How and why notion of ‘violence’ are significant in a society. What aspect or aspects of power involved with violence universal and what can you say about the relationship of violence to history and culture?

‘Violence’, if we go by dictionary meaning it seems to be one of the most misinterpreted words. Dictionary says violence is physical force exerted for the purpose of violating, damaging, or abusing and that is what society at large recognizes violence as. In a broader sense as kelkar (1991:1) has been quoted in ‘domestic violence’ by malvika karlekar the word violence also includes the concept of discrimination, exploitation, upholding of unequal economic and social structure and creation of an atmosphere of terror. The violence consequences of these are not direct and so not as visible, that’s why society as a whole fails to recognize violence as such. To sum up defination of violence

“Violence is produced when an individual or group acts unilaterally, imposing its opinion without allowing space for negotiation; when the power of each side is not equal. This imposed action can affect the bo

The dominant, domineering image of our world are of science and image. Science as accepted as good and violence is accepted as evil. Yet more science, more violence.[Alvares:1988,68 in Nandy ed. ] The society has embraced science with both hands and unknowingly (or knowingly) embraced violence. Science is often thrust on people without their consent. In this view I would like to take the example of a case in USA cited In ‘Violence in everyday life’ by arthure cleinman where we see that how routinely science incorporates violence in our everyday life. The case of the hemophilia patient being converted into an AIDS patient was by sheer failure of the science in predicting the outcome of the experiments that were done on those patients. An analysis of narration given by hemophilia-AIDS patients show that they want to get attention by projecting themselves as innocence thus to separate themselves from the group of those AIDS sufferer who are believed to be so because of unsafe sex and other abuses. Thus they seek to open a moral space separate from the stigmatized space of AIDS.[Kleinman in Das:2000, 237] . This shows the high amount of risk involved with science and above all no one takes the responsibility for this! It can be put that this violence is routinely done by those who are considered to in power or given authority by power on those who are not.

“ Science has come to end the continuum from pure experience to pure abstraction and from organism/nature to machine/science. To the extent modern science seeks to replace the experimental by the a historically abstract and the natural by man made, it has to have an expansionist thrust and it must necessarily deny democratic participation in the production, validation and evaluation of scientific knowledge.”

Now when violence is exercised through one’s personal space it is even more violent form of violence. What had happened in Ireland as depicted in ‘Violence and vision’ by Allen Feldman clearly articulates this. Our body is the measure of violence and so is the space around. That’s why almost all forms of violence are directed towards body. In Ireland the body was not directly used as the measure of violence but the space around it was used with such an enormous extent that there was always a sense of terror prevailing in the environment. Visual surveillances by the means of video camera were always hovering on the heads of irish people. This lead to total collapse of private space and public space into social space. Feldman has compared the camera with the gun point. The government identified the people through camera put them on the notice of wanted and crossed them when they were killed in encounters. The fear of being identified was always there on their mind so they were being subjected to a constant tourcher by those in the power.

Some topics in this essay:
Society Society, Emma Tarlo, Textbooks Srilanka, , Deepak Mehta, Allen Feldman, History Culture, Germany Zews, Conclusion Violence, Violence Violence, modern science, power violence, form violence, violence exercised, perception world, history culture, measure violence space, recognizes violence, ritual khatna, violence complimentary, measure violence, aspects power involved, power violence complimentary, violence history culture,