Overall, Thomas does a great job of positioning the research in a broader systemic context. Thomas considers the systematic causes of violence in Jamaica, such as neoliberalism, slavery, and other historical factors. While I do like her positioning of violence within larger systems, I was more impressed with how she positions her work in the broader context of Anthropology. She not only considers the research trends of violence and elaborates where hers fits in, but she, more broadly, acknowledges the historical implications of studying culture and differentiates her work as a study of systems. Rather than studying culture, and in this case violence, as a means of comparison, Anthropology, she argues, needs to take into account these broader systems of history, politics/economics, and practice. In Chapter 2, Thomas situates the imposition of heteropatriarchal households in the historical situation of colonialism. She discusses the faults in studying the “culture of violence,” which is rooted in the also faulty study of the “culture of poverty.” Both of these works fail to account for the systematic issues that lead to these outcomes. All in all, I loved how she considered not only her own position but also that of her works and took a new approach to ethnography that we have yet to see.
Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica 2/5/2023
One Response to Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica 2/5/2023
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Yes! I completely agree. I really liked how she provided the deep historical context that contributed to how economy, gender, family, and race have been socially constructed in Jamaica throughout time and across nations. I think this captures an important goal of contemporary anthropological writing: to not reify the concept of “culture,” but rather to understand it as a product shaped by multiple systems interacting throughout history. (This reminds me of Tsing’s writing). You can see a stark contrast between Thomas’s writing and the psych and soc studies that she discusses in Chapter 2. These studies contributed social issues to an internal problem within Jamaicans, as opposed to the structural violence that they have been subjected to (and still are). This exemplifies a kind of essentialism that parallels the biological determinism of early anthropology which used “empirical science” to place non-white people below white people. It is upsetting especially that these ideas have been somewhat internalized and reproduced as Thomas discusses that some Jamaicans see their own country as violent. Something that stood out to me was the way that American reports targeted minority groups in disclosing violence. “Today’s ghetto gangs, especially the Jamaican posses, are far more violent than the Mafia. . . .The Cubans and Colombians don’t want to deal with them because they’re so dangerous” (pg 70). I think it is important to report and fight against organized crime. However, their generalizations have serious implications. They associate violence with an entire group of people. They do not refer to the gangs by their group names, nor do they refer to them as extremists. Instead they just call them by their ethnicities. Furthermore, they did not refer to the Mafia as “the Italians,” which creates a distinction between crime and Italians as a people. Referring to minority groups as violent distances violence from the dominant group while further alienating minority groups all at once. How can we be mindful, on a larger scale, of our reproduction of knowledge in order to avoid dangerous generalizations when most people don’t even realize the discrete biases that underlie things like news reports?