The Process of Civilization (and its Discontents): Violence, Narrative and History

The field of history has much to offer to a cross-disciplinary exchange on discourses of violence. This is particularly so as difficulties with reliably quantifying past violence have caused an increasing number of historians (mainly from the field of crime history) to turn their attention to its “narratives,” “cultures,” “mentalities” or “discourses” (see, e.g., Archer 1999; D’Cruze 2000). This tendency, itself part of a broader historical linguistic turn, has increased the theoretical exchanges between history and other disciplines. While historians have gained a much wider conceptual palette upon which they can draw, they, in return, offer long-term insights and perspectives that are too often lacking in contemporary analyses of violence. Nonetheless, such cross-disciplinary approaches to violence within the humanities have not been without their difficulties, partly due to the increasing popularity of biological or evolutionary explanations for physical aggression, some of which have made use of historical data (Daly and Wilson 1994; Pinker 2003: 306-336). Their emphasis on continuities across time and space implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) challenges the primary role of culture stressed in most historical and sociological analyses, a challenge most visible in comparative studies (Wood, 2003). Yet, even those who assert culture’s dominant role in shaping the experience of violence have trouble describing precisely how violence’s “social meaning” is formed. In an ethnographic study of civil war in Mozambique, Carolyn Nordstrom noted reservations regarding a key supposition of cultural constructionism: