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Original poster

Can we talk about violence and culture?

87 replies

JeanneDeMontbaston · 20/03/2015 12:18

I've just been reading a conversation where someone used the term 'symbolic violence', and it's got me thinking about the cultural roles violence plays, and why it plays those roles. This isn't a terribly groundbreaking post, but I wondered what you reckoned to the subject.

I keep noticing that, when we talk about certain kinds of violence on here, they're valorized, almost celebrated, when they have to do with Things Men Did Far Back In History: so, people will say that men evolved to be testosterone-fuelled fighters because historically we 'needed' war. And, in our culture, we respond to certain kinds of violence (world war I, for example) as needing a huge amount of ceremony and ritual, which is intended to celebrate the sacrifices of men in a violent context. And in my teaching, I have to teach my students a paper on Greek tragedy, where they read all about how literature turns violence into an art form, and this is somehow culturally hugely important.

All of these are slightly different things - evopsych about war, and ceremonies about it, and literary depictions of violence - but they all seem to me to be seen as 'serious' ways of relating to violence, serious attempts to historicize it or memorialize it. Right?

There is nothing I can think of that treats violence against women like this, at all. It's almost entirely invisible. There are things like Karen Ingala Smith's 'Counting Dead Women' project, but nothing with the huge scale and cultural impact.

Am I wrong about this? I think we are being encouraged to use memory and emotion differently (less!) when we relate to violence and women, aren't we?

OP posts:
Original poster
JeanneDeMontbaston · 20/03/2015 13:49

Sorry, I didn't really make that clear - I'm not that interested in evo psych or hormones in themselves.

I'm trying to talk about the way we value some cultural narratives, and not others.

Does that make sense?

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cadno · 20/03/2015 13:42

Its been known for centuries that castrating male mammals such as bullocks, colts, lambs, kittens, puppies etc - makes them far easier to manage in terms of their aggression. I'm presuming (that what i recall from school) that testosterone is primarily produced in the testes - this gives persuasive evidence that between testosterone and aggression there is a major link.

I've never studied endocrinology but at the end of the day, all a hormone is, is a chemical messenger that's got a bit of a commute on its hand until it can get to its place of work - and that might mean having a positive or negative on other hormones - such as adrenaline - which in turn has other effects on other tissue in the body. I don't know how these chemical messengers react with different parts of the brain and other tissue - either directly or indirectly - but there is clearly some interaction. If testosterone is such an old chemical in our evolutionary tree, I won't mind betting it has some effect at least on old parts of our brain - maybe not (directly) the parts where our rational 'minds' are sited - but maybe there too.

Original poster
JeanneDeMontbaston · 20/03/2015 12:46

It would be perfectly possible for people to have theorized that oestrogen/progesterone fuel acts of holy rage, necessarily to the survival of the species on account that women must become dynamos of fury to protect their offspring.

We just don't, because we write of female hormones as having other, rather less noble and species-protecting effects.

You can guess that the testosterone/war theory is liable to be, if not bullshit, then delightfully fictionalized, because it grafts so neatly onto prior theories about manliness and war, which far predate our ability to name hormones.

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YonicScrewdriver · 20/03/2015 12:43

I think the evolution in question was how much testosterone fuelled war, not that testosterone didn't predate war.

HTH.

Original poster
JeanneDeMontbaston · 20/03/2015 12:41

cad, sorry, I was being faintly sarcastic about evopsych.

My general position is that it's dubious, because wherever it touches up with history, it invariably turns out to be nonsense.

It's the fact there's a narrative there at all that interests me, not whether that narrative is correct (cos I think it isn't). The fact we have these theories about why men go to war, suggests that it's seen as an important kind of violence to theorize about.

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cadno · 20/03/2015 12:37

I know that this doesn't pertain to the discussion that your hoping to expand on, but when you say that 'men evolved to be testosterone-fuelled', bear in mind that the genes for testosterone go back millions of years before even mammals started to evolve from (presumably) reptiles. As I understand it from wiki, a variety of testosterone is found in fish - so unless this chemical has co-evolved twice (or more), our ancestors' journey through time with testosterone may have started with some common ancestor with those fish. Re: effects of testosterone - Was it Plato that said it was like being chained to a mad-man ?

Original poster
JeanneDeMontbaston · 20/03/2015 12:37

Yes, that's true.

But, how come women resisting isn't seen as heroic? In accounts I read, women are often the last lines of defence, but people generally don't seem to talk about that so much. There's a bit of it with the Blitz, but I can't think of earlier examples where women are represented as being capable of heroic resistance?

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YonicScrewdriver · 20/03/2015 12:32

Well, if you might need to sign up/conscript without resistance, making soldiers into heroes, calling on patriotism etc however passive their true role was a way to do it

Original poster
JeanneDeMontbaston · 20/03/2015 12:28

Predictably, buffy, not really. I have read a fair amount of the critiques but I've never sat down and successfully got through anything. Where should I start?

yonic - yes! Which is so infuriating. And even when we try to disagree with the idea that women weren't 'part' of war, we don't seem to have much language for memorializing their suffering in any organized way.

I would imagine being a male soldier in WW1, when you knew you'd be shot if you deserted and you knew you were fighting over tiny areas of ground with very little sense of their significance, must have been incredibly disempowering and terrifying. And I do agree those men were heroic, but it's a kind of heroism that is 'passive' in the sense of being suffering inflicted on people with very little choice or agency.

Yet, we describe them and female victims of war quite differently.

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YonicScrewdriver · 20/03/2015 12:23

Right, and the fact that women historically suffered violence during war (rape by the victors) is often ignored by the "they fought for freedom! the heroes!" meme.

BuffyEpistemiwhatsit · 20/03/2015 12:21

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