Area of inquiry (group 3): conflict practice questions.

Evans-Pritchard described how, among the Nuer in the 1930s, a man who had killed someone from another lineage took refuge with a leopard-skin chief, who then moved between the two groups until cattle were accepted as compensation. The chief's part in that settlement is best described as

• mediation by a ritual specialist who could persuade but not compel either side
• adjudication by a judge whose ruling both lineages were legally obliged to accept
• an administrative duty carried out on behalf of the colonial government of the day
• evidence that no arrangement existed for limiting violence between the lineages

Answer: mediation by a ritual specialist who could persuade but not compel either side

The leopard-skin chief held ritual standing but no coercive power; settlements held because both lineages preferred compensation to a continuing feud. Reading him as a judge imports the centralised legal apparatus that the segmentary model was written to do without.

Scott recorded in a rice-growing village in Kedah, Malaysia, in the late 1970s that poorer households, after combine harvesters cut the demand for their labour, responded with foot-dragging, pilfering, gossip and quiet sabotage rather than with open protest. He treated these acts as

• evidence that the poorer villagers had come to accept the new arrangement as legitimate
• the opening stage of a rebellion that the ethnographer expected to break out shortly
• everyday resistance pursued in forms that avoid direct confrontation
• individual failings unconnected to the change in how the harvest was organised

Answer: everyday resistance pursued in forms that avoid direct confrontation

Scott's argument is that conflict is often waged in forms that leave behind no organisation and no manifesto, precisely because open confrontation is too costly for the weak. Counting only strikes and revolts as conflict makes most of what actually happens invisible.

Farmer traced the illness and early deaths of poor young women in rural Haiti in the 1980s and 1990s to displacement by a hydroelectric dam, to the loss of land and livelihood that followed, and to unequal access to treatment. In his analysis these deaths are best described as an instance of

• medicalisation, the recasting of a social difficulty as a matter for clinical management
• symbolic violence, the acceptance by the dominated of the very categories of those who dominate them
• cultural competence, the fitting of clinical practice to the beliefs that patients hold
• structural violence, harm inflicted by the arrangements that distribute risk and access to care

Answer: structural violence, harm inflicted by the arrangements that distribute risk and access to care

Farmer's category names harm built into political and economic arrangements, which is why it has no perpetrator to name; the other three all locate the problem inside a clinical encounter or inside the sufferer's own outlook. Placing the explanation there conceals the dispossession that put these women at risk in the first place.

In the Mishamo settlement in Tanzania in the 1980s, Malkki recorded a shared narrative in which refugees ordered the events of the violence they had fled into a moral account of who they were and of what ought to follow. She called this narrative a 'mythico-history' in order to stress that

• the accounts were fabrications and so of little use as ethnographic evidence
• memories of violence are stored unchanged and simply recalled when a researcher asks
• the narrators were repeating an official version circulated by the camp administration
• the past was being actively reworked to make sense of the present

Answer: the past was being actively reworked to make sense of the present

Mythico-history does not mean false history: it names a moral reordering of events that made categories of belonging absolute in exile. Treating such narratives as either literal record or invention misses that they are social work performed on the past.

Richards worked in Sierra Leone during the 1990s and argued against accounts of the civil war that presented it as a descent into disorder without purpose. He traced the movement's recruitment among young people excluded from schooling and from the patronage that controlled access to work, and showed that its attacks followed the geography of mining and of roads. His argument is that

• the violence was organised and intelligible in relation to exclusions that predated the war
• the war was caused by a long-standing disposition to violence in the region's culture
• the fighters had no aims of any kind, which is why the conflict continued for so long
• the conflict should be explained entirely by the interventions of neighbouring states and their armies rather than by anything internal to the country

Answer: the violence was organised and intelligible in relation to exclusions that predated the war

The target of the argument is the claim that some wars are simply barbarism, which conveniently excuses the outside world from asking what produced them. Establishing that a movement recruits, plans and targets is the first step in any anthropological account of organised violence.

Hutchinson returned to Nuer country in the 1980s and 1990s, half a century after Evans-Pritchard's fieldwork, during the war in southern Sudan. She recorded that killings carried out with a gun, at a distance and often in the course of the wider war, were increasingly said not to require the rites that had followed a killing with a spear. The significance of this for the anthropology of conflict is that

• the earlier account must have been mistaken about the existence of those rites in the 1930s
• the arrangements that once contained a killing can themselves be dissolved by new weapons and a wider war
• the Nuer had abandoned every element of their earlier social organisation by the time of her fieldwork
• rites of this kind are performed only where a colonial administration is present to insist upon them

Answer: the arrangements that once contained a killing can themselves be dissolved by new weapons and a wider war

The feud described in the 1930s worked because a killing had to be settled before ordinary relations could resume. Once a category of killing is placed outside that requirement, the mechanism that made feud self-limiting no longer applies — which is a general point about how institutions of settlement fail.