Social Violence and Religious Conflict in Late Medieval Valencia

Mark D. Meyerson, History and Medieval Studies, University of Toronto

Research Grant, 2003

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My HFG-supported project explores violence within the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities of the kingdom of Valencia (Spain) as well as violence between these communities in order to shed new light on the transformation of Spain between 1300 and 1600 from a land of three religions into one uniformly Catholic. I focus on the kingdom of Valencia because it had the largest Muslim population in Christian Spain and a substantial Jewish population. I regard its history as paradigmatic for developments elsewhere in medieval and early modern Iberia. The archival sources for the Valencian regional history, moreover, are especially rich. This project is largely based on the records of various tribunals: criminal justice, bailiff general, governor, Royal Audience, and Spanish Inquisition.

Methodologically, the project is in many respects a form of anthropological history. Viewing violence as integral and specific to particular cultures and as a form of social discourse, I am interested in analyzing the forms, rituals, and meanings of verbal and physical violence perpetrated within each religious community. The practice and control of violence in each community were distinct, as a result of particular kinship structures, economic pursuits and competition, relationship with the authorities of the Christian state, and, of course, historical experience. While this anthropological approach is intrinsically valuable for interpreting the violent behaviors of medieval Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and thus for providing a new understanding of their mentalities, the project’s comparative dimension elucidates the differential acculturation of Muslims and Jews to the dominant Christian culture. Among the Christians, for example, the ritual of “assaulting the house” of one’s (Christian) enemy as a means of dishonoring him or her, was widely performed. (This involved several armed males bursting through the doors of a rival’s house—understood metaphorically as a woman’s body—beating up, in a controlled fashion, the men or women within, and sometimes scarring a woman’s face.) I found that Jews engaged in such household assaults when feuding with coreligionists, and that, for various reasons, Jewish forms of violent status competition came increasingly to resemble those of Christians. The conquered Muslims, in contrast, perpetuated modes of feuding with their own rites of violence and manhood, which were understood to be peculiarly “Moorish.” Hence they did not perform household assaults in the Christian manner, though they did violate an enemy’s domestic space in other meaningful ways (e.g., the abduction of unmarried girls).

Their status anxiety was fed by the authorities' public criticism of them for shameful and un-Christian mingling with Jews and Muslims; they resolved it, I argue, through collective and cathartic violence against the other religious communities.

In exploring the intensity of violence among Christians, especially among the laboring-class Christians who composed the mobs that attacked Jews and Muslims, this study shows that Christians suffered from a high degree of status anxiety, which they expressed in their punctiliousness about questions of “honor.” Their status anxiety was fed by the authorities’ public criticism of them for shameful and un-Christian mingling with Jews and Muslims; they resolved it, I argue, through collective and cathartic violence against the other religious communities. I regard the choice of baptism or death that Christians offered their Muslim and Jewish victims as an expression of the ambivalence with which they viewed them. Finally, by examining the violent practices and feuds of baptized Jews (Conversos) and of baptized Muslims (Moriscos), I show that the Conversos were increasingly contesting honor and status with Old Christians and thus assimilating, whereas Moriscos persistently directed their violence mostly at members of their own ethnic group and thus paradoxically enhanced Morisco distinctiveness and resistance to assimilation. In other words, by viewing violence as integral to and constitutive of culture, I am able to show, at least in part, how and why Muslims and Jews, and later Moriscos and Conversos, followed such different paths in regard to Christian society and culture, and why Spain took the shape it took over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Bibliography

1. Meyerson, Mark. Of Bloodshed and Baptism: Social Violence, Religious Conflict, and the Transformation of Spain. forthcoming.

2. Meyerson, Mark. "The Murder of Pau de Sant Martí: Jews, Conversos, and the Feud in Fifteenth-Century Valencia," In "A Great Effusion of Blood"? Interpreting Medieval Violence. ed. O. Falk, M.D. Meyerson, D. Thiery. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

Political Violence, Military Conflict and Civil Unrest in Palestine: The Palestinian Police, the Fatah Tanzim and the “Al-Aqsa Intifada”

Nur Masalha, Political History of the Middle East, Saint Mary's University of Surrey

Research Grant, 2002, 2003

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This research project was originally undertaken with the aim of examining the roles played by the military and civilian police forces of the Palestinian Authority, and the popular militias (in particular the Fatah Tanzim), during the current uprising (“Al-Aqsa Intifada”) in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It was particularly intended to focus on the likely future trajectories of these organizations, the factors determining the dynamics between them, and the various options for their future evolution. The project outlined a number of research objectives relating both to the Palestinian police and to the popular militias and raised a number of hypotheses about the relationship between these forces; between these forces and the Palestinian Authority; and between these forces and the local population.

The research began by examining the pre–Al-Aqsa Intifada period, focusing on the post-1993 state formation in Palestine and the roles played by the Palestinian Police and Security Forces in the pre-Intifada period between 1994 and September 2000. The work then proceeded to examine the causes for outbreak and subsequent militarization of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, the rise of the Fatah Tanzim, and the emergence of the Palestinian popular militias in 2001 and 2002.

During the course of the research, the situation in Palestine changed dramatically. Throughout 2002 and 2003, the project continued to monitor ongoing developments on the ground as they affected the research, and to modify the goals accordingly. Despite the deteriorating security situation in Palestine, which made visits to many parts of the country difficult, field trips to Jerusalem, Ramallah. and Bethlehem were extremely useful in conducting interviews and collecting primary and secondary material in Arabic and Hebrew.

The police as an institution engaged in very little armed resistance. Most of the resistance put up by the Palestinian population was led by the militias (Fatah Tanzim, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad).

Of particular importance was the strategy demonstrated by the Israeli government under Ariel Sharon, of semipermanent military reoccupation of the West Bank, which seemed to be aimed at the very destruction of the Palestinian Authority itself. The research attempted to measure and assess the effect of the ongoing reoccupation on the ability to respond of the Palestinian security forces and the militias, and concluded that the Israeli assault on the official Palestine Police (the destruction of police stations and police facilities throughout the occupied territories), contributed to the rise of the popular militias and armed units, including those of the Fatah Tanzim, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade and militant Islamic organizations (including Hamas and Islamic Jihad).

During its reoccupation of the West Bank, the Israeli army targeted the security organizations of the Palestinian Authority, particularly the police, and police posts and police stations were repeatedly destroyed and the police killed or arrested in very large numbers. The police as an institution engaged in very little armed resistance. Most of the resistance put up by the Palestinian population was led by the militias (Fatah Tanzim, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad).

The decreasing ability of the Palestinian Authority to function, on the security or any other level, resulted from the Sharon government’s underlying strategy of preventing the emergence of a viable Palestinian state. This in turn led to the development of a degree of skepticism among the Palestinian population about the Palestinian Authority’s future and the future of the two-state solution in general.

Among the specific new factors which the research identified as key are the following:

a) the tendency of the popular Palestinian militias to look to the example of the Lebanese Hizbullah and its tactics in confronting the Israeli army in south Lebanon;
b) the rise in levels of support for the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade among the population;
c) the close collaboration and a certain degree of merging between Islamist and nationalist forces and between these groups and the official police;
d) the occasional adoption by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, which had a secular nationalist tendency, of the tactic of suicide attacks which had hitherto been confined to Islamic groups;
e) evidence of an increasing traumatization of Palestinian society (see points d and f.);
f) the participation of Palestinian women in armed attacks in both secular nationalist and Islamist armed groups, including in suicide attacks;
g) the serious implications of the Brigade’s activities in terms of undermining the Palestinian Authority.

Role of Estrogen Receptors in Aggressive Behaviors

Sonoko Ogawa, Neuroscience, Rockefeller University

Research Grant, 1996, 1997

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Our research focus has been in the understanding of differential regulation of aggressive behavior by two types of estrogen receptors, ER-α and ER-β. ERs, as a member of the nuclear receptor superfamily, are involved in transcriptional regulation of various gene products. It has been known for some time that testosterone is a major factor to facilitate aggressive behavior in most species, including humans. Since testosterone not only acts on brain androgen receptors in its original form but can also be aromatized to estradiol in the brain, it has been hypothesized that estrogen receptor (classical ER-α) mediated action of gonadal steroid hormones may also be involved in the regulation of aggressive behavior. The recent discovery of a second form of estrogen receptor, ER-β, however, further complicated the role played by nuclear steroid receptors in the regulation of aggressive behavior. Using mice that lack either ER-α or ER-β genes, we found that two types of ER may have an opposite effect on aggressive behavior. Specifically, mice lacking ER-α genes were not aggressive at all, whereas those lacking ER-β genes were more aggressive than control littermate mice, particularly during puberty and young adult ages. These findings suggest that activation of ER-α is necessary for the induction of aggressive behavior, whereas activation of ER-β may inhibit aggressive behavior in male mice. It is assumed that ER-α activation at the perinatal critical period for sexual differentiation of brain development is essential for expression of male-typical aggressive behavior. On the other hand, ER-β‘s role is more of a modulatory one to fine-tune the final outcome of the behavior by affecting animals’ anxiety levels as well as social memory/learning ability. Our recent studies suggest that ER-β may inhibit aggression by modifying the synthesis and secretion of neuropeptides, oxytocin, and vasopressin, as well as a neurotransmitter, serotonin.

Mice lacking ER-α genes were not aggressive at all, whereas those lacking ER-β genes were more aggressive than control littermate mice, particularly during puberty and young adult ages.

Bibliography

1. Ogawa et al., PNAS, 94, 1476-1481, 1997.

2. Ogawa et al., PNAS, 96, 12887-12892, 1999.

3. Ogawa et al., PNAS, 97, 14737-14741, 2000.

4. Ogawa et al., Current Opinions of Endocrinology and Diabetes, 9, 224-229.

5. Nomura et al., Hormones and Behavior, 41, 288-296, 2002.

The Association of Polymorphisms in Genes affecting Monoamine Neurotransmission with Aggressive Behavior in Schizophrenic Violent Individuals

Rael Strous, Psychiatry, Beer Yaakov Mental Health Center

Research Grant, 2000, 2001

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Violence remains an important sociobiological problem, and is reported to affect approximately 3.7% of the population each year. In the mentally ill, the prevalence of violent behavior is higher that in the general population. The etiology of violence in the general population, as well as in the mentally ill, is poorly understood, but there are very likely common biological and genetic factors that play a role. This international collaborative study intended to focus on the genetic aspects of violence, investigating polymorphic differences in genes that influence catecholaminergic neurotransmitter systems in the brain.

Considering the wealth of research demonstrating an association between these monoamine neurotransmitter systems and aggression, polymorphic differences in the genes that affect monoamine transmission may play a role in human aggression. Our team has identified a common functional polymorphism at COMT codon 158. The COMT enzyme inactivates catecholamines by catalyzing S-adenosyl-L-methionine dependent methyl conjugation. This polymorphism results in substantial differences in enzyme activity. One allele encodes a methionine at codon 158 (158Met) and the other allele a valine (158Val). 158Val homozygotes have 3- to 4-fold higher levels of activity than 158Met homozygotes.

This investigation confirmed previous evidence by our group showing a relationship between a polymorphism in the gene encoding the enzyme catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) and aggression in schizophrenia.

The COMT polymorphism has since been investigated as a possible contributing factor in several psychiatric and behavioral conditions. This investigation confirmed previous evidence by our group showing a relationship between a polymorphism in the gene encoding the enzyme catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) and aggression in schizophrenia. Patients with schizophrenia (SZ) were assessed for violent behavior using the Lifetime History of Aggression (LHA) scale, an 11-item questionnaire that includes Aggression, Self-Directed Aggression, and Consequences/Antisocial Behavior subscales. DNA was genotyped for the COMT 158 polymorphism, as well as a functional polymorphism in the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) gene promoter. Similar to our previously reported findings, a statistically significant association was found between aggressive behavior in SZ and the COMT 158 polymorphism; mean LHA scores were higher in subjects homozygous for 158Met, the low enzyme activity COMT variant (F(2,105) = 5.616, P = 0.005). Analysis of the major LHA subscales revealed that the association with 158Met was due to high scores on the Aggression and Self-Directed Aggression subscales, but not the Consequences/Antisocial Behavior subscale. No significant association was detected for the MAOA gene alone.

Our findings provide further support that COMT is a modifying gene that plays a role in determining interindividual variability in the proclivity for outward and self-directed aggressive behavior found in some schizophrenic patients. Considering the role of dopamine in schizophrenia and the finding that dopamine agonists provoke aggressive behavior, an increase in dopaminergic transmission caused by COMT 158Met is a possible mechanism through which this allele can act. In the context of preexisting prefrontal abnormalities in schizophrenia caused by genetic, developmental and/or environmental factors, 158Met homozygosity may lead to an increase in prefrontal dopamine with an increased propensity for impulsive, violent behavior in schizophrenia.

Bibliography

1. Rael, Strous. Aggressive behavior in schizophrenia is associated with the low enzyme activity COMT polymorphism: A replication study. Am J Med Genet. 2003;120B:29-34). (July 2003) American Journal of Medical Genetics (Strous RD, Nolan KA, Lapidus R, Diaz L, Saito T, Lachman HM).

Hitler’s Prisons: Prisons and Penal Policies in Germany, 1900–1945

Nikolaus Wachsmann, History, University of Cambridge

Research Grant, 1999, 2002

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My research project explored the different manifestations and causes of aggression and violence in the carceral institutions of a totalitarian state, focusing on Nazi prisons. Widely overlooked by historians, these institutions played an indispensable part in the terror of the Third Reich, incarcerating many hundreds of thousands of men and women: common criminals, political opponents, “racial aliens,” and other social outsiders.

The HFG grant enabled me to examine discipline and punishment in Nazi prisons during the Second World War. This period saw a dramatic escalation of violence inside prisons. Local penal institutions were dominated by brutal forced labor, starvation rations, harsh disciplinary punishment, and physical violence, killing an estimated twenty thousand inmates. At the same time, the German prison authorities implemented large-scale extermination programs directed in particular at Jews, select Poles and political prisoners, and social outsiders labelled as asocial, disabled, or mentally ill. At the center stood the ”annihilation through labor” of some fourteen thousand prison inmates.

Much of my research has been concerned with explaining the involvement of legal officials in this violence. Unlike SS men controlling the concentration camps, many jurists were not fanatical Nazis and had already held state office before Hitler came to power. So why did these men (and a few women) become involved in violence and killings? Why did the existence of a long established, traditional legal system in Germany, and a professional body of trained jurists, provide no secure barrier against a descent into legal terror?

The thinking of officials was also shaped by their long-standing belief that certain offenders were "incorrigible." Crucially, this belief was a product not of Nazi ideology, but of modern criminology which insisted that objective scientific methods could determine the future social behavior of offenders.

It soon became clear that monocausal theories would not go far in answering these questions. Instead, the causes of violence turned out to be complex. Looking at the senior legal officials, racial prejudice against Jews and Poles—radicalized by Nazi policy during the war—played an important part. The thinking of officials was also shaped by their long-standing belief that certain offenders were “incorrigible.” Crucially, this belief was a product not of Nazi ideology, but of modern criminology which insisted that objective scientific methods could determine the future social behavior of offenders. But such doctrinaire views—no longer restrained in the Third Reich—were not all decisive. Senior legal officials were also driven by the opportunistic desire to satisfy Hitler, who held jurists in particularly low esteem.

Turning to local prison officials, their actions were influenced by the ideological factors already mentioned, given added weight in directives from above. Racial abuse was common, as was the maltreatment of supposedly “incorrigible” offenders. But more “practical” concerns were vital, too. To start with, economic considerations were crucial. Production for the war increasingly became the yardstick by which a governor’s performance was measured. As a result, local officials were determined to work the inmates harder than ever before, and to get rid—in one way or another—of those who obstructed the work process because of illness or old age. Local officials were also brutalized by the massive increase in the number of judicial death sentences, carried out inside prisons, and by the growing pressures of their jobs due to overcrowding and understaffing. More and more officials took out their frustrations on the prisoners.

The main focus of my research was on state violence. But I also uncovered examples of interprisoner conflict, fueled by the social and racial prejudices of individual inmates. Often, this resulted in collaboration with the prison authorities, for example by denouncing fellow prisoners. However, I found relatively little evidence for physical violence among the prisoners, so common in the contemporary prison. Overall, it seems that such violence was mostly limited to prison camps, where the authorities delegated important supervisory functions to inmates (just as they did in concentration camps). In regular prisons, by contrast, prisoners did not gain comparable power. It would seem as if the traditional military discipline still widely practiced here, centered around the strict supervision of inmates by warders, may have limited prisoner-on-prisoner violence. But more research is necessary here, to allow for firmer conclusions to be drawn. 

My research is published by Yale University Press as Hitler’s Prisons (New Haven, 2004). The findings presented in this book have already played an important part in the decision by the German government foundation “Memory, Responsibility and Future,” made in summer of 2003, to pay reparations to individual former inmates in Nazi prisons who had suffered under the poor conditions and forced labor.

Economies of Violence: Petroleum, Politics and Community in the Niger Delta, Nigeria

Michael Watts, International Studies, University of California, Berkeley

Research Grant, 2002

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Petroleum in Nigeria has produced a combustible politics marked by violence. Rather than see oil-dependency as a source of predation or as a source of state military power, this research shows how oil capitalism produces particular sorts of enclave economies and particular sorts of governable spaces characterized by violence and instability. While the biophysical qualities of oil matter in this analysis, so do the powers of transnational oil companies, the character of “the oil complex,” and the ways in which oil as a territorially based and nationalized commodity can become the basis for making claims. Petrocapitalism operates through a particular sort of “oil” (a configuration of oil firms, the state, and oil-producing communities). The complex is strongly territorial, operating through local oil concessions. The presence and activities of the oil companies as part of the oil complex constitute a challenge to forms of community authority, interethnic relations, and local state institutions principally through the property and land disputes that are engendered, and through forms of popular mobilization and agitation to gain access to company rents and compensation revenues, and the oil revenues of the Nigerian state, largely through the creation of regional and/or local state institutions. The oil complex generates differing sorts of “governable spaces” in which contrasting identities and forms of rule come into play. In some cases youth and intergenerational forces are key; in some cases gender, in others the clan or the kingdom or the ethnic minority (or indigenous peoples), in some cases local chiefly or governmental authorities, and the forces of the local state. A striking aspect of contemporary development in Nigeria is the simultaneous production of differing forms of rule and governable space—different politics of scale—all products of similar forces and yet which work against, and often stand in direct contradiction to one another.

This research shows how oil capitalism produces particular sorts of enclave economies and particular sorts of governable spaces characterized by violence and instability.

This project focuses on three spaces: on chieftainship, the indigene or ethnic minority, and the nation. These social idioms are inseparable from oil, but their forms of identification and the robustness of their spaces are often incompatible. Standing at the center of each governable space is a contradiction: at the level of the oil-producing chieftainship, the overthrowing of gerontocratic authority and its substitution by a sort of violent mafia constituted by militant youth. At the level of the ethnic community is the tension between civic nationalism and a sort of exclusivist militant particularism (a sort of aggressive ethnonationalism). And at the level of the nation, one sees the contradiction between oil-based state centralization and state fragmentation, as oil becomes a sort of generalized equivalent put to the service of massive corruption. It is in this sense that the research invokes the idea of “economies of violence” to characterize rule (stable and unstable) in contemporary Nigeria. This project traces the varieties of violence engendered by oil, to elaborate the ways in which resources, territoriality and identity can constitute forms of rule, and understand the genesis of economies of violence that emerge from differing sorts of governable (or ungovernable) spaces.

Provisional Irish Republicans: Ten Years On

Robert W. White, Sociology, Indiana University

Research Grant, 1996, 1997

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The primary finding from my research is that, among Irish Republicans, there is a group of people who, no matter what, will not stop their involvement in political violence until they achieve the political goal they seek. That is, until, in their minds, they have achieved a declaration of intent from the British government to withdraw from Northern Ireland.

Most of the people who live in Ireland view themselves as “Irish” people. Traditionally, they tend to be Catholic. A significant number of people who live in Ireland, however, view themselves as British in origin. These are the descendants of settlers who “planted” Ireland in the seventeenth century, and they tend to be Protestant in their religion. The conflict in Ireland is not about religion, but rather ethnic identity. From the beginning of the English conquest of Ireland, in the twelfth century, there has been conflict between “natives” and “invaders.” When Ireland was partitioned in 1920, the partition was implemented such that a majority of those living in the Irish Free State (now the Republic) were Catholic and a majority of those living in Northern Ireland were Protestant. This compounded the perspective that the conflict is over religion. Successive British governments have supported this interpretation, which also supports their interpretation that the British Army in Northern Ireland is a neutral peacekeeping force.

The primary finding from my research is that, among Irish Republicans, there is a group of people who, no matter what, will not stop their involvement in political violence until they achieve the political goal they seek.

From the 1920s, when the Irish Republican Army forced the British to withdraw from that area of Ireland where most people viewed themselves as Irish, there has been either open or soon-to-be open conflict between those who seek a full British withdrawal from Ireland and those who do not. This includes IRA campaigns from 1939 to 1945, 1956 to 1962, the Provisional IRA campaign from 1969 to 1994 and 1996 to 1997, and the current paramilitary campaign by the Continuity IRA (there have also been splinter groups that engaged in Irish Republican political violence, e.g., the Irish National Liberation Army). The primary target of these campaigns has been the security forces in Northern Ireland, including the British Army and local police forces. A large number of civilians have also been killed, by Republican paramilitaries, Protestant paramilitaries, and the security forces.

A key feature of all these Irish Republican organizations is that among their founders, especially with respect to the Provisional IRA and the Continuity IRA (which were founded by the same people), are individuals who are the children of a previous generation of IRA fighters. How these people were raised, who these people are, greatly influences their perspective. Many of them have suffered significant personal costs, either through their parents, themselves, or their children, in pursuit of the “Irish Republic.” To ask them to quit, to accept that the British will always remain in Ireland, is to ask them to not be who they are, their raison d’être. Further, the socialization that produced these people also provided them with an interpretation of Irish history that offers a wealth of evidence that their perspective—that the British will not leave Ireland unless they are forced to so do—is correct. The people described are politically sophisticated; they are not alienated, lost souls or people driven by spite or hatred. This makes them that much more difficult to deal with, from the perspective of a government.

Further, it would appear that people who, no matter what, will not give up the gun until their objective is achieved are present in many politically violent social movements, including the PLO, the ANC, and ETA. Such people keep the “dream” alive across generations.

Bibliography

1. Stryker, S., Owens, T. J., & White, R. W. (2000). Self, Identity, and Social Movements. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

The Carjacker’s Perspective: A Qualitative Study of Urban Violence

Richard Wright, Criminology, University of Missouri-St. Louis

Research Grant, 2000

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With the exception of homicide, perhaps no offense is more symbolic of contemporary urban violence than carjacking. Carjacking, the taking of a motor vehicle by force or threat of force, has attained almost mythical status in the annals of urban violence and has played a substantial role in fueling the fear of crime that keeps people off of their own streets. But for all of the media attention carjacking has received in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, it remains a poorly understood and underresearched crime. In an attempt to rectify this situation, we conducted a field-based study of the decision-making of active carjackers in real-life settings and circumstances, focusing on, among other things, the subjective foreground conditions that move such offenders from an unmotivated state to one in which they are determined to attack a specific vehicle and/or driver. Drawing from semistructured ethnographic interviews with twenty-eight active carjackers recruited from the streets of St. Louis, Missouri, we found that while the decision to commit any given carjacking stems most directly from a situated interaction between particular sorts of perceived opportunities and particular sorts of perceived needs and desires, this decision is activated, mediated, and shaped by ongoing participation in urban street culture.

We found that while the decision to commit any given carjacking stems most directly from a situated interaction between particular sorts of perceived opportunities and particular sorts of perceived needs and desires, this decision is activated, mediated, and shaped by ongoing participation in urban street culture.

Bibliography

1. Jacobs, B., Topalli, V. and Wright, R. (in press) "Carjacking, Streetlife, and Offender Motivation," British Journal of Criminology, Vol. 43, No. 4.

2. Topalli, V. and Wright, R. (in press) Dubs and Dees, Beats and Rims. In Dabney, D., Criminal Behavior: A Text Reader, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa

Adam Ashforth, Political Science, Baruch College, City University of New York

Research Grant, 1998, 1999

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The HFG research and subsequent book, Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa, is an attempt to think about the implications of pervasive spiritual insecurity for the postapartheid democratic state in South Africa. It seeks to chart the contours of danger and uncertainty arising from people’s relations with invisible forces acting in the world, to examine how awareness of these dangers and uncertainty about how to manage them shapes everyday social life. It also raises questions about the ways in which spiritual insecurity complicates the project of democratic governance. The raw material upon which it is based is mostly drawn from my experience of life in Soweto during the 1990s, the decade when apartheid died and democracy was born in South Africa. Shadowing every page is the imperative of thinking about the cultural consequences of the AIDS pandemic in Africa.

For most South Africans, certainly the vast majority of those who call themselves “Africans,” everyday life is shadowed by an apprehension of dangers commonly summarized under the general rubric of “witchcraft,” a term describing the putative capacities of persons to cause harm to others or accumulate illicit wealth and power for themselves by means of mysterious invisible forces. In African communities, illness, death, accidents, poverty, and all the other manifestations of unhappiness in human life cause people to wonder whether witchcraft is at work. When these misfortunes are surmised to be the result of witchcraft, they are perceived as being injuries, harms deliberately inflicted by others. People living in a world of witches, such as most Black South Africans, devote an enormous amount of money, time, and energy to protecting themselves from witchcraft and trying to undo the damage caused by witches. Witchcraft is a fact of life. It impinges upon every aspect of life creating a condition I describe as one of spiritual insecurity.

Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa is organized into three sections. The first deals with the sociology of insecurity in Soweto and examines how issues of spiritual insecurity relate to other dimensions of insecurity such as those arising from poverty, violence, and disease. It charts some of the ways changes in social life in Soweto over the past decades such as increasing socioeconomic inequality, declining community solidarity, and the AIDS epidemic have played into, and played out as, matters of spiritual insecurity. It describes some aspects of life in a world with witches, particularly the presumption of malice in everyday community life, which constitutes what I describe as a negative corollary of the doctrine of ubuntu, or African humanism.

I examine some aspects of the transformations of spiritual power affording protection to individuals, families, and communities that have taken place in this part of the world as a result of Christian evangelization and changes in family life and political structures that have tended to undermine ideologies of "ancestorship."

Part One ends with a meditation upon the implications of believing in witchcraft at the start of the twenty-first century and argues that contemporary Sowetans generally approach issues of witchcraft with a sense that it is better not to believe in witches. Part One also argues that issues of spiritual insecurity in a place like Soweto should be approached from the perspective of “not-knowing,” that is, a recognition of the confusion that surrounds these matters in everyday life rather than a presumption of coherent “systems of belief” shared by communities of believers.

Part Two begins a discussion of the ways in which people in contemporary Soweto interpret and attempt to manage the invisible forces they experience as acting upon their lives. The central point this section considers is the nature of the various agencies that people interact with, agencies inherent in substances, objects, images, persons, and spirits or other invisible entities. When people worry about witchcraft in Soweto, they almost always worry about other persons interacting with substances known generically as muthi, and they seek protection from these dangers by reference to invisible beings such as ancestors, spirits, and deities (predominantly the triune Christian God) as well as other material substances also known as muthi.

The central aim of Part Two is to develop an understanding of how statements about witchcraft and other forms of harm involving invisible forces can be taken as plausible accounts of the world. This involves consideration of the ways people interpret the agency of substances and what I am calling the dialectics of health and harm implicit in the category muthi. Substances with agency, however, are not the only sources of harmful invisible forces. In Chapter Seven I describe the dangers inherent in polluting substances generically known as dirt, particularly those associated with death. Following these discussions of the dangers inherent in substances, I examine some aspects of the transformations of spiritual power affording protection to individuals, families, and communities that have taken place in this part of the world as a result of Christian evangelization and changes in family life and political structures that have tended to undermine ideologies of “ancestorship.” Part Two ends with a meditation upon some of the vulnerabilities and capacities of invisible aspects of the human person such as copying a fetus’s animating spirit to create a monster, “hijacking the mind” of a person in order to lead them to their own destruction, and gaining control of another’s innermost desires.

Part Three raises issues relating to spiritual insecurity as they manifest themselves in the domain of the state and present challenges for democratic governance. Principal amongst these is the problem of justice arising from the fact that witchcraft is a form of harm deliberately inflicted upon an innocent victim. I consider recent calls to reform the laws relating to witchcraft dating from the colonial era so as to recognize the reality of witchcraft, a reality treated as axiomatic by most Africans. Efforts to bring witchcraft cases into the formal legal system, however, run into irresolvable problems of evidence since the action of witchcraft is secret and known only to perpetrators and diviners. But divination involves forms of knowledge that are incompatible with the evidentiary principles underpinning the modern state.

Bibliography

1. Ashforth, Adam. Madumo, A Man Bewitched. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2000.

2. Ashforth, Adam. Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Striving in the Path of God: Discursive Traditions on Jihad and the Cult of Martyrdom

Asma Afsaruddin, Classics, Notre Dame University

Research Grant, 2001

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My research project is focused primarily on a specific genre in Arabic-Islamic literature known as fasda’il al-jihad (“excellences or merits of striving/struggling [in the path of God]”). The prophetic and other kinds of reports contained in this literature will be adduced as evidence in favor of the thesis that the understanding of jihad in the Islamic tradition as primarily “armed struggle/combat” is a late one, which developed out of an earlier matrix of multiple and competing meanings of the term. Furthermore, the cult of martyrdom it engendered developed in response to specific historical and political circumstances. Among these circumstances are the continuing border skirmishes with the Byzantines in the Umayyad period (661–750), the Crusades and the Mongol attacks from the 11th century on, all hostile encounters which prompted the rise of this hortatory literature to galvanize a perhaps-reluctant populace to stave off external threats to Islam.

The Qur'an, the earliest document in Islam, alludes to a multiplicity of meanings for the locution "al-jihad fi sabil Allah," (lit. "striving/struggling in the path of/for the sake of God").

The reasons for propounding the relatively late and historically conditioned development of the notion of jihad as primarily armed combat that creates martyrs for the faith are compelling. Most importantly, the Qur’an, the earliest document in Islam, alludes to a multiplicity of meanings for the locution “al-jihad fi sabil Allah,” (lit. “striving/struggling in the path of/for the sake of God”). Furthermore, the Qur’an has no term for a martyr nor a well-developed concept of martyrdom, which is a necessary corollary to the notion of jihad as religious military activity. The term shahid that is understood today to refer to a martyr occurs only in the hadith literature; in the Qur’an it refers exclusively to a legal or eye witness. Proceeding from this thesis, my study will go on to contextualize the evolution and invocation of this hortatory discourse; that is, to explore why and when this literature was produced, what were the external and internal influences shaping the contours of this discourse, and what bearing does that have on tracing the complex semantic and ideological history of the term and functions of jihad. Considerable attention will be paid to sources such as the related “excellences of patience” (fada’il al-sabr) literature, which documents “alternate” views of jihad as quietism that emphasizes cultivation of the trait of patient forbearance in the face of trials. This approach promises to considerably nuance and transform our current state of knowledge concerning early and competitive perspectives on jihad.