-
Notes
- NYU Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
>> 161 Notes Notes to Introduction 1. Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag. © 2003 by Susan Sontag. Reproduced by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. and Penguin Books, Ltd. 2. Martin S. Holocaust Testimony (T-641), Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library. Notes to Chapter 1 1. The SABC televised the hearings throughout the week and then assembled a one-hour special report to be broadcast every Sunday (Thloloe 1998). These reports contained a broad range of programming: educational documentary footage, interviews, private reconciliations, special hearings, and excerpts of testimony from the Human Rights Violations Committee, the Reparation and Rehabilitation Committee, and the Amnesty Committee—with footage of testimony from perpetrators applying for amnesty. A complete collection of the eighty-four special reports broadcast by the SABC is housed in the South African TRC Videotape Collection of the Yale Law School Lillian Goldman Library (www.law.yale.edu/trc). The full collection of videotaped footage is housed in the National Archives of South Africa, established by the National Archives and Records Service of South Africa Act (Act No. 43 of 1996, as amended). 2. Although eleven languages were spoken at the hearings, the five most frequently used languages accounted for most of the testimony and dialogue (English, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu, and Sotho). All the translators were provided by the Unit for Language Facilitation and Empowerment of the University of the Free State (TRC 2003a, 748–751). 3. Within the security forces, managers were located in the middle ranks of captain, warrant officer, and (depending on one’s responsibilities) sergeant. If a captain was in charge of a large operation, that person would be considered an upper-level manager in the organizational hierarchy (e.g., Captain Dirk Coetzee , in charge of an entire operation at Vlakplaas). Commanders were generals and colonels, and executives were people in the civilian ranks of the apartheid government in charge of particular departments, including cabinet ministers. Foot soldiers in the security forces were low-ranking enlisted personnel. 162 > 163 Giorgi and Giorgi (2003) specifically used what they called “meaning transitions” to separate the different meaning units, placing a dividing line between adjacent passages whenever there was a shift of topic (33). For my analysis, I identified ideas (meaning units) by adapting procedures originally developed by cognitive psychologists Walter Kintsch and Jean Mandler for parsing connected discourse into individual propositions and narrative units (Kintsch and van Dijk 1978; Kintsch 1985; McKoon 1977; Mandler and Johnson 1977). I also noted the type of reasoning used in each segment of testimony, drawing on standard categories of figurative language (Corbett 1990). Finally, with the videotaped testimony, I noted nonlinguistic factors: pauses, facial expressions, hand gestures, and eye contact. 8. The third step involved differentiating and combining the ideas identified in the testimonies. After studying and analyzing a subset of testimonies, taking overviews and identifying ideas, I compared exemplified ideas across different testimonies, grouping similar exemplified ideas into categories and building a comprehensive set of categories with particular instances in each category. According to Wertz (2011), this step is the most difficult because it entails understanding the relations among constituents and “thematizing recurrent modes of experience, meanings, and motifs” (132). 9. The world hypothesis underlying progressive qualitative analysis is formism, with its root metaphor of similarity (Pepper 1942). That is, the analysis assumed that there were commonalities in the influences, motivations, and experiences of violent perpetrators and that by comparing many testimonies, these commonalities could be identified. Supporting the basic assumption of formism was the shared defining experience for the perpetrators in this study: active participation in a violent political organization fighting against a designated enemy. In fact, the powerful abnormality of the perpetrators’ experience often resulted in similar or even identical language in the testimony, especially in the stated reasons and motivations for committing illegal violence against others. This verbatim commonality was helpful in identifying the patterns of influence, motivation, and experience. The world hypothesis of formism can be contrasted with contextualism, which would view each testimony as a distinct whole, emphasizing the individuality of experience and not the shared patterns of influence, motivation, and experience. A contextualist approach would then lead to an analysis that presented a set of individual narratives, with each narrative distinct from the others. With contextualism , one event may have details of texture in common with other events, but taken as a whole, its combination of details is unique and not comparable to other events. As an example, the main...