Understanding Coherence and Cohesion

Cultural Violence*

JOHAN GALTUNG

By 'cultural violence' we mean those aspects of culture, the symbolic sphere of our existence -exemplified by religion and ideology. language and art, empirical science and formal science (logic, mathematics) – that can be used to justify or legitimize direct or structural violence.' Stars, crosses and crescents; flags, anthems and military parades; the ubiquitous portrait of the Leader; inflammatory speeches and posters all these come to mind. However, let us postpone the examples until section 4 and start with analysis. The features mentioned above are 'aspects of culture', not entire cultures. A person encouraging a potential killer, shouting 'Killing is self-realization!', may prove that the English language is capable of expressing such thoughts, but not that the English language as such is violent. Entire cultures can hardly be classified as violent; this is one reason for preferring the expression 'Aspect A of culture C is an example of cultural violence' to cultural stereotypes like 'culture C is violent'.

On the other hand, cultures could be imagined and even encountered with not only one but a set of aspects so violent, extensive and diverse, spanning all cultural domains, that the step from talking about cases of cultural violence to violent cultures may be warranted. For that, a systematic research process is needed. This article is part of that process. One place to start would be to clarity 'cultural violence' by searching for its negation. If the opposite of violence is peace, the subject matter of peace research peace studies, then the opposite of cultural violence would be 'cultural peace' meaning aspects of a culture that serve to justify and legitimize direct peace and structural peace. If many and diverse aspects of that kind are found in a culture, we can refer to it as a 'peace culture'.

A major task of peace research. and the peace movement in general, is that never ending search for a peace culture - problematic, because of the temptation to institutionalize that culture making it obligatory with the hope of internalizing it everywhere; And that would already be direct violence,- imposing a culture. Cultural violence makes direct and structural violence look even feel right - or at least not wrong. Just as political science is about two problems - the use of power and the legitimation of the use of power - violence studies are about two problems: the use of violence and the legitimation of that use. The psychological mechanism would be internalization the study of cultural violence highlights the way in which the act of direct violence and the fact of structural violence are legitimized and thus rendered acceptable in society. One way cultural violence works is by changing the moral color of an act from red wrong to green right or at least to yellow acceptable; an example being murder on behalf of the country as right, on behalf of oneself wrong'. Another way is by making reality opaque, so that we do not see the violent act or fact, or at least not as violent. Obviously this is more easily done with some forms of violence than with others; an example being abortus provocufirs.

1.- Rellenar huecos (1): JXUwMDFh   I see violence as avoidable insults to basic human needs, and more generally to life, lowering the real level of needs satisfaction below what is potentially possible. Threats of violence are also violence. Combining the distinction between direct and structural violence with four classes of basic needs we get the typology of Table I . The four classes of basic needs - an outcome of extensive dialogs in many parts of the world (Galtung, 1980a)-are: survival needs (negation: death. mortality); well-being needs (negation: misery, morbidity); identity, meaning needs (negation: alienation); and freedom needs (negation: repression).The result is eight types of violence with some subtypes, easily identified for direct violence but more complex for structural violence (see 'Table I).

To discuss the categories of structural violence we need an image of a violent structure, and a vocabulary, a discourse, in order to identify the aspects and see how they relate to the needs categories. The archetypal violent structure, in my view, has exploitation as a center-piece. This simply means that some, the top dogs, get much more (here measured in needs currency) out of the interaction in the structure than others, the underdogs (Galtung, 1978, parts 1-111). There is 'unequal exchange', a euphemism. The underdogs may in fact be so disadvantaged that they die (starve, waste away from diseases) from it: exploitation

A. Or they may be left in a permanent unwanted state of misery, usually including malnutrition and illness: exploitation B. The way people die differs: in the Third World, from diarrhea and immunity deficiencies; in the 'developed' countries, avoidably and prematurely, from cardio-vascular diseases.

2.- Rellenar huecos (2): JXUwMDFi

We turn now to the listing of six cultural domains mentioned in the introduction -religion and ideology, language and art, empirical and formal science - giving one or two examples of cultural violence from each domain. The logic of the scheme is simple: identify the cultural element and show how it can, empirically or potentially. be used to legitimize direct or structural violence.

Certain languages - those with a Latin base such as Italian, Spanish, French (and modern English), but not those with a Germanic base such as German and Norwegian – make women invisible by using the same word for the male gender as for the entire human species. The important movement for nonsexist writing (Miller Smith, 1988) is a good example of deliberate cultural transformation away from cultural violence. The task must have looked impossible hen some courageous women got started, and yet it is already bearing fruit. Then there are more subtle aspects of language where the violence is less-clear, more implicit. A comparison of basic features of Indo-European languages with Chinese and Japanese (Galtung Nishimura, 1983) brings out certain space and time rigidities imposed by the Indo-European languages; a corresponding rigidity in the logical structure with strong emphasis on the possibility of arriving at valid inferences (hence the Western pride in being so 'logical'); a tendency to distinguish linguistically between essence and apparition, leaving room for the immortality of the essence and by implication for the legitimacy of destroying what is only the apparition. However, this is deep culture, the deeper layers of that bottom stratum in the violence triangle. The relations to direct and structural violence become much more tenuous.

3.- Rellenar huecos (3): JXUwMDE5 One example of cultural violence would be neoclassical economic doctrine, understanding itself as the science of economic activity. Strongly influenced by the Adam Smith tradition, neoclassical economics now studies empirically the system prescribed by its own doctrines, and finds its own self-fulfilling prophecies often confirmed in empirical reality. One part of neoclassical dogma or 'conventional wisdom' is trade theory based on 'comparative advantages', originally postulated by David Ricardo developed further by Heckscher and Ohlin and by Jan Tinbergen. This is the doctrine that prescribes that each country should enter the world market with those products for which that country has a comparative advantage in terms of production factors. In practice this means that countries well endowed with raw materials and unskilled labor are to extract raw materials, while those well endowed with capital and technology skilled labor and scientists, are to process them. And thus it was that Portugal gave up its textile industry and became a mediocre wine producer, whereas England got the stimulus, the challenge needed to develop her industrial capacity still further. The consequences of this doctrine in the form of today's vertical division of labor in the world are visible for most people to see. Structural violence everywhere (Galtung, 1971, 1988b): among countries and within countries. Thus, the doctrine of comparative advantages serves as a justification for a rough division of the world in terms of the degree of processing which countries impart to their export products. Since this is roughly proportionate to the amount of challenge they receive in the production process, the principle of comparative advantages sentences countries to stay where the production-factor profile has landed them, for geographical and historical reasons. Of course, there is no law, legal or empirical, to the effect that countries cannot do something to improve their production profile -a basic point made by the Japanese economist Kaname Akamatsu. But to do so is not easy when there are immediate gains to be made by not changing the status quo, for those who own the raw materials/commodities. And thus it is that the 'law' of comparative advantages legitimizes a structurally intolerable status quo. In short, this 'law' is a piece of cultural violence buried in the very core of economics.

4.- Rellenar huecos (4): JXUwMDFj

But surely this cannot be said of mathematics? This is not so obvious. If mathematics is viewed as a formal game with one basic rule, that a theorem T and its negation -T cannot both be valid, then there may be violent consequences. Even when mathematical logic explores polyvalent logic, the tool used is bivalent logic with its strict line between valid and invalid; tertium non datur. And it is easily seen that it has to be that way, inference being the mortar of the mathematical edifice, with modus ponens and modus tollens being the key procedures. No inference can be made with ambiguous truth values for the antecedents or the inference (Galtung, 1988c, ch. 4, esp. section 4.4).

This means that mathematics disciplines us into a particular mode of thought highly compatible with black-white thinking and polarization in personal, social and world spaces.

The either-or character of mathematical thought makes it an exciting game: but as a model for a highly dialectic human, social and world reality it is far from adequate. And adequatio is the basic requirement for culture, symbolic space, if it is to guide us in visioning a less violent potential reality.

Violence can start at any corner in the direct structural cultural violence triangle and is easily transmitted to the other corners. With the violent structure institutionalized and the violent culture internalized, direct violence also tends to become institutionalized, repetitive, and ritualistic like a vendetta. This triangular syndrome of violence should then be contrasted in the mind with a triangular syndrome of peace in which cultural peace engenders structural peace, with symbiotic, equitable relations among diverse partners, and direct peace with acts of cooperation, friendliness and love. It could be a virtuous rather than vicious triangle, also self-reinforcing. This virtuous triangle would be obtained by working on all three corners at the same time, not assuming that basic change in one will automatically lead to changes in the other two. But does this inclusion of culture not broaden the agenda for peace studies considerably? Of course it does. Why should peace studies be narrower than, for instance, health studies (medical science)? Is peace easier than health, less complex? And how about biology, the study of life; physics, the study of matter; chemistry, the study of the composition of matter; mathematics, the study of abstract form -all of these are fairly broad. Why should peace studies be more modest? Why draw borderlines at all in a field so terribly important in its consequences, and also so attractive to the inquisitive mind? If culture is relevant to violence and peace, and surely it is, then only the dogmatic mind will exclude it from explorations as penetrating and tenacious as the countless studies devoted to the many aspects of direct and structural violence. The only thing that is new is that the field opens for new areas of competence, such as the humanities, history of ideas, philosophy, and theology. In other words, an invitation to new disciplines to join the quest for peace, and to established researchers in the field to retool - a little. In so doing, maybe peace research could even make some contribution to founding a major scientific enterprise still conspicuously absent from the pantheon of academic pursuits, the science of human culture, 'culturology'. Today the field is divided between 'humanities' for 'higher' civilizations and cultural anthropology for 'lower' ones; with philosophy, history of ideas and theology filling in some pieces. Concepts like 'cultural violence' span all of that, just as 'structural violence' spans the whole spectrum of social sciences. Peace research has too much to learn, so much to take, to receive. Perhaps we shall also in due time have some contributions to make: in the spirit of diversity, symbiosis and equity.

Taken and adapted from: http://www2.kobe-u.ac.jp/~alexroni/IPD%202014%20readings/IPD%202014_2/Cultural%20Violence%20%28Galtung%29.pdf   for academic purposes.