Why Reconciliation? A Response to Critics

In my essay "Reconciliation after Ethnic Cleansing" (Public Culture 14 [spring 2002]: 281-304), I seek to identify processes that might enable departures from violent conflicts. How is it possible to reconcile—to render no longer opposed—in the aftermath of extreme violence, such as an ethnic cleansing? I elaborate two conditions, both centering around redress of loss, that must be confronted to break most cycles of contemporary ethnic and racial violence: (1) reproduction and relations of affinity and (2) retribution. All four commentators address the latter issue while avoiding the first. Why this silence about global ideologies of reproduction?

This omission is all the more striking given how pervasive such tactics are in the very examples cited by the respondents themselves. In nearly all of the empirical cases mentioned—in particular, South Africa, Israel, Bosnia, Kosovo, Lebanon, and Northern Ireland—violence operates through the use of marital and reproductive strategies that have long been subjects of anthropological investigation. Studies critical of these strategies tend to talk technically of "demographic imbalances" or "population control," without naming or addressing the ideologies of reproduction and marital form that are responses to the human face of loss. Marriage and reproduction are indeed human projects, but, as forms of human affiliation, neither can be deemed more necessary or natural than male domination, the oppression of women, or child exploitation—all, at one time or another, assumed to be universal.

The relation of reproduction to both the specific character of human violence and contemporary majoritarian politics deserves more attention. Whereas other animals change their reproductive patterns only after they have been sterilized, humans have more options. Alternatives to reproductive ideologies tend to revolve around less ideological and less coercive relations of care: with the elderly or neighbors not related by blood or adoption, as well as practices of gay, interethnic, intersectarian, and binational affinity. But they remain largely anecdotal because they are not systematically documented in fieldwork.

Laura Nader, Steven Sampson, and Richard Wilson all propose "coexistence" as a model of thinking about nonviolence. Nader elaborates this with reference to three possible topoi: an "ethnic division of labor," "mutual tolerance" of religious traditions, and "respect [for] difference." I am skeptical about the present utility of the first two, even though they may have been efficacious in other times and places. Ethnicity, along with its radicalized and biologized form, race, has had a bad track record. What happens, indeed, when there is no longer a sense, as Nader writes, that "everybody needs others for the requirements of daily living"? Predictable violence. Institutionalized religions would be the last place I would turn for imagining departures from violence. Religious practice is usually about the authority of convention, prescription, rule, creating the sacred and the community; it is not about freedom or the trust and accountability that can be achieved in this world. I am in agreement with Nader only in relation to her third point, regarding the importance of respect for difference.

We might ask, however, what kinds of cultural ideologies nurture this respect? The place in which such ideas originate is largely irrelevant, since ideologies are not pure or stable; indeed they wax, wane, and travel. Thus I reject the idea that things arguably "Western" in origin, such as the rule of law and representative democracy, are somehow still, in the twenty-first century, foreign to the non-West. Nader, for instance, mentions Israel as a "Western beachhead in the Middle East." But the problem in contemporary Israel is not its Westernness, but rather the desire of a powerful religious minority to realize a pre-Western model: a return to Biblical visions of a "chosen people who dwell alone," when republican forms of governance, a world of nation-states, and the Palestinians as such—all symbolic forms inspired by the West—did not exist. In a similar vein, Sampson refers to reconciliation as a "peculiarly Western concept." But reconciliation as a process of rendering an essential antagonism "no longer opposed" can be found...