A picture, they say, is worth of thousand words; in the case of Aisha’s photograph, it may be worth ninety thousand embarrassing and incriminating leaked documents.

Today we have the dramatic story of Aisha and the grotesque punishment she was subjected to. I have started to read blogs and forums which immediately accuse the ever-evil Islamic Shari’a for such mutilations. Little do these self-appointed commentators know but for the great majority of the the non-Pashtun Muslims, Aisha’s mutilated face is not the mark of law but of intolerable violence and a certain punishable crime. Indeed, the disfigurement of Aisha is the result of a radical implementation and even distortion of the Pashtunwali tribal law.

It is interesting to observe that this kind of disfigurement of women, such as the cutting off of nose and ears, is not limited to the Pashtun and can also be found in other regions of the world, often among nomadic tribes – for instance, some Apache tribes used  to cut off the noses of unfaithful married women. Beyond a comparative interest in the human behavior of indulging in such horrific cultural acts, the suffering and disfigurement of Aisha should be strongly condemned as immoral and unethical. The good news is that Aisha may have a chance to have her face reconstructed by the best surgeons in the US.

Yet I wish to discuss another, less visible, aspect of the shocking Time cover. Does the cover (and by extension the mass media), indirectly, by censoring the pictures of hundreds of thousands of civilian victims of the western war machine in favor of images of the Taliban’s brutality, argue for the existence of an ‘ethical’ suffering? Aisha’s injuries are surely horrific, but what about the children and innocent victims of Western military technology? What about their faces, limbs, skin, eyes, mouths, and mutilated bodies? What about Farzana, 8 months, or Guljuma, 10 years old, who now sit, unknown to the western public, in a mud hut inside a crowded refugee camp?

Indeed, the suffering Afghans appear to be ‘newsworthy’ and politically useful only when they bear the marks of their own ‘barbaric culture’, but their plight is carefully censored when the barbarism is the result of the civilizers and their violent salvation through war.

In the West, anthropologically, suffering from acts of war or terrorism (terms which, in today’s Afghanistan, are often used to include national resistance, secular insurgency and territorial disputes) seems to be classified into two distinct categories. On the one hand, the western-induced suffering is perceived as ‘ethnical’ and ‘lawful’, superior and enlightened, an act of ‘love’, a bitter medicine for the salvation of the ‘ignorant’ (understood as ‘not knowing’), the ‘sinner’ through the redemption of blood, and as death with a view to societal resurrection and rebirth. On the other hand, however, there is a perception of a need for punishment of the barbaric actions of the ignorant, of the infliction of evil for the evil committed by people who are somehow disgusting for rejecting the ‘Truth’.

That is, violence and suffering are not condemned for the effect they have on human beings, but are condemned and rejected only if they are not the ‘right’ violence, ‘salvific’ in nature and ‘just’ in cause – in other words, a Transubstantiational violence. Hence, destruction and suffering, in this case, is a part of redemption, while the Taliban’s violence is merely destructive.

I am sure that many readers have noticed the religious terminology in the paragraph above that refers mainly to Christian eschatology. Yet, as Talal Asad has rightly observed:

“When I refer here to religious reasons, I have in mind the complex genealogy that connects contemporary sensibilities about organized collective killings and the value of humanity with the Christian culture of death and love, a genealogy  that I think needs to be properly explored. For what needs to be identified here is not simply the willingness to die or kill but what one makes of death–one’s own and that of others.”  (Talal Asad, 2007: 95)

It is within this ‘genealogy’ of the, particularly American, discourse of war which we can find such a dichotomy between inducing ‘ethical’ suffering and fighting unethical ‘barbarism’. Suffering is not understood in human terms, but rather in cultural, symbolic dimensions. It is for this reason, if I have to provide my anthropological analysis, that Aisha’s face and ordeal matter more than Farzana’s hand or Guljuma’s butchered body, or the plight of hundreds of thousands of other Afghan civilians, many of whom will never receive specialized medical assistance in luxurious private American clinics and must instead make do with emergency war-camps.

© Gabriele Marranci

DS: i’ve heard you say somewhere that part of the problem with MacIntyre’s conception of tradition is that he doesn’t pay sufficient attention to the body and to the literally embodied character of tradition; that bodies, so to speak, bear traditions. And this is connected, isn’t it, with your uses of the concept of habitus. So that habitus and tradition are for you interconnected concepts.

TA: Yes. But i must say that he was for me the first philosopher who made me aware that one could think productively about tradition. What i liked about MacIntyre’s conception of a tradition is that he points to the possibility of its being a space of different interpretations, a space of argument. The old idea that tradition means nonargument and modernity means argument really just won’t do any longer. But what i find disappointing in MacIntyre is, as you said, his leaving out the body. This is not a matter of simply leaving out a dimension that is very real in people’s lives and that enables them to be carriers of a tradition. It raises questions about the autonomy of a space for argument. Because argument is itself interwoven with the body in its entirety, it always invokes historical bodies, bodies placed within particular traditions, with their potentialities of feeling, of receptivity, and of suspicion. So much of this is part of everybody’s experience of what argument is about. We know it’s not a matter simply of “the mind.” Argument is always rooted in temporal processes, it’s always embodied. That’s why persuasion and agreement can be so difficult. Thinking about the notion of tradition meant for me a different opening, a more promising one.

DS: And habitus is the concept that allows you to bring together body-heart-mind.

TA: Yes, that’s right. And that’s without needing to pursue the question of how structures of domination are reproduced–something Bourdieu is concerned with when he deploys the notion of habitus. I employ habitus to refer to the predisposition of the body, to its traditional sensibilities. There’s a crucial difference between habit as the disposition the body acquires through repetition and inertia, through the generally unconscious and uncontrollable circuits of energy, emotion, feeling, and habitus, that aspect of a tradition in which specific virtues are defined and the attempt is made to cultivate and enact them. MacIntyre doesn’t seem to me to appreciate adequately how closely this latter aspect of tradition depends on corporeality.

- David Scott, “The Trouble with Thinking: An Interview with Talal Asad” in Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors, eds. Charles Hirschkind and David Scott (Stanford University Press, 2006), 243-303 at 288-289.

Throughout the course of this blog, “imperialism” and “colonialism” have frequently been used interchangeably, especially with reference to anthropology. I have written about “re-imperializing” anthropology, as I have about “re-colonization,” and “decolonizing anthropology.” Aside from anthropology, dealing with the two phenomena can lead to choices of when to use one term and when to use the other: the choice of terms can depend on the historical setting that one has in mind (whether writing about actual colonies, or the exertion of force at a distance); the ultimate intentions of the given forms of intervention (the effective inhabiting of another society and efforts to remake it to suit the desires of the intervening power, or, the effort to exert and monopolize power in a given space); or the proximity of the actors (colonialism usually being an “up close and personal” kind of relationship). Abstracting these ideas to the epistemic and methodological level (“methodological colonialism”) would seem to create even greater ambiguity around the choice of terms. It also seems, at first glance, that “imperial anthropology,” “imperialist anthropology,” and “anthropological imperialism” are not all the same “thing” necessarily. Before proceeding to the next in this series of lectures/essays, that will situate the institutionalization of anthropology within expanded and renewed Euro-American imperialism in the late 19^th century, it seems necessary to spend some time on the question of terminology.

One of the persistent themes in this essay will be the fact that colonialism/imperialism should not be treated as solely academic concepts to be defined and circumscribed by analysts (usually within imperial institutions that we call “universities”), or to see colonialism as solely something that is done to others. The colonized’s “decolonization” (at best, a work in progress), will always only be a truncated “achievement” as long as the colonizers have not “decolonialized” themselves as well (I use these two different terms to refer to distinct sides of anti-colonialism).

In this piece I refer primarily to two items (there are many more, but these are the simpler and more condensed pieces I use for teaching purposes). One is Ronald J. Horvath’s “A definition of colonialism” (Current Anthropology, 13 (1), Feb. 1972: 45-57) – the first article about colonialism to ever be published by that journal, and even at that late stage we did not have an article by an anthropologist as such (Horvath was a professor of geography). The second is from a large production, that opens with a decent review of the histories and theories of colonialism, imperialism, neocolonialism, and postcolonialism. That is  Robert J.C. Young’s Postcolonialism: An historical introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).

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Colonialism

Young begins by sounding very concerned about the careless use of distinct concepts such as colonialism and imperialism, as if they were simply synonyms:

The use of the term ‘postcolonial’ rather than ‘post-imperial’ suggests that a de facto distinction is being made between the two, yet a characteristic of postcolonial writing is that the terms ‘colonial’ and ‘imperial’ are often lumped together, as if they were synonymous terms. This totalizing tendency is also evident in the way that colonialism and imperialism are themselves treated as if they were homogeneous practices. Although much emphasis is placed on the specific particularity of different colonized cultures, this tends to be accompanied by comparatively little historical work on the diversity of colonialism and imperialism, which were nothing if not heterogeneous, often contradictory, practices. (Young, 2001, p. 15)

There is also basic confusion about if or when the terms, colonialism and imperialism, should be separated from one other: colonies constitute an empire, but imperialism does not necessarily require colonies. That the terms are often used synonymously can also be seen in the work of Edward Said. Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre also tended to speak of colonialism as a single formation, a single system (Young, 2001, p. 18). Quoting Said, Young reminds us that his conception of colonialism was centered on a fundamentally geographical act of violence employed against indigenous peoples and their connections to the land.

On the other hand, Young offers some useful ideas about why the terms have been understood by some as referring to distinctly different phenomena:

The term ‘empire’ has been widely used for many centuries without, however, necessarily signifying ‘imperialism’. Here a basic difference emerges between an empire that was bureaucratically controlled by a government from the centre, and which was developed for ideological as well as financial reasons, a structure that can be called imperialism, and an empire that was developed for settlement by individual communities or for commercial purposes by a trading company, a structure that can be called colonial. Colonization was pragmatic and until the nineteenth century generally developed locally in a haphazard way (for example, the occupation of islands in the West Indies), while imperialism was typically driven by ideology from the metropolitan centre and concerned with the assertion and expansion of state power (for example, the French invasion of Algeria). Colonialism functioned as an activity on the periphery, economically driven; from the home government’s perspective, it was at times hard to control. Imperialism on the other hand, operated from the centre as a policy of state, driven by the grandiose projects of power. Thus while imperialism is susceptible to analysis as a concept (which is not to say that there were not different concepts of imperialism), colonialism needs to be analysed primarily as a practice: hence the difficulty of generalizing about it. (Young, 2001, pp. 16-17)

As many others observed previously, Young also recognizes that if we restrict discussion to colonialism alone, then one has to be mindful that historically there has been immense diversity in colonial forms. There have been colonies of settlement (for example, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the U.S.); colonies of exploitation (where no large European settlement was the aim, as much as the extraction and export of local resources); and various dominant colony-like enclaves, such as military bases on islands, in harbours or other strategic points, that sometimes forged commercial relations with a nearby mainland. There is the added fact that colonies could allow for limited forms of local rule, while in other cases they were administered directly from the colonial metropole (sometimes the very same colonial power could use both strategies, at different times). Some colonies were governed through native intermediaries, while others implanted officials from the “mother country.” Some colonial powers tried to effect cultural assimilation, while others did not. Some stationed their armies in the colonies, and others instead preferred to rely more on locally recruited armies. Thus, as Young argues, a “general theory” of colonialism is more than just a challenge. Young prefers to see “imperialism” as referring to a “global political system,” but that too begs the question as to why he would leave out the economic dimension, and whether there has not also been a diversity of global political systems.

The very interesting question that Young raises (2001, pp. 18-19), is whether this discussion in the end boils down to (a) a rather sterile and abstract academic discussion, and, (b) one that is meaningful mostly from the perspective of the colonizers themselves:

the apparent uniformity or diversity of colonialism depends very largely on your own subject position, as colonizing or colonized subject. From the position of the ruling colonial power, its administrators, and from the perspective of historians of British colonial history such as John MacKenzie, Britain’s different colonies do indeed look, and were, different in the ways in which they were acquired and administered….From the point of view of the indigenous people who lived their lives as colonial subjects, however, such distinctions have always seemed rather more academic. As far as they were concerned, such colonial subjects lived under the imposition of British rule, a view not discouraged by the imperial ideology of Pax Britannica. Anti-colonial practices of cultural resistance to the dominant ideology of imperialism encouraged the critical analysis of common forms of representation and the processes of knowledge-formation. At another level, the links established between Irish, South African and Indian nationalists at the end of the nineteenth century were developed to share knowledge of anti-colonial techniques and strategies. An attack on a police station in Ireland functioned in a very similar way, and with very similar objectives, to an attack on a British barracks in India. The differences in colonial history, in administrative practices, or constitutional status…made for very little difference as far as anti-colonial revolutionary strategies were concerned. From the point of view of anti-colonial political activists, the British Empire looked much the same everywhere….Postcolonial critique tends to take the same point of view because it identifies with the subject position of anti-colonial activists, not because of its ignorance of the infinite variety of colonial history from the perspective of the colonizers.

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Imperialism

Imperialism as a term became current in English only in the second half of the nineteenth century (Young, 2001, p. 26, drawing on Hobsbawm). As Young explains, while originally referring to direct conquest and occupation (nation-states develop empires by making colonies, becoming imperial states whose action over others is imperialist), thanks to Marxism the concept usually became one that referred to a general system of economic domination, with or without direct political domination (i.e., there could be imperialism without colonies). Why “post-colonialism” ultimately makes sense, Young suggests, is that those subjected to it have most often used the term colonialism to refer to previous systems of domination they suffered under the British and French, for example, while using the term imperialism to refer to American domination – essentially a distinction between “old” imperialism and “new”. As Young says, “history has not yet arrived at the post-imperial era” (Young, 2001, p. 27).

Imperialism became a target of anti-colonial struggle, and understood as a general concept of domination, probably with the advent of the Communist International of 1919 (see: archive of the Communist International, 1919-1943; Comintern archives; League Against Imperialism). Reverting to his position as an analyst, Young situates imperialism in a way that it pertains to rivalry between expansionist states, seeking to enhance national prestige and domestic political and social stability, and finding outlets for expanded capitalist production and consumption (Young, 2001, pp. 30-33).

While saying that imperialism is never static, he does seem to find comfort in trait-listing imperialism, which is fine for historical sketches that provide broad characteristics of imperialism at different times, but not so useful for the purposes of contemporary critique. In fact, it can be very counterproductive. The problem, apparently not within the scope of Young’s overview, is that of imperialism denial, which often resorts to ironically static and simplistically empirical historicist analogies. If any traits between “alleged” imperialism today do not square with those of other powers of yesterday, some imperialism deniers seize this as “evidence” that today’s imperialism is not imperialism at all, and that only sinister “biased” characters would insist on using the label. Curiously, given that imperialism denial is today a primarily American phenomenon, few Americans who deny imperialism on the grounds of historicism would be willing to perform the same mental operations when it comes to their own nation: since America of a century ago is little or nothing like America today, then there is no America today. Moreover, denying that America was ever imperialist, is denying that America was ever America.

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Neo-colonialism

Neo-colonialism has come to refer to a system of formal political independence, with direct economic control exercised by foreign power. If we were meant to have clear definitional boundaries between “colonialism” and “imperialism,” the concept neo-colonialism would seem to merge the two: “Neo-colonialism is…the worst form of imperialism. For those who practise it, it means power without responsibility and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress (Kwame Nkrumah, 1965, p xi)” (quoted in Young, 2001, p. 44). The first and most prominent theorist of neo-colonialism was not a Western academic, but rather the Ghanaian independence leader, Kwame Nkrumah. Nkrumah saw neo-colonialism as the American stage of colonialism, of an empire without formal colonies (Young, 2001, p. 46).

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Anthropological Correlates of Imperialist Theories?

Regarding imperialist theories of indigenous cultures, Young’s synthesis is one of the more useful ones. On the one hand, the French mission civilisatrice “assumed the fundamental equality of all human beings, their common humanity as part of a single species, and considered that however ‘natural’ or ‘backward’ their state, all native peoples could immediately benefit from the uniform imposition of French culture in its most advanced contemporary manifestation” (Young, 2001, p. 32). This shares the identical assumptions of cultural evolutionism and more recent international development theory. It is also an unstated premise of the “spreading democracy” thesis of American imperialism today. To the upholders of the idea of essential sameness, critics appear to be denying the humanity of humans: all humans want freedom, so the story goes, and if you don’t believe that Iranians “deserve democracy,” and want to live like us, then you are denying their essential humanity. If you do not want “democracy” for Iranians, then it is probably because you think “they aren’t good enough” to have it. As Young argues, the “very assumption [of equality] meant that the French model had the least respect and sympathy for the culture, language and institutions of the people being colonized – it saw difference, and sought to make it the same – what might be called the paradox of ethnocentric egalitarianism” (Young, 2001, p. 32).

The irony is that the alternative was no less imperialist. British imperialism from the mid-1800s onwards assumed a radical, racially-based difference between the British and their subjects. Assimilation, strictly speaking, would be impossible: assimilating Africans would make as much sense as putting suits on chimps, or trying to teach table manners to dogs. As Young explains, “the British system of relative non-interference with local cultures, which today appears more liberal in spirit, was in fact also based on the racist assumption that the native was incapable of education up to the level of the European – and therefore by implication required perpetual colonial rule. Association neatly offered the possibility of autonomy (for some), while at the same time incorporating a notion of hierarchy for the supposedly less-capable races” (Young, 2001, p. 33). Today, in fact, it might appear less liberal, with the revival if liberal interventionism under the banner of the “responsibility to protect.”

Both forms of imperialism are arguably variations of liberalism. One, ethnocentric egalitarianism, promises to open the doors of empire to all subjects willing (or not) to undergo cultural transformation, which serves to spread empire into the hearts and minds of the dominated. The dominated are thus “liberated” – liberated from the “burden” of being themselves, of being different. The other variant, a racist “respect” for difference, substitutes tolerance for equality. Both equality with the other, and, tolerance of the other, are vaunted as lofty and noble liberal values. Both are equally imperialist. One understates difference, the other overstates it. Both, arguably, recognize difference only to the extent and in the manner that suits the particular goals of power.

Anthropology seems to have had its own “Dual Mandate” of “protection” and “exploitation” with regards to the peoples at the focus of its mission as a university discipline (when anthropology, by definition, was that which you never did at home). Protection came in the form of salvage ethnography, cultural resource management, and some forms of advocacy. Exploitation: by recruiting natives to transcribe their cultures, for academic projects, and by lifting cultural artifacts and even human remains and amassing them in academic institutions. This is not to mention various types of “applied anthropology,” in service of corporations, development, international lending agencies, and military and intelligence communities.

Ethnographic Colonialism, Anthropological Imperialism, and Incorporationism

Back to the terminological problem underscored at the very start. It turns out that even some imperialists could be anti-colonialist, because maintaining colonies was expensive and inefficient where economic dominance and hegemonic political power were concerned. This poses a problem for us then, in our choice of terms: it seems one could be in favour of “decolonizing” anthropology while defending anthropological imperialism (hypothetically). That is meaningful only if we intend to use these terms in order to associate anthropology with (a) certain academic activities that resemble colonialism and imperialism on an intellectual level, and/or, (b) actual policies and practices of states and corporations.

Colonialism may be better coupled specifically with ethnography, in analytical terms, since both require physical presence, in person, and a form of settling within someone else’s home – entering their territory, and setting up camp. This is what we might call “ethnographic colonialism” and it seems to make more sense than calling anthropology colonial, unless one is focusing on anthropologists working in colonial settings. Otherwise, it would seem to be better to couple anthropology as a broad endeavor, with another equally broad endeavor, imperialism. “Anthropological imperialism” could then refer to institutionalized, professionalized, theoretical practice, where anthropologists speak about what is humanity, “on behalf of” all of humanity.

Is there an “anthropological neo-colonialism”? One could argue, as we will see later on, that various national anthropologies, instituted in (few) universities in Africa and Asia following formal political decolonization, were in fact neo-colonial in their political positioning with respect to the state and its nation-building mission, and with respect to its content which was focused on national development.

Ultimately, however, the plethora of concepts (empire, imperial, imperialist, colonial, colonialist, neo-colonial, etc.) can be see as variations, fluctuating in time and space, of a much broader phenomenon that encompasses them all, that renders them means toward and end. That end would be what I refer to as incorporationism. Neither imperialism nor colonialism make sense by themselves, until one relates them to their fundamental premises, ideals, and goals: to make use of others by various means of exploitation, drafting others into one’s sphere in order to extract from them whatever is valued.

The purpose here has been to signal the understandable confusion that can arise in discussing the relationship between anthropology and empire, at the very least on a conceptual level – that is, if we omit the discussions to follow, which should deepen this discussion much further.

▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬

* The phrase, “decolonizing anthropology,” when entered as a search term (retaining the enclosing quotes), produces 3,530 results in Google, and 230 citations in Google Scholar. For a phrase that we are told is prominent in anthropology, or that refers to an important concern that has been the subject of much writing, one will note two things: (a) in the first set of results, my own web pages dominate the top listings, with the others pertaining to Faye Harrison’s edited collection; and, (b) that both Harrison’s volume is out of print.

Words cannot even describe how sick this is. What is going on? What bizarre rip in the fabric of the moral universe occurs over Tel Aviv when the Palestinians are involved? 

Another soldier, describing how a mother and her children were shot dead by a sniper after they turned the wrong way out of a house, says the “atmosphere” among troops was that the lives of Palestinians were “very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers”.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israels-dirty-secrets-in-gaza-1649527.html

The New York Times tried to have a balanced debate on this issue. Unfortunately, the four panelists they picked were all Israeli apologists. The commentators set them straight, however. Check it out here:

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/civilians-caught-in-urban-combat/

 ”I don’t know whether she was suspicious, not suspicious, I don’t know her story… I do know that my officer sent people to the roof in order to take her out… It was cold-blooded murder.”

http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2009/03/all-that-you-have-done-to-our-people-is_19.html

It reminded me of a passage from Talal Asad’s excellent book On Suicide Bombing. He accuses the mainstream media and “scholarly” discourse of at worst, an attempt to reduce the complex history of resistance struggles and civil wars to the trope of the morally bankrupt savage against the liberal, humane West. ”Liberalism too has it’s own culture of death.” (50) He single-handedly dismantles the “civilized vs. uncivilized” argument used by America and Israel to justify their massacres of innocent civilians in Gaza, Afghanistan, Iraq. Unfortunately, regarding the material above: “Guilt is no bar to the repetition of transgression.” (53) How many times have the same arguments been twisted, played out in a bizarre dance of memory/amnesia? 

On a personal note: “I felt more grown up earlier in life, more self determining, more autonomous, and it was because I had not yet been beaten down.”

http://profacero.wordpress.com/2009/03/17/the-r-post/

What is anthropology?

Talal Asad discusses the way anthropology is a relatively new discipline, and that it has constantly been undergoing change. He writes:

“When Evans-Pritchard published his well-known Introduction to Social Anthropology in 1951, it seemed reasonably clear what the subject was about. “The social anthropologist”, he explained, “studies primitive societies directly, living among them for months or years, whereas sociological research is usually from documents and largely statistical. The social anthropologist studies societies as wholes – he studies their oecologies, their economics, their legal and political institutions, their family and kinship organizations, their religions, their technologies, their arts, etc. as parts of general social systems.” The doctrines and approaches that went by the name of functionalism thus gave social anthropology an assured and coherent style.

Today by contrast even this coherence of style is absent. The anthropologist is now someone who studies societies both ‘simple’ and ‘complex’; resorts to participant observation, statistical techniques, historical archives and other literary sources; finds himself intellectually closer to economists or political scientists or psycho-analysts or structural linguistics or animal behaviorists than he does to other anthropologists.”   (Asad 1973:10)

A straight answer? Not really, but it gives us a good idea what kind of specialization has occurred in the discipline. The differences in interests and methods create a confusing picture for future collaboration and ‘disciplinaryness’.

Many many more Asad quotes to come in the next few weeks… As well as more on how anthropology is taking what it’s learned online, aka, how this research is an “anthropology” project.

]]> http://ksangmin.wordpress.com/2008/10/19/talal-asad-on-suicide-bombing/ Mon, 20 Oct 2008 01:11:00 +0000 ksangmin http://ksangmin.wordpress.com/2008/10/19/talal-asad-on-suicide-bombing/

Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing, New York: Columbia UP, 2007.

Talal Asad’s short but powerful book, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia UP, 2007) is not a detailed description or an ethnographic storytelling about suicide bombers, but a series of philosophical (ethical and aesthetic) questions when we encounter the killing of human beings by terrorism (especially Islamic suicide bombing) or the war through the mass media in our everyday lives: What is difference between war and terrorism, the act of war and the terrorist act? What is the motivation of suicide terrorist? Why suicide terrorism brings about horror to people? Engaging with those questions, he traces the history of the discourses (i.e. he seems to apply the method of genealogy, in the sense that Nietzsche and Foucault used) and examines how other scholars answer to them.

As an anthropologist, Asad has lived a unique life. According to Wikipedia, he is “a son of Muhammad Asad, Jewish convert to Islam and author of several books on Islam” and “born in Saudi Arabia and brought up in Pakistan, attended a missionary boarding school where he was one of only a few Muslims among a majority of Christians.” His personal experience as such might be the foundation of this book in dealing with the aforementioned questions. However, his strength through this book lies not in his religious and regional background (Muslim origin) but his balanced and logical reasoning on the problems as well as his strict uses of the terms and the concepts. Since what he is dealing with could be a provocative and dangerous thing (taboo?) especially in this time and at this place, he is warning against a misleading of the book: this book is not intending to justify the terrorist atrocities (4).

The first chapter is a discussion about the terrorism, in particular, the difference between just war and terrorism. While he is asking why the term “terrorism” is “so prominent today when talking about certain kinds of contemporary violence” (8), he criticizes the Huntingtonian view of “clash of civilizations,” since it “ignores a rich history of mutual borrowings and continuous interactions among Christians, Jews, and Muslims” (10). When we wan to distinguish between terrorism and just war, the matters are more complicated than are commonly supposed. While refuting Michael Walzer’s justification that “war is legal activity when it fulfils certain conditions” and his affirmation that international law “legitimizes certain types of violence and stigmatizes others” (16), Asad finds that the modern “war is a legally sanctioned concept, and the hateful killing perpetrated by unlicensed militants is not” (25). Thus, if the act of killing is legally sanctioned by the state, the only power which can punish and commit violence against civilians, it could be a just act of war. Furthermore, this justification is based on the assumption that “civilized nation,” democratic liberalism of the West, has the moral superiority over “uncivilized” opponents, terrorists. So Asad concludes the first chapter saying “it is not cruelty that matters in the distinction between terrorists and armies at war, still less the threat each poses entire ways of life, but their civilization status. What is really at stake is not a clash of civilization… but the fight of civilization against the uncivilized” (37-8).

In the second chapter, Asad looks into other theorists explaining the motives suicide attackers while asking if there is “a crucial difference between someone who kills in order to die and someone who dies in order to kill” (40). Although there are several explanations of it in terms of religion (sacrifice), psychoanalysis (death wish), and the like, he seems to focus on the relationship between violent politics and liberalism. According to Asad, “a conception of politics as the pursuit of war by other means…was born in that epoch [Renaissance], as the state gradually acquired exclusive power to wage war externally and to impose punishments internally” and “that violence…underlies liberal doctrine and practice today” (59). Following his reasoning, we come to the conclusion that “suicide bomber belongs in an important sense to a modern Western tradition of armed conflict for the defense of a free political community” (63).

Instead of asking the motive of suicide bombers, however, “why do people in the West react to verbal and visual representations of suicide bombing with professions of horror?” is the main question of the third chapter of this book. Why suicide bombing bring about horror, “a state of being that is felt” (68)? Asad seems to uncover the contradictory aspect of Western culture as well as horror through the historical and anthropological examinations (genealogical method). Following Mary Douglas, Georges Bataille, and several visual representations (photographs and films), he seems to find out that how horror is contradictory (ecstatic and painful) feeling and how the narrative of sacrifice and redemption, which can be traced from Christ’s indirect suicide, has been embedded in modern liberal democracies and its humanist and secularist ideology. Thus, “ironically, the idea of sacrificing individual life for the sake of national immortality in war as in peace has become quite familiar” (87-8).

Different from the title and the first impression of the book, this book is not about suicide bombing and terrorism. This book is a bitter critique of modern Western nations’ project of subject-body making (technologies of the self) by having a monopoly on violence and punishment (law) and by mobilizing their citizens into the violence against others. In a word, it is a critique of our modern subjectivity and ideology of liberal democracy which in itself cannot be distinguished from suicide terrorism, in that it “seeks to found or to defend a free political community with its own law” (92). 

“The violence at the heart of liberal political doctrine makes this clear: the right to self-defense eventually calls for a project of universal redemption. Another way of putting this is to say that some humans have to be treated violently in order that humanity can be redeemed.”

Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) 62-63.

And Michael has posted an interesting reflection from Talal Asad on why we in the West find suicide bombing horrific.

Also, Chomsky fans will be keen to know that three new Chomsky articles and two new interviews have recently been posted:

• The Most Wanted List, International Terrorism. Tom Dispatch. February 26, 2008.
• “Good News,” Iraq and Beyond. ZNet. February 16, 2008.
• Where’s the Iraqi voice?. Khaleej Times. February 1, 2008.
• Why is Iraq Missing from 2008 Presidential Race?. With Amy Goodman. February 26, 2008.
• The US-Kurdish Relations and the Kurdish Question in Iraq. With Peshawa Abdulkhaliq Muhammed. February 17, 2008.