Violence, History Of

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Bell C C, Hildreth C J, Jenkins E J, Levi D, Carter C 1988 Theneed for victimization screening in a poor, outpatient medicalpopulation. Journal of the National Medical Association 80:853–60

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Lorion R P 1999 Community prevention and wellness. In:Herson M, Ammerman T (eds.) Ad�anced Abnormal ChildPsychology. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, pp. 251–66

Lorion R P 2000 Theoretical and evaluation issues in thepromotion of wellness and the protection of ‘well enough.’ In:Cichetti D, Rappaport J, Sandler I, Weissberg R (eds.) ThePromotion of Wellness in Children and Adolescents. Sage,Thousand Oaks, CA, pp. 1–28

Lorion R P 2001 Exposure to urban violence: Shifting from anindividual to an ecological perspective. In: Schneiderman N,Tomes H, Gentry J, Speers M, Silva J (eds.) IntegratingBeha�ioral and Social Sciences With Public Health. AmericanPsychological Association, Washington, DC

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Martinez P, Richters J E 1993 The NIMH Community ViolenceProject: II. Children’s distress symptoms associated withviolence exposure. Psychiatry: Interpersonal and BiologicalProcesses 56: 22–35

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Richters J E, Saltzman W1990 Survey of exposure to communityviolence—Parent report version. Unpublished measure. Childand Adolescent Disorders Research, National Institute ofMental Health

Rubinetti F 1996 Empathy, self-esteem, hopelessness. and beliefin the legitimacy of aggression in adolescents exposed topervasive community violence. Unpublished doctoral dis-sertation. University of Maryland, College Park, MD

Saltzman W 1992 The effect of children’s exposure to violence.Unpublished master’s thesis. University of Maryland, CollegePark, MD

Saltzman W 1995 Exposure to community violence and theprediction of violent antisocial behavior in a multi-ethnicsample of adolescents. Unpublished doctoral dissertation.University of Maryland, College Park, MD

Scarpa A, Fikretoglu D, Luscher K 2000 Community violenceexposure in a young adult sample: II. Psychophysiology andaggressive behavior. Journal of Community Psychology 28:417–26

Shahinfar A, Fox N A, Leavitt L A 2000 Preschool children’sexposure to violence: relation of behavior problems to parentand child reports. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 70:115–25

Singer M I, Anglin T M, Song L, Lunghofer L 1994 The MentalHealth Consequences of Adolescents’ Exposure to Violence.Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH

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R. P. Lorion

Violence, History of

Violence in its various forms has been an aspect ofhistorical descriptions since Thucydides, but to thisday there is no independent specialty in historicalresearch on violence. The history of violence is thuswritten as part of military and war history, of researchon revolution and protest, and of the history of genderand the body. In Europe and elsewhere, it cuts acrossthe institutional and disciplinary logic of the study ofhistory. This lack of independence has two conse-quences for historical research on violence. First, it isalways interdisciplinary and includes approaches

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proper to political science and social history, as well asissues of cultural history. Second, it cannot look backon a unified development, but on disparate traditionsin the individual disciplines. While revolutionaryviolence, for example, is discussed primarily in thecontext of the French Revolution, research on socialprotest has developed under the influence of 1950sAnglo-American social history and of the reactions tothe 1960s urban riots in the USA. The historiographyof research on violence is thus many-stranded andinternational.

1. Definitions of Violence

The definitions of violence are as varied as itsmanifestations. The term itself takes on disparatecoloring in the context of each respective nationallanguage. English, French, and Italian reflect the Latinand emphasize the injuries caused by violence and itsviolation of corporal integrity. By comparison, theGerman term ‘Gewalt’ is less negatively charged, alsobeing used as a synonym for ‘power’ or ‘pou�oir’. Onlyits extension ‘Gewaltta� tigkeit’ captures the injuriouscharacter of the Anglo-American term. A comparativeexamination of the history of terms is a desideratumfor research.

The spectrum of scholarly definitions of violence isbroad. The distinctions between direct and indirect,collective and individual, legitimate and illegitimate,concrete and structural, physical and psychological,and manifest and symbolic violence reflect varyingaccents in the discussion. Depending on the definition,the focus can be on the manifestations, the justifica-tions, or the effects of violence. The term has beenspecified further in accordance with its intended usefor qualitative or quantitative studies. Modern re-search on protest sees collective violence when at least20 persons take part in acts in which persons or objectsare damaged.

In the current discussion among historians, violenceis widely understood as injury to people’s physicalintegrity, caused by various historical actors in variouscontexts. Here, violence is not seen as an anthro-pological constant, nor as a universal historical traitheld in common, but tied to the actions of specificgroups and conditions that are subject to change invarious national societies and epochs. The Germansociologist, Heinrich Popitz, has advanced this view(Popitz 1986). He sees violence as ‘an act of power thatleads to the intentional bodily injury of others’. In thisview, corporality distinguishes violence from othermeans of domination, such as orders, though itcontributes to their effect.

Since violence injures bodily integrity, it possesses amassive potential for threat and evokes fears. Thesecan contribute to the avoidance of acts of violence, butcan also amplify them. The pair of terms ‘physical’ and‘psychological’ violence touch on this connection. Not

only does the experience of physical violence, such astorture or rape, have psychological consequences;psychological violence, such as brainwashing, can alsohave physical effects. Popitz’ definition also points tothe concept of power. It thus designates the contentof violent conflicts as an often unequal structuralsituation of victims and perpetrators. This underscoresthat the history of violence is also always a partof societal processes in which the distribution andresources of power are up for discussion.

Beyond its physical core, the term violence hastaken on various meanings in the course of the modernage.

(a) In the process of forming states, legitimateviolence is distinguished from illegitimate privateviolence, independent of whether the latter is wieldedin revolutions or in defense of the status quo. The statehas defended and extended its monopoly on violenceas a constituting component of being a state since earlymodern times. This monopoly prevailed through thedisarmament of the feudal rulers. With the army and(since the eighteenth, and especially the nineteenth,centuries) the police, state organs exercised the mon-opoly on legitimate violence. This monopoly requiredjustification in its form and degree, but not in itsexistence. Lindenberger and Lu� dtke saw the hallmarkof modernity in the network of relationships betweenphysically suffered violence, on the one hand, and thestate monopoly on violence, on the other (Lindenber-ger and Lu� dtke 1995). Thus they not only claim anincrease in the state’s practice of control and re-pression, but also touch upon the everyday experienceof violence. In the modern age, citizens can come intoconflict with state regulations and sanctions, which inturn provoke violent actions. In modern protestresearch, Charles Tilly, among others, has held statereactions to unrest responsible for the extent ofcounterviolence (Tilly 1975).

(b) The experiences of dependency and inequalitybetween the centers of power, colonies, and the so-called ‘ThirdWorld’ led theNorwegian social scientist,Johan Galtung, to develop the concept of ‘structuralviolence’ (Galtung 1975). From the perspective ofpeace politics, he drew attention to a discrepancy. Hesaw a chasm between the existing potential fordevelopment based on technology and available soc-ietal wealth, on the one hand, and the respectivelevels of development of disadvantaged groups andcountries, on the other. His concept emphasizes, notindividual perpetrators, but social structures, and notprimarily physically-experienced violence, but povertyand exploitation. He was not so much concerned withlegitimating counterviolence, as vehemently defendedby the Algerian sociologist, Frantz Fanon, but withsocial peace, which he thought would be secured for allthrough equality and opportunities for development(Fanon 1961).

The term ‘structural violence’ flourished in the1970s, but also met criticism. It was accused not only

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of failing to define ‘structure,’ but also for lackingspecificity in its analysis of violence. ‘By tendentiouslydeciphering all relations as relations of violence, theserelations are leveled,’ wrote Wolf-Dieter Narr (1973);i.e., the analyses of violence and of society areindistinguishable. Galtung was able to demonstratethat the term ‘violence’ can be applied meaningfully inthe analysis of acts in the context of the forciblerelations effective in acts of exchange, in inculcatingliteracy, and in migrations.

(c) The concept of symbolic violence is beset withsimilar problems of distinction. Pierre Bourdieu andClaude Passeron used it in their theoretical analysis ofthe French school system and thus designated ‘thatform of violence’ that ‘is exercised against a socialactor with the complicity of this ‘‘actor’’’ (Bourdieuand Passeron 1970). The experience is violent in thatthe actors are subjected to a code of language andbehavior alien to them; it is symbolic through theverbal and semiotic form of its mechanisms. Theseshape the school’s demands and enable or preventscholastic careers. According to Bourdieu, by accep-ting this code, the actors contribute to the lastinglegitimation of the scholastic system of selection. Thisterm rightly touches on the linguistic and semioticdimension of violence, but expands it to the point thatit no longer has clear contours.

(d) In the course of the development of genderhistory in the 1990s, the concept of violence has beenextended to private forms of violence within thefamily. Feminist literature has used the term ‘sexualviolence’. This refers to actions that appear in a formtying societies to sexuality. They are carried outagainst the will of persons who do not have the samepower resources as the perpetrators. Sexual violence isthus analyzed as part of the inequality effective in therelationship between the sexes. It shifts from anexceptional phenomenon to one in terms of which theparadigmatically prevailing ideas of power relationsand sexuality, and the experiences of women and girlscan be grasped. This extension of the concept ofviolence not only opens new fields to scientific re-search, but, since the 1980s, has also been taken up inthe penal codes of individual societies.

2. Historical Research on Violence

In the past, experience with violence was subsumedagain and again in theoretical sketches. Amongthem, the theories of Thomas Hobbes, Max Webber,and Hannah Arendt were doubtless the most influen-tial, though they arose under disparate conditions(Hobbes 1914, Weber 1919, Arendt 1970). But,especially since the 1950s, their influence on historicalresearch on violence has been superseded by that ofNorbert Elias, Michel Foucault, and most recentlyClifford Geertz (Elias 1976, Foucault 1975, Geertz1973).

Thomas Hobbes was the primary inspirer of his-torical research on violence (Hobbes 1914). Inseventeenth-century English society, which was nolonger integrated by religion, he demonstrated in termsof contract theory the necessity of the state’s use ofviolence. Hobbes postulated that, to pacify an Englishsociety composed of private persons hostile to eachother, these persons relinquished their rights to theLeviathan state, i.e., in theEnglish case, to the absolutemonarch. In return, they received protection fromhostile others and the guarantee of societal peace.The double function of the state’s monopoly onviolence—on the one hand, to protect the interests ofindividuals, and on the other, to limit their possibilitiesof self-realization and their rights—has become thecommon possession of most analyses of violence sinceHobbes. The individual’s relationship to state violencethus often develops from his specific experiences eitherwith the state’s protection or with its limitation of hisfreedom.

Norbert Elias has provided important stimuli forhistorical research on violence (Elias 1976). Eliasdescribed European history since the Middle Ages as ahistory of civilization. This hypothesis is based on twocentral assumptions. First, Elias says that, in thecourse of the expansion of the trades, commerce,transportation, and the activity of the state, theinteraction among members of society became morefrequent and more dense. To the degree that theycompeted for influence and shares of power, agree-ments on behavior, and behavioral norms were re-quired. In this process, civilized manners prevailed.On the other hand, the state monopoly exercised anincreased external compulsion over the behavior of themembers of a society. This found its most completeform in courtly society. In the realm regulated bycourtly etiquette, the individual’s success depended onnew civilized modes of behavior. To the degree thatpeoples’ definition of themselves conformed to thisframework, forms of self-compulsion and control offeelings resulted. Violent structures of interpersonalsocietal relations receded as the model of civilized andinner-directed acting spread from the upper strata tothe rest of society. Elias’ historical periodization hasbeen criticized by Hans-Peter Duerr, but his secular-based hypothesis has nonetheless been very fruitful forresearch (Duerr 1988–96).

Michel Foucault emphasized the shift in form andcontent in state practices of punishment, which shapedboth societal reality and the individual’s life practicelastingly (Foucault 1975). In his view, the practices ofdomination targeting the body have shifted since 1800to strategies targeting the mind. The disciplinarymeasures carried out on the human body in clinics,psychiatric facilities, and prisons took on a more totalcharacter in the modern age. As in Jeremy Bentham’s‘Panoptikum,’ the individual is now subjected tocontrol by institutions and the effects of techniques ofpower, which in turn are provided by the fields of

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study that dominate discourses (Bentham 1787). InFoucault’s model, the direct violence of the exercise ofpower made way for the violence of discourses—atleast after the threshold between the epochs, which helocates around 1800. Historical studies have relativ-ized this hypothesis and made it more specific, asthey did with Elias’ theories, but it too has retained itsimportance as a challenge to detailed studies.

While Elias and Foucault locate the changing use ofbodily violence in epochal contexts and societalmacrosituations, cultural anthropological studieshave gained importance over the years, and they areno longer devoted to the causes, but to the forms ofviolence. Attention to the ‘how’ of the practice ofviolence, a maximum of ‘dense description’ of constel-lations of violence, and even an ‘ethics of precision’(von Trotha 1997) is demanded for the description andexplanation of acts of violence and their results. Inreferring to Clifford Geertz, recourse is taken toanthropological approaches or variants of symbolicinteractionism are tested (Geertz 1973).

3. Emphases and New Fields in HistoricalResearch on Violence

3.1 An International Comparison of Violence

Historical research on violence has so far privilegedthe national context and has seldom conducted in-ternational comparisons. This concentration on thenation state suggested itself, since the state monopolyon violence stood in the center of research on violence.But there are still some comparative works, basedpartly on national research or inspired by the latter’squestions. Among these is the long-term comparisonof the period from the thirteenth to the nineteenthcenturies, in which P. Spierenberg describes behaviortoward victims, the weak, and animals to demonstratea general increase of empathy in Europe (Spierenburg1991). Charles Tilly formulated a typology of col-lective violence in Europe, in which he names theparochial conflicts—the feuds between geographicalcommunities (Tilly 1975). He uses the term ‘reactiveviolence’ to designate resistance against state inter-ference in the citizens’ way of life. According to Tilly,proactive violence is exercised within those organiza-tions that acquire, and seek to defend, their politicalpower.

All these investigations face the problem of havingto work with unequal and incomplete national data.Since forms of protest and criminality take differentcultural shapes in different societies, views of realityare often grasped as reality itself. In comparativeresearch on revolution, violence has often not beenaccorded central importance. The only exception isArno Mayer’s study that contrasts the violence of theFrench and the Russian Revolutions (Mayer 2000).Finally, research on totalitarianism has pinpointed

state terror as a central instrument of totalitariansystems. Dietrich Beyrau has presented a critical,detailed analysis contrasting and comparing violentstate measures (Beyrau 2000). It elaborates the similar-ities as well as the differences between the violence ofthe National Socialist and that of the Stalinist systemsof rule. Comparative studies permit discussion of thecharged question of modern research on violence:whether private and public violence dwindles in or iscompatible with the functioning of modern society.

3.2 Collecti�e Violence as Social Protest

Research on protest is one of the most flourishingbranches of research on violence. The extent andsignificance of acts of violence are examined in it. Ithas taken on new contours since the 1950s, under theinfluence of English, often Marxist-inspired socialhistory and of the 1960s American research on urbanriots. Insight into the inherent logic of popular actionhas supplanted the condemnation of rage-blinded,aggressive mob and crowd activity. Their violentnature has been interpreted less as a defining charac-teristic than as an aspect of social protests and less asirrational than as a rational strategy. Georges Rude�and Edward P. Thompson in particular have carriedout this revision (Rude� 1964, Thompson 1971).Thompson has also drawn attention to the ‘moraleconomy’. With this term, he designates the model ofviolence as a fitting behavior by peasants, artisans, andworkers in response to the markets in times ofeconomic crisis or famine. Acts of popular violence inGreat Britain during the transition from the eighteenthto the nineteenth centuries are set in relation to thismodel and contrasted as a traditional alternative tothe developing market society. Thompson’s con-tinuing hypotheses that these protests were directedagainst the gentry have meanwhile been revised.Nevertheless, building on Thompson, attention hasshifted to the significance of violent protests in astrategy based primarily on negotiating and com-promising with the authorities. In this context, JohnBohstedt speaks of a ‘protocol of riot’ that theprotesters strictly adhered to, in order to initiatenegotiations, rather than destructive activities(Bohstedt 1988). When violence was nonetheless em-ployed, its form was often borrowed from traditionalrituals or it was applied symbolically against objects.Between 1770 and 1850 in Great Britain, France, andGermany, the majority of protests against famine, taxrevolts, and resistance against conscription wereusually conducted nonviolently. Following the Amer-ican urban unrest, Graham and Gurr later questionedthis hypothesis of violence’s positive significance fornegotiating processes (Graham and Gurr 1969). Theyunderscored that violence is, as a rule, unproductive,while in Charles Tilly’s interpretation of violent meansas part of power struggles, they can indeed besuccessfully employed (Tilly 1975).

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Since the mid-1980s, this still influential view ofprotest has been accused of attributing too muchrationality to it and of denuding it of its emotionality.Alain Corbin in particular has pointed out the degreeto which fears, hopes, and rumors have been re-sponsible for acts of violence (Corbin 1990). GeorgeLefebvre already traced plundering and acts of viol-ence against the landed nobility in France in 1789 tothe effects of alarming news and fears in the ruralpopulation (Lefebvre 1970). For his part, Corbindescribes how, on a market day in August 1870, acrowd of 300–800 people tormented a young nobleand then burned him alive. He had been accused ofbeing a Prussian and of calling out ‘Vive la Re�pub-lique.’ These acts, like the Grande Peur in the FrenchRevolution, can be traced to the spread of rumors, butthat does not explain their cruelty. For historicalresearch on protest, this finding suggests that violentactivity should be understood as part of a history ofthe emotions.

The investigation of the history of violence has notbeen limited to the extent and significance of acts ofviolence, but has also asked about its instigators andcauses. The mass psychologist Gustav Le Bon hasattributed mass violence primarily to women (Le Bon1908). Historical research on protest has shown thatwomen have taken part in acts of violence. But womenremained in the minority and were more intenselyactive when the well-being of the family was at stakethan, for example, in conflicts with the military.Beyond that, the social profile of people arrested formanifestations of violence has been worked out. Theyusually do not come from the ‘Lumpenproletariat,’but are rural and urban wage-earners, sometimes fromtradesmen milieus. The people, more than the mob,carried out these actions. Bohstedt, in particular, haspointed to disturbed societal relations as one of thecauses of violence in Britain, especially where socialcontact and dependencies between the upper classesand the masses were attenuated (Bohstedt 1988). Butthis hypothesis cannot be confirmed for other protests.Whether acts of violence always followed socialdisintegration, and whether rituals of violence do notin turn presuppose relatively unified communities is aquestion for additional research. In the past, historicalresearch on protest has concerned itself most with thephase in which civic society was formed, but now it isalso examining the period between the world wars ofthe twentieth century and is including the problem ofpolitical violence to a greater degree. Its approachesand methods must now prove themselves in this field.

3.3 Historical Research on Violence as Crime

Violent crime in its long-term historical development,societal distribution, and meaning has been investiga-ted primarily in terms of Europe in the Middle Agesand early Modern Age, and in terms of the twentieth-

century USA. Modern historical studies of crimethat also address nineteenth- and twentieth-centuryEurope are rare. Quantitative international com-parative studies of violent crime often exhibitmethodological deficiencies, because the data base inthe individual countries and through time is uneven,and above all because the prevalence of recorded actsof violence determined also depends on the strengthand severity of prosecuting authorities. Additionally,Eastern and Central Europe have been almost com-pletely omitted from almost all long-term studies, dueto the lack of research there or to language barriers.Nevertheless, trend analyses from a bird’s-eye per-spective can provide hypotheses that can then beworked out in detail or modified by historical micro-research. Spierenberg hypothesized a drop in the rateof homicide in Europe before 1850 (Spierenberg 1991);in contrast, studies of Western Europe and the USAfrom 1800 to the beginning of the twentieth century byGurr and Lane find a rising rate of crime and homicide(Gurr et al. 1977, Lane 1997). These rates allegedly fellin the century from 1840 to 1940, only to rise again inthe middle or end of the 1950s, but individual studiesof crime in discrete nation states or cities do notconfirm this chronology. American research has con-firmed the hypothesis that the USA was, and remains,the most violent nation among the Western demo-cracies. But it is still debated whether this can be tracedprimarily to ‘frontier violence’ (Hollon 1974) and itsconsequences.

Modern research on crime focuses on the relation-ship between delinquents, the penal system, andprosecution. Social history concerns itself with thesocial origin and situation of criminals; legal historyand sociology investigate penal ‘labeling,’ whichcriminalizes specific behaviors; and institutional andpolitical history is devoted to the construction of pros-ecuting bodies. Nicole Castan and Gerd Schwerhoff,among others, have conducted historical studies ofcities or regions, examining premodern societies’approach to violent delinquency (Castan 1980,Schwerhoff 1991). The following general finding re-sulted. Until the early modern age, even homicide wasan infraction that was not punished automatically bydeath, but it could be atoned for and expiated throughrituals and payments of money. In sixteenth-centuryGermany, laws called for more severe punishments,but court practice was orientated more toward re-quiring expiatory measures benefiting the survivingrelatives than toward retaliation. This assessment ofviolence was not surprising in a time that still acceptedit as a definite part of societal practices and rituals inthe premodern period. Among youth, villagers, andjourneymen and masters in trades, not only wereconflicts resolved by violence; initiation rites were alsoorganized around violence.

The criminalization and limitation of violence is aprocess that began in the early modern age, but did notfully prevail until the full-blown modern age. For

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France, and based on the discourse of elites, Muchem-bled reports on rapid advance of the process ofcivilization, locating the criminalization of homicidein the eighteenth century (Muchembled 1988). Buteven for the eighteenth century, doubts have beenraised whether the draconian penalties prescribed canbe regarded as an indicator that more severe normsprevailed, or if these penalties were intended tocompensate for the weakness of prosecuting authori-ties. For it has been pointed out that, precisely inpremodern times, legal jurisdiction and police controlhad not thoroughly penetrated into rural communitiesin a number of European societies. For the nineteenthcentury, Peter Gay has advocated the hypothesis that,despite the criminalization of violence, it was indeedtolerated in specific societal areas, to the degree that itremained limited to and ritualized in them (Gay 1993).He adduces the examples of the duel and students’fencing to gain scars, corporal punishment in schoolsand the army, and violence within marriage. Thequestion of when which practices were prosecutedjudicially and considered illegitimate violence has notyet been investigated adequately in internationalcomparison.

3.4 Recent Approaches of Historical Research onViolence

Historical research on violence has taken on newdimensions in the newer style of the history of war andthe military. The latter is concerned with militaryperpetrators of violence that exceeds normal militaryaction: participation in mass executions, acts ofannihilation, torture, or rape. Browning and Bartovhave been exemplary in pursuing this approach instudying National Socialist police troops and theWehrmacht on the Eastern front respectively (Brown-ing 1992, Bartov 1985). Concentrating on militaryperpetrators opens up the analysis of wars thataccompany decolonization, the Vietnam War, andwarlike conflicts accompanying the collapse of thebipolar world order. Beyond the discovery of formerlyunknown or repressed atrocities committed by soldiersand officers, attention has focused on analyzing thecauses of such inhumane behavior. Current discussionaddresses the question of whether specific images ofcommunity and�or group cohesion motivate the per-petrators.

Beyond soldiers’ and officers’ motivation, inter-action, and acts, research is also concerned with howthey deal with experiences with violence. To the degreethat interest in the history of memory and experienceincreased, the effects of violence on postwar societieshas also been researched. World War I has been morethoroughly considered than World War II. Eventoday, it is becoming clear that societal discourse onwars and on the legitimacy of the violence exercised inthem has as large a role as direct experience of violencein dealing with the past. It turns out that there is a need

to correct the one-dimensional assumptions that ex-periences on the front are transformed directly into abrutalization of postwar behavior.

Since violence is defined as physical injury, itsanalysis is also part of the history of the body. Theexperience of pain is not historically constant andunchanging, but is influenced by respectively specificbodily experiences and views of the body. The con-ditioning of the human body by the military, prisons,and insane asylums, whose importance has beenunderscored above all by Foucault, as well as thefeelings felt and expressed thereby, are relevant asparts of the history of violence (Foucault 1975). Just asthe awareness of the body, its integrity, and its injuriesare interpreted culturally, the views and assessments ofviolent intrusions into the body—such as bodilyinjury, homicide, rape, or torture—depend on therespective common cultural patterns. In the future,these must be examined not only in terms of theirshaping in specific epochs and by gender, but also interms of their disparate shaping in different cultures.

All this already indicates the degree to whichresearch on violence has profited in the late twentiethcentury from interest in questions of cultural history.In this context, simple attributions have becomeproblematical. The taboo against violence is no longerseen as the dominant characteristic of the modern age,whose ambivalence Baumann has underscored(Baumann 1991). The media’s conveying and staging,which depicts and overemphasizes acts of violence,have contributed to this ambivalence of the modernage. These connections are often mentioned in currentdiagnoses, but there is a lack of comparative historicalresearch devoted to the respective cultures of violencein various milieus and at various times. For mostepochs, not even the discursive boundaries betweenviolence and nonviolence are well enough known.Special attention should be paid to the degree to whichstate authorities and the upper strata of societies haveintervened in the justification of forms of violence andin its condemnation. For the respective concepts ofviolence all have a mediating link between the statemonopoly on violence and everyday experience.

See also: Arendt, Hannah (1906–75); Elias, Norbert(1897–1990); Foucault, Michel (1926–84); Hobbes,Thomas (1588–1679); Rape and Sexual Coercion;Social Movements, History of: General; SocialMovements, Sociology of; Terrorism; Torture andits Consequences, Psychology of; Totalitarianism;Violence in Anthropology; Violence: Public; War,Sociology of; Warfare in History; Weber, Max(1864–1920)

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Violence in Anthropology

Across the Cold War and the collapse of great-powersocialism, anthropological studies of violence havefocused on international patterns of revolution,counterinsurgency warfare, state terrorism, militantethnic nationalism, communal violence, and organizedcrime (Wolf 1969, Das et al. 2000). The field has alsoreconsidered the violence of Western colonialism, theepistemic violence of states that marginalize devaluedgroups, and the structural violence inherent in systemsof inequality that consign great numbers of people tounstable incomes and life-threatening poverty, hunger,and preventable disease (Schepper-Hughes 1992,Bourgois 1995).

This array of issues contrasts with social anthro-pology’s earlier functionalist focus on the internalregulation of social tensions, leadership transitions,and intergroup hostilities in lineage-based societies,imagined as isolates. The turn to examining theinterplay of local communities and state politics, andthe political consequences of globalization has revital-ized the subfield of political anthropology.

Although the discipline has appropriated issuesfrom political science and comparative sociology

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International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences ISBN: 0-08-043076-7

Une Theorie Du Systeme D’enseignement. Editions de Minuit,

chantiers de l’histoire. Editions Autrement, Paris, pp. 208–23

Copyright � 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.

All rights reserved.

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Violence, History Of