decisions are made about what

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forms of suffering and cruelty are included within its terms. Torture is a notoriously slippery subject at every step of defining, documenting, diagnosing, recognizing, and prosecuting it. If, as Sanford Levinson has argued, “torture as a term is a place holder—­an abstract word made concrete by the imagination of the reader,” it is through the practices of such people that the meanings of torture are given purchase (Levinson 2004: 27). The chapter, therefore, follows an individual case, from initial submission to final appeal, in order to examine the practical issues of evidence and legal argument involved in the recognition of torture. The case is reconstructed following interviews with the lawyers and attending the case hearing, as well as analysis of the case documents. The research also included following a further 35 claims through from start to finish; as such, the chapter is also based on over sixty interviews with lawyers, case workers, and judges, as well as attending the tribunal hearings in as many of the asylum cases as possible and the analysis of the multiple documents produced by the cases.

Applying for Asylum In spring 2009, a thirty-­year-­old Iranian male by the name of Ali Khalili arrived in the UK. Within three days, he had claimed asylum. Describing himself as a farmer and an atheist, Khalili claimed to have been accused in Iran of Christian evangelizing, drinking alcohol, and insulting Islam. During his asylum interview, the British immigration official asked if Mr. Khalili had had previous problems with the Iranian Etelaat (intelligence agency). Khalili explained that two years before, during the festival of ashura, he had been accused of laughing at a procession of self-­flagellating men. He was detained by members of the Basij militia and beaten on his chest and legs. When the Etelaat went to search his house, the investigators found cans of beer as well as an illegal satellite dish. The next day he was taken to the Etelaat office, where he was beaten some more. His left eye socket was broken by a particularly heavy blow. As he was blindfolded, he did not know whether it was a kick, punch, or blow with an object. After a few days, he was taken to court and sentenced to twenty-­four lashes for possessing alcohol and fined for having the satellite dish. After paying the fine and receiving the lashes, Khalili was released. After his release, Khalili told the official, he had also been detained a second time. When pushed to give more details, he explained that he had been

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blindfolded and handcuffed. He had then been hung from the ceiling by his hands and spun around, while being beaten. The soles of his feet were also hit with sticks, and he was later wrapped up in a rug until he felt he would suffocate. After one week, he was taken to the hospital because he had blood in his urine. The immigration official then asked Khalili how he had managed to escape. Khalili explained that, on the second night in hospital, his brother bribed one of the Etelaat guards, and he had managed to climb out a window and get into a waiting car. Khalili described how he stayed at his cousin’s for two weeks, moving between his house and a shop. After a short break, the immigration official turned to some apparent inconsistencies in Khalili’s account. He claimed that Khalili had said that he had been arrested three-­and-­a-­half months before, which was before he had said he had been accused of proselytizing. He said that he had difficulty remembering the precise dates because of his “psychological status.” The immigration official finally turned to the issue of Christianity. Although Khalili knew Jesus had been crucified, when questioned, he was unable to name the disciple who betrayed Jesus, the names of Jesus’ parents, or his birthday. Khalili again explained that his psychological state made it hard for him to remember these things. Finally, Khalili was asked if he had attended any Christian groups since arriving in the UK, and he replied that he had not had any time. The interview was drawn to a close, and he was told he would be informed of the decision in due course.

The Rejection One week after his interview, Khalili received a letter from the UK Border Agency. The letter pointed out that Khalili had failed to identify Jesus’ birthday or the name of his parents and, therefore, claimed the level of knowledge he showed was not consistent with his claim to have had conversations about Jesus with his friends. The letter argued that there were numerous inconsistencies in his claim, not least about the timing of his second arrest. It also argued that the fact that he claimed the only significant injury he received was blood in the urine was inconsistent with his claims of repeated beatings. It was concluded that Mr. Khalili had given an “inconsistent and implausible account” of his detention and escape; therefore, it was not accepted that he was of interest to the Etelaat. As a result, he did not qualify for protection

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under the Refugee Convention or Article 3, and it was “therefore considered that your removal from the UK is appropriate.”

Issues of Evidence: From the General to the Specific Khalili’s lawyer appealed under the Refugee Convention, on the grounds that he had a well-­founded fear of persecution. In theory, a claim for protection does not need corroborating evidence, but, in practice, lawyers try to collect as much evidence as possible to support the claim. However, the evidence to back up most asylum claims is inevitably sparse. There are very seldom eyewitnesses and little potential for close forensic examination. The perpetrator of violence or persecution is necessarily absent. Often all there is to go on is the individual’s own account. In contrast to such countries as the Democratic Republic of Congo or Somalia, events in Iran are relatively well documented. A host of human rights organizations and newspapers report on the country. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, among others, routinely report human rights violations, torture in particular. Lawyers, as well as the UK Border Agency, also rely heavily on the human rights reports of the U.S. State Department. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the state of U.S.-­Iranian relations, these reports are highly critical of Iran’s human rights record. The UK Border Agency also compiles its own publicly available country of origin information (COI) reports on the main countries from which UK asylum seekers originate. These are based on a compilation of sources from human rights organizations and newspapers. The tribunal has itself also adopted a system known as country guidance cases for asylum appeals, where it makes findings of fact in regard to the situation in specific countries (Thomas 2008). The focus here is on whether particular groups are at risk, rather than individuals. There are over fifteen country guidance determinations on Iran.2 In these decisions, it is argued that the state is involved in “kidnapping and beatings, torture and killings” and that security forces and prison personnel “continue to torture detainees and prisoners.”3 Against this background, the UK Border Agency and Asylum and Immigration Tribunal accept that the Iranian state tortures its citizens. Among the most important forms of detailed case-­specific evidence are so-­called country evidence reports. These are usually written by British or émigré academics and set out details in a particular country in relation to the

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specific claim. Khalili’s lawyer pointed out, however, that she was not sure how much a specific country report would add in this case. The UK Border Agency and the tribunal accepted that the Iranian state tortured its citizens, but the key point here was to individualize Khalili’s case and provide evidence that he had had been tortured. Given that he was not a high profile person and was unlikely to have been written about by a human rights organization or newspaper, it was very unlikely that any country expert could provide this kind of supporting evidence. Given the absence of much other evidence, the key document is often the witness statement of the claimant. Following his rejection letter, Khalili composed a witness statement with his lawyer, via an interpreter, over a number of meetings. In his statement, he accepted that he was not Christian but argued that the authorities would still be interested in him because he came from a very small area and people are “small minded and insular.” He added that he had spoken to his brother who had told him that a summons had been posted ordering him to attend the Revolutionary Court and that he was expecting this to be sent to him. Medical-­legal reports are also commonly used to support asylum claims by providing individualized evidence. Khalili’s lawyer requested a report from a doctor with a long history of writing such reports. The doctor saw Khalili twice and wrote a report on the basis of his interview and examination. His final report said that the “scars on his ankles confirm that he was restrained in chains tightly bound around them for a prolonged period.” He went on to say that, although “he has no signs on his body of the beating and kicking he experienced, this does not mean that it did not occur, for in a man of this physique, recovery would be expected without residual marking.” The doctor added that there is evidence of facial nerve damage caused by a heavy blunt blow to his left maxillary arch. . . . ​This injury is the consequence of a blow to the area by blunt trauma and is consistent with the history [given by Khalili] . . . ​although it could have occurred in a number of other ways such as a blow to the face in a farming accident or in highly competitive physical sport such as rugby. The report concluded that it “is my opinion that Mr. Khalili has suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder occasioned by his ill treatment. Mr Khalili’s psychological distress pattern was consistent with the DSM criteria.”

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Although the doctor clearly felt that Khalili had been tortured, he could not say for sure what had caused Khalili’s injuries and psychological states, but he thought they were entirely consistent with the account that he had given. Having collected all the evidence, Mr. Khalili’s lawyer told him the key issue would be moving from the general to the particular. The lawyer hoped that, by tying Khalili’s account to particular injuries, the medical report would provide this individualized evidence.

The Appeal Khalili’s appeal was heard four months after his initial refusal, on the fourth floor of a modern office block, overlooking a motorway. When his turn eventually came, the UK Border Agency had not appeared, relying instead on the reason-­for-­refusal letter they had sent to Khalili. The judge started by asking Khalili for some clarifications. In Khalili’s hearing, the judge asked how the Etelaat knew the beer and satellite television did not belong to his parents, and Khalili explained he had confessed immediately they were his. His lawyer confirmed that, although the summons to the court was posted by his brother, it did not seem to have arrived. There were no questions at all about his torture, and his cross-­examination ended after only about fifteen minutes. The hearing then moved on to legal arguments. At this point, the judge turned to Khalili and explained that the interpreter would do her best to give him the gist of what was being said, but they did not want to interrupt the flow to give him all the details. Khalili’s lawyer turned directly to rebutting the Home Office reason-­for-­refusal letter. In particular, she pointed out that the immigration official did not have the medical expertise to say whether someone would be expected to have more scars than Mr. Khalili if he or she had been treated the way he claimed. The lawyer’s presentation ended by reminding the judge of the low standard of proof in asylum hearings and that there was nothing implausible in anything Khalili had said. Indeed, the fact that he had not embellished his claims should be seen as an indication of his honesty. The decision was posted one month later. In the written judgment, the judge noted that the doctor had argued that the scars on Khalili’s ankles were consistent with being tied by a chain, that he had evidence of facial nerve damage caused by a heavy blow, and that he suffered from PTSD. However, the judge noted that, on its own, this did not establish that Mr. Khalili had

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been tortured or even detained, merely that he had been chained at some point and suffered a blow to the face. He added the medico-­legal report’s description of his psychological state did not particularly assist with the case, as the description provided to the doctor “could easily have been self-­serving.” The judge noted that he found it of “great significance that the appellant did not know the circumstances of Jesus’ birth or his parentage,” which he deemed to be “central to any understanding of Christianity.” The judge went onto argue that “even making allowances” for Khalili’s “psychological upset, it is difficult to determine that he has been anything other than vague in relation to the time line in relation to this part of the account.” The decision, therefore, concluded that the judge was “unable to accept that the appellant has given a credible account of the circumstances leading up to his claimed detention, torture and subsequent escape.” Khalili’s appeal was dismissed.

Inconsistent Decisions and the Standards of Proof The major issue about which lawyers complain in asylum and human rights decisions is inconsistency. There is an element of unpredictability in all legal cases, but the broad consensus among lawyers is that asylum cases are extreme in this respect. For many lawyers, the particular unpredictability of asylum cases is put down to the relative expertise or prejudice of the judges. Asylum judges are at the bottom of the judicial ladder, and, in general, the area has low status in the legal profession. Judges, like lawyers, run the full range of political and legal backgrounds. Some are thought of as particularly cynical, but this does not necessarily map onto political background. Many of the toughest judges are former pro-­asylum campaigners. However, whether seen as prejudiced or not, the decision making of judges is seen as widely inconsistent. In large measure, the unpredictability of judges’ decisions has to be seen in the context of the limitations of the evidence before them and the legal techniques available for assessing it. In particular, the relatively relaxed rules of evidence produce a broad space of uncertainty at the heart of the asylum process. The standard of proof in asylum claims is formally that of “reasonable likelihood.”4 Practitioners say informally that this amounts to a one in ten chance. Though the claimants bear the burden of proof, in that it is up to them to substantiate their claims, the burden is, formally at least, relatively

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low. Any evidence that a claimant can muster does not have to go through the same tests of legal admissibility as it would in civil and criminal cases. No evidence can be ruled out, not matter how flimsy it appears to be. All evidence must be considered in the round and in the light of the claim as a whole.5 Despite the lower formal standard of proof, however, it is hard to see how this relates to the ways decisions are actually made. Indeed, this has been recognized by the courts, which have called the standard of proof a “pragmatic legal fiction.”6 The lower standard of probability could mean that judges are comfortable with saying, “I do not believe this claim, but nonetheless some of the evidence is plausible, however slight, and I am therefore allowing the appeal.” This never happens. At a practical level, it is not clear what it might mean to give probability a numerical value in asylum cases. Statistical probability applies only across a range, and legal decisions are applied one at a time. The lower evidential standards also mean that evidence is always in question. Writing more broadly, Bruno Latour (2004) has argued that legal decision making is a process of moving away from the facts as fast as possible. In English common law, the processes of moving from fact to law are governed by rules of evidence that set out what can be allowed in the legal domain and what cannot. In asylum cases, however, the relative flexibility of the rules of evidence means that it is very difficult to move beyond the facts. It is very difficult to reach that stable point where a judge can decide that, for the sake of legal argument, he or she is going to take it as read that a particular event has happened and then move on. Having more precise and rigorous rules of evidence would have the impact of ruling out a great deal of the evidence that is presented to support asylum claims. However, having relatively relaxed rules of evidence also means there are no solid standards through which evidence can be interpreted. As a result, all pieces of evidence presented in the course of asylum and human rights appeals can be assessed at face value or questioned in terms of the motives behind their production. Any claim to victimhood is repeatedly questioned in terms of the nature of its claimed proof.

Credibility Khalili’s case, as with the vast majority of claims, had not been rejected on a point of law but because he simply was not believed. Most cases are dismissed not because they are deemed to fall outside the Refugee Convention or the

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Human Rights Act but because they are deemed not to be credible by the judge. Credibility implies the presence of something that is capable of being believed. What will be credible to one person can, therefore, be incredible to the next, depending on that person’s own experiences. Indeed, this is recognized by the English legal system. Unlike decisions on matters of law, where it is implicitly assumed that there is a right or wrong answer, the courts recognize that credibility is in the eye of the beholder. Although judges are warned not to generalize from their own experiences, there is no expectation that different judges looking at the same pieces of evidence will come to the same conclusion.7 As appeals are only allowed from the Tribunal on issues of law, rather than interpretations of fact, this means that rejections on the grounds of lack of credibility are very difficult to take further. Despite, or even because of the recognized subjectivity of credibility, there have been attempts to regularize and define what can and cannot count as credible. The UNHCR defines a credible account as one that is “coherent and plausible, not contradicting generally known facts, and therefore is, on balance capable of being believed.”8 The insertion of “capable of being believed” implies that the decision maker does not have to believe the account but, rather, that it is imaginable that someone else might. The UK Border Agency has tried to add further clarity by issuing guidance that divides credibility into “internal” and “external” issues. Internal credibility relates to the coherence of the account and the details provided by the applicant. External consistency relates to the match between the account and “generally known facts.” Crucially, credibility is not the same as plausibility (Good 2009). Plausibility refers to the “apparent reasonableness or truthfulness” of the account, without referring to whether the individual is actually telling the truth.9 As such, “a story may be implausible and yet may properly be taken as credible; it may be plausible and yet properly not believed.”10 Credibility is by its very nature ambiguous and uncertain. Everyday language synonyms for “credible” include “believable” and “trustworthy.” In the circular logic of the legal definition, a credible account is simply one that is capable of being believed. Yet what distinguishes belief from more definitive forms of knowledge is that it is not immediately susceptible to positive proof. Equally, trust implies a level of uncertainty. We trust in situations where we are not entirely certain or sure. Trust is built on the lack of knowledge and, therefore, always assumes that subterfuge is a possibility. Attempts to judge credibility, thus, work in the space of the inherently unknown, amplifying the feeling that dissimulation is always possible. In this process, there are

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constant attempts to look behind the surfaces to judge the intentions that produced the documents. In these spaces between fact and fiction, victimhood is negotiated in order to become codified through judicial decision making.

Questions of Evidence All evidence presented before the Tribunal can be questioned. Central to any claim is the witness statement of the claimant. The lawyer can play an important role in the process of writing the statement, shaping it in such a way as to give it greater impact. For example, the format of the statements, in numbered paragraphs, obviously bears the stamp of legal form. There is, therefore, a fine line between the lawyers’ helping the claimants and guiding them. Official documents, presented to corroborate an account, can also be seen as persuasive pieces of evidence, or they can undermine a claim. Khalili had tried to obtain an arrest warrant to back up his claim. However, judges can equally use documents as evidence that a case is untrustworthy, by arguing that false documents are easy to obtain, and the likelihood that claimants have false documents speaks to their general lack of credibility.11 Medical reports can also be read in two ways. For some judges, they are persuasive, while, for others, they can be dismissed as based entirely on the story told by the claimant to the clinician.12 In this context, psychological reports, for example, can either be used to explain inconsistencies or vagueness, by talking about trauma, or they can be dismissed on the basis that they are based on inconsistent and vague accounts.13 The diagnosis of PTSD in Khalili’s medical report was dismissed by the judge as being based on an account that “could easily have been self-­serving.” I have sat in a training session, led by a judge, for doctors who write medico-­legal reports, where the judge expressed extreme skepticism about claims of PTSD. He told the audience that, as far as he was concerned, anyone could be diagnosed with PTSD and, if he left the building and went into the nearest train station, he would be surprised if 90 percent of the people there did not fit the diagnosis. Therefore, he argued that it was of little use in helping him make his decisions. Yet judges can also take the opposite tack. A judge who sat in the same building where Khalili’s case was heard told me that, as far as he was concerned, if a doctor said someone had a particular condition, he thought he was in no position to contradict the assertion. The UK Border Agency’s own

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directions also state that a medical report can be taken as good indicator of a well-­founded claim, unless there is good reason for supposing otherwise.14 The key question is how much a psychological or scarring report is felt by judges to indicate the likelihood of past events. Medical and psychological reports do not provide precise causal accounts of how particular scars or psychological problems came about. It is recognized by judges as well as clinicians that scars can have multiple possible causes, and it can often be hard to tell, for example, whether they were caused by being whipped during interrogation or were self-­inflicted during ritual flagellation. It is also recognized by lawyers and clinicians that the psychological impacts of torture are also indirect. Some people who have been tortured can become psychotic, whereas others simply have a few sleepless nights. Furthermore, although a scarring report can say, for example, that a particular injury was caused by a blow with a blunt object, it cannot say who inflicted the blow, why they did so, and where. In line with the Istanbul Protocol, the majority of scarring reports only say that a particular wound is “consistent” with an account. This is, in effect, saying the scar could have been caused in the way claimed, but it could also have been caused in dozens of other ways. In practice, therefore, such reports only have the effect of not contradicting an account, rather than proving in any concrete sense that it describes what really took place. The objectivity of reports is often questioned by judges (Barnes 2004). Experts are instructed that their duty is to the court rather than the claimant, but in practice they have direct contact only with the claimant’s lawyer. Lawyers are highly unlikely to submit reports that are unhelpful for the case. In this context, all reports are inevitably seen as having a partisan edge. Perhaps the most obvious example of how evidence can be read both ways is the use of inconsistencies in judging credibility. Most claims are dismissed for vagueness and contradictions in the claimant’s account. At the same time, however, vagueness and contradictions can be taken as evidence of trauma.15 Indeed, Khalili’s lawyer tried to do precisely this, arguing that he had not embellished his claim. Oral evidence can also be read both ways. Too polished a piece of evidence can appear contrived and rehearsed, but, if claimants stumble and hesitate when asked questions, they can seem to be making it up as they go along. Lawyers, therefore, have a difficult balancing act, where they must present cases that are persuasive but not look too manipulated in a context where everyone is well aware that all evidence is constructed with the precise aim of winning a case. A case that is too neat and coherent can appear too well

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prepared and duplicitous. Yet a case that is partial and incoherent can equally appear to be disingenuous. There is a complex balancing act at play. Disbelief runs through the processes through which claims for protection by torture victims are assessed. Fassin and D’Halluin have argued that, in the French context, where individual accounts are disbelieved, there is a recourse to a system of proof based on physical scars and psychic traces of trauma, where “the body and mind are made to attest to violence endured” (2007: 302). Yet, as Fassin and D’Halluin write, while mental trauma has authority at a general level, “judges . . . ​find claims to trauma less convincing than marks left on the body when deciding on individual and concrete cases” (325) (see also Fassin and D’Halluin 2005). In the UK context at least, however, all evidence, whether documentary, personal, physical, or psychological, is suspect. It can be read at face value or it can be questioned, as the judge looks for the motivations of those producing the evidence. Indeed, the very idea of legal representation itself implies a gap between what is presented and the fact it claims to represent, opening up a space for subterfuge.

Erratic Recognition Although torture may be a legal category, the legal assessment of claims in asylum cases by torture survivors is inherently erratic. Legal procedures may create the promise of predictability, stability, and objectivity but can also bring with them evidential processes that produce unpredictable and unstable decision making. In this context, the recognition of torture victims is largely arbitrary. In practice, the specificity of torture often dissolves in asylum claims. The promise of protection for torture victims is not unique to human rights law, and can also be found in large part in the Refugee Convention, with its broader category of persecution. Deciding whether a torture survivor should receive protection in the UK is overwhelmingly a debate over facts rather than law. However, the evidence with which judges are presented is inevitably limited and incomplete. When asked, most judges will say they have no idea whether they are reaching the right decisions. As one senior judge told me, Asylum cases are unlike other areas—­we do not really even have a sense of what evidence is obtainable. In a stabbing in an inner city, we know what sort of evidence we can reasonably expect, but not in a

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torture case from Congo. In the end, we are really just putting a pin in a piece of paper. . . . ​A great deal of our work is clutching at straws, evidence is often wafer thin, and cases are often not very well presented . . . ​but we have try and make it as fair an accountable as possible.16 This is not simply a cynicism about trauma or scars or oral testimony, but a generalized hesitation on how all evidence should be treated and how to give it the appropriate weight. Yet, in the end, judges must come to a decision: they must grant an appeal or not. Some evidence must be accepted, and some rejected. The key point is that it can go either way, and there are no simple rules for deciding which. The recognition of torture is, therefore, produced through the assessment of often incomplete, incoherent, and suspected evidence. The problem of evidence is not unique to claims about torture, or even human rights claims, but can be found in asylum claims more generally, where evidence is often scarce. Torture claims provide specific problems, though, as they contain notions of both intention and trauma that are difficult to prove. Torture implies an element of the deliberate infliction of suffering, but the perpetrator is always absent in cases before the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal. Torture also implies a level of injury, yet clinical evidence and personal testimony can speak about the causes of injury only in an indirect manner. Evidence is hard to come by, and it is even harder to know whether to trust it. Talal Asad has provocatively argued that, at the heart of the concept of torture is the notion of a universally comparable form of suffering, whose precise levels can be calculated (2003: 117). However, in practice, torture resists easy measurement. This is partly because torture is often inflicted in ways that deliberately do not leave any hard evidence (Rejali 2009). More important perhaps, although pain and suffering are at the heart of definitions of torture, pain and suffering resist measurement. Doctors and other clinicians are widely called on to corroborate claims of torture, but, put simply, torture is not a clinical category. There is nothing necessarily medically distinct about a torture victim, and there can be no clear and precise assessment of the impact of torture in the eyes of the court. The problems involved in the recognition of torture survivors and perpetrators raise the question as to whether the very ways in which torture is understood are to blame. As Alan Badiou has argued, when harms in the abstract are placed on a pedestal, as among the very worst things that anyone can do

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or that can happen to a person, there is always a danger that they become impossible to recognize in concrete events (2001: 62–­63). If a harm is unique, unrivalled, or incomparable, it can also become immeasurable. The notion of torture puts individual suffering at the forefront, yet do we have adequate devices through which this can be grasped? When it comes to individual cases, persuasive proof seems all too often just beyond reach. We live in a world that prioritizes the ability to measure and calculate, yet torture remains beyond uniform evaluation. Law especially demands very particular forms of evidence. Ultimately, the legal recognition of torture is so difficult not because it is too horrific to acknowledge or because its survivors are too numb to speak but because it includes elements about which it is inherently difficult to produce persuasive and reliable legal evidence. Torture can, therefore, only be viewed fleetingly, through a glass darkly. The legal notion of torture sets up a series of requirements for recognition but sets the standards in such a way that very few people are eligible. While this might not mitigate against other forms of moral or social recognition, it does make individual legal cases inherently unstable. This is true whether the case is about criminal, civil, or immigration law, with their very different standards of proof. There is, therefore, an evidence-­shaped hole at the center of our notion of torture. References Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam Modernity. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Badiou, Alan. 2001. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Trans. Peter Hallward. London: Verso. Barnes, John. 2004. “Expert Evidence: The Judicial Perception in Asylum and Human Rights Appeals.” International Journal of Refugee Law 16, 3: 349–­57. Bingham, Thomas. 1985. “The Judge as Juror: The Judicial Determination of Factual Issues.” In Current Legal Problems, ed. Roger Rideout and Jeffrey Jowell, 1–­27. London: Stevens. Brown, Wendy. 1995. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Das, Veena. 1997. Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Fassin, Didier and Estelle d’Halluin. 2005. “The Truth from the Body: Medical Certificates as Ultimate Evidence for Asylum-­Seekers.” American Anthropologist 107, 4: 597–­608. ———­. 2007. “Critical Evidence: The Politics of Trauma in French Asylum Policies.” Ethos 35, 3: 300–­329. Good, Anthony. 2009. “The Taking and Making of Asylum Claims: Credibility Assessments in the British Asylum Courts.” Keynote lecture, “Seeking Refuge: Caught Between Bureaucracy, Lawyers, and Public Indifference.” ESRC-­Funded Conference, School of Oriental and African Studies, April 17.

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Recognizing Torture  159 Latour, Bruno. 2004. “Scientific Objects and Legal Objectivity.” In Law, Anthropology, and the Constitution of the Social: Making Persons and Things, ed. Alain Pottage and Martha Mundy, 73–­ 114. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levinson, Sanford. 2004. “Contemplating Torture.” In Torture: A Collection, ed. Stanford Levinson, 23–­46. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lynch, Michael and David Bogen.1996. The Spectacle of History: Speech, Text and Memory at the Iran-­Contra Hearings. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Rejali, Darius. 2009. Torture and Democracy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Scarry, Elaine. 1984. The Body in Pain: The Making and the Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thomas, Robert. 2008. “Consistency in Asylum Adjudication: Country Guidance and the Asylum Process in the United Kingdom.” International Journal of Refugee Law 20, 4: 489–­532. UNHCR. 1998. “Note on Burden and Standard of Proof in Refugee Claims.” December 16. Geneva: UNHCR.

Notes 1. In particular, it has an agreement with Freedom from Torture (previously known as the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture) that places all cases that have been accepted for assessment by Freedom from Torture on hold and accepts that torture victims should not be placed in immigration detention. While the case law refers predominantly to torture victims, this document refers to survivors. API/May 2006 (rebranded January 2009), Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. 2. These cover issues range from the risks faced by homosexuals, whether fair trails are available to adulterers, and prison conditions, among others: FM (Risk—­Homosexual—­Illegal Departure) Iran CG [2002] UKIAT 05660; FT (Fair Trial—­Adultery) Iran CG [2002] UKIAT 07576; SF (Article 3—­Prison Conditions) Iran CG [2002] UKIAT 00973. 3. FS and others (Iran-­Christian Converts) Iran CG [2004] UKIAT 00303, para. 169; SF, para. 11. 4. Lord Keith in Sivakumuran, R (on the application of) v. Secretary of State for the Home Department [1987] UKHL 1 (December 16, 1987). See also Horvath v. Secretary of State for the Home Department [2000] UKHL 37 (July 6, 2000). On the humanitarian nature of the decision-­making process, see 9R v. IAT and SSHD ex parte Shah (1997 Imm AR 145 at 153(HC)). The Home Office initially tried to argue that claims under the Human Rights Act should be proved “beyond reasonable doubt,” but the courts ruled that refugee and human rights claims should have the same standard as refugee claims. Kacaj (Article 3, Standard of Proof, Non-­State Actors) Albania [2001] UKIAT 00018 (July 19, 2001). 5. Asylum and Immigration Tribunal Procedure Rules SJ 230/205 r 51(1)0. 6. Karanakaran v. Secretary of State for the Home Department [2000] EWCA Civ 11 (January 25, 2000). 7. See Y v. Secretary of State for the Home Department [2006] EWCA Civ 1223 (July 26, 2006), para. 25. Original source Bingham 1985. 8. UNHCR 1998, para. 11. 9. MM (DRC—­Plausibility) Democratic Republic of Congo [2005] UKIAT, para. 16 10. Ibid., para. 15. 11. See, for example, MS (Iran) v, Secretary of State for the Home Department [2007] EWCA

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160  Tobias Kelly Civ 271; Y v. Secretary of State for the Home Department [2006] EWCA Civ 1223 (July 26, 2006) (February 19, 2007). Compare Lynch and Bogen 1996. 12. Kesharvaz v SSHD: AA/03066/2009 (Unreported Case) September 16, 2009; Mohammed v. SSHD AA/07836/2007 (Unreported Case) July 10, 2008; Ali v. SSHD AA/06325/2005 (Unreported Case) December 13, 2006. See also RT (Medical Reports—­Causation of Scarring) Sri Lanka [2008] UKAIT, December 7, 2007. 13. See, for example, Isa v. SSHD AA/01973/2008 (Unreported Case) April 17, 2008; Kiesa v. SSHD AS/05625/2005 (Unreported Case) June 30, 2005; Bashir v. SSHD AA/03732/2007 (Unreported Case) April 27, 2007. 14. Immigration Rules (1994 HC 395) 339K. 15. The case law says that a judge can dismiss a psychiatric diagnosis when making negative credibility findings but must give reasons for doing so: BN (Psychiatric Evidence—­Discrepancies) Albania [2010] UKUT 279 (IAC). 16. Interview with judge, October 8, 2009.

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Chapter 8

The Power of Dead Bodies Nerina Weiss

This chapter is about dead bodies and the struggle of defining them. Focusing on the multilayered metaphor of the Kurdish guerrilla corpse, it elaborates on the political dimensions of the category of victimhood and thus expands in several ways on the discussion introduced by the editors of this volume. Jensen and Ronsbo argue persuasively for studying the concept of victimhood, despite its negative connotations of passivity and vulnerability and the need for external intervention. Why study the category of victimhood, they ask in the introduction to this volume, when victimhood is apparently rejected by our interlocutors? Here I support their insistence on the importance of this category by showing the political significance of victimhood among Kurdish activists living in eastern Turkey. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted among these activists, I argue that, given certain political contexts, victimhood carries a high political value. It is a category that is claimed in order to mobilize and to legitimize one’s position in the Kurdish conflict. The concept of victimhood is central, therefore, to national and transnational discourses in Turkey. In the political arena, both the Turkish state and the Kurdish nationalist movement have claimed the category of victimhood for themselves, each denouncing the other as being terrorists. Being the victim becomes the main argument for gaining recognition, for legitimizing the continuation of violence and resistance, and in calling on the international community for intervention and support. Comparing different resistance movements, Khalili (2007) has similarly argued that the meaning of the category of victimhood

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has changed over time and in different contexts. The transnational liberationist discourse of the 1960s and 1970s focused on heroic (self-­)sacrifice, and, thus, aimed at inciting resistance and international support for an armed guerrilla movement. On the other hand, the humanitarian discourse of later decades represents the innocent and unintending victim as a subject in need of international intervention. Khalili’s history reverberates in some ways in the Kurdish context. The changing focus from heroic guerrillas to innocent victims of state violence may be seen in correlation to tactical changes in the Kurdish nationalist movement—­from a violent guerrilla movement in the 1980s and early 1990s, toward the use of democratic and peaceful means to seek human rights and recognition. Yet the Kurdish movement operates at present with armed and peaceful means simultaneously. In line with this ambiguity, I chart transformations of victimhood not on a temporal scale but rather in terms of its status as a polyvalent and multifarious concept, differentially employed according to varying political and social aims (Allen 2006). I also argue that the concept of victimhood itself is highly ambiguous, by discussing the multifarious category of the victim and the question of agency. In exploring the discourses of resistance movements, Khalili has pointed to the “profound discursive difference between narratives of suffering [the humanitarian discourse] and heroic stories [in liberationist discourses], where the former abdicate agency and the latter reclaim it” (2007: 34). Discussing the category of the martyr, it is especially the defenselessness of the mutilated guerrilla corpse that accentuates the evilness and illegitimacy of the Turkish state and simultaneously grants the dead body agentive powers that go far beyond the fighter’s influence and power in his/her lifetime. The guerrilla corpse becomes a “politicized body” that “traverses both subject and object poles. The body made into a political artefact by an embodied act of violence is no less a political agent than the author(s) of violence” (Feldman 1991: 7). The dead body, thus, becomes both the locus of and the main actor in the struggle over the category of victimhood. The political and symbolic power of dead bodies has widely been assumed a given fact.1 The meanings and representations of the body are produced “through multiple social relationships defined by class, race, sexuality and ethnicity, as much as particular socio-­political contexts, such as racism, colonialism or nationalism” (Žarkov 2007: 9). Verdery (1999) has argued that “the significance of corpses has less to do with their concreteness than with how people think about them. A dead body is meaningful not in itself but through

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culturally established relations to death and through the way a specific (dead) person’s importance is (variously) constructed” (1999: 28). We should, however, not focus on the metaphorical body without also considering the material body (Žarkov 2007). The physical and the symbolic constitute each other. As much as bodies, and here especially dead bodies, have served as the symbols for a political order (Verdery 1999), the political is also (quite literally) inscribed in these same bodies. Bodies are tortured, mutilated, washed with a loving hand, or buried in unnamed graves. These bodies remind us that, besides their metaphoric and symbolic importance, they also represent the ultimate reality of violence and pain (Weiss and Six-­ Hohenbalken 2011). Discussing martyrdom and sacrifice, I will, therefore, focus on exactly this interrelation of the metaphoric and the material body and on the body’s multilayered, ever-­changing meaning. Through the dead body—­the guerrilla corpse—­political ideas and representations of victimhood materialize. They are transcribed onto the body, and they form or produce the body’s symbolic and political meaning. Meaning is ascribed and literally inscribed through torture and mutilation, and the guerrilla corpse constitutes a “multi-­vocal symbol in that [it] conveys several meanings simultaneously” (Kalland 1993: 6), which “absorb and reflect back diverse and often contradictory collective fantasies” (Feldman 2003: 68). However, the body is not only the object of violence and representation. The “encoded body” also becomes a political agent in the reproduction and manipulation of political ideas and social structures: “The body, altered by violence, re-­enacts other altered bodies dispersed in time and space; it also re-­enacts political discourse and even the movement of history itself ” (Feldman 1991: 70 ). I build this chapter from the stories of Ayşegül and Murat. Both were engaged in a struggle to retrieve dead bodies from the military, bring them home, and provide them with decent funerals. To do so, each of them had to defy the military’s representation of the deceased as a terrorist and to reclaim the guerrilla fighter as a martyr in a religious language that, in certain ways, transcended the Kurdish-­Turkish conflict.

Ays¸egül’s Story Ayşegül, a Kurdish peasant woman, had neither seen nor heard from Eris, her son, for many years. Since Eris had left to join the Kurdish guerrilla movement, Ayşegül had lived in constant fear for his life. In autumn 1997, she

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finally heard that he had been killed in a skirmish with the Turkish military. On receiving the news of his death, Ayşegül started a long and tiring journey to find Eris’s body. She tracked it down, stored in a dark room at a police station, waiting to be interred as an unnamed, unclaimed terrorist. Ayşegül’s story is a testimony to the violence of more than twenty years of war between the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Turkish state forces. The Kurds, being the country’s largest minority, have posed the most persistent challenge to the image of a homogeneous society and a serious threat to the integrity of the Turkish state. This threat became especially real when the PKK launched an armed struggle for independence in 1984, with strong support within predominantly Kurdish areas. The Kurdish claim for statehood, and later for autonomy, was suppressed with all means available to the state, however. Hundreds of villages have been destroyed, forests burned down, and pastures turned into military zones. Estimates of the number of internally displaced people (IDPs) vary from four hundred thousand to over one million. Political activists and the families of guerrilla fighters were constantly harassed, their houses searched, family members interrogated, and even violated. Ayşegül’s narrative is told in a way that is poetic and highly symbolic and, at the same time, is based on the brutal facts of a mutilated body. I will not reproduce the entire transcript, as it is highly complex and at times difficult to follow. In the following, I alternate instead between letting Ayşegül tell her story in her own words and my own paraphrasing of passages, providing the reader with context and background information where appropriate. On March 21, 1997, the day of Newroz,2 we watched TV and learned that two guerrilla fighters had been killed in M. We were sure that this was yet only another lie. They were said to have died exactly on the day of Newroz at 7:30. The next day I saw soldiers approaching my house. This was nothing unusual. Anytime, every year, every month, even every two weeks, soldiers would come, but, as far as I can remember, they never entered my house. When they came now, they entered my house with their shoes on, and I approached them. The soldiers brought Ayşegül word of her son’s death. Ayşegül initially refused to believe them, assuming that they were spreading misinformation to demoralize her. She finally accepted the news and went to the gendarme post, where she learned that her son had been killed in the village of K., where the

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corpse was stored. As a widow and without an adult son at her side, it was up to Ayşegül to claim Eris’s body. On her way to K., several hours away by bus, Ayşegül was accompanied by a male relative, but this man had no active role in Ayşegül’s narrative. It was the woman herself who negotiated, defied, and acted. On her way to the town of K., Ayşegül was approached by a stranger who told her the details of her son’s death. Her son had been ambushed as he was leaving a village where he had sought help for his wounded friend. Hundreds of soldiers surrounded them as they tried to escape. The shooting had already started, and the first bullet hit the injured young man. Eris looked at his dying friend and saw that there was nothing he could do to help him. Eris took the youngster’s gun and fled. But it is said that thousands of gun-­bullets were fired at him. He ran like a bird and changed his position, but again thousands of bullets were fired. Suddenly a tank approached from one side. The tank’s bullet hit his left arm and his chest. Then two more bullets from the tank hit him. He continued to crawl away to hide, but he soon died. Ten bullets had riddled his body that now lay dead and soulless on the ground. . . . At the police station . . . ​a man sat down opposite of me. He was huge and wore a cap on his head. He was a village guard. He said “Ana, mother, I beseech you! If they [the police officers] ask, tell them that you have sacrificed your son for the state.” I answered, “How could I say something like that? They have killed my son. How could I say I have sacrificed my son for the state?” He shook his head: “This woman will disgrace us all,” he said and left. It was time for lunch. They threw us out and told us to leave, so they could eat in peace. . . . At four they called us in again. I was called into a room and questioned: He3 asked my name. “Why did you not raise your son decently? You have made your son a terrorist.” I told him, “You are responsible for the way my son has become.” He asked, “How?” I said, “You are.” Ayşegül went on to explain to me how Eris had applied for the military academy. Although he had passed all exams, he was not accepted. Frustrated and convinced that his rejection was because of his Kurdish origins, he gradually became involved with the Kurdish nationalist movement.

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He [the interrogator] said, “If one tear drops from your eye, I will set fire on you/shoot you right here.”4 I answered, “Neither will I cry nor will you set me on fire. My heart is already burning, and I have no more tears. My son was killed, and I have come to take him home.” He said, “Destiny wants it that I killed your son. If not, my mother would have been here now in your place.” I said, “Well, either me or your mother.” My brother-­in-­law, who was present at the interview, continuously warned me, “Ayşegül, please . . .” As if I should not honor my son! He [the interrogator] said, “Many guerrilla fighters have been killed here, but nobody has managed to take their corpses. Why should you want them?” But I answered, “I have come to take home my son.” He repeated, “If I had not killed your son, he would probably have killed me.” I answered, “We have war. It is either you or my son. I would have entrusted my son to you, the Turkish army. He was even accepted into the Turkish military academy, but finally you would not let him.” Imagine, my son had won a scholarship to study free of charge, but they did not let him go. “You took away his certificates,” I told him. “Turkish officials lost his certificates and could not return them. It is because of you and your army,” I told him, “that my son joined the [guerrilla] movement. And now you shot him and killed him.” I insisted, “It is war, and I have come to take home my son.” He asked, “Is that what you say”? I said, “Yes.” He said, “I will kill you.” I cried, “Why would you kill me? I have only come to take home my son.” At that point, I started to sob, you know? He threw me out and told me to come back the next day. This passage is the first of several where the ambiguity of victimhood becomes visible. Eris had not always been a Kurdish activist but had strived for a career among the leadership of the Turkish army—­the keepers of Turkish nationalism, the Kemalist project and the arch adversaries of the Kurdish nationalist movement. Only after his attempts at becoming “Turkish” had failed and he had been painfully reminded of his Kurdish identity had he turned toward the Kurdish nationalist movement. Ayşegül seems not to have a problem with her son’s switching allegiances and his attempts to join the military, which for decades had been responsible for severe state violence and breaches of human rights in the Kurdish regions. Mentioning this episode was rather

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her way of concretizing the hypocrisy of the Turkish state. They claimed equal rights for all citizens in Turkey, but refused Kurds the chance of claiming them. I returned to the police station the next day and signed a number of papers. We were not lucky. And there was no Kurdish-­speaking lawyer there whom I could have asked for advice. I myself do not speak Turkish. I filled out all the necessary application forms, but finally they came and brought the corpse. By that time I had already informed MedTV.5 They had come, but I was in too much pain, too bewildered to say anything. The soldiers started to dig a grave. They [the soldiers] took me, put me onto a bus, and closed the doors. They told me that if not I would cause trouble. “How should I cause trouble [olaya derxim]? Whom do I have to help me to start trouble? I am all alone.” They would still put me in the bus and close the doors. Causing trouble has a specific connotation in this context. Ayşegül uses the Turkish word olay, which means event or incident. Olay is normally used to denote civil unrest, frequently occurring after the funeral of a guerrilla fighter. Such funerals often mobilized several thousand demonstrators. Riots could spread to neighboring cities and last several days. This had happened also in March 2006 during my fieldwork, following the funeral of fourteen guerrilla fighters who had allegedly been killed by chemical weapons during a military operation. Riots broke out in several cities of southeastern Turkey; within a week, twelve civilians were killed and several thousand people (including hundreds of minors) imprisoned and tried (YEK-­KOM 2006). The first riots, also called Serhildan, had broken out in the spring of 1990. They were not orchestrated by a political movement, and the force of the civilian unrest surprised the PKK as much as it did the Turkish state. These first Serhildan were later regarded as a manifestation of a mass Kurdish nationalist movement. In fact, these riots, “coupled with the initial heavy-­handed state response—­hundreds of people were detained and about half a dozen civilians show dead—­pushed many Kurds even closer to the PKK” (Marcus 2007: 143). Ayşegül tried to convince the soldiers that, as a helpless old woman, she would be unable to cause troubles. Convincing the soldiers was a half-­hearted attempt at best—­Ayşegül had already taken the first steps to cause trouble and

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had called MedTV. It did not matter that she had been unable to give an interview at the police station and that the soldiers had tried to keep her locked up and isolated from the public. MedTV would spread the news of her attempt to bring home Eris’s body. The struggle between Ayşegül and the soldiers had obtained another, a public dimension, meaning that a lot more was at stake for both sides now. Eris was no longer only her son: she would bring home a martyr who had died for a (noble) cause. Ayşegül knew what the soldiers feared: that a guerrilla funeral would mobilize followers and that the funeral of a şehit, a martyr, would be seen as a triumph for the Kurdish nationalist movement. Ayşegül was finally allowed by the police to see the dead bodies. As several guerrilla fighters had been killed, she had to identify her son: When they went to see the dead bodies, they let me out [of the bus]. I looked over the corpses. I just had a quick look. I did not look at their faces or eyes. I just looked at their feet. The feet stuck out of the coffins. Pointing at one, I said, “This is my son.” The father of another guerrilla fighter who had died that day was also present. But he said, “I will not say that he is my son.” I was angry: “How can you do that? I am a woman and can do it, so why can’t you say it?” I told him, “But whether you will identify your son or not, I will take home both coffins.” He [the father] said, “But he is unrecognizable; they have crushed his face.” It is not clear from Ayşegül’s narrative whether she had convinced the man to claim his son or if Ayşegül has decided to claim both corpses as her own: We put them in proper coffins. We were surrounded by military jeeps and tanks. They told us: “If you really take these bodies with you, we will shoot you. The PKK will anyway attack you on the way and take the corpses from you,” and things like that. I told them, “The PKK will not take the corpse away from me. My son has become a şehit, and I have come to bring him home.” In claiming bodies and defining the deceased as martyrs, families took an active part in the political struggle of defining the conflict and legitimizing the Kurdish nationalist struggle. The funeral and the funeral procession constituted an “occasion to make a statement about . . . ​the invincibility of ‘the

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struggle’ in spite of losses along the way, which suggests the dispensability of individuals and the inevitability of the ultimate price that has to be paid for freedom” (Ramphele 1997: 106). Mourning the maltreated body further created a sense of community among the mourners and could become a “potent instrument of political mobilization” (Khalili 2007: 126). Therefore, the PKK “wanted people to claim their bodies. These martyrs—­Turkey used the same word for its soldiers killed in the fighting—­were an important symbol of Kurdish resistance and getting families to publicly bury them would be sign of sympathy and respect for the PKK fight” (Marcus 2007, 141). Ayşegül was sure that the PKK would not take Eris’s corpse from her. On the contrary, she was sure the PKK would support a safe homecoming and funeral.

The Undead Body: Of Religion and Nationalist Causes, Part 1 Ayşegül’s story describes not only a fight for the physical body of her dead son but also a fight to define what that body’s significance was. The soldiers and the village guards tried to convince Ayşegül that her son was a terrorist, whose mutilated and dehumanized body should be buried as yet another unnamed and unclaimed corpse, without the necessary rituals. The village guard, therefore, summoned her to yield to the state, to give up the fight and to give up her son—­or, in his words, sacrifice her son to the state. Her son should become an unknown dead, bereft of his political and symbolic meaning. This would simply be the best and easiest way for all parties involved, and the violence and harassment could find an end. Ayşegül refused, however, and managed to claim the maltreated and mutilated body. She claimed it and defined her son as a şehit, a martyr for the Kurdish cause, thus giving meaning to his death and restoring his dignity. In bringing the body home in a long funeral procession, the mutilations and the maltreatment of the body became an opportunity to “put the evil and brutality of the state in full public view” (Ramphele 1997: 106) and to render the state’s claim for victimhood illegitimate. In the last part of Ayşegül’s story, the symbolic meaning of the dead body becomes central. The news of her success in claiming her son’s body spread quickly. Already on her way home, Ayşegül was joined by a crowd in cars and minibuses, forming a funeral procession. These people paid Eris their last respects—­and simultaneously helped Ayşegül shield her son from further military attacks.

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We got up and left the police station behind us, the tanks still surrounding us. We were driving on a curvy road. In each curve, there were men with walkie-­talkies [who] waited. “Eris’s corpse is passing,” they said. Finally we arrived at the town of I. and the streets were full of taxis and minibuses. These cars followed us. When we arrived at the mountain pass, we saw tanks were spread all over the place. When we arrived at K., the soldiers there stopped us and raised the [Turkish] flag. The tanks stopped right in front of our car. As if my son’s bloodless body would rise from the coffin, revitalize, and take up arms again, all barrels pointed at him. From there we continued our journey. At that time, most funeral processions turned violent. The military was, therefore, alert. Anticipating an outbreak of violence, the military had strategically positioned tanks and soldiers on the road. At every curve, soldiers were ready to report and eventually to act. In her narrative, Ayşegül does not mention any violent clashes, however. As the funeral procession became bigger, it is more than likely that some demonstrators produced the Kurdish flag or at least textiles in Kurdish colors (which, at that time, was a mayor crime in itself, but frequently done during a Serhildan). In Ayşegül’s story, it seemed as if the demonstrators were not of interest to the soldiers. In this symbolic encounter between the convoy accompanying Eris’s body and the Turkish state forces, the tanks were not threatening the crowd. As Ayşegül recalls, the tanks stopped in front of her car, which had the coffin with Eris’s dead body on the roof: “As if my son’s bloodless body would rise from the coffin, revitalize and take up arms again, all barrels pointed at him,” Ayşegül comments on the encounter. While Ayşegül did not dwell on this sentence any further and she went on to speak of their homecoming and the funeral, this sentence is probably key to understanding the symbolic power of dead bodies. The corpse was threatening and dangerous; in a sense, it was not entirely dead. Of course this “idea of immortality was not strictly speaking physical because everybody recognized that the individual’s physical existence is ended by death” (Asad 2007: 49–­50). In the Turkish saying, asker vurulunca ölmez, unutulunca ölür (a soldier does not die when he is hit, but when he is forgotten). As this indicates, immortality is linked to the body’s continuous symbolic power and its ability to mobilize: in short, to be an important “actor” in the political game. This likewise became clear from Ayşegül’s poetic description of the moment the

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convoy was held up. Eris’s body was not dead in the sense that he had become harmless and apolitical. On the contrary, his death—­and Ayşegül’s success in defining him as a martyr and bringing him home—­invested his body with new symbolic importance and power. Already during her journey to the police station, in the stranger’s tale, Ayşegül had asserted the heroism of her son, outnumbered and with only a rifle against the enemy’s tanks and missiles. In describing his death, Ayşegül uses the common expression of Kurdish (and Turkish) nationalist discourse: şehit düştü,6 he fell as a martyr. She used the Qur’anic expression şehit, albeit in the secular context of a Marxist-­inspired nationalist movement. As the highest and purest sacrifice, martyrdom has been highly valorized as a political strategy in a number of liberation struggles. There is nothing exclusively Kurdish or Middle Eastern about it. Che Guevara, for example, declared the martyrs of the Latin American liberation struggle as the “most complete expression of the heights that can be reached by a nation fighting to defend its purest ideas and . . . ​its noblest goals” (Guevara 1968: 363, cited in Khalili 2007: 19). As Khalili has stated, while the notion of martyrdom “co-­opts the religious cosmology which justifies sacrifice,” the act itself is, however, “performed in the cause of the nation . . . ​rather than the glory of religion” (2007: 19). The concept of martyrdom in secular movements is, thus, embedded “in cultural constructions which were new and innovative, but which nevertheless were historically (and religiously) rooted” (Fuglerud 2011: 83). The religious symbolism inherent in the Kurdish (and Turkish) nationalist understanding of the şehit, the martyr, thus constitutes another pool of “cultural material and ideational possibilities” (Barth 1993, 4) that is invoked and from which a legacy is drawn. The concepts of martyrdom and heroism have also been used thus throughout the history of Kurdish revolts and liberation struggles. The martyrs of the current armed struggle between the PKK and the Turkish state are all heroic fighters who have offered their life to the Kurdish cause. Thus, it is not unusual that images of recently fallen martyrs are displayed alongside images of historical figures, such as the leaders of the Shayk Sa’id revolt in 1925 or the Dersim revolt in 1932. Linking the dead bodies to this historical past grants legacy to the Kurdish movement and further invests the dead with symbolic power. The term şehit is used equally for all persons who have died at the hands of the Turkish state. The Kurdish concept of martyrdom, thus, not only refers to “the active dissident dying in the act of resistance, but also [to] the innocent bystander, not necessarily armed and engaged in the act of fighting, who

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is however killed at the hands of the unjust oppressor” (Khalili 2007: 149). Civilians who have been (accidentally) killed by Turkish forces are celebrated and honored as şehit: “What matters according to this latter usage is neither personal motive nor political expression but the fatal effect of a violent encounter with the occupying enemy” (Asad 2007: 49). As such, it is not the (intentional) act of dying for a cause that is central to Kurdish representations of martyrdom. As Ayşegül’s story makes clear, being able publicly to define certain bodies as şehit and burying them as such is a triumph and a defiance of the power of the state. It is a triumph insofar as the mostly mutilated guerrilla corpses become the symbols of the illegitimate practices of the Turkish state and render its claims to power illegitimate.

Murat’s Story: Of Religion and Nationalist Causes, Part 2 Ayşegül referred briefly to the mutilation of the guerrilla bodies. She herself did not look at the faces of the corpses, but rather identified her son by his feet. The father of the other guerrilla fighter had refused to identify his son, who had been mutilated and made unrecognizable. In the following, I will try to put these mutilations in relation to the notion of martyrdom. To do so, I will once more return to the religious symbolism employed in Turkish nationalist discourse. Within the Turkish nationalist narrative, religious symbolism was used not only to foster a soldier nation but also to define a person’s relation to the state and her belonging to an ethnic group (Houston 2008). Using religion as a replacement for ethnicity has a long tradition in Turkey. In the Ottoman Empire, people were defined and categorized by their religion, and as late as the 1990s, where both Ayşegül’s and the following story are set, only Armenians, Greeks, and Jews were recognized as minorities. Ethnic minorities did not exist officially in Turkey, as the nationalist representation of Turkey was that of a homogeneous nation, with one people and one language. As the following narrative indicates, religion and religious symbolism are also used in the definition of the martyr, as opposed to the terrorist. Like Ayşegül, Murat, a man in his forties, also had to struggle to define his brother Hüsseyin as a martyr. Murat’s narrative shares many of the elements to be found in Ayşegül’s account. In both narratives, the struggle over the definition of the corpse is central. Both stories depict the police or soldiers as eager to define the corpse as the body of an unworthy terrorist, ineligible for a decent (martyr’s) funeral, and, thus, to be buried in an unnamed grave. In

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Ayşegül’s story, this struggle is a straightforward one. In her conversation with the soldier, he repeatedly asks her why she had raised her son as a terrorist. She, on the other hand, blames the state for Eris’s involvement with the guerrilla force and repeats, “My son has become a şehit, and I have come to bring him home.” In Murat’s case, the struggle over the corpse is a more subtle one. The terms “terrorist” and “martyr” do not feature in his narrative, and the definition of martyrdom or terrorism takes on a rather different, indirect and symbolic form. In associating the body with different versions of history, the body is classified. This classification is, furthermore, based on religious connotation, and—­as is only possible in conversations among persons of the same sex—­it is framed in terms of sexuality. In the early 1990s, Murat was called to the kaymakam, the district governor. When he came to his office, the chief of police and the brigade commander were already present. The Turkish officials wanted Murat to confirm rumors about the death of his brother, a former guerrilla fighter. They told me that, according to the information they got from the people—­that means, they did not have any confirmed information about [my brother’s] death, but they knew that his code name had been Nedim. I said, “Yes, it is true. We have also heard it on the radio and it is true.” The kaymakam said, “Well, we will do everything to assist you.” I said, “Thank you, we will go and get the corpse.” That is when the atmosphere changed. The brigade commander asked, “Is your brother a Muslim?” I mean, excuse me for the expression, “Has your brother been circumcised?” I answered, “If he were no Muslim, if he were not circumcised—­six months earlier he was your soldier. In that case, your soldiers are no Muslims either.” “For me this is not that important,” I told them. For me, it is not important at all. For me, the important thing is the fight. Read alone, this episode is difficult to understand. Earlier in this chapter, I discussed the nationalist interpretation of Islam (Türk İslam Sentezi) and the use of religious symbolism and terminology in nationalist discourse. However, this earlier discussion does not answer the question of why it should be that important to be a Muslim, especially in a secular institution, as the Turkish military is. And what does the reference to religion mean in a heated and tense conversation over a guerrilla corpse? Murat does not further comment

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on this incident, except in his affirmation to me that religious affiliation meant nothing to him as long as a person supported the Kurdish struggle. As a matter of fact, religious faith had no importance when a guerrilla fighter was honored and celebrated as a şehit. Some of the most famous martyrs of the Kurdish nationalist movement were not Muslims but had joined the PKK as internationalists in the 1990s.7 Read in relation to another episode in Murat’s narrative, the aforementioned use of religion as a substitute for ethnic belonging becomes apparent. Here, circumcision and being a Muslim or not indicate an ethnic dimension. Kesilmemişler, those who have not been circumcised, was a common denominator for the Armenian population during the Armenian genocide.8 This connection is literally drawn in the following encounter. Murat and his relative decided to claim Hüsseyin’s corpse. After a threatening verbal dispute, similar to the one described in Ayşegül’s narrative, the two men are finally allowed into the hangar where several corpses of guerrilla fighters are deposited. When Murat and his relative attempt to identify all the corpses, they observe how the soldiers violate one of the bodies: We went to the hangar to identify the bodies. It was a military hangar, a dark place. The corpses were lined up, rapped in shrouds. They had been washed with a fire hose. We opened the shrouds, and I recognized my brother, Hüsseyin. [I also recognized] the second one; it was Ibo. But I pretended not to recognize them so that I could see the others as well. [The soldier] said, “You are only allowed to see your own brother’s body.” I said, “This is not him” and opened the others as well. I opened all of them, looked at them and returned to the first. I said, “This is him.” Mehmet was with me, and also he had recognized Ibo. “These two are yours?” “Yes, both are ours.” In the beginning of the lined-­up corpses, there was also the corpse of a comrade from Lice. It was a comrade with the code name Nuri. The soldiers from the Turkish Special Forces attacked his corpse. “See, this is another Armenian!” and so on they said. They kicked his corpse with their feet. We intervened, and they threw us out. The soldiers now also attacked us. One attacked, [but] the other tried to hold him back. It had reached 22.30. In the darkness, they brought the corpse to the place, where the tanks were parked. (emphasis mine) In the following, I focus on the ethnic-­religious dimension of the treatment of these corpses, especially that of Nuri, the guerrilla fighter from Lice.

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It was probably not a coincidence that it was Nuri from Lice who had been defined and insulted as an Armenian and thus violated. Lice is a small town in the province of Diyarbakır, renowned as a stronghold of the Kurdish nationalist movement. During the 1990s, some of the most violent clashes took place in that town, and, at some point, major parts of it were burnt to ashes in an artillery attack. Today, the vast majority of Lice’s inhabitants supports the pro-­Kurdish democratic movement, and its reputation as a stronghold of the PKK has remained.9 Nuri was linked to the Kurdish nationalist movement through his belonging to Lice and through his involvement with the armed guerrilla struggle. His body was that invested with most symbolic meaning and thus perhaps also prone to be the object of hatred and violence. By declaring Nuri Armenian, the terrorist of the present was associated with the terrorist of the past. Armenians have been regarded as a major threat to the unity of the Turkish state (Mango 2005; Öktem 2006). The Armenian terror is a major part of the founding narrative of modern Turkey, and the expulsion of the Armenians, together with the Russians, is celebrated on national liberation day. Turks and Kurds were involved in the expulsion and killing of Armenians—­not only of the Armenian resistance force but, in fact, of more than one million women, men, and children. These people were turned into the “other” through a focus on religion. Hristiyan (Christians), another group of kesilmemişler, became synonyms for Armenians. Thus, besides a promise for vacant land and possessions, religion was another driving force in mobilizing the local Kurdish population to participate in the genocide (Adalian 2009 [1997]). The Kurdish participation in the genocide is not recognized in Kurdish historiography, however, and even today Turkey denies that the Armenian genocide happened. On the contrary, both nationalist narratives present Armenians as enemies and adversaries: in short, as the terrorists of the past. Although some of my Kurdish interlocutors were critical of the nationalist version of the Armenian genocide (that is, presenting the Armenians as genocidaires and the Anatolian and Kurdish populations as victims), these same interlocutors would use Ermeni as a cuss in their everyday language. Nuri’s body was beaten for being that of an Armenian. In the case of Murat’s brother Hüsseyin, his (ethnic) identity was questioned. The dead bodies, who are linked to a heroic past and who manifest the legacy of the Kurdish movement, are turned into brutal terrorists. In defining the dead bodies as Armenian (terrorists), the angry soldiers and the brigade commander produced a counternarrative to the Kurdish claim of heroism and victimhood.

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Linking the PKK and the Kurdish nationalist movement to the Armenian terror strengthens Turkish claims to legitimacy. Furthermore, by defining the guerrilla corpses as Ermeni, the Kurdish nationalist claim of representing the entire Kurdish population is rendered irrelevant and false.

By Way of Conclusion Linking bodies to the Armenian terror was not necessarily a conscious act. This is a highly spontaneous and emotional reaction, in speeches during heated debates and acts in tense and dangerous situations. Neither can the symbolism of violation and torture, as well as the reference to religious symbolism and a violent past, be attributed simply to the respective nationalist ideology. Captured bodies have often been tortured and mutilated throughout the violent Kurdish past—­by both Kurdish and Turkish nationalists (McDowall 1992). During the Dersim and Ararat revolts particularly, the apparent mutilation of Turkish soldiers and officers was presented as the reason for severe and brutal revenge on civil society (206, 208). I have, therefore, tried to differentiate between the driving forces of violating and humiliating a corpse—­namely, anger, hatred, and fear—­and the form of this violation, as well as its symbolic and emotional effect on the other (Aijmer and Abbink 2000). The way corpses have been violated, as well as the religious and symbolic meaning that has been ascribed to these acts, is based on a cultural framework shared by both parties to the conflict, and it is used either to constitute or to devalue a certain divine communal order. In the case of the guerrilla fighters, the violations are used to undermine the Kurdish claim for historical legacy and to legitimize the Turkish interpretation of the conflict and its causes. Furthermore, through the violation of the physical body, the metaphoric (national) body should be humiliated and violated. After all, the human body is frequently the site and symbol of group conflict. “Body parts become synecdoches for the body, and the body becomes a synecdoche for the group. Thus attacks on single . . . ​individuals are perceived as affronts to the entire . . . ​community” (Turner 1993: 151). Symbolic meaning is ascribed to the guerrilla body and, even more so, physically inscribed into its flesh. The Turkish soldiers undermine the “authority” and “respectability” of the former guerrilla fighter and, through this, render the Kurdish movement illegitimate. The tortured and violated body also becomes the quintessence in the

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construction of victimhood and martyrdom. The innocent, defenseless, or at least morally superior victim stands in contrast to the evil and brutal perpetrator. In order to make this happen, the body has to be retrieved from the military, and its violation shown as proof to the world. That is why claiming the body is so important for Ayşegül and Murat—­but also for the Kurdish nationalist movement. In defining the body as şehit, the respectability and authority of the guerrilla fighter are restored, and the guerrilla’s family situated in the political arena. The brutal violence becomes meaningful, and the state and its claim to power are rendered illegitimate. It is, thus, up to Murat’s and Ayşegül’s ability to claim the body and to turn the inhuman treatment into the essence of martyrdom, to turn the mutilated grotesque body into a heroic and powerful agent. References Adalian, R. P. 2009 [1997]. “The Armenian Genocide.” In Century of Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views, ed. Samuel Totten, W. S. Parson, and Israel W. Charny, 55–­94. New York: Routledge. Aijmer, Göran and Jon Abbink. 2000. Meanings of Violence: A Cross-­Cultural Perspective. Oxford: Berg. Allen, Lori A. 2006. “The Polyvalent Politics of Martyr Commemorations in the Palestinian Intifada.” History and Memory 18, 2: 107–­38. Asad, Talal. 2007. On Suicide Bombing. New York: Columbia University Press. Barth, Fredrik. 1993. Balinese Worlds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Feldman, Allen. 1991. Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———­. 2003. “Political Terror and the Technologies of Memory: Excuse, Sacrifice, Commemoration, and Actuarial Moralities.” Radical History Review 85, 1: 58–­73. Fuglerud, Øivind. 2011. “Aesthetics of Martydom: The Celebration of Violent Death Among the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.” In Violence Expressed: An Anthropological Approach, ed. Maria Six-­Hohenbalken and Nerina Weiss, 71–­88. London: Ashgate. Guevara, Ernesto “Che.” 1968. Venceremos! The Speeches and Writings of Ernesto Che Guevara. Ed. John Gerassi. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Houston, Christopher. 2008. Kurdistan: Crafting of National Selves. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kalland, Arne. 1993. “Whale Politics and Green Legitimacy: A Critique of the Anti-­Whaling Campaign.” Anthropology Today 9, 6: 3–­7. Khalili, Laleh. 2007. Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration. New York: Cambridge University Press. Mango, Andrew. 2005. Turkey and the War on Terror: For Forty Years We Fought Alone. London: Routledge. Marcus, Aliza. 2007. Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence. New York: New York University Press. McDowall, David. 1992. The Kurds: A Nation Denied. London: Minority Rights Publications.

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178  Nerina Weiss Öktem, Kerem. 2006. “Return of the Turkish ‘State of Exception’.” MERIP Middle East Report Online. Ramphele, Mamphela. 1997. “Political Widowhood in South Africa: The Embodiment of Ambiguity.” In Social Suffering, ed. Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock, 99–­117. Berkeley: University of California Press. Turner, Patricia A. 1993. I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-­American Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Verdery, Katherine. 1999. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press. Weiss, Nerina and Maria Six-­Hohenbalken. 2011. “Introduction: Violence Expressed.” In Violence Expressed: An Anthropological Approach, ed. Nerina Weiss and Maria Six-­Hohenbalken, 1–­18. London: Ashgate. YEK-­KOM, e.V. 2006. Das Kriegsbeharren des türkischen Staates gegen den Frieden der Kurden. http://thecaravan.org/files/caravan/son_dosya.pdf. Žarkov, Dubravka. 2007. The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Break-­Up of Yugoslavia. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Notes 1. See Verdery (1999: 1–­22) for a thorough historical discussion. 2. The spring festival of Newroz is celebrated as Kurdish National Day. 3. Ayşegül did not specify whether the person questioning her here was the village guard or a policeman. The only way she refers to her interrogator is by saying “he said.” 4. Yakmak means both to set fire and to shoot. Although the police officer probably meant shooting, she proceeds in answering in the “to set fire” understanding of the word. 5. At that time, MedTV was the only Kurdish broadcasting company. 6. My interlocutors mostly used this Turkish expression, even if the interview was conducted in Kurdish. This is not unusual given that Turkish has been the dominant language in the Kurdish nationalist movement. 7. For example, Andrea Wolf, a German activist who joined the guerrilla movement in 1996 and was killed on October 23, 1998. See Zur Erinnerung an Andrea Wolf-­Ronahi, http://www.nadir. org/. 8. Interview, Bergen, May 2010. 9. Interlocutors from Lice frequently complained that being from Lice often turned them into suspects and terrorists. Particularly at road blocks, where identity papers were controlled as a routine, these interlocutors claimed to have been subjected to special treatment. While other passengers in the bus or dolumş were not molested, my interlocutors claimed they were frequently picked out for special investigations and their baggage was regularly searched.

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Chapter 9

Why Is Muna Crying? Event, Relation, and Immediacy as Criteria for Acknowledging Suffering in Palestine Lotte Buch Segal

During fieldwork in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (oPt) in 2007, I participated in a training session in group therapy for twenty Palestinian counselors in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Two Spanish psychotherapists facilitated the course—­a vital element of which was learning how to enable the clients to establish what in therapeutic vernacular is termed a “safe place.” One senior therapist, Muna, addressed problems she had at the time with a group of detainees’ wives who were undergoing group therapy. She asked, “What if the clients do not have and cannot create a safe place?” The teacher/ trainer replied, “We have to help them establish a safe place.” Muna continued, “I have a problem with a member of this group, Amina. She feels more victimized than all the others. How can I deal with that?” The teachers answered, “The feeling of victimhood is a feeling that ‘no one can understand me.’ You could try asking her how she would feel if someone actually understood her. Because she thinks that she is not allowed to be okay. She reacts like she expects her husband to prefer that she is not okay. Ask her to look toward the future. Because she’s not staying the same: life changes.” Later, during an exercise of psychodrama, Muna had enacted the role of Amina, the woman she had represented as feeling like too much of a victim. Muna told me afterward, “When I played the role of Amina and told the audience why I felt like a victim, I started crying and I could not stop; I just cried

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and cried. I felt for that moment that I was Amina. Esmail [Muna’s husband] is also political [politically active].” Why did Muna’s enactment of Amina cause Muna to cry? Suffusing this opening vignette is the presence of two modes of understanding suffering. One is a Palestinian moral discourse on victimhood, captured by Muna as the concerned wife of a politically active and potentially heroic husband, at risk of both violent death and detention in Israel. To put this in perspective, in January 2012 there were 4,375 Palestinian prisoners detained by the state of Israel for involvement in activities against Israel’s military occupation of the Palestinian territory (Btselem 2012). The second understanding of suffering that underlies the vignette is the framing of victimhood offered by the Spanish trainers as an emotional experience that one gets over, through the working or passing of time. In this framework, affliction hinges on the biomedical notion of suffering as trauma (Fassin and Rechtman 2009). Drawing on Veena Das’s extensive writing on the ways that different forms of pain can find a home in language (1997: 68), I argue that the two modes of understanding suffering located in the vignette together constitute a “standing language” for knowing and acknowledging suffering in the oPt. Moreover, I suggest that this language does not encompass the experiences of wives of Palestinian detainees. By taking Muna’s public breakdown to be a vantage point for an analysis of the templates for suffering currently circulating in the oPt, the chapter sheds light on the forms of affliction that can be known, recognized, or overlooked by Palestinians and international organizations working in the area. In this way, the chapter provides a situated analysis of what the editors of the volume term an “assemblage of victimhood,” comprising larger, political issues of suffering, globally conceived therapeutic interventions, donor programs, and the ways in which these converge with and diverge from local moral ways of living with and acknowledging suffering.

The Standing Language of Knowing and Acknowledging Suffering in the oPt Muna’s difficulty with Anima’s case suggests a level of incommensurability between the therapeutic premise and the life it is supposed to heal. This premise emerges in the Spanish teacher’s verbalization of Amina’s difficulties as related to the onset of an event—­her husband’s imprisonment—­to which she responds with immediate affect. Following an emotional response, Anima

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is supposed to recover. This understanding represents one way of knowing suffering. However, while wives of detainees are included in therapy both because they are related to potentially traumatized men and because they are witnesses of potentially disturbing events of detention, their experiences are arguably not events set apart from the ordinary, nor do they unfold in a temporally linear register with an onset, an emotional response, and an aftermath in which recovery occurs. Drawing on Das and Cavell’s insights on the interweaving of language, life, and pain, I locate the incommensurability between how suffering is lived and is verbalized in the oPt in Cavell’s distinction between knowing and acknowledgement (Cavell 1979, 263; 1988; Das 1998). Cavell argues that acknowledgment goes beyond knowledge, as it includes a moral dimension formulated as “recognising what I know” and acting on it (1979: 263). How this distinction is of relevance to the ethnographic engagement with acknowledgment of suffering figures in Kelly’s recent work on torture (2011), where he concludes that the reason we fail to acknowledge the event of torture and the marks or scars it leaves on its victim is not because pain is inexpressible. Rather, the lack of acknowledgement hinges on our failure to see and listen to the pain right in front of us. The lacuna between knowing and acknowledging the lives of the wives of Palestinian detainees is central to my argument. I argue that how suffering is known within the global psychological discourse resonates with the Palestinian moral discourse of collective suffering as expressed in terms of events, heroism, and endurance in the face of hardship (Afana et al. 2010). Muna, the Palestinian counselor, speaks about her client Amina by using the vocabulary of therapeutic progress even while identifying with Amina’s situation of being the wife of a man who is politically active. Muna thereby employs a language of affect that merges psychological jargon with Palestinian modes of knowing affliction. It is the complex, and often implicit, resonances between these two modes of knowing suffering that I term the standing language of knowing and acknowledging suffering in the oPt. Connolly defines resonance as “relations of dependence between separate factors, morph[ing] into energized complexities of mutual imbrication and inter-­involvement, in which heretofore unconnected or loosely associated elements fold, bend, blend, emulsify and dissolve into each other, forging a qualitative assemblage resistant to classical models of explanation” (2005: 870). These resonances actualize the convergence between a global psychological understanding of suffering as trauma and a Palestinian moral discourse on suffering. Convergence is, following

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Deleuze, the point at which lines “intersect again, where the directions cross and where the tendencies that differ in kind link together again to give rise to the thing as we know it” (1988: 28). The lines in question here are a global, psychological understanding of suffering as trauma and the Palestinian moral discourse on suffering that converge around central criteria for the standing language: discrete event (detention), relation (to detainee or through witnessing an event), and immediacy (of trauma). However, while Muna enacts the standing language and its criteria, she simultaneously recognizes the discrepancy between the standing language and the suffering experienced by her client Amina—­and maybe even her own fearful anticipation of being in Amina’s situation. The ambiguity of Muna’s tears therefore suggests a dissonance rather than resonance that is folded into the standing language and the experiences it attempts to describe and ameliorate. In this way, the standing language is marked by a constitutive uncertainty, despite its seeming dominance in rendering an accurate account of suffering in the oPt. In the first part of the chapter, I attempt to flesh out the criteria for acknowledging suffering—­event, relation, and immediacy—­that emerge in the convergence between the two modes of framing suffering in the oPt. As we shall see, the event and its immediacy are obligatory criteria, while relations are optional. This hierarchy of criteria puts a woman like Amina at a disadvantage in having her suffering acknowledged. In the second half of the chapter, I analyze how these criteria and their internal hierarchization fail to account for what the editors of the volume refer to as the “trembling of less clear cut figures” of Palestinian affliction, which only makes itself felt (or sensed) in the ambiguous tears of Muna, therapist, Palestinian, and wife of a political activist.

Event In The Empire of Trauma, Fassin and Rechtman (2009) map out how knowledge production about suffering and interventions in the oPt have shifted in scope and focus since al-­Intifāda al-­Aqsa, or the second Intifada, in 2000–­2003. From providing medical assistance to people who were wounded in the direct violent clashes during al-­Intifāda al-­Awwal in 1987–­1993, the orientation of international donors has changed to the broader, all-­inclusive psychosocial interventions with people affected by, for instance, house demolitions, violent

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clashes, invasions into homes, and the loss, wounding, or bereavement of family members. Rather than following the precise diagnostic criteria for evaluating the condition of a client, interventions and representations of suffering slide into a witnessing of the general situation of the Palestinians. Fassin and Rechtman term this phenomenon “humanitarian psychiatry” (2009: 209). They suggest that a focus on direct violence and the events that cause traumatization have been obviated for the sake of the clinical narratives of clients, their general life circumstances, and mundane suffering (201). While their analysis clearly has merits, I would argue that the notion of event has retained its centrality. It serves as a marker for suffering across diagnoses, narratives, and representation even when suffering is not related to the occurrence of an event. The attraction of violent events as markers for suffering emerges clearly in the Prisoners’ Support Centre in Nablus, where documenting the physical consequences of torture and detention occurs in tandem with diagnosing and treating ailments psychologically. Since the early 1990s, in similar zones of protracted conflict across the world, emphasis on the psychological and mental effects of violence has prompted the application of psychosocial theories and practices/approaches of alleviating violence (Fassin 2008; Pupavac 2004; Summerfield 1999). As an employee of a Swiss development organization said about the omnipresence of psychosocial intervention, “Is it not what we all do these days?” It is this phenomenon that Fassin and Rechtman (2009) term “the empire of trauma.” One expression of this empire is the sheer volume of scientific articles, studies, and statistics relating to the prevalence of traumatic events and PTSD (post-­traumatic stress disorder) among Palestinians, carried out by both Palestinian and international scientists (Hein 1993; Salo et al. 2004). In the offices of the psychotherapists and counselors at the Prisoners’ Support Centre, a photocopy on the wall displayed the DSM-­IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-­IV) checklist of PTSD, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, and depression, illustrating how therapists imagine their clients’ suffering to be about a violent event that is directly experienced and detectable through psychiatric diagnosis. Along these lines, the former director of a major health NGO, Dr. Bilal Nejmeh, told me how the trope of traumatization as a mode of imagining the plight of the Palestinians occurred with the registration of the mental effects on the wounded victims of al-­Intifāda al-­Awwal in 1987–­1993: It was related to the Intifada-­injured people, which is something completely different from what was later called PTSD. It was a direct

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physical pressure or manifestation, say, if you lost an eye or you end up in a wheelchair. It was related to a physical happening: we were dealing with a psychological phenomenon after a physical happening. . . . ​The second step was that people started to be aware of physical problems due to psychological problems. (Interview, September 2007) Dr. Nejmeh drew attention to how PTSD in the oPt was intrinsically related at its inception to a physical phenomenon, thus indicating that the move from physical injuries to psychological distress is circular rather than linear. Alongside other spheres of conflict across the globe, PTSD was crystallized here as a mode of presenting the suffering of the Palestinians to the rest of the world (cf. Young 1995; Fassin 2008), as well as to, specifically, “eager, but uncaring donors,” as Dr. Nejmeh dryly said. During our talk, we also spoke about the main Palestinian actors who work under the umbrella of trauma and psychosocial interventions as a response to violence. These centers were set up to help those who are perceived to have been most severely afflicted by the occupation, namely, the detainees, the torture survivors, or those suffering from physical disability brought about by what are considered heroic acts of resistance. It is violence—­and thus event rather than general health—­that cuts across the foci of these institutions. Western donors and experts, along with their financial aid and knowledge, have been instrumental in shaping how the Palestinian organizations have grown, and this has set the benchmarks in the Middle East and internationally, too (Hanafi and Tabar 2005). Organizations with a psychosocial mandate employ an ever-­growing number of the educated Palestinian middle class of health professionals. Dr. Nejmeh pointed out to me that these professionals are symptomatic of “a lack of human resources: we don’t have psychiatrists. Instead, we have people who study psychology, and then they act as psychological consultants. And we have social workers who have had some training in psychology and sociological behavior.” Whereas the therapists have earned BAs in psychology and education from Birzeit University, specialized training is given under the auspices of the NGOs. These courses are funded and negotiated by the donors who support these centers. As the research coordinator of the Prisoners’ Support Centre told me, “We follow the fashion. We might want a course in family therapy, but in Europe or the US, EMDR [eye movement desensitization and reprocessing] or CBT [cognitive

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behavioral therapy] is on everybody’s lips and thus on the list of training courses that, for example, the EU wants to fund.” Most of the Palestinian therapists with whom I spoke presented their therapeutic approaches to me as eclectic, comprehensive psychosocial programs that take into consideration the entire human being and his or her life world. However, access to the treatment and services offered by the centers mentioned above is allocated according to the scores of the client on the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire and other instruments used for ranking mental health. These scores determine whether the client shows symptoms of anxiety disorder, depression, or PTSD. The intricacy of diagnostic practices dawned on me when I joined the newly qualified therapist Ahmad at a school in Salfit, where he was to undertake psychosocial interventions. The visit to the school was part of the so-­ called outreach work, which was an attempt to address the fact that many clients are not able to come to the center’s offices for treatment due to financial constraints or fear of being stigmatized. Outreach work is popular among psychosocial organizations, among the “target group” of clients, and, not least, among the donors. It is taken as a sign that the organizations, far from being elitist, are committed to helping the beneficiaries who are most in need. At the Prisoners’ Support Centre, well over half the consultations took place through outreach work. The work was often done by the most recent employees in the organization, who are, thus, often those with the least clinical experience. In the morning, the therapists were either driven in the center’s car or took the as-­servīs (a minibus) to the village that was the target of that day’s outreach work. Upon arrival at the villages or refugee camps, the therapists were dropped off in front of the houses of their clients. The driver would wait for the two or three hours the therapists took to finish their work. Therapists often dread outreach work. It involves the difficulties of a long journey, the lack of breaks, and the frustration of not being able to conduct proper therapy due to the fact of the therapeutic space being the home, with family, children, and guests walking in and out of the sessions. The tired atmosphere of a car full of therapists is tangible and the ensuing hours of recovery long. Many of the therapists doubted the efficiency of the outreach work, but donors liked it. Given the pressure of having to prove that services are effective and widely available, the outreach teams were often under pressure to meet as many clients as possible each trip. When we reached the school, we went to the school director’s office, outside which three children were waiting. Ahmad asked one of the children to

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join him, while the other two had to wait. The “case” was a young boy who had witnessed his father being injured by Israeli soldiers in the street. The father had been left alive, but apparently the child suffered from concentration problems. Closing the door behind us, Ahmad took out his papers and went through the checklist of symptoms for around twenty minutes, during which time curious children constantly banged on the door and pushed it open with roars of laughter. The boy then left the room, and Ahmad told me that the child had “PTSD” and listed the symptoms from DSM-­IV. The examination of the two other children followed the same procedure. Having completed the procedure with the three children, we left and got into the car to go back to Nablus. Rather than exposing Ahmad as a therapist who is not quite at home in the intricate work of diagnosing affliction, this instance shows how the notion of trauma is, in practice, employed under the umbrella of psychosocial interventions, despite the interventions being based on the approach that conceives of suffering as trauma. Ahmad’s translation of the boy’s concentration problems into the language of trauma proved to be a way for the therapist to know the boy’s affliction and, therefore, enable the boy’s distress to be ameliorated. Trauma here serves as a useful proxy for suffering, a proxy that corresponds well to donor pressure, lack of clinical training, burnout, and empathy—­the fact that the therapists often share the experiences of their clients. Especially in relation to current and potential donors, the diagnosis of PTSD is important to Palestinian organizations in order to document their activities with so-­called evidence-­based therapy, among them CBT. CBT and an emphasis on trauma have been established as effective through randomized control trials of victims of rape, American Vietnam veterans, victims of terror attacks, and British victims of traffic accidents (Bisson and Andrew 2009). Hence, donors assume they are effective in the oPt as well. In summary, violent events became central in the standing language because they catered to funding requirements, everyday therapeutic practice, and the Palestinians’ national understanding of themselves as a people who have experienced direct and discrete events of violence.

Relation The DSM-­IV diagnosis of PTSD emphasizes both the occurrence of a traumatic event and the ensuing emotional response of traumatization (DSM‑­IV).

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It is considered a fact and a source of puzzlement among researchers and mental health professionals that women throughout the world and in the oPt display higher PTSD scores than men, despite the fact that women in conflict situations, aside from the places where rape is used as an active part of warfare, rarely experience so-­called traumatic events of torture, detention, direct violence, or the like (Helweg-­Larsen and Kastrup 2007). Women are admitted to rehabilitation programs due to their classification as secondary victims because of their relationship to the primary victim (Solomon et al. 2004). The terms “secondary victim” and “secondary traumatization” are used interchangeably in everyday clinical language in the oPt. The following is, therefore, an investigation of the criterion of relationship as a marker of suffering in the standing language. Whereas all Palestinians experience the occupation and its ramifications, they do so in different ways. Those considered to have sacrificed their lives, hopes, and personal well-­being for the national struggle for a state are asra (detainees), or šuhada (martyrs) (Nashif 2008, 195). Due to the potential side effects of physical and mental torment after detention or an event of resistance against Israel, the detainees and martyrs also occupy the category of primary victim in the psychological discourse, the center of gravity of which is the notion of trauma. The twin position as hero-­victim is brought about through a resonance between the figures of hero and victim, respectively. This resonance is based on the hero-­victim’s relation to a violent event that entails either traumatization or heroism or both. The hero-­victim image is also perpetuated in visual representations of Palestinian suffering: a man passing on his message to his family in the postmortem martyr videos; young children crying or throwing stones, situated somewhere between victimization and resistance; and the mother mourning proudly over her deceased sons. As both Khalili (2007) and Allen (2006, 2008) have noted, these figures have come to embody the Palestinian struggle for recognition of their collective suffering. Allen (2009) further notes that visualization plays a crucial role in the propagation of the idea of Palestinians as deserving victims who are worthy of recognition. The images of deceased bodies and weeping mothers are imbued with invocations of violent events as a cause for suffering and, in parallel, the derivative suffering that occurs through being related to the primary target or victim. The challenges in working with the secondary victims were the topic of a conversation with Muna. I asked her why she employed CBT in her group intervention with the detainees’ wives: 

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They need CBT, they need many things during the day: they are under pressure from society, or they suffer from traumatic events, and maybe there are irrational thoughts in their minds like, “I’m a wife of a detainee, I can’t go out, I can’t do anything,” these are irrational beliefs. With CBT we can work on these beliefs through relaxation techniques. I intervened here to ask her which precise events she was talking about. She replied, I want to remove the traumatic events from their lives. During the session, the women said, “Oh, I am not alone, there’s another woman like me.” When some of them said, “I feel like this and like this,” another one said, “I feel the same, I suffer like you, [so] I am not the only one who feels that.” They learn from each other, how to deal with problems like the children and their in-­laws. (Interview, March 2008) Muna frames the women’s afflictions as consequences of traumatic events that have befallen them. At the same time, when speaking about what she considers to be the root of the women’s suffering, she refers to the social relations making up the fabric of these women’s lives: the pressures from society and dealing with children and the family-­in-­law. The example illuminates how, in addition to the occurrence of a traumatic event, relationships are emphasized in the standing language as key to having suffering acknowledged. That these criteria are at times indistinguishable can be seen when Muna explained to me what she meant by “traumatic event”: she recounted intricate, ongoing situations of relational injury from the women’s social relations, rather than separate happenings. Significantly, these at times implicitly wounding relations are not, however, implicated in the secondary victim’s relation to the primary victim, which draws mainly on the idea of the direct witness to violence. This complicates the attempt to carve out the criteria pervading the standing language, as well as the relationship between therapeutic measures and suffering. The discrepancy between the language available for knowing and understanding suffering and the experiences the therapist tries to heal is embodied in individual therapists and in the institutionalization of how suffering is addressed psychosocially in the oPt. The conversation with Muna points to the parallel existence of the language of traumatic events and the relationship to a primary victim as a means of knowing suffering and an

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acknowledgment that the object of amelioration is the uneventful everyday as a wife of a detainee enmeshed in potentially harmful social relations. Women married to detainees are to a lesser extent perceived by fellow Palestinians and in psychosocial interventions to have an obvious place in the standing language. This is because their recognition as victims is premised on their being secondary victims, through their relationship to those seen as most affected. The question, then, is whether the relation is a criterion that is equal to that of the event. Or, in other words, what is it about the experiences of living a life married to a detainee that is apparently included in the standing language but fails to be acknowledged? Here, Cavell’s distinction between knowing and acknowledgment is useful. To know, argues Cavell, means to read and to allow oneself to be read by others. It is “a process of being read, as finding your fate in your capacity for interpretation for yourself ” (1988: 16). Being known as a human being thus allows one to have a language for speaking and thinking about oneself and one’s experience. Cavell, however, notes the discrepancy between knowing (reading) and experience by arguing that, although language “straightens out experience,” experience can never be straightened out “except through existing itself ” (33); that is, experience goes through a process of translation in which some aspects of it are simply left out in order for it to fit into the models of understanding that are available in language to enunciate experiences. This process of straightening out experience unfolds through the resonance between the global, psychological discourse and a Palestinian moral discourse on suffering. Through resonance, the criteria of violent events and relations are actualized. Relationship as a further point of resonance includes the detainees’ wives in the register of acknowledgment delineated by the standing language. This inclusion is made possible through the straightening out of experience. This means that not all relations are elicited in the standing language: mothers who have lost their children through the occurrence of a violent event figure as a recognized form of suffering, whereas wives who are marked only by absence are eclipsed. A further example of straightening out emerges through how the relations that include the women into the standing language are their relationships to the figure of the hero or primary victim. In fact, however, the relations that the wives of the detainees feel as most pressurizing are the “trembling figures” making up the ground of the women’s lives in the absence of their husbands; namely, the family and family-­in-­law.

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Immediacy Priority in allocating grants is given to projects providing direct medical, psychological, social, economic, legal, humanitarian, educational, or other forms of assistance, to torture victims and members of their family who, due to their close relationship with the victim, were directly affected at the time of the event. (UNCHR 2007, my emphasis) Along with the European Union, the UN Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture (UNVFVT) is a major global donor in terms of providing funding to centers that offer assistance to torture victims and their families. In their 2007 round of funding, the UNVFVT had a total budget of US$ nine million. The above excerpt concerning the criteria for receiving funds forms the basis for the evaluation of applications, and, as two members of the UNVFTV staff stated, they continuously reiterated and explained these criteria when they had meetings on missions to visit or evaluate projects. It was stressed over and over again that the assistance must be directly allocated to the actual, immediate victims of torture. During fieldwork in the West Bank, I participated in a meeting between the Prisoners’ Support Centre and a representative from the UNVFVT. The communications manager of the Centre initiated the meeting with a PowerPoint presentation displaying numbers of violations and of people treated at the Centre over the last few years. According to the tables and graphs, a growing number of clients were the relatives of detainees and martyrs. The presentation ended with pictures displaying the physical wounds on the bodies of torture victims, dead children, and crying women. After the presentation, there was a discussion regarding some uncertainties about who the clients of the organization actually were. The representative from the UNVFTV said, “I need numbers of how many of your beneficiaries are actually torture survivors or direct family,” to which the director firmly replied, “All of them are survivors of torture—­they are captives in Israel!” This point was not given any further attention during the remainder of the meeting. However, the UNVFVT representative repeatedly stressed in front of the employees of the organization that “It is important that, when you make projects for the families, it has to be families who were directly affected. For example, ordinary domestic violence is not torture or to be directly related to it. It does not count.” At the Fund’s European headquarters, I asked workers who the direct victims are who are affected at the time of the event, to which they answered,

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“No one can distinguish between someone who is tortured and the one who witnesses torture.” Both the UNVFTV and its beneficiary projects are accustomed to making intricate distinctions. There are at least two points of convergence that resonate between the two lines of differentiation here: the language of the European donor and the Palestinian Centre’s mode of expressing the suffering of its clients, the detainees, and their families. The two converging points elicited are those of relation and immediacy. The converging point of relation is reflected in the stress in the representative’s statement that a relation to either the event of torture through witnessing it or by “being directly connected” to the torture victim are the most significant criteria for the Fund to allocate funding to a project. For the Prisoners’ Support Centre, the importance of relationship shows through the sheer numbers of its clients, who include the relatives of torture survivors as a major client population. Emphasizing a relationship to the torture victim or the detainee is, thus, a way of including this client population among the deserving victims through a language of secondary victimhood or secondary traumatization. In tandem, the other converging point is immediacy. This point is referred to by the representatives of the Fund, and it is saturated with invocation of the terms “direct” and “directness” in the UNVFVT guidelines. The word “direct” cuts across having undergone an event of torture, limited in time and space, to insisting that a relation to that event must be “direct.” Immediacy is expressed by the Prisoners’ Support Centre through its director’s outburst that imprisonment equals torture and through the graphic portrayal of physical wounds and lost limbs in the PowerPoint presentation. As Lori Allen claims, a “politics of immediation” currently permeates Palestinian political discourse and social relations (2009, 163). The politics of immediation is an affect-­driven discourse embedded in the Palestinians’ call to the world to give its attention to the immediacy of suffering, to the visceral aspects of the conflict, by insisting that images of fragmented bodies be displayed in the international media. Displaying the human body is a way of eschewing the mediating instances that are perceived to blur the message of the humanness of the Palestinians (Allen 2009). This emphasis on immediate suffering also figured at a meeting at a women’s mosque initiated by the Palestinian Prisoners’ Centre. The counselor opened the meeting by introducing the Centre and its services, after which she said: “I want to start with a new subject today: ’Azme [crisis]. I want to know: what does s.ad.me [shock] mean to you?” Different women quickly responded with “a disaster,” “problems and worries,” and “mašākil fi d-­dār”

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(problems in the house [home]). The counselor said: “Let me tell you what ’Azme or s.ad.me mean: if I knock on your door, how will you respond to that? You will open the door, right? It’s a reaction to a particular event. When I knock on the door, you will respond to this action by reacting to this event. . . . ​ Who else has something to say? Imm Amjad, tell us what happened when you got the news that your son had been killed?” Addressed in this direct way, Imm Amjad replied, “Oh, you want me to cry now?” The counselor contended she would feel better if she cried. Imm Amjad began the narration of the death of her son: It was the 20th day of Ramadan, so I was fasting and praying all the time. So on that day when they killed him, my brother came to tell me about it, he was telling gradually, he told me that my son was in the hospital, so I asked him why, and he told me that the Israelis had shot him. I told him, “Please ask them again, maybe you are not sure, or someone told you that he died, but we are not sure. Let’s wait to be sure,” but he told me to be sure, and that he saw him. Then I felt like I was unable to stand up, I couldn’t even cry. But at the same time, I was saying that everyone wishes to die as a martyr, so my son got his wish and I shouldn’t feel bad. I should thank God anyway. These women’s hardship is mostly phrased in a language of acute crisis. Moreover, their experiences are represented by the counselor as related to the onset of an event to which the women respond with immediate affect. The therapist’s decision to focus on a woman who lost her son to martyrdom is emblematic of how the call for immediacy, event, and relation permeates a psychosocial intervention. This example points to the forms of suffering that are included in the standing language of knowing suffering, but which seem again to have been eclipsed by suffering that is direct, visceral, and delineated in time and space. The converging point of immediacy is an expression of the assumption that an event occurs in a moment; it is directly experienced by a victim or a witness, and it can only be ameliorated by direct psychological, medical, psychosocial, or legal assistance.

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Revisiting Muna’s Tears: Incommensurability and Dissonance Thus far, I have identified three criteria that cut across discourse, personal narrative, and donor priorities to constitute the parameters of suffering in the oPt. The criteria that appear are the event; the connection to a violent event, either through having experienced it oneself or as a witness; and the relation to a person to whom such an event occurred. People in the latter category are the so-­called secondary victims. The third and last criterion is the immediacy of the happening of the event and its delineation in time and space. These criteria converge and reinforce one another in ways that privilege immediacy and event above relationship. However, there were fragments of dissonance and incommensurability woven into this standing language. To excavate these dissonances, let me return to Amina, for whom Muna shed her tears. Amina was included in the category of the “secondary victim” and participated in the group for detainees’ wives described earlier. Amina was present when the Israeli army took her husband from their home ten years ago. Her family home was destroyed due to her husband’s violent acts of resistance against Israel. She raises their four girls, lives with her mother and sister, and is under close surveillance by the village community due to her being married yet living as a single woman. Amina is a secondary victim because her husband is in prison. But does her actual experience match the criteria of event, immediacy, and relation? Through inclusion in the category of secondary victim, Amina’s life is translated by counselors so that it maps onto how suffering in the oPt is known, namely, through its relation to a violent event or by being a direct victim of an immediate event. Amina’s case, thus, represents an encounter between an apparently inclusive standing language and an experience that does not match the criteria on which this language is based. Amina’s case implies a misreading or a straightening out of experience so that it matches the criteria necessary to know and to acknowledge it. The misreading is actualized because the criteria that constitute the standing language are imbued with images that elicit the eventfulness of violence, how it occurs immediately and also how some forms of relations intrinsically contain more suffering than others, as is the case in the difference between a mother’s loss and a wife’s experience of an absent husband. It appears that understandings of the suffering underlying the standing language resonate with how physical injury was known in the wake of al-­Intifād.a al-­awwal. The gap between the experiential realms of the detainees’ wives and the

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method of therapy that is available to alleviate their suffering is what made the therapist Muna pose the question to the trainers during the workshop on group therapy: what could she do therapeutically with regard to her client, who did not feel better after several months of therapy? The trainer interpreted Amina’s case in the following way: “She reacts like she expects her husband to prefer that she is not okay.” This framing of Amina’s feeling of victimization locates the reason for her distress in her presumed feeling that her husband does not want her to be okay. The trainer’s words may allude to a failure on his part to acknowledge that the circumstances making up Amina’s life might actually be enough for her to feel anguished, irrespective of her husband’s concurrence or encouragement. If we recall the criterion for an event to be included in the standing language, the trainer’s comment resonates with precisely this: his last words to Muna are that “she is not staying the same; life changes.” The trainer is implicitly comparing Amina’s situation with that of her husband: Amina is out of prison, whereas her husband is the one whose liberty has been taken away. The words of the trainer therefore suggest that Amina can break free of her victimization, whereas her husband is the one who continues to suffer violence by being incarcerated. The trainer’s assertion that things change resonates further with the criterion of immediacy, of a traumatic event that is delimited in time and space. Framing suffering within a temporal register of event and immediacy, there is an assumption in the trainer’s advice to Muna that suffering terminates at some point. This is reminiscent of a point made earlier in the paper, namely, that one of the criteria to be fulfilled in the diagnosis of PTSD is having experienced a traumatic event. Seen in this light, Amina shows the symptoms of a disorder, but she lacks a traumatic event to legitimize her affect. Muna embodies the resonances and convergences between the therapeutic and nationalist modes of framing suffering. Her representation of Amina’s case expresses a convergence between her position as a therapist trained to think within a psychological mode of reasoning and her status as a Palestinian who thinks about her different clients within the national notions of suffering outlined earlier. By posing the question regarding Amina’s claim to victimhood to the teachers, Muna presents Amina’s reactions as excessive. However, at the point of her breakdown, Muna appears to reconsider this assessment as she herself feels the same excess of suffering that is not supposed to be there. Amina is included in the standing language with respect to her relationship with her husband, but her experiences fail the criteria of both event and immediacy. This takes us to the internal connection and hierarchy

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among the three criteria, a connection that explains why Amina is not supposed to feel like a victim, despite her apparent inclusion in the standing language: the criterion of relation is an optional criterion, whereas the temporal criteria of event and immediacy are, in fact, obligatory. This is why Amina’s experience is not fully acknowledged in the standing language, neither by Muna as a therapist nor by Muna as a Palestinian. The moment of Muna’s identification with Amina is an instant where Muna reads Amina and understands her in the way that Cavell delineated. By allowing herself to read Amina’s experience, Muna comes to know her suffering differently from the standing language that is available for knowing and acknowledging suffering. The fact that Muna does not just know Amina’s distress but also acknowledges it is exemplary of the subtle difference between knowing and acknowledgment pointed out by Cavell. Acknowledgment requires a moral inclination to act on one’s knowledge, which is what Muna does by addressing it during the training course and by breaking down when she not only identifies with Amina but also recognizes her lack of means to facilitate change in Amina. Muna thus cries at the point where the fog of the standing language lifts to reveal the nature of suffering as the slow grinding of Amina’s life, which is so finely textured that it evades the criteria that have been put in place to know and acknowledge it. Rather than being out of place, Amina’s feelings reflect the unsettling, continuous situation that is a structural predicament for all the women who are married to long-­term detainees in the oPt. Paraphrasing Tobias Kelly, the question is how the slow grind of Amina’s life relates to the slow grind of ordinary life for the majority of the Palestinians (Kelly 2008), which is eclipsed from the standing language but which produces suffering nonetheless.

Conclusion The chapter has explored how a global, psychological discourse converges with Palestinian notions of suffering to produce a standing language of what counts as legitimate suffering. These points of convergence are event, immediacy, and relation. However, folded into the standing language are dissonances between the standing language and how suffering is lived. Although the lives of detainees’ wives are included in the standing language through the notion of secondary victimhood, this language fails to acknowledge the full range of the women’s everyday, nonspectacular, non-­event-­based sufferings

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and experiences. According to Cavell, a failure of acknowledgement is a denial of the other as a human being, a denial of the other as me (1979: 480). The failure to know detainees’ wives as “others that could be me” lies partly in the differential importance accorded to the criteria mentioned for knowing suffering: relation, immediacy, and event. Whereas the criterion of a relationship is optional, though it allows the detainees’ wives into the standing language in the first place, the criteria of event and immediacy are obligatory. The case of Amina illustrated how, by fulfilling only the criterion of relation, her suffering cannot be acknowledged because she fails the obligatory criteria of event and immediacy. The dissonance between these criteria and Amina’s experience can be found in the difference of temporal structures that underlie the notions of suffering in the standing language and the affliction Amina lives. In accordance with this, the standing language can only know, not acknowledge, Amina’s feeling of victimization, which then became excessive. Amina’s suffering became both known and acknowledged only in the instant her therapist Muna let go of the standing language and allowed herself to let Amina’s life happen to her, Muna. In this way, acknowledgment of suffering that does not fit into how affliction is normally known through the standing language requires a shift from a visual register based on distance and objective diagnosis to an affective register without the comforting distance of scientific terminology. As Veena Das suggests, this alternative vision requires the eye to be not an organ that sees but an organ that weeps (2007: 62). Only in the tears of Muna was Amina’s suffering acknowledged in ways that transcended the standing language. References Afana, Abdel-­Hamid, Duncan Pedersen, Laurence J. Kirmayer, and Henrik Rønsbo. 2010. “Endurance Is to Be Shown at the First Blow: Social Representations and Reactions to Traumatic Experiences in the Gaza strip.” Traumatology 16, 4: 73–­84. Allen, Lori. 2006. “The Polyvalent Politics of Martyr Commemorations in the Palestinian Intifada.” History and Memory 18, 2: 107–­38. ———. 2008. “Getting by the Occupation: How Violence Became Normal During the Second Palestinian Intifada.” Cultural Anthropology 23, 3: 453–­87. ———. 2009. “Martyr Bodies in the Media: Human Rights, Aesthetics, and the Politics of Immediation in the Palestinian Intifada.” American Ethnologist 36, 1: 161–­80. Bisson, J. and M. Andrew. 2009. “Psychological Treatment of Post-­Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) (Review).” Cochrane Library 1. Btselem. 2012. “Detainees and Prisoners: Statistics on Palestinians in the Custody of the Israeli Security Forces.” //www.btselem.org/statistics/detainees_and_prisonershttp://

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Why Is Muna Crying?  197 Cavell, Stanley. 1979. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1988. In Quest of the Ordinary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Connolly, William E. 2005. “The Evangelical-­Capitalist Resonance Machine.” Political Theory 33, 6: 869–­86. Das, Veena. 1997. “Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain.” In Social Suffering, ed. Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margareth Lock. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1998. “Wittgenstein and Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 27: 171–­95. ———. 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books. Fassin, Didier. 2008. “The Humanitarian Politics of Testimony: Subjectification Through Trauma in the Israeli-­Palestinian Conflict.” Cultural Anthropology 23, 3: 531–­58. Fassin, Didier and Richard Rechtman. 2009. The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Hanafi, Sari and Linda Tabar. 2005. The Emergence of the Palestinian Globalized Elite: Donors, International Organizations, Local NGOs. Beirut: Palestinian Institute for Democracy Study-­ Muwatin and Institute of Jerusalem Studies Hein, F. A., S. Qouta, A. A. M. Thabet, and E. El Sarraj. 1993. “Trauma and Mental Health of Children in Gaza [letter].” BMJ 306, 6885: 1130–­31. Helweg-­Larsen, Karin and Marianne C. Kastrup. 2007. “Consequences of Collective Violence with Particular Focus on the Gender Perspectives.” Danish Medical Bulletin 54, 2: 155–­56. Kelly, Tobias. 2008. “The Attractions of Accountancy: Living an Ordinary Life During the Second Palestinian Intifada.” Ethnography 9, 3: 351–­76. ———. 2011. This Side of Silence: Human Rights, Torture, and the Recognition of Cruelty. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Khalili, Laleh. 2007. Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nashif, Esmail. 2008. Palestinian Political Captives: Identity and Community. Abingdon: Routledge. Pupavac, Vanessa. 2004. “International Therapeutic Peace and Justice in Bosnia.” Social and Legal Studies 13, 3: 377–­402. Salo, Jari, Raija-­Leena Punama, and Samir Qouta. 2004. “Associations Between Self and Other Representations and Posttraumatic Adjustment Among Political Prisoners.” Anxiety, Stress and Coping 17, 4: 421–­39. Solomon, Zahava, Mark Waysman, Gaby Levy, Batia Fried, Mario Mikulincer, Rami Benbenishty, Victor Florian, and Avi Bleich. 2004. “From Front Line to Home Front: A Study of Secondary Traumatization.” Family Process 31, 3: 289–­302. Summerfield, Derek. 1999. “A Critique of Seven Assumptions Behind Psychological Trauma Programmes in War-­Affected Areas.” Social Science and Medicine 48, 10: 1449–­62. UNHCR. 2007. “United Nations Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture: Guidelines of the Fund for the Use of Organizations.” Young, Allan. 1995. The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-­Traumatic Stress Disorder. Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press.

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Chapter 10

Departures of Decolonization: Interstitial Spaces, Ordinary Affect, and Landscapes of Victimhood in Southern Africa Pamila Gupta

With Portuguese colonial rule in Angola coming to a (scheduled) end in November 1975, the majority of its white population departed in a matter of a few weeks, making difficult choices about where to relocate, about where to start over again. While the majority returned to the metropole, others settled (or had little choice in the matter) on a geographically closer but less obvious choice—­(apartheid) South Africa—­for a variety of reasons, both personal and political. The chapter explores accounts by three eyewitnesses to these last days of colonialism in order to give a sense of the fractured nature of their experience(s) of displacement and deterritorialization as they and their families moved into the disquieting spaces of apartheid South Africa from an equally fractured colonial and racialized structure, that of Portuguese Angola. I pay attention to the reflections as well as the gaps and silences in their life (hi)stories, including memories of the harsh realities of trying to leave a former colony with simply what one could fit inside one’s car and having to make that long drive, via southern Angola into (South African annexed) Namibia, including indeterminate stays in refugee camps along the way, to arrive in Johannesburg. Many did not know if this strange country was simply a temporary refuge until things settled back during the transition from colony to postcolony, in the awkward in-­between space that is called “decolonization,” after which one could return “home” to Portuguese Angola—­or if, in

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fact, they would have to remain in apartheid South Africa, always with a sense of (colonial) loss. This chapter then is about those who, in some sense, were caught in the interstitial spaces or “lost out” in the power struggles that came to define decolonization more generally. However, it is also a story of hardship, about leaving one’s home, suddenly and abruptly, and the coping mechanisms adopted (and adapted) along the way by several Portuguese Angolan refugees to endure living in apartheid South Africa. Echoing the larger thematic on victimhood set out in the introduction to this volume, they are invisible victims of both colonial and apartheid governmentalities, in the former case because of their white elite status and in the latter despite their whiteness. The thriving but often invisible Portuguese community living in a new South Africa was thus the product of having to cope with these different governmentalities and the possible forms of victimhood set out by them. By looking at victimhood, then, from the perspective of persons who neither would be classified as legitimate victims in the humanitarian sense of the word nor accepted as victims by a general population but who, due to circumstance, found themselves on the wrong side (or space) of history, the chapter contributes a more nuanced portrait of what victimhood can potentially signify at the crossroads of ethics, politics, and shifting governmentalities in a world that continues to produce unlikely victims in unlikely settings. I begin the chapter with a serious engagement with “decolonization” at an analytical level to frame my discussions. Then I describe three oral accounts of the last days of colonialism in Angola, to explore the ways individuals made sense (and sensibility) of the chaos of Portuguese decolonization and integration into apartheid South Africa. Finally, their dramatic stories of departure (from Angola) and arrival (in South Africa) are thematically discussed as a way to better understand the experience of decolonization through moments of “ordinary affect” (Stewart 2007). That these three individuals—­ the concern here is less about whether to label them “victims” or not—­went from having everything in (a middle-­class) colonial life to close to nothing in a matter of weeks, and had to make equally difficult choices in the face of a new political context, is what makes this case study relevant for understanding victimhood, more generally. The chapter focuses on unexpected settings and interstitial spaces (like decolonization); on distinct coping strategies, including that of adopting a stance of victimhood in the face of acceptance into certain governmentalities (like apartheid); and on the uncomfortable affects in everyday conversation of minority communities (like the Portuguese of

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South Africa). In this way, this paper contributes to a better understanding of the subtle contours that make up victimhood and that continue to play out every day in different parts of the world.

Thinking About Decolonization Elsewhere I have argued that the concept of “decolonization” has been poorly understood, let alone recorded, historicized, or theorized; it has often been viewed as an unproblematic given, an insignificant signifier in the transition from colony to postcolony (Gupta 2007), when, in fact, as Achille Mbembe recently argued (WISER May 2012) it was a foundational moment that was not only based on an ideal of “universal human emancipation” but fundamentally reshaped peoples and states of the West, and, I would argue, in relation to the non-­West. Very briefly then, I want to outline some thoughts with regard to treating decolonization as a subject and object of analysis. More generally, the critical project of postcolonial studies has been one of “deconstructing Master narratives, unsettling binaries and admitting marginalized knowledges” (Jacobs 1996: 22). These studies have looked to the strengths and vulnerabilities of colonialism and its attendant colonial subjectivities; the political and economic effects of colonialism as a postcolonial condition; the continued cultural links between metropole and colony in the aftermath of empire, and finally, the difficulty of giving voice to those silenced by colonialism itself (Stoler and Cooper 1997; Dirks 2001; Chatterjee 1993; Chakrabarty 2000). Paradoxically, many of these studies have tended to overlook the crucial historical step that transformed colonies into postcolonies: that is, the physical act of decolonization itself. Instead, “decolonization” has been rendered an undifferentiated act that occurred in almost the same way in various parts of the world, largely in the aftermath of the Second World War, its cultural distinctiveness in particular contexts negated in favor of studying the more sweeping experience of postcolonialism as an enduring political and historical condition. Raymond Betts persuasively reminds us that decolonization “is an awkward and inelegant word, therefore, in a way, appropriate to the subject it attempts to describe. Unlike the phrase ‘end of empire’ which has a certain poetic economy suggesting a grand and sweeping occurrence, ‘decolonization’ is work-­a-­day, rather like other ‘de’ prefixed words that denote cleansing changes” (1998: 1). And following Betts once again, it is only in the

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more recent past, as we increasingly distance ourselves even more from the globalized process of decolonization that it has become a possible focus of research in its own right. When writing about decolonization as a material reality, it becomes clear that it was messy and complicated, occurring in a wide variety of legal settings throughout the world at very different moments in time and with very real consequences that dramatically altered the livelihoods of all those involved, not only those directly in the service of the colonial state. Here, I am invested in studying decolonization as simultaneously a deeply physical and intimate act and from an ethnographic viewpoint. Such a perspective, I argue, can potentially help us understand the multiple and sometimes contradictory experiences of decolonization from those individuals who experienced it firsthand. In other words, things changed dramatically, in both good and bad ways, overnight. We need not only interrogate the universality of the event of decolonization but also look to its particularities, as a moment of closure and humanitarian possibility, both at the same time and in relation to specific historical contexts and certain individuals. We likewise need to look at decolonization as simultaneously a struggle over ownership and selfhood in a period of dramatic transition and population management on a large scale, in which individuals experienced profound personal loss, fear, and insecurity looming ahead. And here I emphasize the daunting task and sheer physicality of decolonization, in moving people and things across oceans and territories in a very heightened and rapid manner. This, I argue, has not been addressed in most writings on decolonization. In the few weeks leading up to Angola’s transition to independence in November 1975, approximately 95 percent of its “white” Portuguese citizens1 left (Kapuściński 1987, 135).2 While the majority left for the metropole, some chose or had to migrate to South Africa or Brazil. A specter of apprehension and lawlessness haunted them in the wake of Angola’s impending decolonization, compelling them to change their lives dramatically, for better or for worse; both hope and despair drove them to depart hastily and abruptly. The late Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński captures one of these moments of affect in his memoir and eyewitness account that he fittingly entitles Another Day of Life: “They had had enough of the country, which was supposed to be the promised land but had brought them disenchantment and abasement. They said farewell to their African homes, with mixed despair and rage, sorrow and impotence, with the feeling of leaving forever. All they wanted was to get out with their lives and to take their possessions with them” (1987: 13).

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For writing about the dialectics of “longings and belongings” (Van der Veer 1995), in relation to this group of Portuguese refugees, life histories take on even more importance, as they attest and give shape to events and occurrences that have left no visible written archival records beyond official state documentation. Here I rely on what I call “ethnographic traces”: the memories, voices, and dispositions of individuals today.3 A focus on persons and personalities provides more nuanced views of personhood through very real voices and lived lives, grounded in specific contexts, as well as acting as a window onto larger patterns of culture, history, and power. Moreover, a focus on the narrative shape of these life (hi)stories helps us understand the power of “ordinary affects” (Stewart 2007), which transforms simple conversational articulations and intimacies into “shifting assemblages of practices and practical knowledge. . . . ​Ordinary affects are the varied, surging capacities to affect and be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences. . . . ​They happen in modes of attention, attachment, and agency” (1–­2). Ordinary affects are those moments of reconciliation between the past and present, of duress and stability, that constantly shape present understandings through the indelible marks (and markers) of the past. Thus, I look for presences and absences in the testimonies of these refugees, as a way to access the multiple sources of their (dis)quietude in making the transition from colonial Angola to apartheid South Africa, as well as the structural inequalities that they felt on a daily basis living in such an unlikely setting.

Leaving Angola: Three Life Histories “We left as if we were going for a Sunday drive,” Laide told me, in a very quiet voice, in between uncomfortable silences, over coffee at a restaurant located in the trendy neighborhood of Melville in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg.4 She had been fourteen years old at the time; her father, a prosperous businessman and coffee plantation owner who, having immigrated to Angola from Portugal only eleven years earlier and foreseeing the end of Portugal’s colonial rule, immediately secured property in Cape Town. Laide remembers the day they decided to pack up their things and leave Angola. It was exactly two days after her cousin had “disappeared” without a trace that her father decided it was no longer safe for the family to remain living on the coffee plantation he owned on the outskirts of a small town in Angola’s interior,

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named Novas Boas. He himself had brought the family to Angola from Portugal when Laide was only three in the hope of a better future for all of them. Only now, eleven years later, he determined that their future lay in South Africa. Laide proceeded to recount for me her version of his story, remembering how her father had been so optimistic about Angola’s future at the beginning of decolonization in 1975. That was the reason he waited almost two years to immigrate to South Africa, she stated. He felt that he had little choice, given the dangerous political conditions of staying, including the “guerrilla tactics” of postcolonial Angolan society, the increasing hatred toward whites by the new government, and the looming possibility of civil war. As her father had been a wealthy man who followed politics closely, he had also prepared for such an event, using his life savings to secure the property in Cape Town. Laide and her two sisters and one brother were told to each pack a suitcase that fateful Sunday morning. Laide’s second brother had been in Lisbon studying, so the concern was to get the rest of the family out of Angola into the safety of South Africa. Since they now owned property there, her family escaped having to stay in the South African monitored refugee camps interspersed along the Namibian and Angolan border,5 before being allowed entry into South Africa. Instead, they packed up their car and went for a very long “Sunday drive,” as Laide described it, arriving in Cape Town to start their Portuguese diasporic lives over again. Almost as an afterthought, she added that her father had always thought the family should continue on to New Zealand, as he saw South Africa as an interim space; this (sadly) never happened in her father’s version of things. Francisco’s family was less fortunate than Laide’s when they left Angola in 1975 under very different economic circumstances.6 During our first interview, also at a cafe in Melville, he recounted for me his family’s arduous and extended journey from Angola’s capital city of Luanda to South Africa in 1975. Francisco had been born there in 1962 and left when he was only thirteen. He remembers how, as a young boy, “leaving Angola” had been a familiar topic of Luandan dinner party conversation. The choice of where to go at that time boiled down to three places: Portugal, South Africa, or Canada. And if one’s Portuguese family was of a high class standing, they were flown out of Luanda directly for Lisbon on the eve of decolonization. His family had not been of that kind of social standing, he remarked.7 As his father, the son of Portuguese immigrants to Angola,8 had trained as a botanist, he packed up their Land Rover with mostly books and equipment for continuing his line of work, the profession upon which this family of six relied on for its survival.

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Francisco recounted for me the experience of leaving Angola as he sketched a map of southern Angola on a blank piece of paper hastily torn from my notebook, its name places (Lobito, Bengela, Huambo, Lubango, and Calueque) where they journeyed largely unfamiliar to me. He described the long convoy of cars, approximately twenty to fifty in number, that made its way to the Namibian border. He remembers that this convoy of cars, which included theirs, was one of the last to be escorted officially out of Angola by Portuguese officials. They proceeded to make their way to Namibia where they crossed the border with relative ease, arriving in the capital city of Windhoek where his father secured work as a botanist at the Namibian Plant Institute and where they lived for the next four years before crossing the border and settling in what was then the Eastern Transvaal of South Africa (now Mpumalanga). Duarte’s story of leaving Angola post-­1975 echoes that of Francisco,9 only it is from the perspective of a forty-­two-­year-­old father with his Portuguese immigrant wife and two young daughters in tow, making the long drive from Luanda. They first crossed into Namibia where they too were placed in several different refugee camps, before arriving in South Africa. I had driven over an hour in an unfamiliar suburb of Johannesburg and gotten lost several times, despite Duarte’s excellent directions given to me by phone, before arriving at his retirement home. His townhouse was impeccably ordered, with numerous family photos surrounding us as we spoke, including one of his recently deceased wife. Duarte was born in Angola in 1933 to Portuguese immigrant parents. His father had arrived in the 1920s to work on the railroads, and his mother’s family traced its routes to Portuguese Madeira, arriving in Angola in 1884. Since there had been little opportunity for higher education in Angola itself, Duarte had gone to Portugal at the age of twenty to pursue a degree in law. There he met his future Portuguese wife, who returned to Luanda with him three years later, his degree in hand. As he did not want to work for the colonial government, he told me how he had chosen to work instead in the mining industry to support his growing family. The decision to leave temporarily in 1975 for South Africa had been an easy one for him, for reasons of economics and politics, even as his parents had chosen to return to Lisbon, for, as Duarte put it, after sixty years of living in Angola, his father was “too tired” to start over again. He still remembers the day that Agostinho Neto, first president of the newly established coalition government, made the statement that “all the colonialists must go and leave the goodness for Angolans.” He and his wife had

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packed up their two cars, leaving most of their prized possessions behind, thinking they would be back in six months’ time. Each took charge of driving one car, one daughter on each back seat. There had only been one road open for the very long caravan of cars, which numbered 820 roughly. Duarte remembers seeing that the Portuguese soldiers who had been commissioned to escort them out of Angola into the safety of Namibia had largely abandoned their posts. It took them three days to cross the border as a result. They were forced to move from camp to camp in Namibia over a two-­month period before they were finally allowed entry into South Africa, arriving first in the small mining town of Cullinan and then at a Portuguese immigrant-­run Catholic church in Lindhaven, a suburb of Johannesburg, to start their lives over again as refugees. These testimonies by Laide, Francisco, and Duarte describe how each made the momentous decision to leave Angola post-­1975 for reasons of politics, economics, and family. They also provide a window onto how decolonization operated on the ground and had profound regional effects. Some Portuguese families were expressly flown out from Luanda to Lisbon on the eve of Angolan independence, while others packed up their cars with a bare minimum of things and drove for days in caravans through the desiccated Namibian desert, staying in refugee camps along the way, to reach a safe haven in South Africa. These historical trajectories reveal much about the cultural specificities and transnational politics of decolonization, the (apartheid) government of South Africa, its annexed territory of Namibia, and newly independent Angola. Once inside South Africa, they needed to put together a life under a very different governmental regime—­apartheid rather than colonial. Here, the newly arrived Portuguese refugees were lumped together and absorbed into an already heterogeneous diasporic community including both mainland and Madeiran Portuguese, which, in turn, disavowed real structural economic and ideological differences between families.

Refugees, Toilets, and “Second-­Class Citizenship” During our interview over coffee, Laide recalled for me how Angola never had an apartheid structure like South Africa. She “grew up with all races,” she said. Her best friend had been black, and even though Angola had been a Portuguese colony there had always been a shared sense of “equality.” So it was with great shock and surprise on her family’s arrival in Cape Town that

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they “had to learn to be white,” as she put it. They were not only told how to “live as white” by government officials, but they were “indoctrinated” into “whiteness” through a system of “do’s and don’ts.” Thus, in one’s everyday life, one had to navigate one’s whiteness, a point that Deborah Posel reinforces in her sociological study of apartheid: The looseness with which the Population Registration Act [in apartheid South Africa] defined racial categories—­allowing for both appearance and social habits as criteria—­gave maximum flexibility to these self-­preserving powers of racial communities. On the one hand, the law was concerned to protect people socially accepted and “known” to be “white” from being classified coloured if they had a “darkish complexion.” On the other hand, the law also allowed white communities to query the racial credentials of people they considered to be coloured on the basis of their appearance, even if in other social circles they had become accepted as white. (2001: 108) Laide then proceeded to recount for me several rather remarkable incidents that still stand out in my mind as I record them here and very much give ethnographic instance to Posel’s argument. In one example, Laide had been traveling by bus with her mother in downtown Cape Town. A heavily pregnant black woman boarded the bus soon thereafter, and Laide’s mother proceeded to give up her space to allow her to sit. The driver of the bus promptly stopped the bus and proceeded to kick all three of them off, the black woman for sitting in the white reserved area of the bus, and Laide and her mother for aiding a black woman to sit in a restricted area. Laide and her mother then helped the woman to the closest hospital. A second incident involved her sister’s use of a public toilet one unremarkable afternoon in downtown Cape Town. She was slightly darker skinned than Laide; she pointed to me and said that her sister was close to my own colour in fact. She still remembers how her sister was kicked out of the white public toilets by the black cleaning staff, as they refused to believe she was entitled to use the privileged facilities. “They were just doing their job,” Laide commented. The end result, however, was that her sister always carried an identity card on her person, in case she was ever forced to prove her whiteness again. A third incident involved her brother, who married his black South African girlfriend in 1982. She remembers how they could not even have a public celebration in Cape Town after their secret wedding in Switzer-

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land, as it was barred under the rules of the South African Immorality and Group Areas Act. Even as many of their neighbors in the wealthy suburb of Constantia knew about the illicit marriage, they never said anything to the authorities. Nor did they acknowledge it openly to Laide’s family. This was how money and class empowerment operated during apartheid, she said. Every morning, she recalled without any sense of bitterness or dismay, Valerie would get into the back of her husband’s car and hide beneath a blanket, whereupon she would be driven to the designated “black areas” where members of her family lived and where she would spend her time behaving as a “black” South African was supposed to. She would return to Constantia the same way in the evenings. Family outings, including one to see a visiting circus, involved Valerie’s sitting in designated black areas, often with her mixed-­ race children, while the rest of the family sat in the better situated white areas. Remarkably, Laide’s brother and Valerie are still married, despite the kinds of hardships they endured at the height of apartheid. Even after her telling of these small incidences, which so clearly shaped her sense of self growing up in Cape Town, Laide, upon reflection, perhaps in a moment of “ordinary affect” (Stewart 2007), remarked that she had forgotten or at least buried many of those stories way inside and was surprised that they were finally coming out. “Structures of feeling” (Williams 1977) in apartheid South Africa were not always just about racial politics, however. Class was always also a contributing factor. Laide recounted for me that, as a child, she had brought home a friend from school, a Portuguese boy by the name of Luis Freitas, whose parents had immigrated from Portuguese Madeira to South Africa10 and whose family came from a working class background. Laide remembers how he was always made to feel different at school, an outcast, and how she had befriended him partly out of sympathy. Her mother, in fact, was also a class snob who rejected Luis’s mother socially and referred to her as being of the “fish-­and-­chips-­shop” mentality.11 Laide told me that she always felt between or outside communities; at the same time that she refused to sing the South African national anthem at school, she also did not feel part of the Portuguese community in Cape Town. More generally, she added, the Portuguese in South Africa were made to feel like “second-­class citizens,” a point echoed in the testimony of Francisco. Once again, Francisco’s experience as a Portuguese refugee, first in Namibia and then in South Africa, is in stark contrast to that of Laide. It was only during our second meeting, this time over a beer at a bustling café in the

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suburbs of Johannesburg, that Francisco first confessed to me that his very real fear of moving today is directly tied to the trauma he experienced as a young child leaving Angola. It was late into our conversation when he revealed to me the racialized politics that his family experienced while crossing the Angolan border into Namibia. Thus, what had initially been described to me as a relatively easy movement between two countries was now transformed into a journey of uncertainty and anxiety. His grandfather’s brother, being “slightly darker in skin colour” than the rest of the extended family, had been hidden in the back of the car under several blankets in an attempt to hide him from the South African officials monitoring the porous border zone when they crossed. Fortunately, as Francisco described it, they were never found out and were allowed into Namibia with refugee status. Ironically, the Portuguese were not the only refugees in Windhoek, according to Francisco; there was also a large East German refugee community living there, a combined product of World War II and Namibia’s history as a former German colony before its annexation to South Africa. Francisco remembers attending a special government school, alongside his brothers and sisters, set up especially for Portuguese refugees in a similar situation as that of his family. There it was compulsory for all the students to learn both Afrikaans and English and attend Bible study classes. Francisco dryly commented how the South African government was making them culturally South African before they were even allowed to enter the(ir) country technically. In other words, Portuguese Angolan refugees like Francisco, or Duarte who also experienced the camps over a two-­month period, even as they were considered white, were not the ideal candidates, according to apartheid immigration officials. It was not only their Catholic and southern European background that posed a problem for a strictly Protestant country, but it was also their status as not quite white enough, as evidenced by the varied skin tones they saw before them, that no doubt deterred their full integration into South African society. Instead, these values had to be inculcated carefully in spite of their whiteness—­hence, the time in camps to learn a specific kind of (Protestant and northern European) whiteness. And, more often than not, it was the Portuguese welfare societies attached to Catholic dioceses in cities such as Cape Town or Johannesburg that acted as sponsors for newly arrived Portuguese refugees from the ex-­colonies, as Duarte noted in his previous testimony. However, Francisco continued, those same immigration officials, in the process of indoctrinating white South African-­ness, often closed their eyes to

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the range of “Portuguese” skin tones they encountered in the camps and the classrooms in Namibia. This was largely because of the inability of many officials to deal with the obvious blurring of boundaries within the highly rigid and racialized categories and structures of apartheid. This mirrors an experience that certain members of the coloured communities of South Africa encountered. In a fascinating study, Graham Watson explores how complicated the operations of race were on the ground for those labeled neither white nor black, under apartheid. He shows how certain lighter-­skinned members of this Cape Coloured community, based on a situational logic, managed to “leap frog” over their own elite members to get acceptance into the lower rungs of the larger white community (1970: 24). It was never a smooth or easily defined process; rather, they adopted certain tactics of “ad-­hoc-­ery” (55) to pass for white among this disenfranchised community (some of whose members were also racially ambiguous). That is, both the dominant group and those in question were vulnerable at some level and knew as much.12 Cross-­cutting loyalties were, thus, based on socioeconomic status rather than skin color (11) and worked to benefit both groups—­“the whites and would be whites were a team” in Watson’s words (55). While the Portuguese case is no doubt different, it operated by a similar logic. Thus, Watson’s study shows how complicated race was during apartheid for groups caught between black and white, such as the Portuguese Angolans under analysis here. On the one hand, they needed to be declared white on entry just as much as apartheid officials needed them to be allowed into South Africa as whites. On the other hand, they were given the arduous task of proving it, not only through the experience of the refugee camps but also in their daily encounters with other whites. After four years of living in Windhoek, feeling like “second-­class citizens” while waiting to see if Angola would be rescued and return to colonial normalcy, Francisco’s family immigrated to South Africa, this time without looking back. Francisco and Laide’s repeated discourses of second-­(and third-­) class citizenry13 circulated in multiple directions, with Portuguese Angolans in South Africa who were labeled “second class” by the white apartheid government in turn labeling Portuguese Mozambican South Africans as “third class.” The same would happen also in reverse. Thus, the idea of classes of citizenship operating within an apartheid structure is an intriguing one that also needs to be explored further in relation to its distinct Portuguese African diasporic members. It says as much about South African society as it does about power relations between and among its more recent immigrant groups.14

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Francisco ruminated on the fact that, for his Portuguese refugee family, race, class, and culture operated in complicated, overlapping, and often unexpected ways. At the same time that he and his brothers and sisters were taunted with epithets like “sea kaffirs” or “poras” from Angola on the playground at school, his family considered themselves to be elites of a certain class standing.15 Specifically, class operated as a cultural category for Francisco’s family in that they considered themselves far distanced from the “Madeiran shopkeeper types,” as he described those that they encountered on a daily basis in the eastern Transvaal. Francisco is not alone in using tactics of deferral to “pora” lower than he on the social rung of Portuguese immigrants living in South Africa. As Steffen Jensen has shown in a recent ethnographic study of the experiences of Coloured gangs and youths living on public housing estates outside Capetown, racial stereotypes are often deferred to lower classes of the same inclusively maligned group—­that is, Coloureds living on the “other side” of town or in the worst neighborhood—­so that distinctions of race are talked about in terms of class and vice versa (2008: 57). It is one of the many “spatial strategies and tactics” (48) adopted by gang members of the Coloured community, and acts to restore dignity to what is perceived as humiliation at the level of everyday practices (7–­10). As was the case with Watson’s 1970 study, where problems of race were elided with ones of class, Jensen’s ethnography complicates this even farther by showing how race and class are elided with problems of religion and culture, such that respectability is produced through bodily performance (67). Thus, for Francisco, it is possible that he restored his own dignity as a child by distinguishing himself from those Portuguese Madeirans who, smelling like “fish and chips” (both oily and fishy), sat next to him every day at school. Perhaps Laide’s mother did the same by refusing to allow her daughter’s Madeiran schoolmate to come over after school to play. However, Francisco then told me how he soon tired of countering every passing remark on the stereotyped image of the working-­ class, uneducated Portuguese South African that followed him in every (apartheid) space that he occupied. He realized that the image of the highly educated Portuguese Angolan was lost on most of his friends growing up. To them, he was Portuguese, hence working class and poor. At some point, he stopped trying to counter this image of his community, which in turn shows the persistence of stereotyping more generally, as well as how deeply they play out in people’s perceptions of themselves. Life in South Africa was also a huge adjustment for Duarte. Like Laide and Francisco, he had to learn “whiteness” on arrival in South Africa. Only,

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he also had to support a young family. He first, however, had to learn to speak English, for when he was granted entry with refugee status he spoke only French and Portuguese. Duarte found temporary work in a brewery company, in an administrative capacity—­ironically, he was filling in for someone who had left Johannesburg to help fight in the South African cause in Angola. He also drove a truck and worked in a mine part time, while studying English at a technical college at night. Duarte also had to keep renewing his family’s refugee status on a monthly basis, only receiving resident status in 1978. While he did not want to stay in South Africa, he felt he had little choice to move elsewhere. Nor had he wanted to return to Portugal since he had spent his whole life in Africa. He had initially wanted to emigrate to Brazil or Australia from South Africa; however, he saw the impossibility of either option, given his difficult position as head of a young family trying to start out. So, he and his wife settled into the idea of making South Africa their home. He trained in computers, while his wife knitted sweaters they sold on weekends at country fairs to supplement his meager income. Duarte saw apartheid as a “shocking system.” He came from what he described as a “rainbow family,” which included many relatives of different skin tones, even a socially accepted mixed marriage between a white Portuguese uncle and a black Brazilian aunt. Nor was Duarte particularly integrated into the Portuguese community of Johannesburg while raising his two young daughters. While he worked for an English company and worked with many other Portuguese technicians, he usually preferred the company of those Angolans considered coloured by South African standards. Not that he had anything against his fellow countrymen, he said. Rather, he just felt more comfortable with the Angolans. He recounted numerous incidences—­ including a visit to a “whites only” beach in Plettenberg Bay where he was stared at by the other beach goers but allowed to stay despite his olive complexion. He told me about how, in his place of work, he could not be bothered to follow the apartheid toilet codes of conduct. He would often use the “Asian” toilets simply because they were more conveniently located for him; however, he would often get into trouble with his English boss for not upholding apartheid standards in the work environment. Duarte always saw himself as an African man at heart. As much as he hated apartheid, he disliked colonialism as well and wrote a story at the tender age of fourteen to that effect, wherein he criticized the Portuguese colonial administration in defense of his father, who, at the time, was a journalist working for the local Angolan newspaper, Voz da Plano Alto. When his principled father refused to censor some of own

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writings despite demands from the colonial administration to do so, the whole family had suffered the consequences. His father was not only denied a promotion but refused a salary for six months, which from the perspective of a young teenager served as a lesson in life that he carried with him as he crossed borders in search of a new home. In some sense, Duarte’s difficulties of fitting in, both within the Portuguese community and within Johannesburg’s larger white society, are not surprising, given the strict policing that immigrant groups generally impose on their newest members to uphold certain standards. Thus, the fact that he preferred the company of other Angolans at the workplace was lost neither on his English employers nor on his fellow countrymen, who were themselves trying to uphold certain (apartheid) standards; this situation thus had consequences in his family’s daily life and integration into society. Perhaps, then, we can better understand Duarte’s actions at the time as one way to counter the stereotype of the racist Portuguese that still persists today. However, Duarte’s immigrant experience also very much reflects the new South Africa, wherein the postapartheid state has found it difficult to talk in terms of complex multicultural identities and where race has been reduced to black and white, with groups like the Portuguese (similar to the coloured community) being viewed through a lens of negative stereotyping, all the while being considered structurally insignificant to South African society, even as this is not correct. The Portuguese are a thriving community, a fact that I have witnessed on numerous occasions, not only by attending a Catholic service in Portuguese at St. Anthony’s in Mayfair but also during the Portuguese annual festival of Lusitoland, while eating prawns at Restaurant Parreirinha and pasteis de nata at Café Belem, buying fresh fish at Rio Douro, and, finally, reading the Johannesburg-­based Portuguese language newspaper O Século.16 Here the testimonies of Laide, Francisco, and Duarte not only attest to the resilience of individual Portuguese diasporic members from Angola, starting over again in South Africa, despite numerous hardships along the way; they also reveal how much the experience of Portuguese colonialism becomes a pivotal point for making sense of new lives within apartheid South Africa. Moreover, “ethnographic traces” such as segregated toilets, varying skin tones, and “white beaches” all point to the complicated politics of whiteness that these individuals had to adjust to and interpolate on a daily basis living in South Africa. That the (apartheid) project of inculcating whiteness (learning to be white) was also a project of inculcating racism and class prejudices was not lost on my informants. Race and class as markers of identity in this

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context were just as much about “appearance” as they were about social habits, behaviors, attitudes, and values (Posel 2001: 103). If racism is “fundamentally a theory of history” (Jacobsen 1998: 6)17—­and the idea of “race” resides not in nature but in politics and culture and operates as a form of “discretionary judgment” (9) by both subject and object in the quotidian—­then, perhaps we can use these life portraits as a way to understand better the limits and locations of victimhood.

A Refracted Lens onto Victimhood Here, I am less interested in whether Laide, Francisco, or Duarte should be classified as “victims” based on what they endured. Nor am I interested in looking at the “whiteness” of cases of victimhood. Rather, my intention has been to use these three narrative experiences as a lens onto victimhood as an anthropological category that requires constant refinement in relation to specific historical contexts. Retornados (returned ones) is the label given to those Portuguese who left for Portugal in the aftermath of decolonization and in whom there an expanding interest, both nostalgic and academic. The experience of those Portuguese refugees who left for South Africa in the aftermath of Angola’s decolonization is an area less critically examined, however. Thus, in this concluding section, I want to reflect, however briefly, on these rare testimonies as a refracting lens onto the nature of victimhood. First, I want to suggest that victimhood can be produced in unlikely settings, particularly in interstitial spaces such as those of decolonization: ones that have been poorly theorized, at the level of both material effect and emotive affect. Decolonization is not only a deeply personalized and politicized historical process (applicable not only to the Angola case) that can be accessed ethnographically. It left large crevices in its wake, with certain people (like Laide, Francisco, and Duarte) caught (or lost) in those cracks, in the spaces of history forgotten by many and in the transition between different governmentalities (here, colonial and apartheid). Perhaps, then, the phrase “end of empire” is best suited for those who won, that is, those who left for the metropole (Portugal, in this case), while “decolonization” is a more fitting work-­a-­day category, following Betts (1998), to describe those left behind in its wake and who emigrated to lesser valued (second-­or third-­class) sites such as South Africa. Second, I want to emphasize the coping strategies of victims: what kinds

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of entitlements take place alongside (colonial) dispossession, how are they articulated in relation to loss, and, finally, how are they reproduced at the expense of others more or less fortunate? The idea of complicity arises here: even as Laide, Francisco, and Duarte never articulated themselves as “victims” to me in the strict sense of the word, they each adopted a stance of “victimhood” (and to varying degrees, Francisco by the far the most) as a way to cope with and be allowed into and accepted as members of a white-­ sanctioned apartheid society. That they also articulated their “colonial guilt” as a somewhat romanticized version of Portuguese colonialism (as “less” racist) suggests its use (and abuse) as a form of justification for learning anew apartheid racism, for having no choice but to inculcate its values to be allowed into this confining society.18 This, in turn, tells us something about the nature of victimhood and from a slightly different vantage point. It suggests the forms of (colonial, apartheid, classed, racialized, and gendered) violence perpetuated as these individuals navigated between two distinct and oppressive forms of governmentality that produced very real victims. Third, I want to return to the power of moments of “ordinary affect” (Stewart 2007) that arise as a form of understanding and reconciliation in the aftermath of such experiences of dramatic displacement and deterritorialization. When Laide talks about her experience of leaving Angola as “going for a Sunday drive,” she is talking about a certain kind of loss that she is at a loss to articulate. For Francisco, it is the experience of the refugee camps that he lived in temporarily in Namibia as a young boy, before crossing the border into South Africa, that perhaps scarred him and fuel his present day fear of ever leaving Johannesburg. And for Duarte, the feelings of humanitarian sympathy he extended toward other Angolans while working and living in postapartheid Johannesburg act as moments of “ordinary affect.” Not only do such (ethnographic) traces suggest the ways in which the past continues to be an absent presence for many victims, but they point to the sometimes intertwined nature of loss and complicity, as well as its recuperation in the everyday. References Betts, Raymond. 1998. Decolonization. London: Routledge. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

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Departures of Decolonization  215 Da Rosa, Victor Pereira and Salvato Trigo. 1990. “Islands in a Segregated Land: Portuguese in South Africa.” In Portuguese Migration in Global Perspective, ed. David Higgs, 182–­99. Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario. Dirks, Nicholas. 2001. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Gordon, Suzanne. 1988. Under the Harrow: Lives of White South Africans Today, chapter on Carlos Garçao. London: William Heinemann. Gupta, Pamila. 2007. “Mapping Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean: A Research Agenda.” South African Historical Journal 57: 93–­112. Jacobs, Jane. 1996. Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City. London: Routledge. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. 1998. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Jensen, Steffen. 2008. Gangs, Politics and Dignity in Cape Town. Oxford: James Curry. Kapuściński, Ryszard. 1987. Another Day of Life. Trans. William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-­Brand. London: Penguin. Leal, L. 1977. Breve história dos portugueses na África do Sul. Potchefstroom, South Africa: Potchefstroomse Universiteit. Mbembe, Achille. 2012. Southern Theory/Global Humanities—­Lecture Series on Frantz Fanon. WITS Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. May. Pereira, Maria Victória, ed. 2008. Pathways of Feeling: Stories Told by Portuguese Women in Africa. Johannesburg: Portuguese Women’s League in South Africa. Posel, Deborah. 2001. “Race as Common Sense: Racial Classification in Twentieth-­Century South Africa.” African Studies Review 44, 2: 87–­113. Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Stoler, Ann and Fred Cooper, eds. 1997. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tazzo, Debora. 2005. “People in Transition Between Africa and Europe: Cultural, Social, and Economical Aspects of Portuguese Immigration into South Africa from 1926 to 1975.” Honours Thesis, Department of History, University of KwaZulu Natal, Durban. Van der Veer, Peter, ed. 1995. Nation and Migration: The Politics of Space in the South Asian Diaspora. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Watson, Graham. 1970. Passing for White: A Study of Racial Assimilation in a South African School. London: Tavistock. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press.

Notes 1. The category “whiteness” itself needs to be examined more critically, particularly from a historical perspective of racialized and classed categories operating within an elite Portuguese colonial setting such as Angola. I am restricting my discussion within the scope of this paper to white Portuguese on the eve of their departure from Angola for South Africa, although those given secure passage on the first planes and ships out of Luanda also included Goan Indians and Black Angolans. Thus, it was a complicated matrix of who was allowed to leave or not, further complicated by the fact that most Mozambicans had Catholic names, so it is difficult to distinguish ethnic backgrounds

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216  Pamila Gupta based on the names found in the archives and newspaper articles on the topic. The estimated figures vary widely, but most recent approximations suggest that 350,000 Portuguese left Angola for Lisbon and approximately another 50,000 for Brazil or South Africa. 2. The ensuing civil war in Angola compelled most people (who could) to leave due to the dangerous circumstances. The process of decolonization included the mass exodus of the majority of the white Portuguese communities living there amid a civil war involving the FNLA—­National Front for the Liberation of Angola, led by Holden Roberto and backed by Western powers and Zaire; MPLA—­Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, led by Agostinho Neto and backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba; and UNITA—­National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, led by Jonas Savimbi and backed by several Western powers and South Africa. 3. These traces are the more important because of the mortality of people living through these dramatic events. Hence, this chapter is dedicated to Duarte, who passed away in 2011. I thank him, as well as Laide and Francisco for their generosity and candidness in the interviews that I conducted with them. 4. Interview with Laide in Johannesburg, South Africa, March 11, 2008. 5. Namibia (formerly South-­West Africa) had been a Germany colony and was subsequently annexed by South Africa after World War II. It gained its independence from South Africa only in 1990. Due to the limited scope of this chapter, I will not delve into the complicated history of relations between South Africa and Namibia. 6. Interviews with Francisco in Johannesburg on April 22 and October 14, 2008. 7. These tended to be families that were in the direct employ of the colonial government. His family followed an older Portuguese Angolan migration pattern. 8. Some of his family members had also come to Angola via Brazil, but his parents had come from Portugal earlier. No exact year given. 9. Interview with Duarte in Johannesburg, South Africa, September 11, 2008. 10. The history of immigration of Portuguese Madeirans to South Africa started as early as the 1850s, and descendants of these immigrants make up a large portion of the Portuguese community currently living in Johannesburg, alongside mainland Portuguese (1950s–­), Azorean Portuguese (1950s–­), Mozambican Portuguese (1975–­), and Angolan Portuguese (post-­1975). For an expanded discussion of this history, see Leal (1977), Gordon (1988), Da Rosa and Trigo (1990), Tazzo (2005), and Pereira (2008). The difficulty exists in separating these different migration patterns in present day South Africa and exploring whether these disparate groups have developed into one Portuguese diasporic community. The Portuguese community in South Africa is currently estimated at 500,000 self-­identified members. See http://www.saweb.co.za/epa/info.html, accessed July 8, 2013. 11. It would be interesting to develop further the idea that Portuguese stereotypes of Madeirans were very much tied to island mentalities: that those from the mainland tended to look down on islands people. In this case, then, Laide’s mother maintained her childhood stereotype of Madeiran types after her migration to South Africa from Portuguese Angola. 12. According to Watson, the task of the pass-­white was to present himself to members of the white group in such a manner that the whites could not be altogether sure he was of Coloured origin (1970: 55). 13. Interestingly, this same topic came up in an interview with João, a Portuguese Mozambican who after 1975 immigrated to Portugal with his family from Mozambique as refugees. He described to me how his family was treated as “second-­class citizens” only in Lisbon. He used the same words to describe his experience. As refugees, they were given food and clothing vouchers. They were

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Departures of Decolonization  217 treated horribly he says; it was parallel to apartheid, even. He was labeled the “Mozambican kid” in school and always had to work harder to prove himself. He says that he has been marked by his African-­ness forever. As his family never felt like they fit in into Lisbon society, they immigrated to South Africa in 1991. Interview with João in Johannesburg, South Africa on August 6, 2008. 14. Recently, the argument was put forth to me by one of my interviewees that, since Mozambicans received colonial independence first from the Portuguese (June 1975), six months prior to Angola’s, its Portuguese citizens were better treated in South Africa in the immediate aftermath of their migration. However, they abused their privileges as “refugees” so that when many Portuguese Angolans started arriving in South Africa they were poorly treated as a result. This could perhaps explain the appalling conditions under which Francisco’s family was forced to stay (and for an extended period) in refugee camps in Namibia. This argument further suggests that the Mozambican and Angolan decolonization experiences were tied, not seemingly separate cases, and, thus, need to be studied relationally. 15. “Sea-­kaffirs” was a racial/ethnic slur, referring to the fact that these immigrants arrived via the sea (from Angola) and that they were kaffirs or at least had some African (and by implication black) blood in them. More generally, kaffir has a long and complicated historical genealogy in the context of Southern Africa. “Pora” stands for a Portuguese person and corrupts into an “a” in Afrikaans, but pora is also a Portuguese swear word (no exact translation available), likened to calling an Afrikaans person a Dutchman. 16. In June 2009, I went on a Portuguese tour of Johannesburg with my Portuguese South African friend Victor, who opened my eyes to a thriving community—­we visited churches, cafes, sporting events, and even a traditional Portuguese dance performance taking place in a local park. I cannot thank him enough for his generosity in showing me “all things Portuguese” in Johannesburg today. 17. Following Alexander Saxton, Jacobson writes, “It is a theory of who is who, of who belongs and who does not, of who deserves what and who is capable of what. By looking at racial categories and their fluidity over time, we glimpse the competing theories of history which inform the society and define its internal struggles” (1998: 6). 18. Interview with Lara, daughter of Duarte, in Johannesburg, South Africa, July 5, 2008. She argues that there is a larger discourse that is typically represented in these narratives of immigration to South Africa from the colonies: that life was great back in the colonies, that they were not racist there, that they had to learn whiteness in South Africa, and that they were appalled by the way black people were treated in apartheid South Africa, whereas in Angola blacks were treated well by the Portuguese. She became reflective in our interview, saying that none of that is really true, that it is a convenient fiction employed to talk about and account for living and adjusting to the apartheid structure of South Africa and that it is a tactic used by both men and women alike.

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C h a p t e r 11

Performances of Victimhood, Allegation, and Disavowal in Sierra Leone Andrew M. Jefferson

On June 12, 2006, a group of forty-­three men, women, and children were arrested following a protest at the local office of the UNHCR in Freetown Sierra Leone. The protest was designed to draw attention to local corruption, years of neglect, and, most potently, to claims that identities and stories of suffering were being systematically stolen—­“they are selling our names,” as one of them put it. In the words of a press release I helped the chairman of the group draft, After a peaceful demonstration on 12 June 2006, expressing serious grievances about the handling of the resettlement process, that regrettably resulted in the destruction of some property, a group of forty-­ three Liberian refugees have been charged to court by the Country Office of UNHCR Sierra Leone. During our arrest some of us were tortured, others beaten and we were held in police custody for longer than the stipulated time. Transferred to the notorious Central Prison, Pademba Rd we were refused the possibility of attending court, where we would have been granted bail, for a period of 15 days. During that time men, women and children were forced to sleep in overcrowded, inhumane conditions. We acknowledge that the demonstration got out of control and we regret this development. Nevertheless we find it deeply troubling that the UN agency responsible for our protection, which has neglected us

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for 16 years, is now encouraging our inhumane and degrading treatment at the hands of state authorities. For years the local office of UNHCR has held out the promise of resettlement to a third country. 2 days before the incident we were informed that we should give up this hope and return to Liberia. Unfulfilled promises combined with institutional malpractice whereby non-­Liberians have been resettled utilizing the files and identities of Liberians fuelled our grievances and form the extenuating circumstances surrounding the incident. This chapter is concerned with the forty-­three and their transactions with the UNHCR in the light of their initial incarceration and their court case. The case leads into a grounded discussion of rights, identities, and victimhood and the nature of suffering. I first met the forty-­three in Freetown’s central prison as they struggled (unsuccessfully) to get to their first court hearing, where they hoped to be granted bail. They were charged with various offenses of violence and public disorder following the protest that, as implied above, evolved into a violent demonstration outside the gates of the UNHCR local office in western Freetown. During the course of their arrest, some of them were burned with cigarettes, and others were beaten to such an extent that they were freed still bleeding the same night by police officers not knowing what to do with them, no records having been made of their arrest or their injuries. One woman, Sarah Mansaray, later died from her injuries. I witnessed the cigarette burn scars on the stomach of a man and the marks from a rifle butt on a woman’s arm. As I have already said, I co-­wrote the pressrelease that followed. From my earliest encounters with the Liberians, I was implicated in the constitution of a narrative making sense of their lives, obliged by the ethical imperative of the presentation of pain to intervene. But my interventions were often hesitant and characterized by doubt, indecision, and undecidability. Stanley Cavell, building on Wittgenstein, suggests that certain key philosophical arguments should not be decided but rather dismantled (1995: 136). This gesture of not deciding but dismantling is one I employ in this chapter as I analyze the encounter between the group of displaced Liberians and the UN refugee agency. I analyze a set of circumstances in which, for the displaced Liberians, to live is “to suffer.” Suffering is a quality of life itself rather than an aberration. I hesitate in the face of the im-­mediacy (that is, nonmediated, instantaneous yet enduring quality) of suffering. My hesitancy is grounded in a lingering uneasiness with the criteria through which human experiences of

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suffering are typically understood in dramatically discrete terms. By proposing hesitancy in the face of the very criteria that are used to decide what counts as suffering and what does not, and what counts as a “grievable life” (and what does not),1 I hope to suggest that dominant notions of suffering may be part of the reason that some forms of suffering are not successfully ameliorated by conventional measures. But hesitation—­the perpetual suspension of decision and the choice to adopt a “shimmering” orientation—­is not only an analytic strategy. It also characterized my encounter with the Liberians, with the Sierra Leonean police, and with the local office of the UNHCR. Neither in nor out, neither totally committed nor totally apathetic, my movement between these actors and across the locations they inhabited during the course of my fieldwork was a hesitant, contingent practice featuring doubt, uncertainty, anxiety, vulnerability, necessity, and luck. Inspired by Veena Das (1998: 172, 181), I am hesitating both in confrontation with the mundane and extraordinary worlds I encountered in the field but also in the face of the conceptual categories used to make sense of these. In this chapter, I examine the entanglements between the forms of life represented by the Liberians’ everyday lives of accumulated suffering and the criteria employed by those who are mandated (or not) to try to change or mediate or ameliorate these lives.

Civil War and Its Consequences The civil war in Liberia from 1989 to 2003 (see Utas 2003) brought with it the usual kinds of casualties of war: death, destruction, displacement, and dispersion. More than 350,000 Liberians fled during this period (UNHCR 2007), many of them to neighboring countries such as Guinea and Sierra Leone. There they encountered humanitarian agencies such as the UN office for refugees. A small proportion of the originally displaced persons were subsequently resettled in third countries (UNHCR 2007, 2006) and over one hundred thousand were repatriated to Liberia after 2004. The UNHCR tells a positive story about the repatriation process, but we hear little about those who were not repatriated, whose dreams are yet to materialize and whose everyday lives are characterized by almost two decades of perceived neglect, injustice, and suffering. It is a small group of these people who are the main figures in the case I present below.

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Performances of Allegation and Victimhood The protest was the culmination of what the Liberian refugees claimed was over a decade of neglect by the UN authorities. While they languished in camps, local employees of the UN were, they alleged, selling the Liberians’ stories to relatives who were subsequently, under obviously false pretexts, being relocated to, for example, Canada. The Liberians’ claim was that stories collected by the relevant authorities and stored in a file for consideration as part of the process of determining their status, entitlements, and possibilities for resettlement were “sold” by local staff to Sierra Leonean citizens who, armed with a new identity (containing the appropriate story of displacement and suffering), were then processed and resettled in lieu of the Liberians. Adding insult to injury, the UN representative responsible for pushing the case in court was the very same man the refugees accused of corruption and negligence. This chapter addresses the way the Liberians and the UNHCR portrayed their situation. I frame the encounter as a constitutive juxtaposition of performances of allegation and disavowal. While allegation and disavowal are clearly performances of opposition, the point here is not to decide in favor of one or the other but to dismantle and dissect. What are the logics of the respective performances? What rationales are at work? What are the constituting principles of the transactions and appropriations my ethnography bears witness to? And what can we learn about the construction of knowledge from my own hesitant positioning in the field? The account features four major players: the justice sector, a displaced population, an international humanitarian agency, and a narrator (myself).

Meeting the Liberians in Prison Imagine postcolonial Sierra Leone. Picture huge levels of underachievement, wasted diamond revenues and economic decline, decades of self-­serving politics, intimidation and abuse of political power. Recall images from the media in the 1990s: youths rampaging with machetes and machine guns, amputated limbs, extrajudicial killings, looting and destruction of property—­signs of a postcolonial state apparently self-­destructing during a ten-­year civil war. Here you have a glimpse of a dominant version of the local historical context that precedes and frames this case.

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Zooming in on the prison where I first met the refugees, we are confronted with a somewhat notorious penal establishment, repeatedly used to eliminate political threats, itself part of an extremely dysfunctional and strained judicial system. Picture the nine hundred or so prisoners, among them petty criminals, marginal street traders, coup plotters, a treason trialist, as well as a former militia commander of whom the judge said on sentencing, “If you had been charged with murder I would have been the happiest man in town to see you hang.” It was in this prison, within this kind of judicial and political context, that I first met the forty-­three refugees. Try to put yourself in my sandals as I stood encircled by up to twenty-­six Liberians and other curious remand prisoners, fronted by the remand section’s “redband.”2 I stood arms crossed, clutching my notebook, eyes flitting distractedly past the speakers as one after another they listed the injustices and ironies by which they felt afflicted. Few signs of prison officers. The Liberians were clearly frustrated. The chairman expressed these frustrations in an educated, level, diplomatic, reasonable fashion. He justified the blockade and the disorder at the UN office as expressions of resistance and impatience. He seemed to feel it was a natural response to the sufferings they had undergone. More intense and verbose was a man who called himself a human rights activist, who intervened every time the chairman paused for breath. They knew the conventions, they claimed, and they spoke with authority before their comrades. Another man circling in the background said he was willing to die; he would be the first to offer himself if it came to violent confrontation. Yet another indicated he was “defence,” meaning security. He too exhibited slightly agitated body language. At the start, I had stated categorically that I was a researcher, not a lawyer or member of the Red Cross—­my own oft-­ repeated lame defense in the face of repeated tales of injustice. I said little as the chairman shared his story, speaking of systematic malpractice at the UNHCR. An old man wearing a traditional hat was pulled forward, and the rips in his shirt were produced as evidence of police brutality. It was a one-­sided account that was delivered, clearly partial, a defense, a declaration of indisputable injustice. And it was persuasive, not least by force of numbers and by spatial dynamic. I was surrounded, trapped, confined. To escape, I turned toward the redband asking about facilities in the remand section of the prison. The refugees were housed in the back parlor. There were 167 prisoners in the remand section. The capacity was a hundred, the redband told me. There was not floor space enough for all 167 to sleep at once, so some had to

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crouch or stand up. The redband wanted to show me the toilet facilities or lack of them. He led me along the side of the block toward the wall separating the remand compound from the soccer field. It stank of urine from the drains. There was a double toilet cubicle made of concrete with two squats. Men sat on the steps leading up to it. Both squat holes were blocked. As I examined these facilities, the Liberians reappeared. This time they were more hostile. One of them tried to encourage me to give a letter he had written before his arrest, addressed to the British High Commission. I returned it to him saying it needed to be rewritten, given the grimy stains on the paper. I was uncertain whether their increased agitation was due to their having worked themselves up by their own accounts of injustice, my declarations that I had little power to affect the course of events regarding them, or the change in location to a place where neither I nor they were visible anymore from the administration block. I had been happy about that latter fact as I moved with the redband, pleased to move beyond surveillance, but now, surrounded by disgruntled refugees expressing frustrations on behalf of family members waiting at court, I felt rather vulnerable. Raindrops began to fall. No one reacted. I wonder now how long I was there. It felt like an eternity, being barraged with information I could barely absorb, let alone process and respond appropriately to. I felt blurred, overwhelmed, agonized even, as I was struck by a profound inability to provide what they desired.3 They said that they would demonstrate and protest if they were not soon taken to court. “We will burn Freetown,” they declared, toning this down to metaphorical burning in response to my frowns: “Of course, we won’t burn anything, but we will protest, make our grievances felt.” Finally, I agreed to deliver a message to their families at the court. When I arrived there, I met family members and the chairman’s wife, a young Sierra Leonean woman whom I had to summon to the outside of the court when the police refused me entry. She looked drawn and anxious, dressed in her finest head tie and best dress. She obligingly came out, and I passed on the message: “We are not coming to court. Why not?”—­both information and plea. I asked whether she knew the parents or mothers of the girls who had been arrested. She pointed to a group of women sitting waiting on the bank above, where a truck usually parks. “Unless I ask,” she said. She went back in and came with another woman and a man. The woman introduced herself, an intense person with urgency in her eyes. She launched into her own speech about the injustices the men had faced. Three days later, back in the remand section, the redband took me up to

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the cell block and into a cell where the chairman sat with three or four others. I sat on the single bed. A blanket lay on the ground. My eyes took a few moments to adjust to the dim light coming from the ventilation window high up on the wall. Eight or nine men had followed me into the cell and squatted or stood as I read from a list of names, sharing greetings from wives, friends, and family members. The chairman repeated the injustices they faced, appealing to Geneva as the final authority rather than the laws of Sierra Leone. He presented them as citizens/subjects under UN rather than Sierra Leone jurisdiction, invoking a kind of globalized citizenship. He sifted through a variety of papers, including the registration documents of the Executive Committee for Liberian Refugees, the address given being the UNHCR site on Wilkinson Road, the site of the protest! Ten people slept in the cell, they told me. There was insufficient floor space for ten persons. One man demonstrated how they stood ramrod straight, leaning on the wall to sleep. The chairman pointed to a spot in the corridor where he slept outside the door of another cell, perpendicular to the cell wall. He indicated as if it was an allocated space, his space. The forty-­three spent fifteen days in prison before finally being granted bail after days of uncertainty and insecurity (see Jefferson 2012 on judicial limbo). But their troubles did not stop with release. Four days after bail was granted and the forty-­three were released from the Central Prison, a number of the senior members were rearrested, first following the arrest of Charles Taylor (former Liberian president and warlord) and later during a visit by Kofi Anan. The police rationale was that the refugees might disrupt the secretary general’s visit with their grievances or try to free the former Liberian president from detention at the Special Court. The fact that the refugees had fled Liberia to escape Taylor seemed an irrelevance. The process of arrest seemed arbitrary but, in hindsight, looks quite deliberate. The original arrests targeted people not even present at the demonstration. These later arrests included key members of the activist committee, that is, those most vociferous in their critique of the UNHCR. I went to the police station and interviewed the detective responsible for pursuing the case. He described a threatening letter delivered to UNHCR. He told of a meeting the Liberians had held on Kroo Town Road, and accused them of conspiring. I asked whether he had any evidence, whether I could see the letter. He paused for what seemed like a long time—­pondering, I thought, the legitimacy of my request. I was doing the same. What a nerve, I thought, to request to see the evidence. The letter was handwritten in

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clumsy scrawl. In relatively large script, it threatened to burn down the UNHCR and kill any police who interfered. It was signed “LIB” and signed off with the less than friendly salute “Fuck You All.” I reacted quickly to my scan of this letter. “This is not the doing of the chairman. He might be aggrieved and disgruntled, but he is not stupid,” I argued. “What evidence links him with this letter?” I asked. “We have evidence,” the officer responded flatly. He talked about the police responsibility to take complaints from the UN seriously and, furthermore, rather mysteriously, about underground sources of information, of conspiracy and threats, that implicated the chairman and the other detainees. He argued with me, seeming to enjoy it in a slightly disenchanted way. His logic was clearly informed by the priorities of state security, having primacy over individual rights. At one point, he laid his head down on his arms, exposing the back of his head to me as if to say, ‘That’s enough now, leave me in peace.’ So, let us leave the detective sleeping and the accused Liberians and their families anxiously waiting for their next court appearance. Indeed, this scene captures rather accurately the circumstances of the refugees during the exactly twelve months it took before the courts finally found them not guilty.

The UNHCR Disavowal Encounters with others, particularly helping agencies, provoke mediations where suffering undergoes transformation and is converted, diluted, interpreted, and considered in terms other than its own. The UNHCR is an agency set up and mandated to relieve suffering. Two quotations suffice to set the institutional scene. UNHCR is mandated to provide international protection to persons of concern. Protection, which includes physical security and the restoration of human dignity, involves supporting communities to rebuild their social structures, realize their rights, and find durable solutions. Protection encompasses all activities aimed at ensuring that women, girls, boys and men of all ages and backgrounds have equal access to and can enjoy their rights in accordance with the letter and spirit of the relevant bodies of law, including international refugee law, international human rights law and international humanitarian law. (UNHCR 2008: 5)

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Forced displacement affects women, girls, boys and men in both similar and different ways. The immediate trauma and disruption can lead to a sense of confusion, insecurity and isolation, usually in a strange and sometimes hostile environment, that can be exacerbated when individuals have been subjected to or witnessed violent incidents. (11) The disavowal of the UNHCR was most clearly displayed during a meeting I had with the deputy country representative at the local office in Freetown, eighteen months after I first met the forty-­three in prison. Accessing the UNHCR compound contrasted vividly with the experience my co-­ researcher and I had touring the everyday worlds of the refugees. After driving to the western part of town in a Jeep borrowed from the officer in charge of the prison,4 we walked toward the blue metal gates securing the vast compound and were greeted by a face at the grill door. Not a warm welcome, but professional. After waiting some minutes in the shade behind the gate, we were invited to accompany a security guard to the main building, where we waited in leather/plastic armchairs beside a security desk manned by two female security guards. A few minutes later, we were being served tea in a waiting room as we waited for the deputy country representative. It felt rather odd to have shifted location so visibly from the site of the forty-­three’s sufferings in the camp, the prison, and the courts to the site of the sufferings of the UNHCR personnel. After brief introductions, the representative asked our business. I began by apologizing for coming unannounced and thanking him for seeing us, then explained about my research and my encounter with the forty-­three and that we would like to hear what he might have to say about it. The representative was well spoken, intelligent, and clearly an experienced man in the UNHCR hierarchy in Sierra Leone. He acted as though he was 100 percent certain of his staff. He was adamant that the UNHCR did not prosecute, that UNHCR would never prosecute, that it was the police who prosecuted. He described how the police took the matter up as a public disorder offense. He drew a very clear distinction between the police’s work and the UNHCR work. He trusted the identification processes of the police and referred to how the case also involved witnesses who identified participants. He was undoubtedly legally correct. Indeed, this was a theme of the conversation: at every point of accusation, there was a cast-­iron defense. Perhaps not surprisingly, the perceptions of the Liberians were not shared by the office of the UNHCR. The key issue for both parties was identity. Who are they exactly?

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Are they bona fide refugees? If not, UNHCR has no obligation to them. He spoke in general terms about the case, referring to his juniors, the legal officers and protection officers who would know the details. He invited us to imagine how it was to experience an angry mob, threatening to buy fuel and trashing offices and computers. He described how staff fled and hid themselves in an upstairs office. He was thankful that the gas station had the good sense not to sell the mob fuel. He spoke of the UNHCR’s responsibility to its staff, of how they were traumatized by the incident, and of other incidents where UNHCR country offices had been targeted. He seemed to forget, however, that the forty-­three accused were acquitted. In the eyes of UNHCR, they were guilty or at least beyond contemporary concern. Most of them were not refugees, he claimed. He also referred to the humanitarian heart of UNHCR staff, of how they had a higher threshold of tolerance because of their awareness of the plight and desperation of the client group. In short, this meeting confirmed the position of the forty-­three as persons of no concern to the UNHCR. Far from investigating their complaints, the institutional position seemed to be to cast aspersions on their characters, disputing their claim to any entitlements and absolving the UNHCR of any responsibility for the fate of the group at the hands of the police and the judicial system. A rather surprising level of faith was demonstrated in the police. The UNHCR did not accept any responsibility for the “violations” suffered by the Liberians at the hands of the police or the structural violations they suffered at the hands of the criminal justice system. The key trope of UNHCR was defensive, a disavowal, a retreat into legitimate legal territory where the forty-­ three were excluded from the group of the deserving and their experience of hood was essentially denied. Legal, bureaucratic, and mandate-­ refugee-­ related criteria were at work guiding the actions of the UNHCR, underlying protection and the the account of the representative. A politics of self-­ UNHCR staff ’s own experience as victims of the violent demonstration served to counteract the power of the forty-­three’s allegations.

Commentaries on Displays of Victimhood and Performances of Allegation and Disavowal During my encounters with the forty-­three, at times I disavowed and deferred decision, and at times I identified with their allegations and acted on their behalf. My own “performances” embodied a tension between skepticism and

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acceptance at face value, informed, at my starkest moments of identification, by an ethical imperative to respond to the visibility of suffering. But as I discussed above, I could also see the sense and appreciate the logic of the UN representative. Criteria for adjudicating who was in the right or who was most wronged were themselves “shimmering” (see the Introduction to this volume) and drifting in and out of focus as I moved across action contexts and participated in different practices with different actors. Alasdair MacIntyre (1988) has asked “whose justice, which rationality?” Clearly, competing institutional and personal notions of justice and competing rationalities are in operation, grounding the actions of all parties in this case, including my own. On Rights Let us think about the way human rights are invoked by the Liberians on the one hand and the UN on the other. The Liberians invoke their violated rights as their defense and as the grounds for their display of violent resistance. Members of the UN office invoke their right to be free from violence and invoke notions of impunity to argue that an example be made of the Liberians so that no one will in the future seek to make a case through violent means. They draw on notions of peace, security, and the rule of law to negate the claims of the Liberians. The accusations of malpractice are dismissed outright. What is illustrated here is the power of rights discourse to infuse competing claims—­that is, to be used to support radically different points of view—­or what we might call, following Dembour, the “polyvalency” of human rights (Dembour 2006, 2010; Jefferson and Jensen 2009). It is not simply a bitter irony that the UN agency responsible for the care of the refugees became complicit in their control. Seen from the perspective of the forty-­ three, an almost sinister structural blindness seemed to be in operation. The staff of the UN office were blind to the fact that they were colluding with unjust and even illegal state practices to ensure their own security. By invoking the law and their right to security, they were blind to the violence of the police and unable to see or even consider the worth of the refugees’ claims. Redesignating the Liberians as troublesome excombatants deflected attention from allegations of malpractice.

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On Identities The case also illustrates how different people have different means to pursue their rights. As the Liberians trashed the UNHCR compound, they expressed their frustrations at what they perceived as sixteen years of neglect, in the hope that someone would finally listen to them and grant them a right to which they felt entitled and which they claimed had been stolen from them. As the UN took the case to court, it implicitly, though surely not deliberately,5 colluded with the state authorities in violating the rights of the Liberians, at the same time as it sought to protect its own right to a peaceful existence. Now, were this chapter meant as an attack on the UNHCR, as an exposé of dubious practices, it would be important to verify the truth of the allegations about corruption and file selling. I am not able to verify their truth. Neither have I seen any evidence (though the Liberians claimed to have some). The allegations interest me, nevertheless, given their specificity (local employees were consistently named), their durability, and their pervasiveness. Myth or not, the allegations were repeated many times by different people as I encountered them in different contexts—­the remand section of the prison, the court, the refugee camp, over dinner in a local restaurant, and in the chairman’s clinic, among other places. True or not, the allegations of neglect and misconduct formed a dominant organizing principle for the collective identities of the troubled refugees. The Liberians perceived their identities as literally stolen; they had fled their countries and then had been displaced by a second experience of civil war; they had been recognized by UNHCR as refugees, but that recognition had been erased during a verification exercise conducted by UNHCR during 2006. Today, the UNHCR refuses to acknowledge the Liberians’ status as refugees, implicitly depriving them of the identity that gave their lives most meaning. Maybe it is not surprising that the concrete allegations mirrored what was implicitly happening anyway. The notion of stolen identities is the key trope in this case for the Liberians. It is the key “mediating” principle, the key sense-­ making strategy employed by the refugees as a collectivity, though there are undoubtedly countless individual versions. Allegations about forms of life and disavowals of (secondary) forms of life are based on particular criteria and constructed through particular language use and self-­attributions. The categories through which the Liberians knew themselves were rescinded. They no longer recognized themselves, despite their persistent and noisy cries. Indeed, their rhetoric and displays of suffering can be read as an (im)possible attempt to claw back their identities. The refugees seem only knowable to themselves

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through the attributed category of refugee and hoped for resettlement. Robbed of the attribution, they are robbed of a self. As I analyzed my data, I began to ask myself what does it mean to live in an unknown/unknowable everyday world, a stranger even to the identities attributed to one? This is not a question I can answer. However, following Das, I pose the question as a way of making room—­at the moment of hesitation—­for experiences of unknowability and uncertainty (Das 1998: 184; see also Das 2007: 2). Ironically, the Liberians saw the court case as their opportunity to settle their status and entitlements as refugees once and for all. For them, the court case came to be about their legitimacy as refugees and their worth as human beings, not about their violent resistance to alleged corrupt practices. Yet the process was surely weighted against them. The conflation of grievances with defenses ignored the fact of their own wrongdoing in the eyes of the law. Indeed, the court case silenced their grievances, as it further demonized them. The refugees equated the law with justice, failing to realize that the court case would merely determine their guilt or innocence regarding the trashing of the UN offices and would have absolutely no bearing on their refugee entitlements and the wrongs they claimed they had been subject to. But justice had become subsumed by law (see Comaroff and Comaroff 2006). They believed that, because they were before a court of law, an institution of justice, their own sense of having been wronged over the years could be addressed. During the transformation from protest to demonstration to defense, we see a process of depoliticization at work. Grievances were reduced to defenses. The tables were turned on the peaceful protesters as they were re-­ presented as perpetrators. The street was replaced by the courtroom. The discourse of slogans and chants and blockades was replaced by a slow, dysfunctional legal discourse, their status transformed from self-­declared victims to state-­declared thugs. To some extent, we might argue that they were themselves complicit in this depoliticization. On “Hyperbolic” Victimhood Even after the court case was over, the Liberians maintained their accusatory discourse, rooted in a sense of having been robbed of their identities and shored up by references to their dire conditions vis-­à-­vis their immediate neighbors and human kind in general. They portrayed themselves as being the worst off. Occasionally, this took on a hyperbolic form, for example, in a series of emails the chairman sent me:

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Please we are dying in Sierra Leone. (December 8, 2007) Brother Andrew the 20,000 Liberian refugees are suffering BUT the forty-­ three CHARGED are the worst. THE CHILDREN AND WOMEN. (February 14, 2008) Their sense of being at the bottom of the social pile (of being disposable, dispensable almost) was highlighted by the narratives of group members told to my co-­researcher and me during a series of visits to their “camp” eighteen months after I had first met them in the prison. The camp, which is no longer serviced as a camp by UNHCR, is located on either side of a Second World War airfield built by the British and adjacent to a constellation of radio masts known as Kuwait. It lies beside the main road linking the Freetown peninsula with the hinterland. Public transport to the town center (and the court) takes up to two hours. In terms of access to resources, the camp was likened to a village. There are some opportunities to make a livelihood, for example, collecting wood, doing laundry, or making clay for cooking pots in a village five miles away. At a final meeting we held with the forty-­three, the chairman starkly claimed that “it is better to be a slave than a Liberian refugee.” A number of key themes emerged during our visit, perhaps best summarized in terms of exclusion and survival.6 The sharing of multiple stories all around the same core narrative served to emphasize that the forty-­three clearly saw themselves as victims of malpractice as well as failed expectations. They consistently portrayed themselves as materially worse off than their neighbors,7 but, unlike our experiences in the city among urban youth, money or material goods were not the chief way through which needs were expressed. The women spoke of injustice and lack of security, the men of resettlement and the desire to escape. When they showed us their houses, many made statements such as “we are living like animals” or “this is not a place for a human being.” Their accounts tell a tale of harassment and mockery by neighbors, both Liberians and “so-­so” Liberians (that is, those whose Liberian identity is fake). Health concerns were another dominant theme of the narratives. Most striking, however, were the repeated references to sexual violence, especially, but not only, by the women in the camp. Incidences of rape and rape allegations seemed to work as markers of a special vulnerability. We wondered about the actual prevalence of sexual violence in the camp, and whether the discourse was literal or a representation of the extreme suffering they feel.8 There was no doubt, however, that the eighteen-­year-­old daughter of the

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chairwoman of the group had been victim of a recent rape—­she was still bleeding and experiencing severe pain in her lower abdomen. Reference to sexual violence would seem to communicate intimate fears and personal insecurity and would seem radically connected to the sense of self that seems so much at stake for the forty-­three. “It is how they punish us,” said the mother of the raped girl. During our final meeting, the chairman pointed out that some of them work as prostitutes. We wondered whether there was a conscious effort to emphasize sexual violence—­in town, as a woman, one is obliged to sell oneself; in the camp, one is raped. This is a powerful and tragic language. The Liberians existence, as they narrate it, is tragedy writ large: “We are already dead,” declared one of the men as he showed my co-­researcher his home. Stories of mockery, ostracism, and scapegoating within the camp coexist with tales of cordial relations. Yet relations within the camp are also strained because of the court case. “They don’t care if we are dead or alive,” said one woman of her neighbors. Other camp dwellers see themselves as being collectively punished, stigmatized, and excluded because of their association with the forty-­three. Blame and hostility are the results. Occupying the position of most suffering was important to their sense of who they were and what they hoped to become. How can we account for the extreme claims of the chairman? How can we account for the “hyperbolic” claims to suffer vis-­à-­vis others? During ethnographic encounters, we can never discount the role of unequal relations and attributions of power—­be these rooted in privilege, race, or economic disparities—­in informing the narratives recited and the behaviors displayed. Yet I do not believe the claims are only discursive strategies. It is not just rhetoric. Or even if it is rhetoric, it is rhetoric with significance beyond their engagement with me and my research assistant. Cavell links the idea of having a voice with having a political existence (1995: 161). It is, as if, drawing on Das (1998: 185, 191) and Cavell, that language is a “bodying forth.” The words, expressions, and performances of victimhood are almost “wrenched out” of the Liberians. They are perhaps controlled by the words they speak to a greater extent than they control the words. They cannot help themselves. Somewhat paradoxically, however, while they certainly performed a vivid and hyperbolic version of victimhood, they were far from passive and refused to give up their quest. Through what I came to think of as an obstinacy informed by a kind of desperate hope, they resisted the idea that their possibilities were limited. For example, the chairman wrote to me on February 9, 2008: “We are still fighting for our Rights.

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We have taken this matter to the APC government and there are hopes or light in the tunnel. We have met the president and the parliament on this issue, no matter what we shall win.” And further on April 11, 2008: “We have been with the APC government to help and hopefully our dream is coming to be realized very soon.” How can we account for this refusal to settle for the status quo? How do they retain hope against all the odds? Perhaps because there are few life-­ affirming alternatives? Obstinacy and hope are co-­ constituted in practice. In this case, enduring struggles almost determine intimate identities (Holland and Lave 2001). On Hierarchies of Victimhood The contrasting language used by UNHCR about successfully repatriated refugees and urban refugees or troublesome combatants who only wish for resettlement provides an example of what, following Das, we can see as the conditions of use of criteria. Distinctions made between higher and lower forms of life are captured in language: This success story was possible because of the unambiguous wish of the Liberian refugees to return, the commitment of the Liberian government to bring its people back home, the efforts of UNHCR and other partners and the support of all countries in the West African region. (UN News Centre 2007, my emphasis) Urban refugees in Sierra Leone are generally averse to any durable solution other than resettlement. In June 2006, a group of former Liberian combatants and refugees, demanding resettlement, stormed into the UNHCR compound in Freetown and destroyed vehicles and office equipment. (UNHCR 2006: 287, my emphasis) Here we can observe a contrast between the worth attributed to those who unambiguously wished to return and those who were averse to such a solution. The labeling of the refugees as trouble-­making ex-­combatants is a gesture of unambiguous delegitimation and disrecognition in postwar Sierra Leone. The refugees were a rather mixed group. Some were indeed former combatants. A few were children. Three of them were mentally ill. Among them were an elderly woman with breast cancer and an old man with heart problems. Paraphrasing Das (2007: 16) we might say that the criteria for

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being a refugee does not apply to those who do not exhibit the signs of being an acceptable form of life. The Liberians exhibited the wrong signs. They excluded themselves from the universe of obligation that the UNHCR mandate circumscribes. The refugees became people of no concern, people UNHCR could legitimately have sent to prison and quite legitimately disavow. While the Liberians raise serious concerns and their position vis-­à-­vis the powerful UNHCR was a fragile one, the UNHCR are not unaware of the trickiness of such relationships. One manual states the following: Where persons of concern are struggling to survive, UNHCR and partner agencies have a great deal of power, since they are seen as a lifeline. This can distort relations between people of concern and the humanitarian agencies, since people may be reluctant to raise complaints about or disagree with activities that are implemented. Think about the future and consider the long-­term implications of all decisions. (UNHCR 2006: 109) The mandate of UNHCR addresses the extreme and spectacular events of war and displacement, not the everyday trials and tribulations of living with poverty. The everyday troubles of the Liberians were not or were no longer of concern to the UNHCR. The Liberians cry out about the everyday and cry toward the future; the UNHCR addresses the past—­its point of reference is the spectacular, not the mundane (and it is the spectacular stories that are being sold on the streets of Freetown, leaving the Liberians to their gray miseries). The case points to suffering as ordinary rather than spectacular, as sedimentary rather than sequential, as a quality of life rather than an anomaly.9

Conclusion I think of the delicate task of repairing the torn spider’s web, evoked by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations, as my metaphor for the engagement with suffering and healing that ordinary life reveals. (Das 2007: 15) This chapter exemplifies an approach to social life focusing in general on persons’ participation in social practice and more specifically on performances of allegation and disavowal and the possibilities and limits on their conduct of

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life. I have tried to take seriously the agency of “persons-­in-­practice” (Jefferson and Huniche 2009) and the institutional and historical structures within which they are caught up and which, via their participation in such structures, they constitute, while recognizing the relationships between enduring struggles, contentious practice, and intimate identities (Holland and Lave 2001). Illustrated here are the enduring struggles potentially faced by refugees in war-­torn regions. Traumas are persistent and pervasive. Victimization happens not once only but is potentially ongoing. The way this problem is handled by members of this particular refugee community—­that is, what it means for intimate identities—­has been explored above. Four points can be emphasized: first, how contestations over identity are actually contestations about people’s respective place in the world, about, at one level, the right to “exercise existence” itself (Mbembe 2001); second, how victims of regional conflict and displacement can become victims of broken promises, unmet expectations, neglect, and literal and symbolic mortification (the supposed theft of identity); third, how a case of resistance became a case of denied collective worth; and fourth, how suffering is not a response to a single discrete event but a quality of life itself. In relation to the latter point, I suggest that suffering for the sufferer is not mediated but immediate. It is of the moment but not momentary—­it endures. Through this lens, suffering is not related to a single discrete event or even a sequence of events. Suffering is im-­mediate—­both immediate and enduring. Were we to say suffering is accumulated, we would stray close to implying that it is amassed, collected over time, as if a series of discrete events combined and contributed to the current experience of suffering. True enough, discrete events have featured in the lives of the refugees; but to the degree that they have been lived through and lived with, they contribute not to a set of experiences of suffering added one on top of the other but to a contemporary experience of suffering that is no less than an experience of self as sufferer. They do not do suffering; they are suffering. They embody suffering, in its im-­mediacy. Suffering is not a form of life, a choice among many. Suffering for them is life. This is not a Cartesian self (I think; therefore, I am) but a disheveled self (I suffer; therefore, I am)—­a disposable or dispensable self, a reject(ed self). It has become a collective self, further cemented by the experiences of prison and the court case. For the refugees, a politics of allegation informed the righteousness of their position as victims. Victimhood is the central self-­attribution for the refugees. Not only does it distract from their actions at the UNHCR office, but it is also a vital marker of identity.

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Behind the scenes in this chapter has lurked a question about what it is about modernity and contemporary humanism that has us operate according to particular criteria of who is most worthy and in terms of a priori judgments about what kind of assistance is (almost) universally appropriate. What drives the desire to “repair torn spider’s webs” with hegemonic models of poorly theorized, efficiency-­driven assistance, and poorly tested models of so-­called best practice? One driver is a model of suffering that assumes it to be rooted in discrete, often spectacular events. The case presented in this chapter challenges that foundational assumption. Suffering, for the Liberians, is an enduring, pervasive present. Throughout my encounter with the forty-­three, I have agonized about how to reduce or contain their suffering. Could I counter their obstinate hope, their faith that they will one day overcome, with a “reality check”? I have come to the (hesitant) conclusion that to contain the suffering would be to incarcerate anew. To counter their hopeful obstinacy with a reality check would be to eclipse the possibility of a future, to obliterate the selves that have been formed. To equate suffering with life itself and to ponder what it means for suffering to be a quality of life and of subjectivity are decisive gestures. Yet, they are ones taken hesitantly, as I remain caught between a desire to dismantle and an obligation to take a position and to act. The luxury of hesitancy is not, of course, afforded to the forty-­three (or even the UN). References Butler, Judith. 2006. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Cavell, Stanley. 1995. Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida. Oxford: Blackwell. Comaroff, John L. and Jean Comaroff. 2006. Law and Disorder in the Post-­Colony. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Das, Veena. 1998. “Wittgenstein and Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 27: 171–­95. ———. 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dembour, Marie-­Bénédicte. 2006. Who Believes in Human Rights? Reflections on the European Convention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2010. “What Are Human Rights? Four Schools of Thought.” Human Rights Quarterly 32, 1: 1–­20. Holland, Dorothy and Jean Lave. 2001. History in Person: Enduring Struggles, Contentious Practice, Intimate Identities. Santa Fe, N.M.: SAR Press. Jefferson, Andrew M. 2012. “Glimpses of Judicial Limbo in West Africa.” Amicus Journal 26: 13–­20. Jefferson, Andrew M. and Lotte Huniche. 2009. “(Re)Searching for Persons in Practice: Fieldbased Methods for Critical Psychological Practice Research.” Qualitative Research in Psychology 6, 1–­2: 12–­27.

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Performances of Victimhood, Allegation, and Disavowal  237 Jefferson, Andrew M. and Steffen Jensen, eds. 2009. State Violence and Human Rights: State Officials in the South. Abingdon: Routledge. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1988. Whose Justice, Which Rationality? Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. London: University of California Press. UNHCR. 2006. UNHCR Global Report 2006. Geneva: UNHCR. ———. 2007. UNHCR Global Report 2007. Geneva: UNHCR. ———. 2008. A Community-­Based Approach in UNHCR Operations, chap. 2, “The Context, Concepts, and Guiding Principles,” 11–­26. www.unhcr.org/publ/PUBL/47f0a6712.pdf. UN News Centre. 2007. “UN Refugee Agency Set to End Liberian Repatriation Programme.” June 29. http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=23089. Utas, Mats. 2003. “Sweet Battlefields: Youth and the Liberian Civil War.” Ph.D. dissertation, Uppsala University Dissertations in Cultural Anthropology.

Notes Special thanks to Lotte Buch and Nanna Johannesen, my co-­field researcher Maya Christensen, the chairman of the refugees, and to the forty-­three. I am also grateful to the participants at the Human Rights, Victimhood and Consent workshop held in Bergen in June 2010, and to Steffen Jensen for constructive and generous editorial input. 1. As Judith Butler puts it, “Some lives are grievable, and others are not; the differential allocation of grievability that decides what kind of subject is and must be grieved, and what kind of subject must not, operates to produce and maintain certain exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively human: what counts as a livable life and a grievable death” (Butler 2006: xiv) 2. “Redband” is a title given to a prisoner who functions as a mediator between the prisoners and the authorities and is partially responsible for maintaining discipline among the prisoners. The title is, I believe, a British colonial legacy. 3. My early but quite consistently ambivalent and shimmering responses to the distress they revealed and articulated informs the analytic argument of this chapter. A feeling of powerlessness, futility, and paralysis informed my engagement, even as I acted, listened, and engaged with members of the group and advocated on their behalf to the UNHCR deputy country representative (to no avail). 4. This fact illustrates the ambivalence of my own position in the field. In a similar way to which this chapter concerns the refugees and the UNHCR, my orientation to prison was to both prisoners and prison staff. This ambivalent or seesawing position brings with it a tendency to hesitate, to weigh different positions, to be in thrall to undecidability in both method and analysis. 5. To talk of UN disavowal of (if not complicity in) physical and structural violence tends to raise the hackles of, for example, the human rights community. Such analyses promote discomfort on all sides. It is my hope that the discomfort created might somehow at least remove the ground from beneath our feet, displacing us from the moral high ground of well-­intentioned, power-­over, top-­down, self-­satisfied, structurally blind strategies, and encourage us to tread more sensitively and take local actors more seriously in their own terms, in their own territories. 6. There are generational and gendered differences among the forty-­three. Younger members, those with few memories of Liberia, seem less loaded/weighed down by the constraints on their trajectories. They are more at home in their world; they have a grasp of Krio, which older members are jealous of.

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238  Andrew M. Jefferson 7. During a visit to their home in one of the poorest neighborhoods in central Freetown, one family described how they could afford to eat rice only once a week on Sundays. They emphasized that this was unlike their neighbors, whom they portrayed as better off. 8. Veena Das (2007: 14) has noted that “It is also the case that stories about violence that circulate during riots include the theme of rape regardless of actual incidences.” 9. I argue that suffering deserves a puzzled and hesitant approach. A skeptical reader might ask whether it is legitimate to stand back and ponder in the face of ongoing suffering. Is there time? Are we not obliged to act? Sympathetic as I try to be to the sufferings of people, I wonder at times whether a lack of active incredulity combined with the imperative to act now is at the heart of the unquestioning acceptance of some psychosocial practices that may confine more than they liberate.

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Chapter 12

Victims in the Moral Economy of Suffering: Narratives of Humiliation, Retaliation, and Sacrifice Sofie Danneskiold-­Samsøe

One evening during Ashura, Iman1 approached me at Hussainiya al-­Sadr2 in Copenhagen. She had heard about me and wanted to know more about my study of Iraqi suffering. Her own story of how she had given birth to her daughter in prison was well known, but she wanted to tell me herself. In the jumble of women’s talk and children’s play, Iman told me the short version of her experiences in her Iraqi prison. Iman had lived with her husband, daughter, and son in Kuwait and was expecting a third child when her husband’s father and his six brothers were imprisoned for being members of the Shi‘a resistance movement. Iman’s husband decided to support his family in Iraq with a visit, accompanied by Iman and their four-­year-­old son, but they were all arrested at the airport. They were handcuffed and blindfolded by the intelligence service and put into separate cars. Iman and her son were placed in solitary confinement. She was stripped naked and two ragged and filthy blankets were thrown at her, one to sleep on and the other to cover her. When she was taken for interrogation, Iman covered her head with the blanket, and the interrogator mocked her for covering herself. They interrogated her about her husband, but she refused to confess and was sentenced to prison for not being willing to inform. During the interrogation, Iman and her husband were confined in separate cells, but Iman was allowed to visit her husband to see his bruises and scars from torture.

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After four months, Iman’s condition became critical, and she was taken to the Alawia Hospital in Baghdad and had a caesarean. While she was in the hospital with her newborn girl, her son was taken to her husband. When her son returned to her, he brought an apple for Iman. Her husband had saved it from his scarce rations and kept it for her. This apple was the last communication between the two, as Iman’s husband was subsequently executed. Iman’s story was one of many moral tales within a moral economy of suffering in which Iraqi refugees in Denmark situate themselves as victims.3 Taking into consideration the degradation and passivity often associated with the victim figure, one may ponder the motives and social advantages of the exposition of victimhood. As the Introduction to this volume asks, rhetorically, does not the study of people as victims deny them their agency? One possible answer to this question, echoing the Introduction, is that victimhood becomes part of a transactional moral economy. In this chapter I demonstrate how people actively produce victimhood as a way of gaining moral and social value when facing humiliation and subordination. The chapter investigates how degradation is turned into moral value and how victimhood as value results from an active social effort aimed at accruing moral gains. Violence visited on people provides the fuel for the moral economy, and the ideas of obligation and duty guide reciprocal relations to form the morality of suffering. In this way, morality is the currency of victimhood. Seeing Iman’s story as having exchangeable moral value points our attention to suffering as part of a reciprocal gift economy. Apart from being a personal account of Iman’s life in prison, her narrative is also a parable of moral behavior, an ethics of suffering, not only in marital relations but a moral template for how humans should respond to suffering. Thus, my analysis does not address victims’ actual responses or actions toward their tormentors; instead, I explore the narrative configuration of morality within a diaspora community of sufferers who have gone past the time and place of oppression. Iraqi refugees began to arrive in Denmark in the 1990s and within a few years they became the largest group of refugees resident in the country.4 They have diverse political, religious, and ethnic backgrounds, and they associate with each other accordingly. Their narratives share the existential experience of domination by the absolute power of the Baath regime and the powerlessness of not being able to retaliate or recoup the losses incurred. To a certain extent, such transactions of suffering are unilateral because they are negative forms of reciprocity (Sahlins 1974), where the oppressor inflicts suffering on

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the victim and both sides are acutely aware of the nonmutuality of the relation. However, despite the apparent one-­sidedness of the relation, I argue that suffering as it becomes a social value enters into reciprocal relations. Clearly, the taking of life in Iman’s story of arrest and imprisonment and eventual death is a unilateral. However, her husband’s sacrifice helps excavate a moral gain from this loss. To put it simply, I ask how power inflicts pain, how the “powerless” respond to suffering, and what gains the “powerless” accrue in this moral economy of victimhood.

Humiliation As this section will show, humiliation is the demonstration of negative reciprocity. Anthropologist Ghassan Hage evokes a similar definition of humiliation in his analysis of Palestinian suicide bombers: “Humiliation is the experience of being psychologically demeaned—­ treated like less than a human being by someone more powerful than you, without having any capacity to redress the situation” (2003: 137). This definition is echoed by Iraqi refugees when they narrate their experiences of imprisonment and oppression by the regime. Humiliation was an integral part of prison and torture stories; it was a characteristic of the general oppression in Iraqi society, and I was told about humiliation in various ways and situations. However, the stories are not only testimonies of oppression and suffering caused by a superior force; they also present the explicit manifestation of negative moral reciprocity. In Iraq during the Baath regime, when somebody had been shot, the family of the condemned person was forced to pay for the bullet. They could not mourn the deceased nor organize a funeral to honor and respect the dead. This practice of the Baathist regime was explained to me over and again as a way of understanding the humiliation. The narrative was not about unjust and inhuman executions but about the detail of having to pay for the killing device: after the life of a dear one has been taken, compensation is demanded for a worthless and impersonal metal bullet. This was a symbolic act, exceeding the general deprivations relating to educational and occupational opportunities. Stories of a final small blow or burden that makes the entirety of one’s suffering unbearable explain the loss: blending sugar with mortar for the building of a castle for Saddam Hussein’s son, in the time of sanctions when basic

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food items were scarce, the bill for the bullet after taking a dear one’s life, and the compulsory (but invalid) votes at parliamentary elections, when any form of democracy had long since been abolished. The salt rubbed in the wound compounds the pain and makes the losses incurred at the hands of a superior power clear and undeniable to the victim. The insignificant value of a bullet fortifies absolute power by stating that everything can be taken away without mercy, without any compensation whatsoever, with no gift or acknowledgment (however modest its value) in return. Just as a small return—­though not proportionate to the initial loss—­can provide a symbolic acknowledgment of the deprivation (for instance, in the form of words of apology or regret), so the symbolic manifestation of withheld return demonstrates rejection of any attempt to balance the relation of reciprocity. In line with this analysis of domination and humiliation, Steffen Jensen (2008) describes how domination produces humiliation. Through the study of gangs and politics in a harsh and economically depressed neighborhood in Cape Town, he shows how dignity, paradoxically, becomes an issue in the moment of humiliation—­humiliation being the negation of dignity. People deploy various and competing aspirations and strategies to restore dignity, but they share the quest for remaking a moral core. Morality thus becomes an essential but contested issue. Similarly, Iraqi refugees produce morality in reciprocal terms: the moral debasement of perpetrators corresponds to the moral strength of victims. The more innocent the victim, the more cruel and morally reprehensible the perpetrator; the more vulgar and mean the perpetrator, the more dignified the victim. The imbalance of loss and return is accentuated by the moral virtues bestowed on the victims in contrast to the moral lowness of their persecutors. To help me understand the brutality and decrepit morality of the regime, my informants told me a story of the maltreatment of a baby. This is one of several narratives repeated to me in different versions, corresponding to a shared notion of suppression and suffering at the hands of the Saddam regime. This version of the story was told by Mariyam, who had waited more than eight years for her fiancé to be released from prison before they could be married and have children. According to the story, a man was imprisoned and interrogated but refused to cooperate or give any information, even though he was subjected to physical torture. Then his mother was taken to prison and tortured to death, then his brother in the same way, and finally his wife. At last, his baby was taken by the feet and flung against the wall. The man still refused to cooperate and finally died of sorrow after the child passed

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away. Another version of the story was told by Abu Thar, a middle-­aged lawyer who was imprisoned and tortured at the age of fifteen. In this version, a woman went to prison with her two young children and was questioned about her husband. When she said she had nothing to tell (and, indeed, she did not know anything), the prison guards took one child and banged its head against the wall until it died. They asked her again about her husband; again she had nothing to tell them, so they did the same to her other child. She instantly lost her mind, so they killed her too and tossed the three dead bodies into a rubbish bin. In the first story, despite the immense brutality, it is not the physical harm done to the man but his mourning for his child that ends his life. In other words, he resists the violence and thereby demonstrates moral strength and persistence. Thus, this is not only a story of the brutality of Saddam’s regime; the primitive violence and force used are opposed to the physically weak yet morally robust resistance. The most harmful blow comes not from physical injury but from the humiliation of witnessing torture without any means of acting. Another narrative concerns the learned and respected man on whom the prison guards urinate. Yassin, himself a former political prisoner belonging to the left wing in Iraq, told me of one such man, a distinguished university professor he had met in prison. The old man’s sophisticated intellect was set against illiterate prison guards who could hardly spell their own names. Yassin told me this story to emphasize the mechanics of humiliation. While Yassin framed his narrative in his own experience of being forced to stand knee-­deep in excrement, the story of the university professor was perceived as the height of humiliation. Similar stories are told of highly esteemed scientists and religious scholars. In the stories about women and babies, the victims are portrayed as innocent and defenseless, their assailants exploiting their vulnerability. Other protagonists are men of honor and esteem. Contrast is employed to illustrate this: high intellectual status, innocence, and moral standards are set against the physical violence of the prison guards; the civilized intellect against primitive bodily functions. The higher the moral status of the victims, the more humiliating the acts committed against them. Some refugees told me how they had witnessed such degradation and about their pity for the victim; how they, as observers, felt the humiliation themselves. The intention was not to humiliate a single person, they would tell me, but to humiliate all opposition. The central point in the narratives is that violation constitutes a debasement of civilization and moral standards.

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One of the stories that Abu Narjas, who belonged to the Shi‘a opposition, shared with his fellows at the Association of Former Prisoners is the incident of the prayer rug. This incident took place in 1982, shortly after Abu Narjas was imprisoned. At ten or eleven one night, one of the prison guards came to his cell. The tide of battle had turned against Saddam’s regime in the war with Iran, so the prison guard was irritable. Abu Narjas was in a cell with thirty-­ five other political prisoners from the Shi‘a Islamic movement. The prisoners had cut some old blankets into pieces to use as prayer rugs. The prison guard came and ordered everyone who had cut a blanket to get out. In the first cell, ten prisoners went out and were severely and brutally beaten. In the second cell, five blankets had been cut, so five prisoners were beaten up. Finally, the guard came to Abu Narjas’s cell. Twenty blankets had been turned into prayer rugs. Although he had not cut his blanket, he was still punished by one of the guards. Abu Narjas portrays the prison guard as pathetic in his furious failure to manifest his superior power (paralleled in the narrative by the military losses at the front). He is doomed to lose in the battle over prayer rugs, as it is a moral battle, and his weapons are sheer physical force. The prisoners, for their part, scorn this force and tear apart the blankets, one of their few means of physical comfort in prison. They reject the pleasure of the warmth of a blanket and give it a religious purpose instead. They destroy what little they are given and transform it into a moral device. By doing so, they display their moral strength over mere earthly possessions. The rough violence of the prison guard illustrates only the opposition of physical superior force to moral superiority. According to the story, the prisoners did not use physical strength, which would not have stood a chance against the ruthless regime. Instead, they invoked moral strength. Whether the prison authorities really were threatened by this nonviolent uprising is beside the point. The moral inferiority of the prison authorities is reciprocated with moral strength, and the force of moral superiority makes way for justice.

Retaliation How can proclaiming one’s moral supremacy be an answer to humiliation? If humiliation is defined as a demonstration of the negative reciprocity of violence and the moral gap between the victim and the persecutor, as my Iraqi informants tend to do, it suggests that not to retaliate would merely confirm

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the monopoly of violence of the Baathist regime. So why did Iraqi exiles in Denmark choose the opposite strategy? To answer this question, I consider the question of equivalence through retaliation. In fact, my Iraqi interlocutors’ refusal to consider retaliation for the atrocities they had endured under the Baathist regime was a way to balance and counter the suffering inflicted on them. By rejecting retaliation, they invoked moral superiority. In this way, the superior physical force employed by the perpetrators is countered by the victim’s moral superiority. The rationale is that a violent response eliminates moral superiority. For instance, Widad, a young woman from Iraqi Kurdistan, stated that revenge would put her on the same moral level as her persecutors. She responded to my question on revenge as follows: Revenge? . . . ​That’s exactly what I have been fighting against. I oppose generalizations and condemnations of entire populations, like Arabs or Danes, and seeking revenge on them. Yet, it is a struggle to insist on that. If you wished for vengeance and also did avenge yourself, you would be just like them. But you should not. You have to be better than them. Widad is a woman in her early thirties, trained as an engineer in Iraq and Denmark, who is now living as a writer of poetry and novels. She has written about her personal experiences of prosecution and torture by the Baathist regime in the book Tara’s Book: A Story from Kurdistan (Akrawi 2003). While the novel is about a Kurdish woman, Tara, and her childhood and youth in Iraqi Kurdistan, it is Widad’s own story told in the third person. She writes about how she and her family were persecuted by the Baath regime, surviving torture and gas attacks since her early childhood, and how she escaped and arrived as a refugee in Denmark. Widad told me about the reviews the book received shortly after its release, with which she was very disappointed, especially with a reviewer from the newspaper Politiken. He claimed that no human being would be capable of standing by and living up to the high ideals of Tara, the book’s main protagonist. Nobody could emerge from such injustice and violence without bitterness and vindictiveness. Hence he felt that Widad’s account of the life and experience of this Kurdish woman was not credible. However, Tara’s story is a portrayal of the life of Widad as she experienced and remembered it. Dismissing the story as inauthentic, and Tara’s opinions and ideals as false, rendered Widad’s experiences and beliefs false. The reviewer was writing in

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conformity with those people who try to depict Kurds as vindictive rather than morally fortified, Widad told me, “They depict us as savage creatures who will do anything; they depict us as having a vindictive culture. But we do not seek revenge, despite chemical attacks, mass graves, and everything.” Insisting on goodness and human decency as ways to cope with atrocities and have to be defended continuously, including against the attacks of critical reviewers, Widad invoked a superior morality of nonretaliation. Widad was not alone in renouncing retaliation—­or refusing to engage in a retaliatory form of reciprocity. At a public debate on April 25, 2003, I asked Mazen, a member of the Communist Party of Iraq, about a future judicial settlement in Iraq. He answered that, at the moment, the priority was peacekeeping and establishing a democracy. He feared a premature settlement, as it might lead to a bloodbath. Time should pass before the process could begin, he said, and the process should be well planned in order to make the settlement controlled and orderly. Of course, offenders should be condemned, but he cautioned that one must recognize that not all members of the Baath Party were criminals; many were forced to be members of the party. The oppressors must stand trial, but it must be controlled and civilized. The craving for retaliation should not take over, he insisted. While condemning violent acts of retaliation, Mazen himself displayed magnanimity toward (minor) offenders, excusing ordinary Baathists. By not giving in to the temptation of a vengeful retaliation, he confirmed his own moral standards. Following from this, retaliation is essentially an uncontrollable force, and, like Widad, Mazen renounced the desire for revenge, like other basic human instincts. Mazen expected the desire for vengeance to cool as time went by, though precautions should be taken to ensure that the process will be pursued in a civilized and fair judicial system. Hence, it takes moral strength and fortitude to refrain from retaliation. As Widad noted, abstaining from vengeance is a struggle. One must control the (allegedly natural) propensity for retaliation. In my talks with Yassin after the invasion in 2003, we focused on the prospects for Iraq after Saddam. He had confidence in a peaceful future, as the Iraqi population was exhausted from many wars and not interested in another. Yet there was a risk of civil war being provoked by the Baathist regime as well as by the American invasion forces. The former regime had put messages in bottles into the graves of executed victims that gave the names of their tormentors to fuel animosity and civil war. Some people preferred Saddam because he ensured order, and they feared chaos and civil war. Thus,

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Yassin argued, resisting retaliation means continuing the struggle against oppression. Like Saddam, he said, the Americans had an interest in creating judicial chaos, and a civil war would suit their interests, as it would give them an excuse to clamp down on resistance and, subsequently, to take control of Iraqi oil resources. In fighting Saddam and the American forces, the best thing to do was, thus, to act in a civilized and peaceful manner. Echoing Widad, Yassin claimed that vengeance would put him on the same (moral) level as Saddam. In the present situation, the most important thing was not to let the Baathists gain power again. Yassin and other likeminded people prioritized peace and democracy over retaliation. At about the same time, many of my Iraqi interlocutors encouraged me to go to Iraq to witness and document the atrocities of the Baath regime, so I went to visit Mariyam to ask her advice on how I should prepare myself. Earlier she had presented me with an abaya and a hijab5 so that I would be decently dressed. On this day, she provided me with other essentials, such as advice on how to get what she thought to be valuable information in Iraq. She suggested that I contact the Association for Former Prisoners in Iraq, who work to locate political prisoners under the Baathist regime. They look for documents and files and go through them to discover all the offenses committed against the prisoners—­who beat them, how they were tortured, who killed them, and what happened to their bodies. As she put it, “We quench our thirst in those files. You will visit the families [of martyrs]. You will see them in their happiness and misery, and you will experience the correlation between the two emotional states they are in.” The thirst Mariyam talked about is a thirst for disclosure of closely kept secrets, for the exposure of people and bodies hidden in torture chambers and mass graves, for an end to the state of uncertainty about the fate of relatives that was a cause for continual worry: a thirst that could only be satisfied through certainty, however terrible the knowledge of their fate might be. Hence, the thirst Mariyam was talking about was not a thirst for revenge but for certainty. Maryam’s narrative illustrates that, while retaliation as striking back is morally indefensible, there is another form of retaliation at play, indicated by the two emotional states of which she speaks: happiness and misery. On the one hand, the files of the mutilations and executions of prisoners count in the reckoning of oppression to the advantage of the oppressed, while martyrs are invoked and produced in the accounts of suffering. On the other hand, the act of documentation is a form of symbolic retaliation different from revenge.

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Mariyam has a saying that she often repeats, “If I ever meet Saddam, I shall eat his flesh and drink his blood.” This is clearly not at statement of intent; it is a symbolic consumption of the body of the oppressor in order to retaliate against the physical harm that Saddam Hussein has done to people and the lives he has taken away. In other words, Iraqi refugees evoke retaliation in two different ways: they invoke symbolic retaliation through narrative imagination, while they renounce actual retaliation. The two meanings are intertwined: the first emphasizes the inequality of the distribution of suffering, while the second produces victims of that suffering. When Iraqi refugees reject retaliation, they make a virtue of necessity and transform themselves from humiliated objects of domination to dignified subjects. In reciprocal terms, the Baath’s regimes taking of life is transformed into a victim’s giving of life. By sacrificing him-­or herself, the victim reverses the reciprocal relation. In this way, the production of the victim—­of sacrifice—­becomes an alternative to retaliation.6

Sacrifice Transforming suffering into sacrifice is not an easy task, not least because the status of sacrifice has to be recognized in order to have social value. This section analyzes how sacrifice becomes a socially recognized category or commodity through invoking martyrs. To understand the moral value of sacrifice, it is useful to revisit Michael Jackson’s analysis of Kuranko sacrifice and reciprocity:” Sacrifice has always been a way of redressing a loss of balance between one’s immediate world and the wider world. It accomplishes this through the gift that, in the Kuranko view, transforms the relationship between persons or categories of persons and bestows a state of blessedness (baraka) upon them. This is because the gift creates life” (Jackson 1998: 72). The “loss of balance” in the world of Iraqis is repaired through the human sacrifice of martyrdom. Among the Kuranko, the result is baraka, a Muslim term referring to “the free gift of blessing by God” (Gilsenan 1990: 79). For many Iraqis, the suffering martyr is a religious figure. Within both the Shi’a and Sunni traditions, the grandson of the Prophet, Hussein, constitutes the paramount figure of human suffering and sacrifice. For Shi’a Muslims, the martyrdom of Imam Hussein at the battle of Kerbala, known as Ashura, has become the paradigm of selfless suffering. He is the great sufferer in the bayt al-­ahzan (house of sorrows), which basically consists of the Prophet, his

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daughter Fatima, and her male descendants. Because of the brutal way in which he was killed, Imam Hussein is designated the sayyid al-­shuhada (prince of martyrs) (Ayoub 1978). However, it is not only Muslim religious figures who are designated as martyrs but also those people who died in the struggle against political oppression.7 Communists like Yassin and Shi’a political activists like Abu Narjas both employ the name of martyr for their fellows in the struggle. By doing this, the loss of the most precious value of human life is transformed into the gift of human sacrifice. Instead of being deprived of life by superior forces, one’s loss of life is turned into a voluntary and generous act of sacrifice. The martyr did not die solely from evil forces outside his or her control; the hand of the tormentor is just an instrument for killing, not the real determinant. The true cause of the death of a martyr is his or her devotion to an ideal or belief that he or she is ready to uphold without compromise, even in the face of death. The martyr claims back his or her worth through a determination of will, thus nullifying the power and constraint of the tormentor, trading superior physical force for moral superiority, and finally demonstrating the magnanimity of generosity when risking one’s own life in opposition to the debasement of one’s oppressors. By enduring pain and sacrificing life, one resumes control over life and restores human worth. Widad told me about her emotional struggles during torture: However odd it may sound, you get to a point where, in fact, you do not care about it [torture] anymore. You become indifferent to the torture because you cannot do anything about it anyway. You can do nothing. All along you will try to keep up your courage because it [torture] was all about planting fear within us. Therefore it was important not to be afraid as a way to survive. I did not grant them the pleasure of being afraid; I could not do anything anyway, my hands were tied and my eyes were blindfolded. Not to show any sign of pain, to accept the infliction of torture and the marks it makes on the victim, is what Widad addressed. She refused to show her pain in order not to let herself be humiliated and to maintain her worth, a worth or pride her tormenters were trying to subvert.8 “You have to be proud not to break down. It [not being proud] is certain death, because you have stifled your soul completely. I am still alive because my soul is alive. It has been worth the struggle.”

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Widad believed that all humans are born proud and honorable, but that the actions of others may cause us to lose our pride. To prevent others from damaging our natural pride and to demonstrate the worth of one’s beliefs and morality, the individual must stand by her convictions, not letting others impose their rule on her and deflect her from her beliefs. The individual can act generously and give away what little she has, even at her own expense. In this case, her own privation may highlight the generosity of the act: it is not the value of the material gifts that counts, but the moral value of being generous. Precisely through forgoing one’s needs, generosity acquires its moral value. Widad’s tales of emotional struggle and moral worth are existential reflections on the losses and gains of the struggle and the individual’s sense of dignity. It is not clear from her reflections how or to what degree her sacrifices are publicly recognized. Clearly, negative reviews of her story frustrate her, as reviewers do not acknowledge her sacrifices. How, then, can sufferers attain recognition for their sacrifices? First, sufferers make their sacrifice recognizable by inscribing the individual’s story into a generally recognized story of domination and resistance. In fact, most people would tell their personal story of suffering to me by incorporating it into the political history of Iraq (Danneskiold-­Samsøe 2006: 184–­202). Second, sacrifice invokes divinity if the sacrifice is made in the name of a divine power or for a greater, moral, or spiritual cause. The sacrifice is socially valued and approved if people acknowledge the connection to the divine. If the sacrifice is human death, it becomes possible to employ the valuable category of martyrdom. On April 9, 2003,9 the men in Hussainiya al-­Sadr took a picture of Muhammad Baqir al-­Sadr and carried it above their heads, reciting in one voice, “With the blood of Al-­Sadr, we wash away misery,” referring to the torture and killing of Muhammad Baqir al-­Sadr in 1980. He sacrificed his life, as he did not give in to interrogation and stood firm in his beliefs. One month later, at Hussainiya, Nadia, a high school student, told me with excitement that al-­ Sadr’s body had been found. Those who were ordered to bury him after his death found a different place for his grave than that to which they had been directed, in order to protect his body, and now they had informed about the grave. The body was as fresh as though it had been buried yesterday, Nadia told me, and repeated that the body was not decomposed at all. That is the sign of a true martyr, and al-­Sadr was a real martyr, not like many who claim to be martyrs but are not, she said contemptuously.

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This conviction of the imperishability of al-­Sadr’s bodily remains may sound mysterious. Yet if we examine the logic of human sacrifice, the idea may not be so unfamiliar. As Mauss has argued, all gifts incorporate something of oneself (Mauss 2002 [1923]: 25). In human sacrifice, what one gives is oneself; thus, it can be said to be the ultimate gift. Since one cannot give anything more precious, it is the ultimate act of generosity. In return for this sacrifice, the martyr will receive a heavenly reward, that is, spiritual and eternal elevation at the expense of the material and the ephemeral. Again, moral superiority is the response to the violent subjugation of one’s body and property. Al-­Sadr is still a human, but the preservation of his body bears evidence of extrahuman capacities. To invoke the divine in him is to make him die for a greater cause and claim an alliance with greater powers than an earthly tyrant such as Saddam Hussein. In some ways, Al Sadr’s martyrdom was extended to include all Iraqis. Anyone who died as a consequence of Saddam Hussein’s oppression, including death from torture, assassination, genocide, or military action, may be called a martyr. The expansive nature of this martyrdom was revealed to me in the months following the invasion in 2003. Every Iraqi person with whom I talked raised concerns about their relatives in Iraq, particularly family members who had disappeared years ago and had never been heard of since. For some, their fate was revealed as knowledge about specific atrocities of the Baathist regime. If proof of death were not found after a few months, the family would consider the person dead. In commemoration of the deceased, a number of fatihas (the ceremony of mourning named after the al-­sura fatiha, the opening verses of the Qur’an) were arranged in Iraqi communities and private homes. In the invitations, the deceased were all called martyrs. Yassin gave me a book titled In Memory of a Stone: A Photographic Documentation, a collection of photographs from the 1980s of partisans in Iraqi Kurdistan and elsewhere who were labeled martyrs (Kamo 2002). The introduction of the chapter “Seekers for Freedom” reads: We were just like all others, and had similar human characteristics. But, we tried to create a virtuous life, where all people share freedom, happiness and joy. We tried, but earned pains and moaning for loosing dear people we loved. They sacrificed themselves for that kind of life we wanted to create. Yes, we tried and approached the light that might bring us closer to truth . . . ​this very light, which still lights up our cold nights. (Kamo 2002: 51, original spelling).

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As this indicates, “they” died for a greater cause, for a virtuous life that “we” wanted to create; that is, the martyrs died for a shared cause. They are singled out by name, whereas other people in the book are anonymous. When someone passes into martyrdom, he or she is ascribed moral esteem and individuality through the naming. Just as the humiliation of one respected person is an insult to everyone who associates himself with the cause he represents, the death of the martyr (in the singular) constitutes a sacrifice for the collective, for the many. In this way, the martyr embodies absolute moral superiority. A martyr repays violation with her or his own death and, hence, is not able to retaliate. Instead, he or she is repaid with heavenly revenge that surpasses earthly sacrifice. No one I met told me how he or she broke down, informed on family and friends, or cooperated with the intelligence services of Iraq, even though some might have been tempted or forced to do so in the face of great pain and moral dilemma. On the contrary, they described how they resisted pain and humiliation and did not show any signs of moral weakness. Why, then, did Nadia disapprove of the widespread claims of martyrdom? Keeping the advantages of moral superiority in mind, one would think that a high number of martyrs would prove the extent of the suffering that was endured and of the moral standards that were defended. I suggest that Nadia’s disapproval points to an ambivalence in evaluating martyrdom. When the martyr identity is ascribed to victims of political violence, ordinary people are lumped together with celebrated figures such as al-­Sadr, says Nadia. Consequently, his glory fades. The extension of martyrdom to people of modest moral value threatens the martyrdom of those of high moral value. In addition, the sheer number of martyrs cheapens the worth of the sacrifice. The sacrifice has to be acknowledged by the many in order to count, and (at least) two requirements have to be fulfilled: the suffering has to result in one’s death, and the martyrdom has to be acknowledged by others. Both conditions, therefore, render one’s own proclamation of one’s martyrdom impossible. The ultimate claim of martyrdom comes from a divine sign like al-­Sadr’s preserved body. If somebody is wrongly named a martyr, the claim verges on blasphemy. At the same time, having a vast number of martyrs increases the total value of the moral economy of victimhood, as it reflects the extent of suffering and (human) losses, which can attract attention and recognition. Being a witness of atrocity and injustice applies to all people who suffered at the hands of the policies of the Baathist regime. The appellation of martyr is, thus, given

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in two ways: to the exceptional individual who sacrificed him-­or herself for the cause of the many or to the many who, by their vast numbers, confirm their dedication to resisting oppression and injustice. The Arabic term for a martyr is shahid (masculine) or shahida (feminine), both meaning “witness.” It is not clear in what sense the martyr is a witness: whether the death of the martyr in itself is a form of proof of atrocities or if the martyr brings witness to God or other divine powers by transcending from life to death. This paper indicates that the two understandings of the word are intertwined and equally true. Just as “true” martyrs are supposed to be revealed by their divine associations, the tormentors of martyrs are rendered diabolic. Thus, Saddam is often depicted as Shaitaan, the devil himself. By demonizing their oppression, their own suffering and their capacity to endure it tip the balance of the moral economy in their favor; the suffering and its cause are rendered metaphysical. It is not the actual, earthly persecutors who are to suffer revenge by merely having their violence reciprocated, but Saddam Hussein, as the tyrant of all tyrants, who is to suffer in hell by the hand of God. Only such divine retaliation is legitimate and might compensate for the suffering of the victims. No earthly revenge can ever be compared to their suffering, nor can it be legitimate. This form of demonic evil seems to rest underground. In June 2003, I met Bashir at the collective fatiha, which took place in the gym of a municipal school in Copenhagen. Chairs were set in a row along the walls, and water was provided at a table in the middle. At the entrance, two blackboards were plastered with lists of the names of martyrs who had been discovered in the days after the fall of the Baath regime. A tape with recitations of the al-­sura fatiha played in the background, still allowing soft conversations. Bashir looked far from his usually cheerful self as I expressed my sympathy at the death of his two brothers. He told me they had disappeared many years before, and nobody had heard from them since. Now they had been found dead, and not only they but also members of his wife’s family. He had just returned from a visit to his wife’s family in Sweden for another fatiha. I added with regret that so far none of the subterranean prisons had been excavated (and, therefore, the chances of finding any disappeared relatives were decreasing), referring to the prevailing theory that there were secret dungeons hidden underground in Iraq. Bashir responded: “No, instead they found mass graves. That is what you have in the ground of Iraq: oil and mass graves, deep down oil and on top of that mass graves. If it were not for the oil, we would have no

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mass graves. Now they are looking for weapons of mass destruction under the ground.” By associating genocide with oil wealth, the immorality of greed is once again associated with vice and evil. Both are located underground, where there is an underworld of the remains of cruelty hidden away from the light of day. The causes and consequences of Iraqi suffering lie out of sight in the form of oil and mass graves and presumably (in spring 2003) underground prisons and hidden weapons of mass destruction. Just as Iraqis depict a greater world of high ideals, goodness, and sacrifice, there is also a vicious world of demonic vice and violation. The martyr negates these subterranean enormities of death and destruction through the promise of new life. When the martyr sacrifices his or her life, morality is confirmed, and goodness can prevail, counterbalancing the evils of the underground.

Conclusion Along the lines of the Introduction to this volume, I have stressed the transactional nature of victimhood by exploring how Iraqi refugees refer to and reflect on humiliation, retaliation, and sacrifice in narratives of suffering. By marginalizing, persecuting, torturing, and ridiculing opponents, the former political regime severely restricted subjectivity and agency. Having fled from these atrocities, Iraqis in exile invert the experience of degradation by drawing on the logic of gift exchange. In their narratives of humiliation and sacrifice, they transform the tormentor’s explicit manifestation of negative reciprocity to the martyr’s gift of life that will never be reciprocated: a “generalized reciprocity,” in Sahlins’s terminology (1974: 193). As such, the logic of gift exchange becomes a strategy for empowerment: by giving life instead of having his or her life taken, the victim gains agency, and by invoking moral superiority, the victim restores dignity. Iman’s narrative illustrates the point: while her movements and actions are strictly constrained by prison walls and guards, her husband takes advantage of the little space left for unauthorized action by sending her an apple. The magnitude of this token gift displays the moral and reciprocal gap between victim and tormentor.

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Victims in the Moral Economy of Suffering  255 References Asad, Talal. 2007. On Suicide Bombing. New York: Columbia University Press. Ayoub, Mahmoud. 1978. Redemptive Suffering in Islam: A Study of the Devotional Aspects of Ashura in Twelver Shi’ism. The Hague: Mouton. Akrawi, Widad. 2003.Taras bog: En beretning fra Kurdistan. Copenhagen: Forum. Danneskiold-­Samsøe, Sofie. 2006. “The Moral Economy of Suffering: Social Exchange Among Iraqi Refugees in the Danish Welfare State.” Ph.D. thesis, University of Copenhagen. Devereux, George. 1967. From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences. The Hague: Mouton. Gilsenan, Michael. 1990. Recognizing Islam: Religion and Society in the Middle East. London: Tauris. Hage, Ghassan. 2003. Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society. Annandale, NSW: Pluto Press. Jackson, Michael. 1998. Minima Ethnographica: Intersubjectivity and the Anthropological Project. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2011. Life Within Limits: Well-­Being in a World of Want. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Jensen, Steffen. 2008. Gangs, Politics and Dignity in Cape Town. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Kamo, Kardo. 2002. In Memory of a Stone: A Photographic Documentation. Berlin: n.p. Lucht, Hans. 2008. “Darkness Before Daybreak: Existential Reciprocity in the Lives and Livelihoods of Migrant West African Fishermen.” Ph.D. thesis, University of Copenhagen. Mauss, Marcel. 2002 [1923]. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Routledge. Sahlins, Marshall. 1974. Stone-­Age Economics. London: Routledge. Strenski, Ivan. 2010. “Sacrifice, Gift and the Social Logic of Muslim ‘Human Bombers’.” Terrorism and Political Violence 15, 3: 1–­34.

Notes 1. All names of informants are pseudonyms except Widad Akrawi. 2. Hussainiya is a meeting place for religious worship, life-­cycle rituals, political discussion, gossip, and other social activities. Hussainiya refers to the Imam Hussein, the icon of Shi‘a Islam, and Hussainiya al-­Sadr is named after Islamic scholar Imam Muhammad Baqir al-­Sadr, former head of the political party al-­Da’wa al-­Islamiyya or “Vocation for Islam.” 3. The chapter takes its point of departure in stories of victimhood told by Iraqi refugees during ethnographic fieldwork among Iraqi families and associations in Copenhagen in 2002–­3. 4.When I initiated fieldwork in 2003, the Danish Statistical Service (Danmarks Statistik, www. statistikbank.dk) listed 24,025 people of Iraqi origin living in Denmark, of whom 19,738 had emigrated from Iraq and 4,287 were descendents of Iraqi immigrants. 5. An abaya is a full-­length dress with long sleeves and width; a hijab is a headscarf. The abaya and hijab are signs of chastity and piety and are traditionally worn by women in public and in company with males unrelated by blood or marriage. 6. For an existential discussion on the logic of retaliation and sacrifice, see Jackson 2011, 68–­76. 7. For a discussion on sacrifice, reciprocity, and the social designation of martyr, see Strenski 2010 and Asad 2007.

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8. See Devereux 1967 and Lucht 2008 for discussions on deliberate nonresponsiveness as negation of symbolic exchange. 9. The day of the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Firdos Square in Baghdad, shortly after the Iraq War invasion.

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Epilogue

Histories of Victimhood: Assemblage, Transaction, and Figure Elizabeth A. Povinelli

At least since Nietzsche penned his infamous words about “the man of ressentiment,” the scholarship on suffering has been fractured into two often antagonist halves—­the phenomenology of sufferers and the politics of suffering. Not all critics follow Nietzsche’s brutal reading of the genealogy of the victim—­the man who makes of his suffering a righteous condition. But the division between the fact of suffering and the instrumental use of suffering persists. And in this general genealogy, Histories of Victimhood situates itself. As Steffen Jensen and Henrik Ronsbo ask in their introduction to the volume, “How do we recognize and acknowledge suffering without reducing affected communities and individuals to hapless and objectified victims?” To which their answer is a definitional distinction: “victims denote experiential suffering,” while “victimhood is a political entity.” The aspiration of Histories of Victimhood is to map out the diverse assemblages, transactions, and figures of the contemporary diffused and dispersed politics of victimhood without losing sight of the phenomenological grounds of victims. These aspirations are powerfully met in the essays that precede this epilogue. Whether focusing on the callow treatment of immigrant and rural women by nurses in South African clinics (Le Marcis), the logics of human torture in classic Greek and Roman antiquity (Rejali), or the politically dismantling immediacy of the Liberian claim that to live in Sierra Leone is to suffer (Jefferson), the experiential grounds of these political scenes press silently into the analysis. And as we move from various national settings—­Angola (Gupta),

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Sierra Leone (Jefferson), South Africa (Jensen, Le Marcis), India (Kaur), the United Kingdom (Kelly), Turkey (Weiss), Denmark (Danneskiold-­Samsøe, Guatemala (Ronsbo and Paniagua), Colombia (Jakobsen), and Palestine (Segal)—­readers see the emergent heterogeneous field in which individual bodies, national and international agencies, and aesthetically arranged discourses both continually make and remake what experiential suffering is and what political work it can do. We also glimpse, I think, less a definitional division—­between victim as denoting the experiential sufferer and victimhood as the political mobilization of this experience—­than a dialectic of ressentiment of the sort that Wendy Brown outlined long ago. Ressentiment, she argued is “a triple achievement: it produces an affect (rage, righteousness) that overwhelms the hurt; it produces a culprit responsible for the hurt; and it produces a site of revenge to displace the hurt (a place to inflict hurt as the sufferer has been hurt). Together these operations both ameliorate . . . ​and externalize what is otherwise ‘unendurable’ ” (1995: 68). But as I read across these richly conceptualized histories and ethnographies, I began to wonder how a cognate conceptual framework might lead us to rethink the genealogy of suffering and its codification as the division or dialectic of victim and victimhood. Should the victim be the ground on which victimhood is built? Or, put another way, is the analytically apt referent of victimhood the victim? Or is it something else: the sufferer, the monster, the pathological, or the abnormal? How, for instance, might the problematic of the pathological and normal touch on the analytics of victimhood? I am not initially thinking of the concept of normalization that Foucault developed in Discipline and Punish, nor the difference between the forms of normation underwriting disciplinary power at the level of the individual and the forms of normalization underwriting biopower at the level of the population. After all, Foucault in his trilogy on biopower, as well as his lectures on the abnormal, was drawing on a longer critical history. French sociology was, after all, founded on the backbone of Émile Durkheim’s rules for distinguishing the normal from the pathological (Durkheim 1982). For Durkheim’s social science, no less than Nietzsche’s Gay Science, “good and evil do not exist” (Durkheim 1982: 86). The good is whatever constitutes a social fact for a particular society, what can be seen as general and external to the individual and holds a coercive force over her. When properly functioning, these social facts undergird a healthy society. Durkheim can approach the relationship between the good, the healthy, and the diseased in astoundingly simple statements such as that, for “societies, as for individuals,

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health is good and desirable; sickness, on the other hand, is bad and must be avoided” (86) and that health “is recognizable when there is perfect adaptation of the organism to its environment,” while sickness is “all that upsets that adaptation” (87). But he also quickly complicates matters. Reproductive functions may produce death but are clearly normal. Old age is normal rather than a sickness. Moreover, sickness of certain sorts is hardly pathological. If he modifies his practices of hygiene, a “gastritis-­prone individual” can hardly be said to have a pathological condition. Even criminality can be a normal—­ that is, healthy—­condition. For Durkheim, the normal is simply a phenomenon that is useful to the social or individual organism or a phenomenon that is “normal without serving any useful purpose, simply because it inheres in the nature of the creature” (1982: 94). Thus, a social fact is said to be normal only in relation to a given social type, viewed at a specific stage in its development and from the point of view of general and collective social life. What the sociologist must decide is whether a pathological condition is a symptom of an older social system “increasingly dying out” or of the natural order of a healthy system. (95). Is this a transition period “when the whole species is in the process of evolving, without yet being stabilized in a new and definitive form” (94)? The answer to this question is crucial. If the system is healthy, then society has the moral right to discipline those who resist the coercions of socially abstract and external laws, even though these resisters are a normal part of the system; indeed, society has the moral right and duty to kill those who seek to overthrow the system. To extinguish, suppress, or kill this abnormality has no more moral or political weight than extinguishing a flu virus. Nor does it make that which is killed a victim. In other words, for Durkheim, the flu virus may suffer its death, but it cannot be a victim, nor, as Butler (2006) has put it, can it be mourned. The purpose and power of sociology was epistemological and diagnostic—­to have a method of knowing which state a society was in and how to remedy its condition. Conceptualizing certain parts of the social order as historically anomalous would seep into the way that one of the founders of British social anthropology would describe the devastating effects of settler colonialism (Radcliffe-­Brown 1965). From the Durkheimian point of view, certain populations are not victims, no matter how much they suffer. This takes us back to the questions with which I began. Is victimhood built on the grounds of the phenomenological experience of victims? Are victim and suffering interchangeable terms? When we look at the problematic of victims

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and suffering from the point of view of the normal and the pathological a very strange but I think productive new question arises: What is the normal aim of that which suffers? To answer this, let us remember how Foucault’s more immediate touchstone, Georges Canguilhem, a philosopher of the medical sciences, inverted the approach of the norm, normality, and normativity.1 For Canguilhem, biological normativity should not be derived either from the metaphysics of essences—­that is, the set qualities of entities—­or from quantitative measures—­the fixed nature of populations. Rather, biological normativity was the dynamic nature of entities and environments such that entities are emerging from, adjusting to, and seeking out new norms in relation to the emergent, adjusting, and demanding environments. The diagnostic epistemology of Durkheim is not abandoned so much as redeployed. No longer will the task of the sociologist and philosophy be to explicate social or biological norms and treat bodies according to their deviation from this norm. The task is to consider an entity as normal when that entity is able to maintain a flexible and formative power in relationship to the environment out of which it emerged. This approach to biological normativity presents a cognate relationship to Spinoza’s rethinking of the ethics of entities, namely, that the nature and proper end of entities is to persevere in being. From this view, the virus and the protosocial groups have an equal right as host and dominant social collectivity. But Canguilhem, like Nietzsche before him and his student Foucault after him, removes Spinoza from the philosophy of essences such that essence is the end of becoming. “Normativity, in the fullest sense of the word, is that which establishes norms” (Conguilhem 1989: 126–­27). Normativity is performative. The goal of every entity is to make an environment in which it is and can thrive. Once we have liberated biological normativity from the metaphysics of essences and the sciences of quantification and we have receded into the prehistory of the entity, the very grammar of subject and predicate must be altered. The abnormal does not seek to become abnormal. How could “it” seek to be something before “it” even is something? If we are to think immanently, then, we should probably remember that various conditions and forces of differentiation open a space that we retroactively see as having existed before the space existed. The opening materially entails, or phenomenologically expresses, potential bodies that are differentially enabled by the environment that formed them. Certain scholarly approaches to disability studies certainly make this point concrete. The body becomes enabled and disabled relative to a material and technologically habituated environment. Critical environmental studies likewise understand biological normativity as a result of the

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dynamic relation of bodies and embodiment. The recent discovery that BPA, the plastic used to manufacture water bottles, is an endocine disrupter that leads to hormonal disturbances in mammals should not be read from the perspective of a fixed biological norm—­although the mainstream politically and socially organized resistance to the continued use of BPA read it exactly in this way. Instead, we might ask what forms of life (consumer capitalism) produced this form of life (BPA) that produced a new form of life (hormone disruption) and how might these new forms of life “seek” to persist. I place “seek” in scare quotes to note that agency cannot simply be attributed to nonhuman forms of life but might be conceptually altered when applied to nonhuman entities.2 The elimination of BPA will not merely demand a change in manufacturing techniques but an alteration of the form of life even as the emergence of an entity has already changed—­in this case via the hormonal system—­that form and, in emerging in a specific form (plastics), cannot simply be eliminated. And this was Canguilhem’s point: “The dynamic polarity of life and the normativity it expresses” has an agnostic attitude to the direction of any particular form of life, including the persistence or shape of human life (1989: 127). Again, the distortions this approach forces on the grammars of subject-­ agent and predicate need to be emphasized. Canguilhem is not proposing a politics of voice as advocated by some in the antipsychiatry movement in France and the U.S. (Spivak 1988). The reason is not merely Joan Scott’s trenchant critique in “The Evidence of Experience”: that, when experience is taken as the referential truth of subjugated histories, historians “take as self-­ evident the identities of those whose experience is being documented and thus naturalize their difference”—­with the effect that they “locate resistance outside its discursive construction,” reifying “agency as an inherent attribute of individuals, thus decontextualizing it” (Scott 1991: 777). Whether eventually attributed to individuals or the discursive field, the agent/agency is originally something other than itself. When we probe Canguilhem’s thinking deeply, we see he is not merely critiquing Durkheim’s diagnostic epistemology—­the man of science or law or collective public reason who will provide the rational grounds for deciding whether the sufferer is a normal deviation from the collective, and thus can be disciplined or ignored, or whether she is a symptom of emergent sociality, such that her suffering can be seen as the normal condition of birth. Nor is he merely interested in existing entities who live in the no-­man’s land of bracketed recognition—­the periods in which a group is neither granted nor denied recognition.

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Canguilhem, like Foucault and Deleuze after him, urges us to consider the moment prior to the individual and its discursive field, recognition and its brackets, the moment before normativity has established its norms. And this moment is the moment of the abnormal and abnormal suffering. In his lectures on the abnormal in 1974–­1975, Foucault argued that three figures provided in the genealogical prehistory of modern abnormality—­the human monster, the deviant individual, and the masturbating child—­were recombined into the sexual monster. But in his later lectures, Foucault would make the figure monstrous do other work. In his lectures The Government of Self and Other, Foucault, echoing Canguilhem, attempts to think the moment before performativity (dire vrai) had established its performative conditions. If, in the analytic sense, a performative is that which produces the state it refers to such that its “truth” is its ability to establish those states, how does performativity become normative? How does a form of truth-­speaking emerge from previous forms of truth that are producing and presupposing a given organization of subject, referent, and world? Why would this previous world accede to its normative refashioning? How would this previous world react to this new form of truth? Foucault was clear and was here clearly reflecting his teacher’s sensibility: new forms of truth are nearly always suicidal because the monstrosity of immanent parrhesia is usually treated monstrously by the given. Deleuze and Guattari equally saw the pure event as unrealizable and unliveable (Delueze and Guattari 1996). New forms of truth no less than new forms of life are monstrous, fragile, and suicidal events. Once again, the task of the sociologist and philosopher has changed. The task is no longer merely to consider the normal entity as that which maintains a flexible and formative power in relationship to the environment out of which it emerged. Instead, our task is to understand how monstrous forms of life are able to endure long enough to come to have and be given self-­referential thickness, to extend themselves over space and time, and eventually to dominate as metaphenomenal life. How might this superficial discussion of the normal and pathological change the way in which we approach victims and victimhood? First, the victim would no longer be the phenomenological reality against which victimhood acts as a political figuration. Victimhood would emerge wholly as a discursive register, one of many that separate suffering into a variety of moral and amoral, abnormal and normal harms, such that a form of life is embodied as harm, suffering, victim. After all, the medical anthropology is rife with examples of bodily states that are so diffused into the background conditions

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of life that they are not experienced as harm or suffering but must be made to be experienced as such. Second, even if we decide to distinguish victimhood as a political entity from the experience of harm/suffering, we need to consider the political at the moment of monstrous harm. By “monstrous harm,” I mean to the moments in which a monstrous harm emerges and is experienced as a threat to the current categories of the normal and the pathological as themselves crucial to the political imaginary. But this current order has yet to make this harm commensurate with its harm, and the emergent harm has yet to constitute itself as the norm (Le Blanc 2002). Finally, placing the dynamic relationships among incipient forms of suffering and victimhood into a model that views normalization as the power—­or pulsion—­to make norms radically breaks the anthropology of victimhood from the pluralizing universalism of liberalism. References Brown, Wendy. 1995. States of Injury. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Butler, Judith. 2006. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Canguilhem, Georges. 1989. The Normal and the Pathological. Trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett in collaboration with Robert S. Cohen. New York: Zone Books. Delueze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1996. What Is Philosophy? Trans.Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. Durkheim, Émile. 1982. “Rules for the Distinction of the Normal from the Pathological.” In The Rules of Sociological Method, ed. and intro. Steven Lukes, 85–­107. New York: Free Press. Esposito, Roberto. 2008. Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gane, Mike. 2002. “Normativity and Pathology” Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology 9, 4: 313–­16. Le Blanc, Guillaume. 2002. Canguilhem et la vie humaine. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Radcliffe-­Brown, Alfred Reginald. 1965. Structure and Function in Primitive Society: Essays and Addresses. New York: Free Press. Scott, Joan. 1991. “The Evidence of Experience.” Critical Inquiry 17, 4: 773–­97. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Notes 1. Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito has compared Durkheim’s approach to the radical rethinking of norm and life in the work of Georges Canguilhem. See Esposito 2008 and Gane 2002. 2. Debate about Latour and “actant.”

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Contributors

Sofie Danneskiold-­Samsøe teaches at the Institute for Society and Globalisation, Roskilde University. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on social suffering and gendered violence among Middle Eastern families in the context of the welfare state. Pamila Gupta is a senior researcher at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg, South Africa. She has published on the Indian Ocean, Lusophone India and Africa, and postcolonial Mozambique. Her monograph The Relic State: St. Francis Xavier and the Politics of Ritual in Portuguese India is forthcoming. Stine Finne Jakobsen is external lecturer at Copenhagen University. Her research focuses on victims of violence—­in particular, refugees and displaced persons—­and postconflict interventions. She has previously worked as researcher at DIGNITY-­Danish Institut Against Torture and the Danish Refugee Council in Liberia. She has published in journals such as Conflict Security and Development and Forced Migration Review. Andrew M. Jefferson is Senior Researcher at DIGNITY-­Danish Institute Against Torture and specializes in the study of prisons beyond the West. He is cofounder of the Global Prisons Research Network. He is engaged in a “practice research” project, together with organizations in the Philippines, Kosovo, and Sierra Leone, looking at the entangled encounters between prisons and reform agencies. Steffen Jensen is a senior researcher at DIGNITY-­Danish Institute Against Torture in Copenhagen and associated with the University of the Philippines. He has published on violence, gangs, vigilante groups, human rights, and

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urban and rural politics, as well as on the relationship between security and development in rural and urban South Africa and in the Philippines. He has published the monograph Gangs, Politics and Dignity in Cape Town, along with edited volumes on policing, human rights, and security. Ravinder Kaur is Associate Professor of Modern South Asian Studies at the Department of Cross-­Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. She also directs the Centre of Global South Asian Studies at the university. She has worked on the history of Partition in the Indian subcontinent on a variety of related themes, including the question of state resettlement policies, citizenship, social class, and caste differences among the refugees, as well as memory and narratives of forced migration. Her work includes a historical ethnography of refugee resettlement, Since 1947: Partition Narratives Among Punjabi Migrants of Delhi, as well as a number of journal articles and book chapters. She is currently engaged in a new research program focused on the work of the spectacular images in shaping the “new” India after the economic liberalization. Tobias Kelly is a Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests include human rights and legal anthropology. He has carried out fieldwork in Israel/Palestine, the UK, and the UN. He has published two monographs Law, Violence and Sovereignty and This Side of Silence: Human Rights, Torture and the Recognition of Cruelty (University of Pennsylvania Press). Frédéric Le Marcis is Professor of Anthropology at the Institut Français de l’Éducation of the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, member of the research team Triangle (UMR 5206). He is currently associated with the the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement IRD (SESSTIM, UMR 912) in Burkina Faso. He has been working on issues of AIDS in South Africa, Burkina Faso, and Ivory Coast and on Roma migration in Europe. He has published Vivre avec le sida après l’apartheid (Afrique du Sud) and coedited with Kàtia Lurbe i Puerto in Endoétrangers: exclusion, reconnaissance et expériences des roms et gens du voyage en Europe. Walter Paniagua holds a doctorate in Social Psychology from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. His research focuses on cross-­cultural health, political violence, and poverty in Guatemala. Currently, he is writing about the psychosocial impact of humanitarian work in Central America.

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Contributors 267

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University. Her work focuses on the anthropology of the “otherwise” in late liberalism, a topic she has explored in four books: Labor’s Lot, The Cunning of Recognition, The Empire of Love, and Economies of Abandonment; and a short film Karrabing: Low Tide Turning, selected for the 2012 Berlinale International Film Festival, Shorts Competition. Darius Rejali, professor of political science at Reed College, is an internationally recognized expert on government torture and interrogation. Iranian-­ born, Rejali has spent his scholarly career reflecting on violence and, specifically, on the causes, consequences, and meaning of modern torture in our world. His award-­winning work spans concerns in political science, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, history, and critical social theory. He is the author of Torture and Democracy, Torture and Modernity: Self, Society, and State in Modern, as well as many recent articles on violence. He is currently working on torture prevention through a grant supported by the U.S. Institute of Peace. He is studying prevention of torture in war using as his data patterns of torture in Iraq from 1980 to 2010. Henrik Ronsbo is a Senior Researcher at DIGNITY-­Danish Institute Against Torture in Copenhagen. He has published on issues of violence, indigeneity, and civil war in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Peru and on issues the history and development of the NGO-­responses to civil war in Latin America. Lotte Buch Segal is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. She has published on the themes of intimacy, violence, security, and affect and how these are configured in the Israeli-­Palestinian conflict. She is currently writing a monograph on absence and affect in the West Bank (to be published by Penn Press). Nerina Weiss is senior researcher at Fafo-­Institute for Applied International Studies, Oslo. She holds a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the University of Oslo and has done fieldwork in Cyprus, among Kurdish activists in Turkey, and on Kurdish torture survivors in Denmark. Her research focuses on political violence, histories of victimhood, social suffering, gender, and the development of appropriate methodologies for the anthropology of violence. She has published various articles and is coeditor of Violence Expressed: An Anthropological Perspective (with Maria Six-­Hohenbalken).

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Index

Actant, 3, 9, 107, 126, 263n2 African National Congress (ANC), 90, 109, 115, 117 Agamben, Giorgio, 18, 62 Agency: 1ff., 19, 46, 53, 68, 94, 162, 202, 218ff., 240ff., 261 AIDS, 11, 108; denial of, 113, 117–­18; international discourse on, 84–­86, 89–­90; and NGOs working with, 83, 106–­22; treatment, 90, 117–­18; victims, 9, 105–­6, 118, 121; and women, 11, 13, 83–­90, 93–­94, 97, 100, 103n6, 105, 107 Amnesty International, 39 Apartheid, 90–­92, 95–­96, 105–­7, 109–­13, 198–­ 99, 205–­14 Assemblage, 8–­9, 92, 100, 104, 106, 110, 126; postconflict, 129, 132–­34, 140–­42; as relations of exteriority, 10, 104, 121; as victimhood, 2, 8–­10, 17–­19, 45, 81, 84–­85, 105–­9, 121, 122, 126, 134, 142, 180 Badiou, Alain, 7, 8, 13, 157 Bataille, Georges, 14, 124 Benefactor, 2–­3, 7, 13, 18, 141 Beneficiary, 2, 6–­7, 66–­75, 79–­80, 105–­6, 109, 116, 125–­26, 132–­35 Biomedical, 89, 117, 180 Biopolitic, 2, 6–­8, 11, 19, 258 Body, 260–­61: dead, 161–­63, 168–­69, 171–­73, 175; exhumation of, 10, 132–­37; and gender, 57–­61, 97; haggard (wounded), 14–­15, 24, 27, 29, 45, 61–­62, 149–­56, 176–­77; politics of the, 8; suffering; 1, 4; of victim, 45 Bureaucracy: as challenge, 66; paraphernalia of, 9; as procedures, 70; of loss, 130ff. Butler, Judith, 6, 237n1, 259

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Caregivers, 6, 23; practices of, 87ff. Christianity: and asylum, 147ff., reformulation of crucifixion’s meaning, 41; and humanitarianism, 41; in South Africa, 91; and torture, 33; Citizen, 8, 25–­28, 31–­32, 69, 72–­73, 80, 136–­ 41, 209, 224; in relation to torture; 25–­28, 30–­31, 35 Clients, 9ff., 84ff., 142, 179ff., 227; clientship, 10; stereotypes of, 96, 100 Clinic, history of, 90–­92 Colonial, 5, 204–­5, 259; administration, 98–­99, 211–­12; discourse; 63n2; government, 216n7; as governmentality, 199, 212–­14; as guilt, 214; law, 49, 63n4; legacy, 237n2; as loss, 198–­99, 202; subjects and silence, 200; race, 11; as rule, 198, 202. See also Decolonization Community, 1–­2, 5, 11, 125, 128, 130–­31, 134, 178; care, 100; Christian, 33; and development, 225; diaspora, 240; indigenous, 126–­ 28, 136–­37; interventions, 128; Iraqi, 251; leaders, 131; of mourners, 169; and nation, 136; organizations in, 127; political, 18–­19, 258; politics, 117–­18; Portuguese, 199–­205, 207, 211–­12, 216nn2, 10; and race, 206, 209–­12; refugee, 208, 235; residents, 117; and sacrifice, 14; suffering, 257; and victim, 14, 117–­18; village, 193 Das, Veena, 16, 46, 144, 180, 181, 196, 220, 230, 232, 233–­34, 238n8 De Landa, Manuel, 10, 104, 121. See also Relations of exteriority Death penalty, 32–­33, 39 Decolonization, 198–­201, 205, 213, 216n2

270 Index Deleuze, Gilles, 105, 109, 122, 181–­82, 262. See also Assemblage Displacement, 2, 9, 45–­46, 48, 81, 105, 226–­27, 198, 214, 220–­21, 225–­26, 229, 234–­35; displaced families, 47–­48, 67–­70. See also Internally displaced people (IDP) Donor, 6, 9; 106ff. Durkheim, Émile, 258–­61

Intervention: making of victim, 73; postconflict 133ff., psychosocial, 2, 125ff., 135ff., 180ff., 192; rights-­based, 108–­9, 134, state 56, 61; targets of, 73, 105, 118 Jews, 5, 30, 172 Justice 31, 37, 39, 230, 244, sector, 221, 227 Latour, Bruno, 74–­75, 152, 263n2. See also Network Law, 12, 25, 27, 34–­37, 40–­42, 76, 86, 119–­22, 144–­45, 152–­53, 156–­58, 204–­6, 224–­25, 228, 230, 259, 261 Legal, 7, 10, 12, 18, 26–­27, 32, 34–­37, 49, 95, 119, 125, 128, 131, 144–­46, 149–­58, 192, 201, 227–­30

Emotion: 8–­9, 134, 176, 180–­81, 247–­50; and political economy, 13–­14 Entanglement, of categories, 95 Exchange, 3, 10, 88, 95ff., 104, 112, 240, 254 Fassin, Didier, 8, 87, 124–­25, 156, 182–­83. See also Trauma, empire of Figure, 2ff., 57, 84, 97, 107, 116, 181, 187ff., 240, 248–­49, 262; and ground, 2–­3, 14, 16, 17, 50; of humanitarianism, 14–­15; interpellated, 17; of intervention, 19; of widow, 49–­ 50. See also Talmy, Leonard Foucault, Michel, 8, 258, 260, 262. See also Governmentality

Migration, 12, 50; to Britain 146ff; from Angola, 208, 216n7, 216nn10, 11; migrants as threat, 91; in South Africa, 84–­85, 91–­92, 107; urban, 97; women and, 97ff. Moral, 3, 6, 13, 17–­19, 41, 49, 55, 84, 89ff.,104, 122, 132, 158, 180ff., 195, 240ff., 259 Morality, 10ff., 54, 83ff., 104ff, 240, 254

Gender: agency and subjectivity, 53; gender-­ based violence, 119; inequality, 86–­87, 107; rights, 108 Globalization, anti-, 110 God-­man, 7, 17. See also Nietzsche, Freidrich Governance: discourse of, 129; good, 110; strategies of, 73

Network, 8–­9, 73–­79; and victimhood, 9, 67–­ 68; and power, 112–­16, 122 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 7, 257, 258 NGOs, 3ff., 12, 18, 65, 72–­33, 80, 83, 105ff., 122, 125ff., 141, 183ff.

Health care. 65ff., 83ff. Heroic victim, 2, 4, 6–­7, 12, 15–­17–­19, 162, 171–­77, 187–­89 Human, 4, 14, 17, 29–­31, 39–­40, being, 185, 189, 196, 261; capital, 66–­67; rights, 2–­3, 12, 14–­15, 17–­19, 25, 42, 85, 130, 134, 144, 148, 151–­52, 156, 162, 166–­67, 222, 225, 228, 237n5 Humane violence, 18, 23–­42 Humanitarian, 3, 4, 6–­8, 11, 12, 80, 134, 162, 199, 214; psychiatry, 8 183; agencies, 1, 220–­ 21, 234 Hussein, Sadam, regime of, 38, 242–­44, 246–­ 48, 251, 253 Internally displaced people (IDP), 9, 47, 65–­ 68, 164; assistance to, 80; as victimhood category, 78–­79

Patient, 88ff. Penal, 23, 222 Perpetrators, 6, 104, 121, 129ff., 148, 157, 230, 242 Population, 1–­2, 8, 45, 73, 84, 109, 116–­21, 137, 191, 199–­201, 258–­60; migrant, 90–­91, indigenous, 127–­30; refugee, 45; of victims, 37 Poverty, 107, 113: and victimhood, 78–­79; extreme, 66–­67, 79–­80 Power, 8, 56, 67, 85–­88, 96–­100, 109, 112, 125, 162, 170–­71, 202, 240–­42, 258–­63; configurations of, 3; relations of, 116–­18, 121–­22, 209, 232; state, 124, 172; struggles, 199 Pragmatics of admission, 84–­85, 88–­90, 92, 96–­100 Prison: Abu Ghraib, 38; asylum, 148; guards, 255; Iraqi 239; Israeli, 13; narratives of, 243; resistance of prisoners 219

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Index 271 Psychology, 2, 5, 128–­29, 135–­41, 155, 181–­84, 187–­95 Punishment, 24ff. Quasi-­event, 15–­16, 18–­19 Race, 86, 95–­96, 125, 162, 205ff. Rechtman, Richard, 8, 124–­25, 182–­83. See also Trauma, empire of Refugees, 2, 5ff., 19, 46ff., 58ff., 105, 199, 205ff., 213–­14, 218ff., 240ff.; camp, 185, 198, 203ff.; victimhood, 105–­7 Relations of exteriority, 10, 104–­5, 106, 110, 112, 121–­22. See also Assemblage; De Landa, Manuel Sacrifice: 4, 7, 11–­15, 32, 37, 162–­63, 169, 171, 187, 241, 248–­54, 255n6 Social program: in Colombia, 68ff., 80–­81; official assistance programs, 80; social services department, 114; in South Africa, 114; and victimhood, 67 Sociology, 5, 259–­62 Sovereignty: 36, 57, 86 Suffering, 28, 38, 131, 134, 144ff., 180ff., 219ff., 225, 231ff., 250ff., 257ff.; as enactment, 16, 221, 229, ethnographic description of, 17; as everyday, 10, 220, 234; as experiential, 1, 17; figure of 16, 189, 191, 228; genealogy of, 258; as human, 1, 240, 248; as identity 14,

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16, 46, 49, 104, 122; of Jesus 41; as moral; 12; as narrative, 162, 218, 250; as object of exchange 240ff.; Palestinian, 10, 16; phenomenology of sufferers, 257; politics of, 257; as sacrifice 15, 248ff.; scholarship on, 257; subjects of, 45–­46; torture as, 157; as trauma 180 Survivor, 7, 45, 125ff., of torture 144ff., 184ff. Talmy, Leonard, 16. See also Figures Terrorism, 3, 36, 161, 163–­64, 169, 172–­76, 178n9; War on terror, 109 Torture, 2, 8–­9, 24ff., 139, 144ff., 163, 176, 181, 187, 190–­91, 240ff.; of slaves, 25–­28, 30, 41–­42 Transaction, 2ff., 8ff., 10ff., 109, 112, 122, 125, 131, 142, 219, 221, 240 Trauma: discourse of, 10–­11, 124, 134, 186, 187; empire of, 8–­9, 124–­25, 140, 180–­83; as PTSD, 6, 149–­50, 154, 183–­84, 186–­87, 194; victim, 8 Tribal court, 100, 119–­21 Turkey, 2; 166ff. UNHCR, 12, 19, 153, 218–­20, 220–­22, 224–­25, 229, 233–­35 Violators, 40. See also Perpetrators World Health Organization (WHO), 84, 86

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Acknowledgments

This volume grows out of the ideas developed by the intellectual environment created around the participants in the research program “Histories of Victimhood.” The Victimhood program was supported by grants from the Danish Council for Independent Research in Social Sciences and the Danish Council for Strategic Research in Development Studies with additional funding provided by DIGNITY: Danish Institute against Torture. We have also enjoyed material and institutional support from Institute of Anthropology at Copenhagen University and International Development Studies at Roskilde University as well as the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg. Without this institutional and financial backing the book would not have been possible. But we have also enjoyed tremendous support from colleagues, friends, and other important, intellectual co-travelers that are not part of this volume. They have helped us develop our thinking, participated in many of the research seminars that preceded the writing of this volume, and their intellectual attention is deeply appreciated. These are Christian Lund, Finn Stepputat, Mark Duffield, Lars Buur, Helene Risør, Reason Beremauro, Veena Das, and Alan Young. Finally but not least important, we would like to acknowledge the support and help given to us by the two organizations with which we have conducted research for the Victimhood program. They are Masisukumeni Women Crisis Centre in Nkomazi, South Africa and the Equipo de Estudio Comunitarios y Acción Psicosocial in Guatemala. Their staff and management welcomed us and our research ideas, took the time necessary to reflect on our ideas, and engaged in a long-standing conversation about suffering, NGO work, research, partnership and a range of other activities. Without this conversation,

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the present volume would have been very different indeed. We would therefore like to acknowledge the intellectual accompaniment provided by Bruce Osorio, Susana Navarro García, Judith Erazo from ECAP; Anna Nyambi, Rachel Nkosi, Patricia Magagula,  and Tina Sideris from Masisukumeni; and Enos Sikhauli from the University of Pretoria.