The first portion of Thomas’ novel was a dive deeper into anthropologists’ traditional notions of what social and economic factors contribute to both the presence and persistence of violence in a community or culture. Her definition of the central concept of “exceptional violence” outlined in the introduction as, “the attempt to think through the repertoires and cyclical histories that expand to incorporate and accommodate the new while always giving us the sense that we have somehow seen this before” (pg 4), is able to account for a more profound examination of culminating violence considered across time and space instead of through the lens of isolated instances. We can see this idea actualized in Chapter 1 when she elaborates on how providing slaves in Jamaica with provision grounds played a part in developing the patterns of political authority and hegemony during the nationalist period. In this section, she explains the social and economic impacts of provision grounds on the basis of two central ideas. The first is that the providing of provision grounds, which from my understanding were basically lands of poor quality, to slaves caused “structural vulnerability”. Essentially, while the lands provided seemingly provided economic freedom, they also inevitably tied the slaves to a specific land plot or plantation, which contributed to the development of social and economic hierarchies among the slaves and their considered “superiors”. The second is that, naturally, the providing of provision grounds to many slaves increased the frequency and intensification of slave disputes over the properties. In discussing the provision grounds in the nationalist period of Jamaica, Thomas was able to effectively demonstrate this concept of “exceptional violence” by illustrating an example across both space (geographic divisions) and time (in a historical sense), and also showed the cyclical, repetitive nature of this type of violence throughout this period in history.
A couple of questions that came to mind throughout the reading — How can we see the lingering effects of the institution of provision grounds in the modern day Caribbean today? Where do we see instances of exceptional violence in our contemporary world? What is the best way to go about preventing the perpetuation of the harmful impacts of exceptional violence?