Reverberations: Violence Across Time and Space

By University of Pennsylvania Press

The turn to the nonhuman in the humanities and social sciences has arguably been mobilized through a washing away of political violence, its histories, and its traces. Reverberations aims to redress this problem by methodologically and conceptually placing political violence and nonhuman entities side by side. The volume generates a new framework for the study of political violence and its protracted aftermath by attending, through innovative ethnographic and historical studies, to its distribution, extension, and endurance across time, space, materialities, and otherworldly dimensions, as well as its embodiment in subjectivities, discourses, and imaginations. Collectively, in the study of political violence, the contributions focus on human agencies and experiences in engagement with nonhuman entities such as objects, land, fields, houses, buildings, treasures, trees, spirits, saints, and prophets. In a variety of contexts, the scholars herein ask the crucial question: What can be learned about political violence by analyzing it in the terrain of relationality between human beings and nonhuman entities? How are things such as objects, spaces, natural phenomena, or spiritual beings entwined in histories of political violence? And vice versa—how are histories of political violence implicated in nonhuman things?

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Dec 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9780812298123

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Reverberations of Violence Across Time and Space

Yael Navaro, Zerrin Özlem Biner, Alice von Bieberstein, and Seda Altuğ

The irreversible damage brought upon the earth by capitalist organization, human-motivated extraction, and allied systems of military destruction have recently come to the fore. New works on the Anthropocene have zeroed in on the destructive human agency involved in the irretrievable transformation of the earth as an ecological system. Works in this emergent environmental turn have begun to illustrate nature’s many responses, made in its own modes and by its own means, to violence born and imposed upon it via human-led modes of destruction (e.g., Gusterson 1996; Masco 2013; Kirksey 2015; Haraway et al. 2015; Lyons 2016). Underscoring the anthropos in the Anthropocene, scholars in this trajectory construe human beings as part and parcel of the ecosystems we inhabit, thereby shifting our attention to the relational responses of nonhuman environments to human-led worldly desecration of catastrophic proportions. It is in the wake of the incorporation of the more-than-human in recent examinations of planetary destruction at a cataclysmic scale (Stengers 2015; De La Cadena 2015; Danowski and Viveiros de Castro 2016) that this volume in the study of violence is situated. In light of such unprecedented transformations of the environment and the philosophical reorientations that accompany them, it is time, we propose, for our understandings of violence to be recast. We do this here through ethnographic and historical studies of violence that address violence’s more-than-human effects, manifestations, traces, and repercussions as distributed indefinitely through this-worldly time and space as much as through a supernatural other world.

Reverberations aims to generate new concepts and methodologies for the study of violence and its protracted aftermath. The innovative ethnographic studies presented here attend to the distribution, extension, and endurance of violence across time, space, materialities, and otherworldly dimensions, as well as its embodiment in subjectivities, discourses, politics, and imaginations. Our intention is to complement the focus, in the study of violence, on human agencies and experiences with an engagement with nonhuman entities such as objects, land, houses, buildings, treasures, trees, spirits, saints, and prophets. We in turn interrogate and critique the displacement or debunking of the human in the posthumanist branch of inquiry known as the new materialisms by engaging them through and through with the study of violence. What, we ask, can be learned about violence by analyzing it in the terrain of relationality between human beings and nonhuman entities?

The turn to the nonhuman in the human sciences has arguably been mobilized through a washing away of violence, its histories, and its traces. As the human being and the notion of the social was dislodged from the pedestal place it held in the humanist philosophies and sociologies to make way through the posthumanist turn for the study of things, so was the concept of agency recast and symmetrically distributed between human and nonhuman entities (Latour 2007). In works inspired by actor-network theory and social studies of science and technology (e.g., Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007; Candea 2010), the focus of analysis was so much tilted toward literally the object of analysis, that anything possibly referring to human responsibility, initiative, intention, decision, action, culpability, or complicity such as pertains in violence and its histories was cast away from the domain of research interest. As things took frontstage in posthumanist anthropology, human actions, politics, power relations, and conflict were pushed offstage. In the present work, we argue that in these attempts to expel the human from the center of anthropological analysis, the reification of things has worked to disembody, de-gender, and whitewash human beings, making it appear as if it were unproblematic to render humans voiceless, discourse-less, and lacking in imagination.¹ This volume aims to redress this problem by methodologically, conceptually, and politically placing political violence and nonhuman entities side by side. How, we ask, are things such as objects, spaces, natural phenomena, or spiritual beings involved in histories of violence? And vice versa—how are human histories of violence implicated in things?

If the new materialisms have glossed over and effaced violence (or rendered it nondescript), studies of violence to date have predominantly assumed an anthropocentric framework inspired by humanist philosophies. In most of its conceptualizations, violence has been associated with the destructive acts of human beings and their sociopolitical extensions, most often adduced as states or other forms of institution or organization. The main question has been the relative agency of human beings in perpetrating violence, whether on an individual or massive scale. In turn, victims of violence have been studied as being located on the receiving end of a person-toperson manifestation unmediated by things. Humanist philosophies of violence also prevail in civil, criminal, and international legal systems. Focused as such on the question of human agency, the act of violence in its exposure of intentionality and the event of violence in its singularity has attracted attention, addressing culpability and responsibility, but therefore limiting the possibility of exploring the endurance of violence in its endless distribution through space and time or its transmogrification and reapparition in unexpected, nonhuman guises. Our conceptual frameworks and vocabularies must be up to the task of capturing the more-than-human/other-than-human forms in which human-inflicted and -embodied violence coagulates, leaves its traces, only to reverberate and manifest again. Sites and locations where the perpetrators of violence continue to be supported by their states, where histories of genocide are denied, and where those who name atrocities and demand justice are criminalized require such a vision of us.

In most historical studies, violence is sited but not specifically conceptualized. This is particularly the case in Middle East studies. One of the many reasons for this neglect in conceptualizing violence is that the history of the Middle East has widely been written as equivalent to a history of violence assumed to be inherent to the society. Critical scholarly work strives to demystify such Orientalist depictions by highlighting nonviolent historical episodes and themes or by expounding on the modern character of violence (McDougall 2005; Makdisi and Silverstein 2006; Makdisi 2019). In turn, a burgeoning critical literature that thinks about violence (Khalili 2013), its underlying causes, manifestations, and mediators, has also developed in the post-1990s. Studies on colonial and postcolonial settings across disciplines such as law, sociology, history, and art have revealed the embeddedness of violence in the making of law and property (Bhandar 2018; Mitchell 2002), infrastructure and logistics (Chua et al. 2018), archives (Fahmy 2017), state, war, and governance (Ismail 2018; Neep 2012), urban space (Fuccaro 2016), and environment and famine (Davis 2001; Davis and Burke 2011).

Inspired by this vein of critical scholarly work, this volume attempts to conceptualize violence by amending the analytical framework through which we consider the relations between persons and things. Placing political violence at the center of our inquiry, we present ethnographic and historical studies that probe its manifestations and reverberations across human and nonhuman fields and planes. Foucault (2012) was arguably the first posthumanist philosopher to analyze violence as it exists beyond the wounds inflicted through torture upon the human body, in spaces, time, institutions, and regulations. This edited volume aims to build on that trajectory by drafting into the study of violence more recent challenges from affect theory, vitalism, and the new materialisms (e.g., Thrift 2007; Anderson and Harrison 2010; Bennett 2010; Coole and Frost 2010).

Our critical assessment of the humanist legacies within studies of violence that focus singularly on human agency and subjectivity is thus matched by our critique of posthumanist approaches which, in distributing subjectivity outside (Latour 2007), have failed to explore embodiment, racialization, and genderedness (Lossin 2020). Here, we propose to reembody analysis out of the shards left behind by the new materialist turn. We do this by keeping the insights of the new materialisms on board, while simultaneously carrying them forward into the study of political violence and its embodied and materially embedded histories. Before moving on to attend to the question of materiality and particularly the notion of remnant as central to the context of this volume, the following section offers a more detailed engagement with and critical reading of posthumanist thought and its treatment of violence. We tease out concretely what we take on board for our project as well as where we critically depart from posthumanist scholarship.

Posthumanist Thought and the Absenting of Political Violence

Posthumanism is broadly associated with a number of projects bound together by a break with what is commonly referred to as the linguistic turn within the social sciences and the humanities.² The preferred sources of inspiration for this stream of scholarship are to be found in cybernetics and cognitive sciences, science and technology studies, actor-network theory, affect theory, Deleuzian assemblage theory, and animal and ecological studies. All of these share a commitment to de-privileging the human and to moving beyond a theoretical framework of social constructivism that insists that the meaning, agency, and value of nature derives primarily from its cultural, social, and ideological inscriptions.

In view of the disciplinary and thematic focus of this volume and its collection of contributions, we take a closer look at two branches of posthumanist theory in particular: the new materialisms, concerned specifically with the nature and status of matter and materiality, and the ontological turn, the most prominent manifestation of posthumanism within anthropology. As elaborated in more detail below, while neither of these strands are born from engagements with political violence, they still present themselves as theoretical ways out of what is imagined as a modernist violence against nature and indigenous others. Violence is here seen to emanate primarily from a modernist nature/culture dualism. But we argue that the posthumanist project very problematically disembeds and absents histories of political violence from its analyses of human/non-human engagements.

Both strands of posthumanism which we would like to critique share a desire to turn away from questions of epistemology, identified with the linguistic turn, toward reality itself (Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman 2011). Importantly, this reality is not imagined as one shaped by political violence. When violence comes into view in these works, it is mainly in the form of an apocalyptic specter, an indiscriminate violence riveting along networks and pushed by ecological, technological, economic, and political processes whose enmeshment is so complex as to render the work of localization practically impossible or futile.

In an effort to rethink and challenge the powerful dualisms of nature and culture, mind and matter, the new materialisms have committed themselves philosophically to monism (univocity of being or single matter) and immanence (space and time as a common block) (Braidotti, in Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012). As a result, the new materialists speak not of inter-action between pre-existing entities, but of intra-action of the social, the biological, and the technological at the heart of becoming. Matter is not thought of in terms of recalcitrance or negativity, but in terms of a productive vitality. Materiality is an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable (Coole and Frost 2010, 9). It is characterized by an active, earthy, not-quite-human capaciousness (Bennett 2010, 3; cf. Braidotti 2013). Matter and materiality are not to be conceived of in terms of substances and stable states, but as forever in the process of becoming. Whether Jane Bennet’s thing-power, Rosi Braidotti’s posthumanist subject, or Donna Haraway’s (2008) species encounters, this becoming is emphatically relational, occurring through cohabitation, collaboration, incorporations, fusions, and splits in a field that features different kinds of bodies, microorganisms, and technologies and is forcefully animated by affect and desire.

The second branch of posthumanist thought we want to focus on is the ontological turn, broadly associated, within anthropology, with a larger set of projects, including indigenous cosmology studies (Viveiros de Castro 1998; Holbraad 2012), multispecies ethnographies (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010), experimental scientific realism (Latour 2005), and phenomenologically inflected accounts of dwelling and material vitality (Ingold 2011). While the theoretical leanings and ethnographic interests of these works have brought into view themes and matters of pertinence that resonate with the contributions to this volume, including the supernatural and the more-than-human, their take on and treatment of violence is markedly different from ours.

Importantly, the ontological turn has been marked by a suspension of statements of universal generalizability in favor of foregrounding concerns with methodology and a concomitant reconfiguration of the relation between knowledge systems and ideas about the nature of reality and being. According to one of its foundational texts (Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007), the point is to refrain from explaining, contextualizing, or interpreting ethnographic material. Ethnographic encounters with the unknown or the apparently senseless should not, they argue, lead to a domestication or incorporation of the ethnographic material within the limits of our conceptual world. Instead, the ontological turn argues for rethinking the relation between concepts and things such that it becomes the things themselves that generate new concepts. As has been noted by Michael Carrithers (in Carrithers et al. 2010) and David Graeber (2015), this move depends on treating language literally and not as something indeterminate. Concepts are taken as constitutive of reality and reality is hence knowable because concepts are reality.

Whether through monism (univocity of being) or idealism (concepts as constitutive of reality), the new materialisms and the ontological turn seek to find a way out of those dualisms considered to be at the heart of the enduring logics of thinking and action aimed at control and mastery, both over nature and over colonial and indigenous others—mind/matter, reality/representation, nature/culture. Leaving behind these dualisms is thus also seen as a way of leaving behind the violence inherent in these regimes of power. The new materialists seek to do so by overcoming the inherent opposition and hierarchy within such dualisms through a new conceptualization of difference, one structured by affirmative relation. In their attachment to the possibility of radical alterity, the ontologists, however, leave a space for dualistic thinking as one among many cosmologies (Descola 2014).

Central to challenging the premise of human exceptionalism has been the project of asking anew the question of agency. Within both strands of posthumanist thought examined here, agency extends beyond that of humans. This might proceed by foregrounding autopoiesis or self-styling observable in vital matter (Braidotti 2013), or by making efficacy and the capacity to make something new appear as the defining criterion for agency (Latour 2005; Bennett 2010). The effect of such a distribution of agency across an ontologically heterogenous field (Bennett 2010, 23) is that politics and the political are likened to ecology, with consequences for analyses of accountability: In a world of distributed agency, a hesitant attitude toward assigning individual blame becomes a presumptive virtue (38).

On the one hand, posthumanist thought is presented as an urgently required intellectual project that points the way out of the entrenched dynamics of mastery and exploitation so as to prevent the reoccurrence of violence. On the other hand, its methodological and analytical tools render violence imperceptible and non-localizable by dispersing it along extensive networks. Revealingly, an important part of the posthumanist critique of the linguistic turn relates to the latter’s alleged privileged concern with death and finitude as part of its humanist legacy. Latour (2010), for instance, criticizes deconstruction as a practice of negativity that privileges distancing from and othering of its object, whereas what is needed in this moment of human self-destruction via climate change is a (more hopeful) practice of reassemblage or compositionism. For Bennett (2010), likewise, the linguistic turn’s focus on human suffering contributed to hardening the distinction between humans and things, while Braidotti (2013) wants to think of life beyond the horizon of death. A concern with finitude (death) as constitutive of subjectivity fuels, according to her, a political ecology of loss, mourning, and melancholia, preventing us from engaging in an urgently needed affirmative relation to the present. Throughout posthumanist thought, death, suffering, and the past are devalued. As Ingold (2011) puts it, life conceived of as vitalist and non-teleological extends beyond death as a constant movement of opening (4). Both the new materialisms and the ontological turn are for this reason not in the business of writing histories of the present. In line with their commitment to the future and the emergent, they instead want to assemble or spell out speculative or autopoietic alternatives, futures that are not tied to the logics, rationalities, or habits that govern the present (cf. Savransky, Wilkie, and Rosengarten 2017; Hage 2015).

While this volume engages with a posthumanist sensitivity toward nonhuman things, with landscapes, infrastructures, the subsoil, matter, and more-than-human beings, we critically distance ourselves from how political violence has been absented particularly within the two strands of posthumanist thought, the new materialisms and the ontological turn, with which we engage. Posthumanist thought proposes to leave behind a concern with suffering and death identified with the linguistic turn. Not to focus on death and suffering, but to lessen its import by dissolving it in a vitalist flow of becoming, is posited as a gesture of intellectual detachment politically and ethically necessary in order to move into a future of possibilities. As a consequence, violence, suffering, and death are rendered invisible; they disappear from the scene of conceptual and empirical engagement.

Living with Remnants of Violence

When locating the imagination behind this volume, it is important to site Turkey and its protracted history of violence for the critical framework we propose in this introduction, which has an empirical and material counterpart in the field.³ We introduce the notion of remnants, a concept that has emerged from our research in Turkey, as a comparative tool for the study of political violence. Remnants refers to the residuality of violence, its afterlife and spillover effects, its material and immaterial traces, and its ability to be inflicted in social and political relations. Our project has been to trace the remnants left behind by communities who were displaced, deported, exterminated, and/or ethnically cleansed by the Ottoman and Turkish states, specifically by reference to the Armenian genocide.⁴ Our objective has been to ethnographically site practices of living with remnants in Turkey’s presentday politics. Such living takes the form of silencing of uncomfortable events such as abductions, looting, and forced conversions, and a resistance to reveal relationships of complicity in violence that deliberately targeted ethnically and/or religiously defined others.

The synonyms for the notion of remnants, as we conceptualize it, are multiple: ruin, remainder, trace, leftover, and residue all capture aspects of the remnants we have sought to site and explore. We thus consider remnants as multiplex phenomena that have enduring effects in the afterlife of the environments associated with the communities who were the targets of annihilitory practices. These are material remains in the form of houses, temples, and other forms of built structure once used and inhabited by communities who were forcefully displaced, ethnically cleansed, and/or exterminated. Entire villages or towns can be considered remnants, as can individual objects of everyday life, such as pieces of furniture or household items left behind after the violence. Immaterial affects associated with past atrocities that take the form of memory or the imagination among people who continue to live in these sites, such as accounts of haunting, may also be considered remnants. Remnants figure likewise in subjective and embodied ways, where contemporary inhabitants of Turkey have begun to claim Armenian, Greek, or Kurdish ancestry, reaching back to grandparents who were forcefully adopted, converted, and assimilated. Remnants also constitute the context for ongoing inter-communitarian conflicts, which sometimes take legal and economic forms, between the stakeholders in Turkey and its diasporas.⁵

Remnants is not a neutral term. Persons who survived the Armenian genocide were often stigmatized as remainders of the sword (in Turkish, kılıç artığı) by people from the majority Muslim communities in Turkey. We expressly misappropriate this term, turning it into a theoretical concept from which we mobilize a critique of the originary violence upon which the Turkish Republic was manifested. Remnants in our rendition, then, takes the attributes of a framing analytical trope from which we propose to question the denial of atrocities and ongoing complicities. In their many varieties and forms, both tangible and intangible, remnants (in our conceptualization) are formative of new social practices and relations. We have ethnographically researched experiences of living with remnants in south and southeastern Turkey, regions that have witnessed massive demographic and social upheavals as a result of violence perpetrated and endorsed by the state. As material, immaterial, or embodied traces from a violent past, remnants can produce affects and imaginaries conducive to the emergence of new forms of politics and subjectivity. Highlighting this potential, we explore the dialectical relation between these remnants and the subjectivities of past and present inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey by studying the ways residual traces are either silenced and erased or surprisingly referenced in daily lives, making unlikely appearances in the present. What has happened to what was left behind? How are such remnants of violence reconfigured in new forms of politics and subjectivity? How might we unearth the spatial, temporal, and material dimensions of violence, and its transmogrification and re-apparition in other guises?

Thinking Through Reverberations of Violence

Reverberations in our title is a thoroughgoing concept we propose for organizing the study of the long-term persistence of violence. The concept allows us to trace violence’s remains and to pinpoint violence’s continuities and endurances. Rather than approaching violence as the expression or reflection of social and political formations, the concept of reverberations pushes us to conceive of violence as a sociopolitical form in itself, one that generates its own effects in continuum (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2003, 5). More than studying violence as just a contingent event with a beginning and an end (that may or may not coincide with a military truce, a regime change, or the end of a court case), we study the long-term resonance and vibration of violence across spatial, temporal, and material fields, highlighting the entanglement of human-made violence in more-than-human, supra-human, or other-than-human entities. On the one hand, this implies being attentive to a violence continuum that includes all expressions of radical social exclusion, dehumanization, depersonalization, pseudospeciation and reification that normalize atrocious behavior and violence toward others (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2003, 21). On the other hand, it implies being attuned to the lingering effects (and affects) of violence (see Navaro-Yashin 2009, 2012; Stewart 2007), including its echo, cyclical recurrence, and sporadic reoccurrence in different guises, shapes, and dimensions.

As Günther Anders (2008) has observed in his studies of Hiroshima and its aftermath, acts of atrocity do not terminate in the effects they inflict upon people, lives, bodies, psyches, land, nature, homes, fields, and other worlds. Just as Hiroshima never ended, so, too, do catastrophes like Chernobyl (Petryna 2003; Alexievich 2006), Katrina (Dawdy 2016; Adams 2013), and Fukushima (Weston 2012) endure. In addressing and emphasizing the endurance of violence, we follow the lead of scholars of the Armenian genocide and the Palestinian Nakba who have studied them as ongoing (Suciyan 2016; Ekmekçioğlu 2016; Salamanca et al. 2012). In this volume, we attend particularly to the aftermath of the Armenian genocide in Turkey as it materializes in state practices of denial and further atrocities committed so as to legitimize the denial (Nichanian 2009; Biner 2010; Erbal and Suciyan 2011; von Bieberstein 2017a).

To say that violence is ongoing is to highlight the way violence leaves wounds that are traceable even in sites where evidence has been quite effectively effaced. It is to argue that violence comes back, that it returns and resumes, or that it haunts politics, materialities, and subjectivities forever. To insist that violence is ongoing is to open the field for the study of violence in the many guises and shapes it takes, both human and nonhuman, in the aftermath of atrocities. To suggest that violence is ongoing is to question the very rubric of aftermath itself. It is to ask whether there really is an after to violence. Inevitably, our volume works with and through a methodological pessimism (Navaro 2020), but one that we hope does not gloss over histories of struggle and resistance by those who have been the targets of political violence.

Through the imaginary of reverberations, we argue that violence can be conceptualized as roaring, rumbling, grumbling, or murmuring, to use sonorous metaphors, or as having residues, remainders, excesses, surpluses, leftovers, or relics, to use spatial or material ones. In all cases we argue that violence has no closure or end, that it instead continues to generate new social forms and relations, and that it endures in other human and nonhuman entities and forms further afeld. The extent and expanse, metamorphosis and transmogrification of violence is what is central to our ethnographic and historical queries.

Arguably the notion of trauma addresses the reverberation of violence in human bodies and subjectivities. Violence inflicted upon the human psyche on an individual or massive scale has formed the primary concern of scholarship on violence, especially in the period following the Holocaust, engendering conceptualizations drawing on theories of subjectivity (Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997; Das et al. 2000; Biehl, Good, and Kleinman 2007). In works inspired by psychoanalysis, trauma became a key concept through which to understand the effects of violence on human beings (e.g., Caruth 1996; Leys 2000). If violence was conceived as embroiled in affects, the affects in these studies were primarily construed as emerging from and exerted upon human psychical interiorities or inner worlds. Concepts theorized in this vein, such as depression, loss, and suffering, have generated distinctive edited volumes in anthropology and allied disciplines, examining the relation between violence and subjectivity (Das et al. 2000; Eng and Kazanjian 2003).

Some of these studies have built upon the notion of structural violence to develop the social suffering school (Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997). Paul Farmer (2004) had insightfully defined structural violence as violence exerted systematically—that is, indirectly—by everyone who belongs to a certain social order (307). Farmer studies the perpetual effects of slavery, colonial racism, and postcolonial indebtedness on the health, lives, and livelihood of contemporary Haitians. Proposing a materialistic approach for the study of the social (308), Farmer charts out a political economy of violence, studied as ingrained in social structures and institutions and therefore as recycled, regurgitated, and repeated in cycles of poverty, deprivation, and destitution. We are reminded here, as well, of Pierre Bourdieu’s (1979) work on symbolic violence. Through this notion, Bourdieu attends to the ideological dimensions of domination based on social class differences, the ways in which materially differentiated access to capital and power is reflected in the cultural representations that organize a society. Centering class in his study of violence, Bourdieu’s work explores violence in the habitus of a society, in its forms of structured life and behavior that reflect ingrained socioeconomic differences and therefore reproduce them.⁶

In turn, more recent studies on violence have begun to explore the effects and affects of violence on nonhuman spaces and materialities in tandem with those inflicted upon human bodies and subjectivities. Scholars in this vein have studied the reach, persistence, extent, and expanse of violence across time, space, and materialities as ruination (Navaro-Yashin 2009, 2012; Dawdy 2010, 2016; Stoler 2013; Gordillo 2014), as well as its mystical or supernatural re-apparition via haunting (Gordon 1997; Kwon 2008; Biner 2020). The relations between people and their personal objects in conditions of war and its aftermath has been studied as well, incorporating spatial and material geographies in the conceptualization of violence (Slyomovicz 1998; Navaro-Yashin 2009, 2012; von Bieberstein 2017b; Biner 2020).

Some scholars in critical international relations and architectural theory have explicitly attempted to create analytical concepts that move beyond the anthropocentrism of violence studies, researching the deliberate destruction of physical and built environments through notions such as urbicide and spacio-cide (Bevan 2006; Coward 2009; Hanafi 2009; Herscher 2010). Emerging from architecture and urban studies, other scholars have expanded the conceptual scope of this scholarship with a focus on the materiality of sovereignty or the architecture of occupation (Segal, Tartakover, and Weizman 2003). This has evolved especially from studies of Israel’s use of infrastructure, technology, and the built environment in its domination over the Palestinian people (Monk 2002; Yacobi 2004; Weizman 2007; Pullan and Baillie 2013). Unlike the new materialisms which depoliticize their object of analysis in order to render it as an object tout court, disembedded from human agency, responsibility, culpability, or embodiment, we follow the lead of scholars who have shown us that spaces and materialities are thoroughly embedded in embodied histories of violence such as those working on the Israeli apartheid and its longue durée, what Palestinian scholars designate as ongoing Nakba (Salamanca et al. 2012; Sa’di and Abu-Lughod 2007).

The ethnographies in this volume account for violence as it seeps into the environment, the atmosphere, the air, nature, as it permeates people’s relations with supernatural beings, with their objects, houses, land, fields, and trees, their built environment, and infrastructures. Despite its diverse mediators, manifestations, and sites, the violence explored in this volume is human-produced violence. Importantly, it is political violence that crisscrosses relations between the human body, the environment, materialities, space, and time. Without locating violence as existing solely within the asymmetrical intersubjective relation between perpetrator and victim (e.g., Mamdani 2001), the ethnographies here trace political violence as it crosses substances, fields, and dimensions, analyzing how it is reconfigured, how it assumes other chemistries, or appears in new molds. In each instance, specific rather than abstract conceptualizations of violence are developed and discussed, springing off from the reverberations metaphor here proposed as a concept for the comparative study of violence.

Parts of the Book

This book is composed of three thematic parts that reflect the conceptual building blocks of our collective query. Each part of the book approaches one aspect in our theorization of violence. The three parts consecutively address spaces of death; violence and the supernatural; and violence against nature/infrastructural violence. These three thematic frameworks push the study of violence further afeld, addressing the appearance of violence in the guise of non-human entities (such as spaces, supernatural beings, natural and built environments) and studying the deployment of violence through them.

Part I: Spaces of Death

Bringing death, the corpse, land, and the underground into a productive engagement with posthumanist literatures, this first part of the book opens a conceptual space for exploring how posthumanist theory could potentially think violence in its historical and political dimensions. Within a particular strand of posthumanist thought, the underground is temporally reimagined in terms of the Anthropocene. Humans have violently affected the earth to the extent that we are now speaking of another geological age. The ground beneath is a fertile conceptual space for re-thinking the place of the human in relation to the nonhuman. But this ground is also a space of death, a site where death occurs (Morris, Chapter 1) and where violence’s ultimate figure—the corpse—fnds its point of destination (von Bieberstein, Chapter 2). Some posthumanist philosophers (Braidotti 2013) have re-conceived of the dead body as a site where the human meets the nonhuman in a moment of indistinction. However, we argue that death also points to people’s enduring struggles and aspirations for recognition and political subjectivity. And just as these struggles have a history, so, too, is the underground historically constituted.

In this part, we explore how land and topography are sites of violence through which various forms of dispossession have occurred and have been occurring. Land in particular is a material commodity, and land-related conflicts carry the burden of the past and are reminders of competing truth regimes that move through different temporalities. Unveiling the discourses and practices on which property regimes are based not only demystifies the state’s legality, but also singles out the role of violence in material processes of dis/possession.

Chapter 1 by Rosalind Morris, entitled Chronicling Deaths Foretold: The Testimony of the Corpse and the Problem of Political Violence in South Africa, explores the contradictory status of political theory in South Africa today. It takes as its point of entry and departure the figure of the corpse—and the corpse as figure—in the representation of life on the de-industrializing periphery of the gold-mining sector. This theory emerges in a particularly complex social field. On the one hand, it orients itself around the explanation of an economic logic that has been described as necropolitical, which is to say, beyond biopolitics, beyond the demand for the functionalization of the living human body. This theorization has exposed the degree to which people, especially poor migrants, are often made to inhabit a space of death. At the same time, however, it has also had to confront the assumption by capital, particularly mining and retail capital, of functions previously assumed by the state; namely, the provision of health care and particularly the distribution of AIDS and tuberculosis-related medications and diagnostics. In this chapter, Morris provides an alternative theorization of the postbiopolitical scene in South Africa. Importantly, her contribution grasps the parsing of life and death in a manner that recognizes the aspiration to recognition and political subjectivity that remains so central to the imagination of those who enter the representational scene primarily via the figure of the corpse.

In Chapter 2, entitled Speculating on Death: Treasure Hunting in Present-Day Moush, Alice von Bieberstein looks at the practice of hunting for what are mostly referred to as Armenian treasures in the area of Eastern Turkey/Northern Kurdistan/Western Armenia and asks how temporality articulates with death and the generation of value in this post-genocide locale, still riveted by violence and hardship in the ongoing war of the Turkish state against the Kurdish political movement. Von Bieberstein’s ethnography leads her to highlight and detail the essentially speculative nature of treasure hunting, involving investment in the here and now in equipment, the acquisition of knowledge, and social relations in the hope of striking it rich in an undetermined future. She traces affinities between this practice in its temporal specificity with other contemporary economic practices, but also with particular strands of posthumanist thought, noting common attachments to a fantasy of immortality and to a future free of the burden and constraints of the present. Importantly, she shows how death becomes dedramatized in bodies of posthumanist thought, while, in the case of treasure hunting, it lurks in the ever-present threat of accidents, madness, loss, and impoverishment. But it is also constitutive of the very possibility of treasure hunting, as it cannot be thought independent of the history of genocide and mass dispossession that has formed the region. Following an excursion in how speculation, the future, and death is thought together in studies on contemporary forms of biopolitical governance, von Bieberstein fnally elaborates how treasure hunting can be conceived as a speculative investment in (historical) death. She argues that together with life insurances that had been held by Armenians in 1915 but were never cashed, treasure hunting marks the material-economic excess that could never be domesticated within a Turkish national economy founded on the mass transfer of non-Muslim wealth.

Chapter 3, by Seda Altuğ, Culture of Dispossession in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic: Land, Ethnoreligious Difference and Violence, studies the multilayeredness of past violence by looking at the ways in which it permeates and saturates the land and topography in Beshiri, one of the districts of contemporary Batman, Turkey. A rural lowland and a medium-sized site in southeast Turkey, Beshiri and its surroundings have experienced some of the most violent faces of the late Ottoman Empire centralization and Turkey’s anti-Kurdish ethnic nation-making processes resulting in the Armenian genocide (1915) and a low-intensity warfare in the region (1925–) under the Turkish Republic. This chapter attempts to explore how violence and dispossession have been re-inscribed and engraved in land and topography and how knowledge of the natural and built environment forms the channel through which communal belonging and exclusion for the dispossessed selves are experienced and produced. In addition, based on Ottoman archives, Altuğ’s chapter presents the simultaneity in the transformation in the meanings attached to land and religion, a dynamic which underlies the interrelatedness between the land issue/agrarian problem and Armenian massacres in the last decade of the nineteenth century. By historically analyzing these stories, imaginaries, and subjectivities produced about the land and its topography, Altuğ explores the ways in which the ruined/ruining land, together with its material components, has turned into a fragmented trace of the past, as well as how it is being economically and symbolically deployed in the making of communal identities and sovereignties.

Part II: Violence and the Supernatural

The relationship between violence and the supernatural has long been studied in anthropological works (Taussig 1980; Ong 1988; Kwon 2008; Khan 2006; Morris 2008). In these works, narratives about supernatural beings such as the jinn, saints, spirits, angels, or demons have been studied as representations that give voice to experiences of violence and loss. In this strain of thought, anthropologists have considered the supernatural that lies beyond the worldly self, as an idiom for interpreting and structuring social reality (Crapanzano 1980, 1992; Mageo and Howard 1996), as a text formed through confrontations with various historical experiences (Lambek 1996), as a language of loss (Taneja 2013, 2017), or as the source for multiple histories that are made not only by human agents but also by invisible forces (Mittermaier 2012). Other social scientists and philosophers have moved these discussions around demonology (Crapanzano 1992) further and have ascribed a more revolutionary and transformative role to ghosts and their acts of haunting. Haunting keeps the event alive and present, engendering sites where history and subjectivity make social life (Gordon 1997, 8) and where insurgent politics and the establishment of responsibility between generations become possible (Derrida 1994). Despite their different takes on the role of the spiritual and the spectral, these explorations of the supernatural have mostly worked from within social constructionist