Théoriser la violence en Amérique

Abstract

PHILIPPE BOURGOIS THEORIZING VIOLENCE IN THE AMERICAS A THIRTY-YEAR ETHNOGRAPHIC RETROSPECTIVE: This thirty year retrospective analysis of violence at my fieldwork sites in the Americas (Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Panama, USA) explores the importance and difficulty of recognizing the continuities of violence across historical eras as an ethnographer. Expanding on the continuum of violence concept, I propose the utility of identifying the mutually reinforcing interface of three overlapping categories of invisible violence: structural, symbolic and normalized. If theory is meant to help us see more, then theorizing violence through a continuum of categories of invisibility is useful because it contravenes the political effects of the contemporary hyper-visibility of interpersonal and petty criminal street violence. The increasing global reach of a punitive version of corporate neoliberalism over the past two decades has lumpenized large sectors of the urban and rural poor. Recognizing the links between categories of invisible violence in this globalized context of social inequality explains the demobilization of class-based demands for economic redistribution and populist support for physically repressive forms of governmentality that punish the poor deemed unworthy.

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