Violence and translation

Anthropological Quarterly

Volumn 75, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 105-112

  Das, Veena ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0035649177     PISSN: 00035491     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (10)

1. I am very grateful to Talal Asad and Gautam Ghosh for their critical reading of earlier drafts of this essay.
2. See especially, Veena Das, "Wittgenstein and Anthropology," Annual Review of Anthropology, 1998, 27: 171 -95.
3. The distinction between an "inside" in which values of democracy and freedom were propagated and an "outside" which was not ready for such values and hence had to be subjugated by violence in order to be reformed has marked the rhetoric and practice of colonialism and its deep connections with Western democracies.
4. There is an important tension in the pronouncements that assume that teleology has been completed in the body of the American nation and the idea of the "promise" of America. I do not have the space to develop the argument here but I believe this tension slips into the idea of the promissory notes of America for its new immigrants and the completed teleology for the assimilated.
5. As an aside I note that these modes of engaging warfare were not only tolerated but also even admired as techniques to be used in the new global economies in which training was not the training to obey rules but to push the body to its limit and to learn to deploy guerrilla techniques in business.
6. Friedrich Nietzsche. 1969. On the Genealogy of Morals. New York: Vintage, P.127
7. Michel Foucault, 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, p. 9.
8. Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, New York: The Free Press, 1951, pp. 219-20
9. Ibid, p.240.
10. I wish to simply note that to be vulnerable is not to be a victim - hence my appeal is not gesturing towards a fatalistic submission in the face of violence and death but towards a leashing in of reason gone demonic.