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15/07/2020 Category: Insights Tagged with: knowledge relatedness torture

Torture and the veil of singularity: A commentary on Veena Das’ ‘Where is Democracy in India? Asking Anthropological Theory to Open Its Doors’

Lotte Buch Segal

In her AT Commons blogpost, Veena Das (2019) argues that torture is a social phenomenon. Hence, the relationship between the victim and the perpetrator is not external to the social. Their relationship is a social tie as are the multiple reasons that caused them to end up in those respective subject positions. The implications hereof pose a fundamental challenge to how we normally think about torture as a singular event befalling an individual human being and a rupture of human connectivity.  If we pause for a moment to take in the full ramifications of that argument, we are essentially being asked to make a concerted effort to examine torture on par with other social phenomena.  Modern torture, as the classic work of Darius Rejali (2007) has shown, is designed to leave no visible marks, on the allegedly intact human being. As Tobias Kelly (2012) has also argued the invisible nature of modern torture is what makes it so difficult to document when victims are released after interrogation. In his book ‘This Side of Silence’ Kelly thus poses the question; on which hooks do we hinge our knowledge that torture actually has taken place? How do we trust that someone’s expression of pain is due to torture (Ibid.)?

It is in this context that books such as Wahid Shaikh’s take on an extremely important role. As Das writes in her piece, it is easy to point to torture as being inhuman and pathological, yet doing so would also mean that we refuse the sociality of torture and ultimately, that there are spheres of human interaction that anthropology fails to address. Thus, accepting Das’ invitation to allow torture to take a firmer hold over anthropological theorising, I will dwell here on two important points in her reading of Wahid Shaikh, which may be taken up as future fields of study in the discipline.

 

The social life of torture

‘What proof do you have that torture affects not only the individual survivor but the entire thick of relationships around them?’, a reviewer once asked me as I was preparing to launch a study on the impact of torture of individuals on family and kinship relations. Whilst it is always interesting to think about the notion of proof in anthropology as we move from a methodological individualism to reverberations and effects on connected human beings, the work I have done with families where a relative has been exposed to torture speaks of the way in which the psychological, bodily but not least relational pain works itself in the textures of kinship (Segal, 2018). These insights speak to Richard Rechtman’s work on survivors of genocide in Cambodia which likewise teaches us how torture puts relationships under extreme strain not only in the sense of a rupture, or even destruction, but more like a tear that becomes part of kin relatedness among the living and the deceased as well (2006). Even more so, psychology and psychiatry testify to the damage done to the generation coming after that of the so-called direct survivors of torture (Dalgaard et al., 2020). From my ethnographic work in and around a Danish torture rehabilitation clinic it was clear that the most challenging cases to work with for the clinical staff were the family cases – because, in families where one or more members have undergone torture, the risk of domestic violence is as high as 50 % (ibid). Research from other contexts, like Lotte Meinert and Susan Reynolds Whyte’s (2017) study of violence as contagion in Northern Uganda underlines the longitudinal ways in which transgressive violence only slowly loosens its grip on community sociality. And, we only need to look to the field of Holocaust studies for evidence of transgenerational trauma. As such, I am thus not convinced that the reviewer’s question to my assumptions regarded the availability of proof of the social life of torture – proof is abundant.  Rather, I read their question to me as mirroring the doubt that cling to the phenomenon of modern torture; it is nowhere to be seen, how then, can it be true? Whether doubt or resistance to taking in the full ramifications of torture upon human lives, Veena Das’ piece shows how anthropology needs a willingness to reckon with torture as part of the register of human action that is possible rather than relegating it to pathology or the realm of the inhuman.

 

Learning survivorship

As Das writes, the book by Wahid Shaikh holds the potential to teach us about what it means to live through torture. A pedagogy of survival is of interest beyond anthropological scholarship. Shaikh’s book reminds me of Esmail Nashif (2007) and Lena Meari’s (2014) detailed descriptions of how the colonial prisons in Israel gave rise to Palestinian political communities whose pedagogies of how to resist torture and colonial coercion circulated and ultimately educated Palestinian prisoners in political citizenship during their imprisonment but beyond it too.

A book like Shaikh’s also shows us on the most intimate of levels, what it means to survive imprisonment under harrowing conditions. We might put it in company with Shahla Talebi’s powerful memoir cum monograph of her years of imprisonment in Tehran’s most infamous prison. With great tact and care, Talebi (2011) describes how shared bonds and memories made imprisonment, indeed torture, liveable —yet she also shows how relationships among prisoners became prone to mutual suspicions and even violence. Yet even when bonds break, it does not mean that that the prisoners became examples of the inhuman or the asocial. Rather, the anthropological archive testifies how sociality involves simultaneously the making and breaking of social ties (Butler, 2004; Strathern, 2004). What if we were to take these insights to the study of how human beings live with the effects of torture? How lives and relationships become marked, not in spectacular but entirely mundane ways, say, like how a family changes its routines entirely around the fact that a parent with nightmares will sleep during the day. Or, children who learn early on the family does not necessarily mean a safe haven but a place in which a multitude of everyday acts of care are necessary in order to keep the destructiveness of torture at bay. As such also reminding us powerfully of Janet Carsten’s insight that kinship is not only about the mutuality of being but as much about the different ways in which kin members may hurt each other (Carsten, 2003).

The social phenomenon of torture, then, is not other to anthropology, quite the opposite; further research might allow us to better grasp and theorise those forms of human action and relationality that are not necessarily recognised as sociality proper but form part of human lives across the globe, irrespective of the fact that we would rather not know.

 

References

Butler J (2004) Precarious Life: The powers of mourning and violence. New York: Verso.

Dalgaard N Thorup, MH Thøgersen, M Skovgaard Væver & E Montgomery (2020) Family violence in traumatized refugee families: A mixed methods study of mother/child dyadic functioning, parental symptom levels and children’s psychosocial adjustment. Nordic Psychology 72(2): 83-104.

Carsten J (2013) What kinship does—and how. HAU. Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3(2): 245-252.

Das V (2019) Where is democracy in India? Asking Anthropological Theory to Open Its Doors. Anthropological Theory Commons. Url: http://www.at-commons.com/2019/11/24/where-is-democracy-in-india-asking-anthropological-theory-to-open-its-doors/ (accessed 16 Jan 2020).

Kelly T (2012) This Side of Silence: Human Rights, Torture and the Recognition of Cruelty. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Meari L (2014) Sumud: A Palestinian Philosophy of Confrontation in Colonial Prisons. South Atlantic Quarterly 113(3): 547–578.

Meinert L and SR Whyte (2017) These Things Continue: Violence as Contamination in Everyday Life After War in Northern Uganda. Ethos (Special Issue: Social Contagion and Cultural Epidemics) 45(2): 271-286.

Nashif E (2008) Palestinian Political Prisoners: Identity and Community. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

Rechtman R (2006) The survivor paradox: Psychological consequences of the Khmer rouge rhetoric of extermination. Anthropology and Medicinel 13(1): 1-11.

Rejali D (2007) Torture and Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Segal L B (2018) Tattered Textures of Kinship: The Effects of Torture Among Iraqi Families in Denmark. Medical Anthropology 37(7): 553-567.

Strathern M (2004) Partial Connections. London: Rowman Altamira Press.

Talebi S (2011) Ghosts of Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran. Berkeley: California University Press.

Cite As

Lotte Buch Segal (2020) Torture and the veil of singularity: A commentary on Veena Das’ ‘Where is Democracy in India? Asking Anthropological Theory to Open Its Doors’. Url: http://www.at-commons.com/2020/07/15/torture-and-the-veil-of-singularity-a-commentary-on-veena-das-where-is-democracy-in-india-asking-anthropological-theory-to-open-its-doors/

About the author(s)

Lotte Buch Segal is a lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. Her earlier work was based in occupied Palestine with an emphasis on the ways in which the conflict is lived and endured in everyday life for the families of the Palestinian political prisoners. Currently, she studies modes of healing available to survivors of torture from the Middle East in Northern Europe. She has published in JRAI, Ethos, Medical Anthropology, and Ethnos among others.

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