I found the selections from Deborah Thomas’s work, Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica, incredibly thought provoking. I like how she starts out with a broad call to reframe anthropology’s role in defining and describing “culture.” When she calls for shifting the focus away from the “rubric of comparison and explanation” and toward themes of history, politics, and practice at a broader level, it seems to me like she’s directly calling out some early thinkers in the field, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict (4). I think this is necessary, but I’m not sure it’s fair to say that modern anthropologists are still comparing cultures to one another in the way the discipline used to. Next, she makes the move to discuss how violence is not a cultural phenomenon, but an “effect of class formation,” which is also racialized and gendered (4). When she moves into talking about reparations, she argues that the reparations framework “requires that we focus on structural, rather than cultural lineages and inheritances” (6). As she points out, it’s extremely racialized and racist to associate violence in Jamaica and other Caribbean countries with a lack of agency and patterns of pathology in violence (12). While it’s certainly problematic to talk about violence in Jamaica and the Caribbean more broadly in terms of psychopathy and as if it were out of people’s control, it is interesting to argue that the systems of oppression that created the conditions of violence are not inherently part of culture. I’m wondering, what does this thinking mean for what “counts” as culture? Why can’t culture encapsulate the structures that produce the diverse forms of violence? Or in a broader sense, why can’t culture encapsulate all of the structural forces at work in any society? I wonder if she will tackle this in further depth in other parts of the book that we haven’t engaged with.
Another thing I’m thinking about with Thomas are the broader questions she discusses in relation to how we “make and remake” ourselves in the contemporary world. She talks about Hegel, Arendt, and Fanon, highlighting each thinker’s context and how that drove their arguments for how people “produce themselves.” I’m wondering about how the question she poses, “In a postcolonial, post-Cold War context, do we redefine citizenship so that it is a meaningful concept” already frames her project within the overarching structures of nationalism and people’s relationship, or lack thereof, to the state. Can there be citizenship with no state? I like how she extends the state to mean trans-national organizations, though. Especially in the global health world, it’s so easy to see how NGO’s can wield power over governments, both local and national, (not to mention the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and World Health Organization) wielding/controlling the entire economic structure. Given this framing, I wonder what Thomas would say about current “decolonization” movements in the global health and global aid space? Is decolonization in these spaces even possible, given their structure and funding, as well as their transnationalism?
Lastly, I was struck by the anecdote at the beginning of chapter one, in which the police are afraid to investigate her friend’s murder because they don’t know the “bush,” or the local rural area. This underlines the high levels of fear and the lack of trust in institutions that pervade Jamaica, in a really powerful way.