I’ve been at this conference on atrocious violence (“Why neighbors kill”) at the University of Western Ontario. I came mainly because the subject –which is fairly heavily focused on genocide and crimes against humanity–is very compelling to me. And also, because two of the other invited guests, the clinical psycvhologist Erwin Staub from UMass, Amherst, and the Lebanese sociologist Samir Khalaf are both definitely worth listening to.
And they certainly did not disappoint. (I hope I can write more about what they said, later.)
I was invited to the conference by Richard Vernon of UWO’s Center on Nationalism and Ethnic Relations. But I hadn’t realized that it was being co-sponsored by the Dept. of Psychology here– a fact that led to half or more of the presentations being given by various social psychologists, all of them I think from North America or the U.K.
Fair enough. I learned a lot about the way these social psychologists view and explain the world. They have some interesting insights into the motivations and behaviors of the people they study– a large proportion of whom, it turns out, are their own students. They do also conduct some ‘field’ studies. But these are overwhelmingly conducted within their own societies. I think the only ‘data’ presented in the mind-numbing succession of Power Point displays to which we were subjected that came from societies in which there have, actually, in recent history been widespread atrocities were one each from Northern Ireland and former-Yugoslavia.
(I’m leaving to one side, for now, the atrocities committed in the US detention facilities around the world, though they are not totally unrelated to the topic at hand.)
One of the phenomena that these psychologists plumbed in some depth is the tendency some humans have to “other” people from other social groups, and the way that “othering” can lead to stereotyping, prejudice, hate, etc…
I must confess, though, that I heard a certain–probably quite unintentional–amount of “othering” going on in some of the meta-discussions of the conference: namely, “othering” all those poor benighted people from war-torn and generally low-income countries who are unfortunate enough or misguided enough to get themselves into atrocity-enacting situations.
For starters, we had no scholars from any of those societies making presentations at the conference. We talked a lot about Rwanda–which was a main theme of the conference–and we talked about other locations of recent atrocities around the world. But we didn’t have any Rwandese people in the room with us, except during the Friday-night showing of a film about the genocide. Two people from the local Rwandese community were kind enough to give up their Friday evening to come and help lead a post-film discussion. But even that discussion threatened to degenerate into a totally inter-whitefolks “theoretical” slanging match until someone (myself actually) brought back an attempt to focus on the insights of our Rwandan friends there.
The most evident way that I saw the conference engaging in an “othering” of people in atrocity-burdened societies, however, was when the discussion in the main sessions moved to “what should be done in the face/aftermath of atrocities”. At that point, the whole tone of the discussions was, “What should we do?” … “Can’t we have the UN intervene more forcefully?” … “Should we seek to have war-crimes courts or truth commissions?” … “How should we decide between them?”
You get the drift. It felt like a sort of extremely anguished, extremely well-meant whitefolks’-burden-ism. That the onus of deciding world affairs is really on “us”, the whitefolks represented in the room; and that the only possible menu of policy responses to the enactment of atrocities anywhere in the world should be those responses that our societies have dreamed up (i.e., military intervention, war-crimes courts, or truth commissions).
Actually, at one point in the conference, a social psychologist called Peter Glick who studies different forms of prejudice and stereotyping talked about a phenomenon called “paternalistic prejudice” — the kind of attitude in which people (mainly men) take on themselves the onus of making decisions on behalf of others (often women), because they think they “know what’s best for them”.
Well?
Anyway, seeing all this unroll before my very eyes in the conference room made me think of some of the critiques that Alcinda Honwana, a really accomplished Mozambican anthropologist who has studied the aftermaths of atrocities in both her own country and Angola has articulated about what she calls “western ethnopsychology”. In the cases she cites, the kind of WEP that she is talking about most is clinical psychology, namely, the set of practices enacted by the hordes of Freudians, Jungians, Lacanians, etc etc who descend on (some) sites of recent atrocity in a well-intentioned effort to set about providing their own healing services to the survivors…
Well, you have to read what Alcinda writes about not only the near-total ineffectiveness of that, but also the real risk of such efforts being actively counter-productive in terms of the healing and reintegration of the worlds of the survivors.
Anyway, it strikes me that western ethno- “social” psychology is probably a branch of WEP, too.
None of the many people who talked about Rwanda at the conference even presented any data about or representing how Rwandan people themselve describe, explain, and reflect upon their experiences. The unexamined assumption there was just that the way that westerrn whitefolks describe, explain, and reflect upon what happened in Rwanda is just a, or let’s say THE, sufficient approach.
Aaargh, I’m sorry to come across like such an ungrateful whiner. There were a lots of really interesting, informative things that happened at the conference. But I must say, from my exposure here, that I far, far prefer the general approaches–and in particular, the sensitivity to the importance of cultural difference–used by people in the field of anthropology. I think, at the end of the day, that good anthropologists have a lot more insight to offer into the truly existential challenges faced by individuals and communities who are emerging from periods of mass atrocity.
Talking of which. Though I don’t have time to describe everything that Samir Khalaf or Erwin Staub said, I can’t hold back from sharing one great bon mot contributed to the conference by Samir. He said at one point that he feared that what some westerners ended up achieving when they address the question of mass atrocities is to “add ‘insight’ to injury”…
One short conversation I had with Richard Vernon was also quite illuminating: we were discussing the three meanings of the word “humanity”. Namely: the collectivity of all human persons; the ethical value of treating other people decently; and the state of being human. This was actually a useful expansion of the little insight I had in Boston two or three months ago, as recounted here.
I have to run, to get up and dressed, breakfasted, and checked out of this really nice conference center here. Today, I’ll be with F/friends in Hamilton, Ontario, then flying to New York. I have to say it is really great being in Canada! Clean, well-run public facilities; polite, well-trained public employees; newspapers not dominated by tales of war, violence, and domestic political mayhem; lovely long summer evenings. So this evening, it’ll be back to La Guardia and back into the belly of the imperial beast….
I don’t know if this was true at the conference, but Americans (and probably any other people) seem reluctant to face the problems with their own government. For example, U.S. explanations for the problems in the Middle East usually hinge on some defect with the Arabs. For example, terrorism might be explained as motivated by poverty while ignoring the greivances in Palestine and Iraq. I think the best thing Americans can do to end atrocities is reform their governement.
“Right now there is much soul-searching and self-flagellation on the 10th anniversary of the Rwanda massacre, when the West would not intervene to stop it. For 100 days, people were killed at the rate of about 8000 a day. That happens be about the number of children who die every day in Southern Africa from easily treatable diseases. That’s Rwanda-level killing every day, not for 100 days, but constantly. And it’s far easier to stop than sending troops to Rwanda. All that’s necessary is to spend pennies a day to bribe drug companies to produce the needed remedies, instead of doing what they are required to do by law: maximize profits by producing “life-style drugs” for the rich rather than life-saving drugs for the poor. That would suffice to stop ongoing Rwanda-style killing — again, not just for 100 days, and just among children in one region. Is anyone doing it? What does that tell us about the alleged humanitarian concerns over Rwanda? Or Darfur? Or… What it tells us, loud and clear, is that humanitarian concerns are wonderful as long as it’s someone else’s crimes and we do not have to do anything about them apart from striking heroic poses.”
Just something I read in a blog the other day that I think relates to the gist of your comments on the conference, as well as to the heroic poses we all strike railing against things we can do little or nothing about while ignoring, or benefitting from, much larger crimes that we conceivably could stop.
Along the same lines as your argument above, I think it’s interesting that we do not refert to the atrocities in Rwanda as “abuses.” Perhaps it’s that us/them syndrom of which you speak. They torture and kill. We, err a few bad apples, abuse.
And Helena, I am very curious why you use the term “abuse” instead of torture. I don’t mean to be critical of you personally, your credentials as a good, intelligent person with a command of the language are irreproachable. I ask because your reasoning might help me understand the dynamic of Orwellian language. Did you just unconsciously go with the dominant patter or did you make a conscious decision to use the word “abuse?” If so, why?
The above quote is from Chomsky. Look away.
I did not know the term ‘paternalistic prejudice’ but I recognize it soooooo much. It is nice to have a word to describe the irritating attitude I feel shimmering through in so many places.
marjolein
Your posting and the following comments do bring up the issue that attempting to “psych out” any arbitrary “other” population is a great way to avoid any larger political or economic structural analysis. (Think of “The Arab Mind”, or other such tracts.)
It also mirrors the conservative view of any number of social problems we have at home – poverty, drug abuse, crime, etc. In that view, it is the fault of those individuals who are involved. Even the liberals take part in this notion, in the sense that they offer drug counseling or other efforts aimed at addressing the symptoms of these social ills, while they have fuzzy notions of supposed “causes” that are often rooted in pop-psychological memes.
Yet, I seem to recall a study that showed that crime (for example) tends to increase — not with absolute poverty levels, but with increasing levels of income disparity.
So, shouldn’t the question of the conference have been, “What are the social, political, and economic superstructures that support mass atrocities?”
It is I think unfortunate that the approaches you describe are classed as “western” (also ironic since many involved would regard themselves as progressive.) I personally would tend to use the term “current academic.”
There are indeed a large number of other methods of observation and classification practiced by westerners. Good essays often exhibit this and they don’t weight themselves down with a scientistic (not scientific) “science.”
Our problem is that a great deal of avery absurd people have entrenched themselves in the academies (which has always been the case,) their perspective is self referential (students as primary research,) they have access to many social resources and key points of decsion making.
Ironically the argument that the university is offering a liberal arts perspective, a general view, humanism etc. feeds a national policy exactly contradictory to this. Thus the writings which define our civilization are not experienced directly but through the lens of some post post (is it post post post yet?) modern theory and indeed it has openly been stated by some who want to teach non European perspectives that they discourage the reading of primary black sources like Wright, Malcolm X etc. because these can result in confusion and incorrect understandings.
The problem is not “western” in the sense that includes all that western, but a specific form of western authoritarism.
I want to stress that the participants at the conference were most likely nearly all people I would agree with politically on many, many things; and really well intentioned, socially concerned, and nice people. I think it’s just the unexamined chutzpah of the philosophy that their understandings of phenomena in western societies can necessarily and without a further thought be universalized and therefore mapped onto societies very different from their own–or indeed, in many of these cases, any understanding that there ARE societies very different from their own– that puzzles me.
In other words, I don’t see these people as either themselves having “authoritarian” proclivities or consciously furthering any authoritarian agendas. I think the possible and frequent effects of what they do may be to strengthen existing power imbalances and authoritarian trends in global society, but that’s a different thing.
For me, the fundaemntal commitment is to let, nay encourage, other people to speak for themselves. That is true for people in Rwanda, Mozambique, or other conflict-riven societies. It is also true of western social scientists! Jump on in, fellas!