How not to study religion-related violence By attempting to precisely classify and label incidents of collective violence, researchers often become part of the diversionary tactics of the producers of violence to displace blame from themselves to others
Friday, November 24, 2006 by Vishal Arora | Tags: india, religious violence It is ironical that religion-related violence, which is endemic to certain parts of India, is studied in such a way that it actually helps in the production and reproduction of violence, perpetrated mainly on religious minorities by Hindu nationalist forces, rather than prevent it. By attempting to precisely classify and label incidents of collective violence, researchers often become part of the diversionary tactics of the producers of violence to displace blame from themselves to others, says Paul R. Brass, Professor (Emeritus) of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. In an essay titled, "On the Study of Riots, Pogroms, and Genocide", part of his new book, "Forms of Collective Violence: Riots, Pogroms, and Genocide in Modern India" (published by Three Essays Collective, September 2006, Rs.250 in India, $10 elsewhere), Brass exposes a lacuna in the study of collective violence saying that social scientists study the phenomena of violence "to display their theoretical skills" rather than expose the dynamic processes that produce those phenomena. "Our work then becomes entangled - even through the very theories we articulate - in the diversionary tactics that are essential to the production and reproduction of violence," says the acclaimed political scientist, whose research in India spans more than 45 years. To make his point, Brass explains that the violence that is often misnamed as a riot and is mainly perpetrated on members of the Muslim and Christian minorities in India is produced in three phases: "preparation or rehearsal", "activation or enactment" and "explanation or interpretation". In the sites where rioting is endemic, producers of violence continuously work to create an atmosphere of religious animosity as part of their preparation and rehearsal process, he says. About the activation or enactment of a large-scale riot, he says it takes place "under particular circumstances, often in a context of intense political mobilization or electoral competition in which riots are precipitated as a device to consolidate the support of ethnic, religious, or other culturally marked groups, by emphasizing the need for solidarity in face of the rival communal group." It is criminals and the poorest elements in society who are recruited and rewarded for enacting the violence, he adds. The third phase - of explanation and interpretation - follows the violence "in a broader struggle to control the explanation or interpretation of the causes of the violence". In the third phase, says Brass, even journalists, politicians, social scientists, and public opinion generally also become involved. He says the third phase is marked by a "process of blame displacement, in which social scientists themselves become implicated, a process that fails to isolate effectively those most responsible for the production of violence, and instead diffuses blame widely, blurring responsibility, and thereby contributing to the perpetuation of violent productions in future, as well as the order that sustains them." According to Brass, the principal beneficiaries of this process of blame displacement are the government and its political leaders, "under whose watch such violence occurs". He says politicians and the vernacular media, during the violence, and in its aftermath, draw attention away from the perpetrators of the violence by attributing it to the actions of an inflamed mass public. Ignorant of the diversionary tactics, researchers think they must know what they are studying or label an incident of violence before they can make the necessary generalizations. But, "the producers of violence are themselves engaged in the same process and they continually outpace and outwit us, producing new and varied forms of collective violence that lead us into the game itself rather than providing us a site for a distant gaze," he observes. The producers of pogroms "insist that the violence that has just occurred is nothing more than a riot". They label genocidal acts "as merely spontaneous revenge and retaliation by justly and excusably outraged members of a group, acting spontaneously against an 'other' group whose members have misbehaved." He says his research has shown that what are labeled Hindu-Muslim riots have, more often than not, been turned into pogroms and massacres of Muslims, in which few Hindus are killed. "In fact, in sites of endemic rioting, there exists what I have called 'institutionalized riot systems', in which the organizations of militant Hindu nationalism are deeply implicated." In the following essays, he uses case studies of incidents of violence during the partition of India-Pakistan in 1946-47 and the riots in Meerut city in Uttar Pradesh state in 1961 and 1982 to validate his theory. Brass concludes that the main job of researchers should not be to classify and label precisely such violence, as "no hard and fast distinction can be made between these supposedly distinct forms of violence, since pogroms masquerade as riots and many, if not most, large-scale riots display features supposedly special to pogroms". There are other forms of genocide than the likes of the Holocaust and which are "particularly of the mutual and retributive type (which seem like riots between two communities), a form of violence that develops in stages that constitute clear danger signals". The researchers, he suggests, should rather "observe" the assignment of blame as part of the process of production of violence and seek "to expose to view the dynamics of violence and the ways in which each new large event of collective violence is, in fact, different from all others that have preceded it because of the very fact that its producers know very well what it is that they do, what has happened before, how to displace blame from themselves to others." http://www.speroforum.com/site/article.asp?idCategory=35&idsub=159&id=6720&t=How+not+to+study+religion%2Drelated+violence _________________________________________________________________ All-in-one security and maintenance for your PC. 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