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  • Introduction Control and excess:Histories of violence in Africa
  • Florence Bernault (bio) and Jan-Georg Deutsch (bio)

Violence is a murky issue to research and to theorize: this introduction suggests that it has also often been approached differently by anthropologists and historians. In the pages that follow, we reflect on the ways in which both disciplines have worked to interpret violent events in Africa, whether in the deep past, during the colonial era or in more recent periods. To better contextualize these disciplinary advances, we intersperse them with brief reviews of general theories on violence. The three articles featured in this special section, while dealing with very dissimilar case studies, provide common insights on three main themes. The first engages with the paradox of the contingency and continuity of violence, and with the unevenness of perpetrators, victims and targets. The second deals with the refractive meanings attached to violent events. The third probes, underneath the apparent turmoil of violent acts, the deep moral and cultural frameworks of action that underwrite them. We have composed this introduction around these main questions.

Although historians and anthropologists have devoted considerable work to violence, it seems to us that the former have primarily focused on collective forms of instrumental violence, or, to follow Charles Tilly’s formula, on ‘violence as politics’. This includes the uprisings and actions of subaltern groups and individuals, usually deemed ‘illegitimate’ by established regimes, and the legal ‘force’ exercised by institutions and state officials to control such actions (Tilly 2003). This disproportionate attention is explained by the nature of historical sources. In Africa, archival series inform mostly on institutional violence and on collective resistance and uprisings: they include prison statistics, judicial and administrative records, complaints and petitions to international organizations (Terretta 2013). It is much more difficult to find the traces of individual acts and temporary outbursts. Although court hearings, life stories and private correspondence offer rich stories of domestic and interpersonal violence (Van Onselen 1984; Jewsiewicki 1993), many are too tenuous or isolated to construct a more general interpretative narrative. Moreover, historians of Africa have been late in dealing with the history of emotions and their works have focused primarily on productive affects rather than anger and hatred (Cole and Thomas 2009).

Yet historians of violence have not worked in isolation: most have been influenced by theories outside their field. Interpretations of institutional and [End Page 385] popular violence, for instance, have been inspired by the concept of hegemony (Gramsci and Boothman 1995) and the notion of ‘symbolic violence’ crafted by sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu (for a critical discussion, see Addi 2002: 156–79). One of the most accomplished examples is Jonathan Glassman’sstudy of urban riots on the Swahili coast in the late nineteenth century, in which he argues that the violence of the crowd reflected intense struggles about the moral economy of various stakeholders (1995). In turn, the concept of the moral economy signals how historians have affected other fields. The work of E. P. Thompson has proved widely influential among social scientists, including anthropologist James Scott, who reworked it in his study of peasant rebellions and resistance in Malaysia (Thompson 1971; Scott 1976; 1985). For historians, empirical research has been guided by two main agendas: the need to interpret the causes and factors of violent acts, and to identify long-term patterns while paying attention to contingent convulsions and crises. Recently, for instance, in a landmark study of a German police brigade operating in the ghettos of Poland in 1942 and manned by middle-aged men from Hamburg who were ineligible for regular military duty, Christopher Browning engaged with Hannah Arendt’s work on the banality of evil (1970). Browning argued that the men terrorized and massacred Jews out of basic obedience to the authorities and the fear of ostracism rather than primal hatred or ideological commitment (1992a). A moderate functionalist, he highlights the importance of the cumulative radicalizing of the Nazi state over time, a theory that critiques ‘intentionalist’ historians who rely on Hitler’s grand plan and totalitarian politics to explain the development of the final solution (Browning 1992b).

Like historians, anthropologists have had to confront the ambivalent and contradictory aspects of violence...

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