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Fieldwork Under Fire

University of California Press

We wondered, while writing this introduction, in which state of mind this book would be read. Which wars will rumble through its words? Which images will provide a visual background to the chapters presented here? As we were editing the contributions, we could not help but think and talk about the war in the Balkans. The term "ethnic cleansing" made us remember other times and other wars and made us realize that the place may be different, and the suffering unique, but that everyday life under war is at any place and any time confusing and full of anguish. This realization is so obvious that it is almost banal, yet why is this perennial chaos of warfare and the incomprehensibility of violence for its victims so seldom addressed in scholarly writings? Why do we find so many intricate studies about war and so few about human suffering? Let us compare two quotations that were written half a century apart.

I'm writing from the shed. It is half past five in the afternoon, you can hear shots outside and the exploding of mortar shells. Father and Asim are asleep, grandma is playing cards. How idyllic, isn't it? We are already spending our fifth month in this way. Terrible. I do not know where to begin. . . . It is so difficult to write this. There is so much, and I am so confused. Now and then I have a crisis, just like everybody. I'm afraid, depressed. Everything is so hopeless. I don't know if you can understand this at all. Probably not. At the beginning we didn't understand anything either. When they bombed us, this turned out to be nothing compared to everything that happened thereafter.

Strange are the ways of life in the ghetto, abounding in surprises of every sort. Nothing is logically predictable, and people often wrack their brains over one or another turn of events that had seemed completely clear but underwent a change at the last minute. . . . What is the determining factor here? What influences this situation? Why do omens of improvement so

often end with things becoming worse and vice versa? These are questions that disturb the entire population and for which no answers can be found, answers that may not even be found before the war is over! It could be whim, and it could be necessity!

The first quotation is from a letter written on August 14, 1992, by a woman in Sarajevo and sent to her brother living in exile in the Netherlands (reprinted in De Volkskrant , 10 September 1992). The second quotation was written on August 30, 1942, and comes from the hand of an official chronicler of the Lsdz ghetto (Dobroszycki 1984:245 246). We begin with these stories from Europe to emphasize that violence is not somewhere else in a third world country, on a distant battlefield, or in a secret interrogation center but that it is an inescapable fact of life for every country, nation, and person, whether or not they are personally touched by direct violence.

Such stories as these are all too common: we could as easily have drawn similar ones from Somalia, Guatemala, Sri Lanka, the United States, Mozambique, Ireland, Spain, and China. SIPRI, a Swedish conflict research and documentation center, has identified 32 major wars in 1992 ("major" being defined as producing over one thousand casualties a year). If we consider conflicts with under one thousand killed annually, then the figure rises to 150. And if we expand our definition according to greater anthropological sensibilities to include the pressing conflicts in many people's lives riots, gang warfare, tribal genocide, and forms of terror warfare such as rape and torture then we find that the number of people directly affected by violence extends into the hundreds of millions.

The foregoing quotations have another significance that is of central importance to this volume: they evoke everyday experiences of violence in its myriad manifestations, ranging from war to popular protest, from rape to the contestations surrounding rumors of violence, from moral discourses concerning conflict to the tragedies of senseless brutality. We want to focus on the experiential dimension of conflict, on the ways in which people live their lives in contests marred by inescapable violence. We believe that violence is a dimension of people's existence, not something external to society and culture that "happens" to people.

By way of explaining this, we return once again to the example of the Balkans. As one peace plan after another is being rejected, and as one truce after another is being violated, a mood has been growing among many people and politicians in Europe and the United States that there is simply no solution to the war because the combatants "have gone crazy," "are acting like barbarians," or "are drawing on their basest instincts." The war no longer belongs to the realm of political conflict; it has regressed to a level of inhumanity that is outside normal social life, an unreal world where soldiers enjoy killing and rape is a military strategy.

While such sentiments are common, we think they represent a dangerous misconception. For too many people everywhere in the world, violence is an all too human reality. This includes the victims of violence but also the perpetrators who themselves are caught in spiraling conflicts that their actions have set in motion but that they can no longer control. To understand their plight and to try to begin to forge solutions, we must confront violence head on, place it squarely in the center of the lives and cultures of the people who suffer it, precisely where they themselves find it. Violence may not be functional, and it is certainly not tolerable, but it is not outside the realm of human society, or that which defines it as human. As this book shows, violence is not enjoyable, except perhaps for the pathological few. Nor is it a devolution into a seething "proto-" or "precultural" set of behaviors. Like creativity and altruism, violence is culturally constructed. As with all cultural products, it is in essence only a potential one that gives shape and content to specific people within the context of particular histories. Little can be said about the concrete form of violence or the content of human existence pursued outside the constraints of society and culture. Warfare is, as Margaret Mead (1964) says, "only an invention."

Moreover, these quotations express the confusion of cultures and communities in crisis and how life has to be reinvented each time anew under ever-changing circumstances. Violence is confusing and inconclusive. Wars are emblematic for the extremes that people's existential disorientation may reach. Such life-threatening violence demonstrates the paralysis as well as the creativity of people coping under duress, a duress for which few are prepared. Even soldiers, who have been trained to deal with the risks and uncertainties of action on the battlefield and have been prepared to carry out dangerous and complex tasks under enemy fire, cannot rely on the routines of exercise and command. The everydayness of war is a never-ending stream of worries about the next meal, the next move, and the next assault. This immediacy of action characterizes not only war but any form of violence. There are few social prescriptions on how to cope and survive in violent...