Our other Others: on perpetration, morality, and ethnographic unease
Abstract
enThis article critically assesses the impact of political and moral positions within contemporary anthropology. Re-examining ideas of advocacy and the ethical within the discipline, it argues for an alternative political anthropology that focuses on perpetration rather than victimhood, offenders rather than the offended. If anthropology wants to be a discipline that works against social wrongs and suffering, then understanding the positions and perspectives of those causing them is, we contend, a necessary point of departure. Yet how can we approach people ethnographically who transgress bodily, legal, and moral boundaries, and why is this not more commonly done? In answering these questions, we analyse mainstream disciplinary ethics, both current and historical, and highlight some of the reactions that the study of perpetrators evoke in anthropologists. This illuminates an inconsistency within political anthropology. While there is ample theoretical and ethnographic nuance within the subdiscipline, this complexity seems to fade when we focus on perpetration. We suggest that anthropology engages more fully in the study of perpetration and approaches the issue by clarifying how (mis)dynamics are anchored within shared social worlds and historical becomings. This article thus calls upon us to expand our anthropological attention and curiosity beyond what might be morally comfortable.
Abstrait
frNos autres autres : actes criminels, moralité et malaise ethnographique
Résumé
Cet article évalue de manière critique l'impact des positions politiques et morales au sein de l'anthropologie contemporaine. En réexaminant les idées de plaidoyer et d'éthique au sein de la discipline, il plaide en faveur d'une anthropologie politique alternative qui se concentre sur les criminels plutôt que sur les victimes. Les auteurs affirment que si l'anthropologie veut être une discipline qui lutte contre les maux et les souffrances sociales, la compréhension des positions et des perspectives de ceux qui les causent est un point de départ nécessaire. Cependant, comment pouvons-nous approcher ethnographiquement les personnes qui transgressent les limites corporelles, légales et morales, et pourquoi cela n'est-il pas plus courant ? Pour répondre à ces questions, l'article analyse l'éthique disciplinaire dominante, à la fois actuelle et historique, et met en lumière certaines des réactions que l'étude des auteurs de crimes suscite chez les anthropologues. Ceci met en lumière une incohérence au sein de l'anthropologie politique. Alors que la sous-discipline comporte de nombreuses nuances théoriques et ethnographiques, cette complexité semble s'estomper lorsque l'on se concentre sur la perpétration. L'article plaide en faveur d'études plus poussées des actes criminels et aborde la question en clarifiant comment les (mauvaises) dynamiques sont ancrées dans des mondes sociaux partagés et dans les devenirs historiques. Cet article nous invite donc à étendre notre attention et notre curiosité anthropologiques au-delà de ce qui pourrait être moralement confortable.
One of the unique merits of anthropology has been its ability to counter othering. It has pushed against descriptions of people as primitive and uncivilized, and opposed hierarchies of value that position Others as inferior. Regardless of the group or way of life under scrutiny, anthropology has sought to make meaning out of difference and has insisted on common ground and worth, and on our ability to connect and understand dissimilarity as situated and significant in its own right. While fully focused on difference, the discipline has maintained an idea of shared points of connection and possibilities of understanding (cf. Boas 1887; Evans-Pritchard 1937).
This obviously does not mean that anthropology has been apolitical or non-critical. On the contrary, its opposition to processes of othering and marginalization has been directed towards those in power. Hence the discipline has, over the years, been at the forefront of the cultural and civilizatory critique of the Global North by pointing out the dominance and oppression of Western hegemony, capitalism, and state formation. It has done so, brilliantly at times, by documenting the consequences of such powers, giving voice to those who are victims of them, and making the harms caused visible and audible through its ethnographic engagement. In fact, anthropology has become so vested in speaking truth to power that in many ways it has come to identify with an explicitly critical approach – mostly in highly reflected and nuanced ways, yet increasingly, we worry, in ways that seem to forget the discipline's open-minded point of departure and therefore ends up painting the world in black and white, good and bad. In other words, while a multitude of work exists on ‘politics from below’, on resistance, alter-politics, community organizations, and activism, the ‘powerful’ and the ‘dominant’ remain stereotypically predefined and prejudged in much political anthropology, subject to empirically disconnected classification rather than ethnographic elucidation.
This article clarifies the current influence of the discipline's politico-moral bearings. It takes stock and ponders what is being lost and won in this move towards an increasingly predefined and moral point of departure within political anthropology. It does so by looking at people and processes that are commonly disregarded in much of anthropology, namely perpetrators and perpetration.1 To be clear, these are not terms that are used by the people in question, but ascriptions that enter intellectually and affectively into anthropology by way of contra-identification.
The ethnography presented is two-fold. First, it is shaped around the authors’ experiences with the moralizing reactions of fellow anthropologists to our fieldwork among Protestant Loyalists and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) in Belfast, West African militiamen, and pimps and human traffickers in Romania. Second, the article builds on our long-term ethnographies of people and politics that are seen to be ‘unlikeable’ within much mainstream anthropology. The article thus centres on both academic encounters during the last couple of decades and ethnographic material derived from long-term fieldwork. We illustrate the opposition we have faced from fellow anthropologists when presenting our own empirical material on people who are identified as violent, transgressive, or oppressive, and we investigate why this might be so. We do this to make it clear that proportionally there are still only few anthropological studies of perpetrators compared to studies on victims, and to argue that the reasons for this lack of research on perpetrators are problematic and should be overcome by returning to the cornerstones of our discipline, namely anthropological curiosity, open-minded investigations, and the notion of sharing common ground.
Our proposal in this article is thus a simple one. Instead of analytically black-boxing or working with preconceived and essentializing notions of people who in one way or another are defined as perpetrators, we advocate a political anthropology that seeks to investigate and understand the social positions, points of view, and practices of those who are perceived to engage in harmful acts or to maintain discriminatory orders. This article is thus a call to carry out research on so-called perpetrators, violators, and offenders with the same anthropological openness and curiosity that we believe those who fall victims to them deserve. We suggest that a hyper-humanist approach is needed that investigates the reasons and perspectives that underlie the phenomenon. Instead of relying on rudimentary preconceptions of perpetrators, we argue for an approach that relies on in-depth ethnography to gain critical insights about them. To start with, we shall briefly situate the political positioning and shifting state of morality within the discipline in order to contextualize our argument within the history of anthropological ideas and practice.
Colonialism, complicity, and the original sin
In many ways, modern political anthropology has been focused on the study of people who have been victimized, oppressed, or abused by those in power. As such, a fair number of anthropologists would present the discipline as ethical by default, as a champion of tolerance, respect, and inclusivity. While this desire to be a force for good and support the downtrodden is undoubtedly a positive ambition, there are two problems associated with the discipline's presumed innate moral bearings. On the one hand, it leads to a neglect or stereotypical description of those who are (sometimes hastily) defined as immoral Others, that is, those occupying positions of power, dominance, and perpetration. On the other hand, this idea of the ethical at the core of the discipline is historically dubious at best. While important figures within the discipline were engaged in shedding light on those who were dominated by colonial and imperialist forces from its early days, and on documenting the ways of life, cultures, and communities that were coming under pressure from the expansion of Western and capitalist influence (Boas 1982 [1910]; Lévi-Strauss 1973 [1955]), the discipline has a far darker past to its name. It may have developed a clear normative comportment, yet it did not initially demonstrate much respect or support for the marginalized, but rather served as an instrument for their further oppression. In large part it emerged as a tool for domesticating and controlling alterity in the shape of both internal and external Others.
Anthropology can thus be seen to have been all too influential in the first half of the last century. For a discipline that commonly bemoans its lack of impact, this may seem implausible, yet by connecting evolutionism, phrenology, and physiognomy, strands of it gained a disturbing popularity early on. Anthropological criminology (or criminal anthropology, as it was also termed) was, for example, influential well beyond the discipline. Setting forth a theory of ‘the born criminal’ and concerned to identify innate deviance (Lombroso 2006 [1887]), this field of thought suggested that alterity be understood in evolutionary terms. It saw the ‘criminal persona’ as an atavistic remnant amongst us, an evolutionary throwback to be removed or isolated in an attempt to protect the general population from its negative influence. Lumping criminals and ‘degenerates’ with indigenous populations and stateless people, such as the Sami, Jews, or Roma (cf. Stewart 2013), this line of anthropology came to criminalize the already marginal and to sanction brutal state actions against them in the name of public health and safety. Though conveniently forgotten, anthropological criminology was perhaps the most influential strand of anthropology at the time. The impact of its thought was evident in the numerous eugenics programmes that emerged in the lead up to the Second World War2 and that can be found in much crypto- and social Darwinist reasoning and research since.
This negative definition of ‘otherness’ was, however, not restricted to ‘internal Others’ but was equally visible in the anthropological engagement with people outside Europe and North America. The same evolutionary logic was dominant in the Victorian era and was used to understand the global political, social, and cultural differences encountered during colonial expansion and imperialism. Many of the great thinkers and anthropologists of the Victorian era, such as Spencer (1860) and Galton (1886), rejoiced in the scientific dimensions of evolutionary thought when seeking to understand human and cultural variation. Furthermore, as anthropology progressed from ‘armchair theorizing’ to field-based studies, many anthropologists found themselves working directly for the colonial state. Through a potent mix of racism, ethnocentrism, and social Darwinism, therefore, not only did the discipline become a driving force for the legitimation of imperialism as a benevolent and modernizing endeavour, it was also used to investigate foreign cultures and societies so that they could be ruled and exploited more effectively. Colonialism and imperialism were thus understood as granting the subjugated populations an opportunity to achieve a higher level of evolution, thereby constructing colonization as a civilizing mission (Balandier 1970 [1955]: 46; Lonsdale 1986).
Atonement and an emerging schism
Anthropology has obviously come a long way since then. Its evolutionist and racist tenets were mostly disbanded following the discrediting of eugenics after the Second World War and the civil rights movement in the United States. The latter instigated a move away from institutionalized racism, while the former, in tandem with decolonization, led to a fundamental rethinking of anthropology and a realization of its complicity in systems of domination, exploitation, and perpetration.
From the 1960s onwards, the discipline thus forcefully distanced itself from the ‘original sin’ of its theories and practices (Kuper 2010) in its quest to regain moral legitimacy. In the progressive anti-racist and anti-capitalist politics of the 1960s and early 1970s, in which alternative systems of thought and ways of life were positively positioned within a larger social and cultural critique of the Global North, anthropology thus acquired a newfound ethical validity. This was a validity that stood in direct contrast to its earlier teachings and which has, ironically, entailed that the discipline has made enemies out of those who still thought and think with its debunked intellectual baggage. Anthropology grew highly political by being in opposition to a large part of its earlier self. The discipline became torn between its position as a foundationally scholarly endeavour and its political commitment. In other words, a tension developed between its academic workings and requirements and its ethical ‘obligations’ towards the oppressed Other and against the people and processes that were identified as perpetrating coercion and control.
This schism between foregrounding the intellectual or the political in various anthropological approaches can be found throughout the discipline's recent history, partly in heated discussions and partly as myth. Consider, for example, a story that circulates about an incident involving researchers from the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute and a group of white settlers in former Rhodesia. As the story goes, a handful of Manchester School scholars were in a bar in Lusaka after a seminar. A white settler who was also frequenting the establishment voiced his prejudices against the local population. One of the junior researchers reacted heatedly to a blatantly racist proclamation and a scuffle ensued. As the anthropologists were leaving the bar later that evening, the head of the research team reprimanded the young scholar. Scolding him for his rash reaction, the senior scholar exclaimed: ‘What were you thinking? You should have been taking notes!’
The moral of the story is, of course, that the desire to react ethically and politically should at times be tempered by a larger ambition to understand and investigate, and thereby acquire the knowledge needed for more viable change. The story itself is probably an incorrect rendition of the actual occurrence. Yet it has gained an almost mythical status, as it exemplifies a common tension between the political and intellectual impetus of much anthropology, both then and now. As well as pointing towards a defining moment in the anthropological history of ideas, it resonates with a present-day issue, namely how the academic and the ethical can clash in ethnographic encounters and anthropological ambitions. It asks if political principle comes before ethnographic engagement or vice versa.
The same question runs deep in the discipline's more contemporary epistemological debates. A now famous exchange between Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Roy D'Andrade, and commentators in a themed section of Current Anthropology entitled ‘Objectivity and militance’ is a case in point. In the discussion, D'Andrade proposes the motion that ‘anthropology can maintain its moral authority only on the basis of empirically demonstrable truths’ (1995: 408), while Scheper-Hughes calls for an ethnography that is both ‘personally engaged and politically committed’ (1995: 419). The tension between the two perspectives runs thick throughout the articles and commentaries, just as the theme section generated an abundance of debate, which in many ways is still not resolved. The divergent approaches continue to inform disagreements related to the discipline's ideal focus, political obligation, and ethical standing. It has a forceful presence, at times explicit and confrontational, at times implicit and almost ghostly, as it continues to question whether critique comes before ethnography.
Perpetration and the disciplinary disconnect
Regardless of the critique voiced against it, Scheper-Hughes's ‘personally engaged and politically committed’ approach in anthropological research has, undoubtedly, produced an amount of highly significant work. Working within a critical theoretical framework, it has been a major source of inspiration and an instrumental part of the anthropological attempt to shed light on the invisibilized or lesser-known harms, wrongs, and atrocities committed in the world, in terms of both large-scale brutalities and more intimate violations and transgressions (see, e.g., Das 2008; Das, Kleinman, Ramphele & Reynolds 2000; Nordstrom 1997). Anthropology became a discipline that brought forth and gave voice to those who were otherwise hidden and silenced by economic and political power. In fact, from the outset, it has not only developed its own expertise in documenting political abuses. It has also led to the development of a critical anthropological tradition that has furthered the discipline's impact by crafting detailed ethnographies of inequalities and discrimination and used these insights to speak truth to power (Scheper-Hughes 1995). In the process, ethnography itself came to be seen as empowering. By giving voice, it became part of a political struggle and was imbued with the potential to change the situation of the powerless for the better.
For all the merits of this approach, and for all the effort put into shedding light on situations of oppression, the anthropological study of such politics emerged as strangely one-sided. While it yielded fascinating insights into the social and political life of transgression, exploitation, and persecution, it remained ferociously Manichean. It entered into the world ethnographically with a very clear sense of what was at stake and whom to support socially and politically, and it remained relatively uninterested in elucidating the perspectives of those who were seen as engaged in oppression or domination. The forceful move away from its earlier evolutionist and colonialist ways led the discipline to discard what were (pre)defined as the powerful and the perpetrators from its area of study. Once it was realized that ethnographic illumination could in itself be regarded as empowering, the ‘politics of anthropology’ crafted a lopsided version of ‘political anthropology’ in which important parts of the social and political world became sidelined as research fields within it. Applying ethnography to the powerful and to perpetrators stood out as bordering on the unethical.
Acts of power and perpetration, instead of being phenomena that also needed to be understood ethnographically on their own terms, were thus relegated to predefined notions of dominance that apparently needed but little elucidation. So, while we, within this strand of political anthropology, have rich and beautiful analyses of the consequences of dominance, we have very little or only very crude descriptions of the social life and reasoning of the ‘dominant other’. This may be seen as an obvious effect of a critical theoretical approach, yet it is clearly a misguided one. Not only does it ignore the considerable time and effort that Marx (2004 [1867]) committed in seeking to understand the detailed functioning of capitalism in order to clarify the logics of its oppression – highlighting that capturing such dynamics ought to be essential for a critically informed scholarship – it also disregards the later generations of critical theory and their focus on the complex workings of power (Boltanski 2011; Rosa 2013; 2019).
While anthropological theorizations beautifully touch upon the relational nature of power, and on victimhood in politics, conflict, and crime, it is strangely myopic and disengaged from illuminating ‘the perpetrator's’ point of view. The other side of power, so to speak, remains primarily unexplored. Rather than being the focus of study, the dominant and powerful are commonly black-boxed and left unresearched, or understood by means of rudimentary or tautological explanatory avenues that we as a discipline would otherwise fully object to. It remains a mystery that scholars who proclaim the merit of theories of, for example, systemic, symbolic, and capillary notions of power (cf. Foucault 1980: 37-54) – and who dedicate much effort to theorizing the complexities of the political – have no problem approaching perpetration and violation in a predefined manner as something that does not need explaining but which may be merely ascribed innate tendencies towards domination, as a libido dominandi. It is furthermore unfortunate, as one of our best opportunities of preventing oppression and perpetration obviously lies in understanding when, how, and why people engage in them. The attention granted to those who suffer the effects of coercion, oppression, and systems of domination may be one of the finest aspects of the discipline, yet we drastically need an equally ethnographically curious and courageous engagement with the people or processes that are perceived as dominant in order to produce the multifaceted ethnographies that are required to generate better theorizations of politics and power.
However, the question remains as to why more ethnography is not being conducted to shed light on perpetrators and perpetrating orders by a discipline that, at least theoretically, acknowledges the situated and contextual dimensions of political acts and the contingent nature of power (cf. Shoshan 2021: 112). We have alluded to the answer in the foregoing, but the study of perpetration is, interestingly, not lacking in related disciplines. A range of works have dealt with the phenomenon, be it in relation to war, crime, or violence (Collins 2009; Kalyvas 2006), just as important research has been done by philosophers, political scientists, psychiatrists, and criminologists (see, e.g., Arendt 1963; 1970; Heidensohn 1991; Knittel & Goldberg 2020). This includes in-depth psychological analyses, evaluations of programmes and methods aimed at ‘abusers’ (Dixon, Archer & Graham-Kevan 2012; McMurran & Gilchrist 2008), and interdisciplinary work centred on mass atrocities, genocides, legal trials, and terrorism (Barrett 2019; Smeulers, Weedersteijn & Holá 2019; Williams & Buckley-Zistel 2018).3
Broadening the focus to move beyond large-scale atrocities and conflicts in anthropological research (Hinton 2004; Malkki 1995), the anthropological research that actually does exist on the issue wonderfully depicts the lifeworlds and social possibilities of people who are commonly identified as perpetrators (e.g. Bourgois 2003; Jensen 2008; Nordstrom & Robben 1996; Utas 2003), just as several much-needed anthropological analyses have been produced depicting far-right militancy and conservative populist politics (see Feischmidt & Szombati 2017; Gagnon 2020; Haltinner 2018; Mills 2021; Pied 2018; 2019; Pinheiro-Machado & Scalco 2020; Reuter 2019). Similarly, a range of recent studies engage with questions regarding the methodological, analytical, and ethical challenges of studying ‘people we don't (necessarily) like’ (Bangstad 2017). One example is the Focaal forum on the new far right that results from the Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale round-table forum held at the American Anthropological Association meetings in Vancouver in 2019. The forum not only depicts the modalities of the new far right, it also asks important questions regarding what exploring these modalities means for anthropology, its research methodologies, activist interventions, and ethics (Ssorin-Chaikov 2021). Equally, a good example is provided in Gingrich and Banks’ edited volume on neo-nationalism, in which they discuss how fieldwork can be carried out in situations where the anthropologist has no sympathy for their interlocutors, thereby putting advocacy out of the question (Banks & Gingrich 2006: 11). They highlight the complexities of approaching neo-nationalist informants as examples of fragile, marginal, and politically dispossessed populations, since their informants’ rhetoric against minority migrant groups in Europe makes them unsympathetic to the anthropologists (2006: 24). In another example, Nitzan Shoshan (2021), in discussing the challenges of fieldwork among right-wing extremists, describes how he had to depart from the celebrated idea of interlocutors as collaborators and of combining research with advocacy in his study of such groups.4
Despite these recent and much-needed interventions, in-depth ethnographic studies of ‘perpetrators’ remain few and far between within the discipline. When perpetration has actually been addressed in anthropology, this has traditionally been through the perspective of those who are victimized by it rather than those who engage in it, and often, as noted, with a strong moral goal of giving them a voice and challenging the system. The consequence is that the discipline predominantly approaches domination and perpetration as contextual background rather than ethnographic foreground.5 While an inductive and/or abductive approach is a trademark of anthropology, it is not ordinarily applied to those we define as dominant or powerfully transgressive.
Perpetration and unlikeable politics
Our empirical material provides a case in point. Our interlocutors share the premise that their practices and perspectives commonly spur public and academic condemnation rather than comprehension, a fact which is equally clearly felt by someone conducting ethnography among them. The ethical foreshadowing of politics in anthropology divides the world into groups essentialized as either good or bad. While it is perfectly possible to disagree with people's politics and practices while still working to gain an understanding of these in an ethnographically informed and nuanced manner, many anthropologists seem, in contrast, to rush to publicly position themselves on the side of the perceived good. Moral discourse commonly instantiates clear conceptions of Others. In this manner, the seminars, conferences, and workshops we attend are, unfortunately, not full of scholars trying to understand the complex workings of perpetration but crowded instead with people collectively performing their disgust of it.
At a conference dinner in Oslo, for example, a senior professor from a UK university left the table where Vigh was sitting because she found his research topic detestable. She had, during the conference, been a kind and sympathetic acquaintance, yet as he mentioned doing fieldwork in Belfast, researching Protestant Loyalists and the UVF, the Ulster Volunteer Force, the professor's mood changed, and her demeanour darkened. By researching Loyalists, Vigh was apparently committing the sin of granting a voice to a group of people whom she believed should be politically silenced and counteracted. In her understanding of the conflict in Northern Ireland, one group clearly inhabited the moral high ground and, hence, there was only one appropriate side to research and listen to. Conducting an ethnography of Loyalism placed Vigh in the ‘enemy's’ camp. The problem was not that Belfast was seen as an illegitimate place to do fieldwork, but rather that Loyalists were seen to constitute an illegitimate political group to research. As she departed, she looked back over her shoulder and said contemptuously: ‘You would even study the BNP!?’
It was an awkward moment. As she left, the tension hung thick in the air, tainting the rest of the dinner. But she was right. We would indeed study the BNP, the British National Party. Not because we sympathize with their political views, nor because their views are similar to Loyalist political perspectives more generally, but because we need ethnographic illuminations and anthropological elucidations of such movements, as they represent powerful political trends in our contemporary world. Such studies may tell us something important about current processes of marginalization, othering, and fear. However, instead of seeking insights, the reaction was one of demanding moral condemnation. Classifying Loyalists together with the BNP is, in this manner, a direct articulation of the perceived illegitimacy of their politics. Our colleague described in the above example is not alone in doing so. Academically, Ulster Protestants have been categorized together with the Boers and Israelis as dominant settler communities (see, e.g., Lowry 1996; Mitchell 2000), with the Serbs as aggressive nationalists (see, e.g., McKay 2000), and, as seen above, with the BNP and other racist, sectarian, or bigoted parties. Comparing, for example, the murder of an African-American man in the American South by the Ku Klux Klan with the murder of a Catholic by Loyalists in Northern Ireland, McKay states that ‘the aggressive self-pity is similar’ (2000: 267), suggesting that what fuels Loyalist violence is a blindness towards one's own dominance and an illegitimate and contemptible feeling of suffering. The various parties and people mentioned in the above example populate the pinnacle of political illegitimacy within anthropology. Instead of working for a noble cause, they are seen to be fighting for an immoral one and to be directly engaged in a struggle against tolerance, diversity, and coexistence. This, too, is the case with Loyalism. In stemming from a settler community, Loyalist and Unionist politics are directly or indirectly portrayed as a fight for domination and a continuation of an ‘unnatural’ order. Identified with politics centred on power over rather than power to, Loyalists are regularly defined as perpetrators in anthropology, that is, as people who wilfully seek to hurt, harm, violate, and dominate. And, strangely, this drastically curtails our academic interest in them. Of the myriad work done on ‘the Troubles’, only a very small part has focused on the Loyalist community. There are approximately ten studies mentioning the IRA, the Irish Republican Army, for every mention of the UVF. The imbalance in attention is striking.
A look into the anthropology of Northern Ireland therefore reveals that Loyalists are regarded as being less interesting or worthy of study, and that they are lumped with other perceived racist and bigoted parties as unsavoury groups and disagreeable subjects with unpalatable politics. While there is little doubt that British dominance in Ireland has historically been brutal and horrendous, Loyalist politics are currently not centred on colonial aspirations but on maintaining a viable presence. Dominance in itself may be interesting as an analytical abstraction, but when actually conducting the fieldwork, we quickly realize that violence and aggression are commonly related to former suffering and anxiety, being regularly explained as pre-emptive with reference to larger political environments and histories as ‘fears of losing one's job, one's cultural or gender identity, feelings of humiliation and frustration’ (Banks & Gingrich 2006: 12). As an interlocutor in a Loyalist enclave of Belfast6 told Vigh, ‘There is a feeling that we are losing out, that we are actually the ones who are hard done by, you know, and it's like it never stops. That is why there is this kind of siege mentality, so it is, because it never fucking stops’.
What is defined as aggression from the outside may thus be seen as attempts to counter vulnerability when viewed from within. This does not legitimize violence, and we are aware that the above quotation will in all likelihood be read as a hollow claim to victimhood for those who see Loyalism as an aggressive political stand. Yet the anchoring of dominance or violence in a striving to hinder or pre-empt danger or decline appears to be almost universal when we talk to people engaged in militant politics and conflicts (cf. Butler & Athanasiou 2013). This draws our attention to two central aspects of such situations: namely that victimhood serves as political capital in contemporary conflicts, and that even xenophobia and proteophobia – phobia etymologically meaning both aversion and fear – may be related to the distress of potential loss (cf. Bauman 1993; Kalb 2009). As a member of an overtly racist British political party sought to convince Vigh in an interview, their attempts to gain cultural and racial supremacy were measures to protect what once was: that is, a past seen as orderly and categorically pure. If, the interlocutor stated, Vigh as an anthropologist ‘truly liked cultural difference, then ought he not to support the fight against immigration too?’ The logic of his argument is, of course, that cultures need to be shielded and kept apart, as they will otherwise melt into an undifferentiated mass and disappear. In this specific case, the fear was that this would cause him to lose the community which he saw as central to his identity and security. Imaginaries of future decline or detrimental change are central to many turns towards violence. Yet, if we want to grasp this, anthropologists really need to be less offended and study more offenders. Doing so grants us the insights needed to work towards alleviating fear and, hence, pre-empting further perpetration.
Perpetration and unlikeable people
Anthropologists, we hold, need to approach those who engage in practices they find despicable in a manner that is more than moralizing and to do more than consolidate predefined notions of the good and the bad. The point is to grasp when and why violence or perpetration become meaningful to people as a social modality.
Allow us to demonstrate this point further. On another occasion, Korsby was approached by a senior colleague after giving a talk at a conference in the United States about her research among Romanian pimps7 and human traffickers,8 illustrating how they take their illegal businesses to other European countries. The colleague was outraged that the talk concluded that the management and orchestration of sex work, based on Korsby's specific ethnography, can be a collaboration between pimp and sex worker. Yet she was further outraged that the talk had focused on empirical data on the livelihoods and experiences of the pimps and human traffickers, especially in its analysis of empirical examples of physical violence within the sex worker-pimp couples. The issue was that the talk focused on the experience of the perpetrators of physical violence (who in this case identify as male), rather than on the experiences of the victims of physical violence (who in this case identify as female).
While there exists a wide range of important scholarly contributions analysing the experiences of migrant sex workers (see, e.g., Andrijasevic 2010; Brennan 2004; Day & Ward 2004; Korsby 2023a; Skilbrei & Polyakova 2006), as well as victims of human trafficking (see, e.g., Korsby 2013; 2023a; Plambech 2014), less ethnographic fieldwork and research has been carried out among those who facilitate these practices (Horning et al. 2022; Horning & Marcus 2017; Horning, Thomas & Jordenö 2019; Horning, Thomas, Marcus & Sriken 2020; Korsby 2017; 2023b; Marcus, Horning, Curtis, Sanson & Thompson 2014; Milner & Milner 2010 [1972]), and even less among those convicted of human trafficking (Keo, Bouhours, Broadhurst & Bouhours 2014; Korsby 2015; 2023b; Mai 2010). Despite these themes being understudied, just as in the Belfast example, an ethnographic focus on the perceived dominant side of the sex worker/pimp or the victim/human trafficker relationship was seen as inherently problematic by the senior colleague. While the vantage point of the victim of human trafficking is comme il faut in anthropological research, conveying the perpetrator's point of view was met with concern.
Once again, our colleague's reaction is unsurprising. The privileging of ‘victim ethnography’ in anthropology is partly related to the possibilities of doing such research in the first place, with victims being easier to approach and gain rapport with. It also becomes clear, when looking through the literature, that men who are violent towards women – as well as men who work as pimps or do other kinds of sex market facilitation – do not inhabit social positions for which anthropologists have traditionally wanted to accord space.
Taking a scientific interest in those who are expected to be on the dominant side of a sex worker/pimp relationship elicits strong reactions, as illustrated by Korsby's interaction with her senior colleague. Having asked this senior colleague as well as others about their responses to Korsby's research topic, it has become clear that these reactions often build on one of two opposite perspectives on sex work. Overall, these different perspectives on sex work can be divided into what Barbara Sullivan (2003) has termed ‘radical feminist’ responses – also referred to by Ronald Weitzer (2010) as ‘prohibitionist’ responses – versus ‘sex work feminist’ responses. Needless to say, feminism in our view is ever evolving and complex, going way beyond this rigid divide between two different ‘kinds’. Nonetheless, even though Sullivan and Weitzer coined these terms many years ago, the distinction is relevant to mention here, since some of the reactions that Korsby has received from academic audiences to her research seem to take their point of departure from either of the two sides of this divide. Radical feminists ‘regard the sex industry as a universally harmful institution’ (Weitzer 2010: 15) and are strongly against the legalization of sex work. They see the sale of sexual services as a result of masculine domination over women, and the sale of sex as therefore an expression of female oppression and of male exploitation and violence against women (for examples of this approach, see Hughes 2000; Jeffreys 1997; Raymond 2013). Sex work feminists, on the other hand, make a distinction between voluntary and non-voluntary sex work and thus distinguish between sex work and human trafficking (for examples of this approach, see Doezema 2000; Kempadoo 2001; Kempadoo & Doezema 1998). Sex work feminists object to radical feminists’ portrayals of women's inability to decide over their own bodies, and they argue that sex workers need rights rather than rescue. Their point is that women are powerful and have the agency to make choices about what to do with their own bodies, with many sex work feminists supporting legalization of sex work and decriminalization of sex workers of all genders (Molland 2012: 38; Sullivan 2003: 70).
Thus, on the one hand, some radical feminists will view Korsby's empirical descriptions of love, dedication, and romance between pimps and sex workers as working against their position of wishing to protect women from male violence, which they see as inherent in sex work and pimping. On the other hand, some sex work feminists suggest that the academic focus on pimps and other kinds of sex market facilitators – and on the violence that can arise within those relationships, described from the pimps’ and facilitators’ perspective – takes away the agency, space, and voice of those who should be at the centre of our focus: the people selling sexual services.
However, Korsby's ethnography of male/female pimp/sex worker relationships reveals the ambivalent intertwinements of care, exploitation, opportunity, business, and intimacy that are accentuated in relationships like these. Often the pimps and the sex workers are in romantic relationships with each other, and many have known each other since childhood and have grown up in the same working-class neighbourhood. These relationships are fraught with deep complexities of power, money, expectation, romance, and family obligations (Korsby 2013; 2023a; 2023b). As an example, according to the pimps and convicted human traffickers in Korsby's ethnography, resorting to physical violence against a female sex worker in fact marks the ultimate loss of power within their relationship. Not only was physical violence how it worked ‘in the old days,’ as Korsby's informants said, and only the ‘stupid pimps’ would resort to that (Korsby 2015; 2023b), referring to how escalations in this regard would hinder financial success, but physical violence also carried different moral consequences within the intimate realm of the sex worker/pimp relationships. As a 25-year-old Romanian pimp told Korsby when asked about instances of physical violence: ‘Then you know that you have failed and that you can never go back … she will never look at you in the same way again, and you lose this path that you were on together. Then your business has also failed’. This alludes to the complexities of shame, violence, and power that are inherent in these relationships, and in a preliminary way it points to the potential long-term consequences for the couple as business partners and lovers once violence has entered the relationship – complexities that, in our opinion, offer relevant insights into the workings of the global sex industry.
Perpetration and positions; privilege or precarity
The point is that our preconception of what perpetration might be about affects the depth and scope of political anthropology and calls for critical scrutiny within the discipline. To start with, this entails understanding what the anthropological understanding and construction of perpetration and violation looks like in relation to the region, class, social position, age, and gender of the people in question.
Youth soldiers are interesting in this context. Those who have been forcefully mobilized are differently positioned than those who enter ‘voluntarily’. The latter will often be placed in the normative category of perpetrators as young men driven by greed and an innate propensity for violent behaviour, taking what they need by way of the gun – illustrating what Paul Richards (1996) has called the ‘New Barbarism’ theory. By construing people caught up in such situations as radically Other – brutes, barbarians, or thugs – we are able to remove them from our social world – to externalize them to the point where we are no longer part of their wrongdoings, and their perpetration is no longer related to ours. Yet, as Richards demonstrates, the vision of ‘New Barbarism’ becomes impossible to sustain if we actually research those who are supposed to embody it. In this respect, working with predefined notions of normative polarization often both invisibilizes the ‘local's point of view’ and reduces complex scenarios to simple divides.
However, the problem runs deeper than that. An anthropology that demonizes people or politics, however righteous this may seem, often adds to the problem rather than the solution. It causes people to retract even deeper into the in-group safety of oppositional, and at times extreme or militant, social positions. People who are demonized or discursively marginalized become withdrawn into their own community, who stand out as the only ones who recognize their worries and are attentive to their side of the story. The consequence is that they stop feeling accountable to others than their own kind. Some of the xenophobe ‘white’ communities in the postindustrial parts of the Global North are a case in point, just like the right-wing political movements who have historically been able to harness their support by performing empathy for their lot. There are, as such, no convincing reasons for not researching people who are identified as violent or oppressive with the same anthropological open-mindedness and curiosity that we afford everyone else – at least if we want our work to be more than complacent postures directed towards a moral and discursive community of peers.
We have no particular love for the practices and perspectives of our interlocutors, yet, as in all other kinds of ethnography, we need to withhold moral judgement until we have conducted our ethnography if we want to understand what is at stake. Otherwise, we may ask, why do fieldwork at all? If we have already defined the setting at hand, identified the good and the bad, and know what is at stake, why, then, the need to undertake such cumbersome research when conclusions can be drawn from the safety of offices and auditoriums? In ethnographic terms, such preconceptions and prejudices are intellectually unambitious. Furthermore, it must be underlined that investigating and understanding do not equal condoning. Ethnography creates empathy, surely, but not necessarily political sympathy. It is difficult to understate the importance of this: a non-moralizing approach is exactly the point of departure that has traditionally allowed ethnography to make a difference by adding constructive nuances to ossified and polarized landscapes. Despite this, anthropologists who have actually attempted to put their scholarly inquisitiveness above moral bias are often met with strong reactions and even condemnation when it comes to what is identified as perpetration. Take, for example, John Borneman (2012; 2015), who describes how the ‘emotional ambivalence’ of the audiences at his talks about his research on paedophiles in Germany has been projected onto him (2012: 184). As our own examples of our colleagues' reactions to our research show, within the discipline's majority opinion, some groups, it seems, are best left anthropologically unexamined.
An anthropology of perpetration does the opposite. It digs in and uses ethnography to clarify the social positions and possibilities from where engagement in violence, oppression, or subjugation departs, instead of merely leaving researchers to position themselves politically against it. While speaking up against perpetration of any kind is obviously important, merely positioning oneself against it may feel politically deep, but it runs the risk of being intellectually shallow. And while being politically deep is good and proper, the hard polarization that accompanies violence and war runs the risk of causing anthropologists to reproduce, and at times strengthen, conflictual divides rather than work against them. A peace and conflict studies approach to war would usually seek to withhold judgement until the research was done, merely because one sees nothing but one's own preconception if one does not, and because solutions need to encompass the fragility and complexity at play on all sides of such conflicts, no matter how unequal they may be. Anthropology, on the contrary, seems at times all too eager to become partisan and to rush to make one side meaningful while the other side is left self-evidently aggressive. Even worse, the destructiveness of violence at times blinds researchers and commentators to what is at stake in social and political terms. ‘What gives today's civil wars a new and terrifying slant is the fact that they are waged without stakes on either side, that they are wars about nothing at all’. This comment by Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1995: 30, original emphasis), referring to the wars that tore through the Upper Guinea Coast in West Africa towards the end of the last millennium, clearly confuses the fact that he can see no meaning with the fact than none exists. The absurd idea of meaninglessness quickly loses its validity if we look at the social positions and understandings of those who actually engaged in these wars. Were Enzensberger thus to communicate with and listen to the people whose acts he dismisses as meaningless, he might see these ‘perpetrators’ as driven by more than their ‘autistic nature’ (1995: 20, emphasis in original), and contribute to the debate with more than merely an analytical production of monsters. The meaning behind much collective violence is not necessarily located in ideological narrative but in praxis. It is not necessarily politically articulated but socially situated, as meaning obviously does not reside in discourse alone (Mbembe 1995: 325). We need thick descriptions from all sides of a conflict in order to gain a point of departure for viable peace.
Curiosity or dismissal
Whether working with ‘unlikeable politics’ or ‘unlikeable people’, on crime or conflict, giving a space to the voices of the perceived wrongdoers is not an attempt to water down or negate perpetration as a political, social, or cultural problem. We certainly need to research victims of domination to understand the suffering it causes. For example, there is a clear need for more critical race studies, postcolonial, and poststructural gender studies for us to apprehend the full extent of pervasive domination, slow crisis, and structural violence. Yet, at times, it seems as if the normative bearing within much anthropology has blinded us to the value of ethnographies of the political processes, groups, and people that are ethically prickly – those that might make us feel morally uncomfortable. Looking ethnographically at perpetration in a manner that is reflexively cognizant of our preconception, and which attempts to withhold judgement until fieldwork has been done, broadens our understanding of such dynamics. It probes power from the inside and allows us to fathom its contingencies and dialectics.
Coming back to our initial question of why this kind of research is not more frequently done within the discipline, one answer is that it is ethnographically difficult to research people who are aware that their communities and actions are negatively perceived in much social science. Yet, as we have seen, the difficulties in carrying out such studies are not just externally defined but internally derived. In the reactions to our work described above, certain groups are unpopular to study because ethnography is perceived as a way of giving these groups a further voice and because giving voice is, as said, seen as empowering. In relation to the already dominant, this, then, is perceived to further accentuate existing imbalances of power. However, as also shown, when we conduct the ethnography, it often becomes clear that those who are most obviously identified as working power in negative ways are not parasitical on a system, but positioned within it such that they experience a need to protect themselves from decline, loss, and regression. In Michael Jackson's words, ‘will’, even as a political intentionality, is always in-tension (1983: 335), contingent, and socially situated in a world that is experienced or imagined to be about to engage one – here in worrisome ways. Powerful or powerless, our acts are directly related to our understanding of the intentionality of the Other, as they are caught up and constituted in endless cycles of action and reaction (Vigh 2006; 2011).
‘I foamed in a Marxist rage’, a colleague humorously stated in a seminar after reading Peter Sloterdijk's (2008) philosophical work on ‘bubbles’. In Sloterdijk's perspective, bubbles serve as an analytical optic for human arrangement, a metaphor allowing us to grasp the way in which ‘worlds’ may be both singular and shared, bounded as well as interdependent entities. Bubbles in the plural connect with one another as foam, a figuration in which every border is shared and is both mutually supportive and destructive. Their co-constitution in the larger structure of foam induces an element of horizontal and vertical co-fragility into the structure. If one bubble bursts, so do the surrounding ones with which it shares its boundaries. Yet when and why would co-fragility be upsetting from a Marxist perspective? If one views the capitalist world as orchestrated by figures of power outside the otherwise shared system, by manipulative and hyper-enlightened figures of pure dominance, then yes. The alternative, and equally critical, perspective would, however, be to maintain that – hierarchical as it may be – there is no one outside the system. We are all caught up in the same dynamics – both those who profit from it and those who do not. This does not relieve perpetrators of responsibility, nor does it makes suffering any less real, but it lends itself to a far more nuanced description of politics where the social and systemic dimensions of political tensions and conflicts become clarified rather than mystified into a Manichean political order.
While this approach remains attentive to asymmetric power relations, structural violence, and oppression, it directs our attention to the fear of loss and dispossession that affects even the upper echelons of sociopolitical systems and that often underlies perpetration and the turn to violence itself. Clearly, wrongs need to be made right, harms need to be healed, divides need to be dismantled, yet we need to do so in a way that recognizes perpetrators as just as profoundly caught up in harm-producing systems and situations as anyone else. This entails taking our point of departure in a foundational anthropological approach, based on ethnographic fieldwork and academic curiosity about their social positions and lifeworlds – an approach that counters othering instead of contributing to it.
The argument allows us to return to our initial discussion and to dwell on the difference between ‘moral anthropology’ and an ‘anthropology of morals’ (Fassin 2012). Where the former positions the good and the bad and promotes clear-cut lines for anthropological advocacy and engagement (Scheper-Hughes 1995; 2004; 2019), the latter looks at the ways in which good and bad are constituted, positioned, challenged, or sought to be maintained. There is much to be gained from the former, yet political anthropology surely needs to be more if it wants to make a difference that reaches beyond the partisan. Painting the world in black and white does little to illuminate and address the often deep-seated imaginaries, fear, and fragility that inform politics. In this perspective, a study of the UVF is just as important as one of the IRA, and research on Trumpites is as necessary as researching anarchists. Yet within a moralizing anthropology that is saturated with preconceived ideas of our ‘other Others’, researching any of the former two amounts to being seen as politically dubious and as working against the politics of anthropology.
This is, of course, fully unacceptable. Not only is such fieldwork necessary, we need more of it! Perceived dominance, violence, and aggression should, in this manner, spur ethnographic engagement and curiosity, not disengagement. Anthropologists may, in morally and politically righteous ways, write off oppressive or violating forces from the ethnographic field of study. However, all of anthropology's Others, the white supremacists, anti-genderists, xenophobic nationalists, settler colonialists, militant right-wing protesters, neo-Nazis, predatory politicians, or QAnon members, are in desperate need of being ethnographically investigated using an approach that positions them within shared social worlds and historical becomings. If we want to realize the potential of political anthropology, we really do need more curiosity and less moralizing dismissal within our discipline.
In conclusion
At times, writing this article has felt like committing disciplinary hara-kiri and running wilfully into a counterargument of incomparable levels of subjugation and suffering. Yet our aim with this article has been a modest one. Our work takes its point of departure from an insistence on an academic curiosity about people's reasons for and ascriptions of meaning to what they do, even if we may disagree with them. All violence and domination is problematic and should be challenged, yet we gain little from prefiguring the world in black and white and merely reproducing the division in our disciplinary approach to it.
We simply have to investigate our ‘other Others’ as we would anyone else. In this regard, this article is not a call to be less political or speak less truth to power, but rather to let empirical insights come before – and thus to inform – critique. We should ethnographically engage with those we see as wrongdoers and perpetrators with the same openness and curiosity that we afford anyone else in order to understand rather than ‘other’ them. As argued, understanding does not mean condoning. We thus need to move beyond our ethnographic unease. The alternative is counterproductive as it ostracizes and potentially militarizes. While we are inescapably morally attuned beings, we can suspend passing judgement during fieldwork without losing sight of what we are looking at, or why.
In relation to internal debates in anthropology, such a perspective has, as described, been frowned upon. Investigating perpetrators is seen to come too close to legitimizing them, we are told. However, an open-minded study of perpetration may actually bring political anthropology closer to realizing its potential as an approach that generates the insights and nuances needed for effectuating viable and lasting change – a way of putting anthropological knowledge to use, which we hold is in itself an ethical agenda. This article is thus a call for a political anthropology that insists on perpetrators being as ethnographically interesting and anthropologically important as any other politically engaged or entangled actors. This is necessary if we want our work to be part of providing viable solutions, rather than adding further to the problem. The consequence of not elucidating the perspectives of perpetrators and oppressors is that we lose important insights into the social anchoring of harm.
Acknowledgements
The research for this article is supported by funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement no. 725194, CRIMTANG), as well as funding from the European Union under Grant Agreement no. 101068833, TRAFFICKER. Views and opinions expressed in the article are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency (REA). Neither the European Union nor the REA can be held responsible for them.
NOTES
Biographies
Trine Mygind Korsby is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. Her research examines the themes of sex work facilitation, sex work, human trafficking, transnational crime, and criminal livelihoods in Romania, Portugal, and Italy.
Henrik Vigh is Professor of Anthropology and Head of the Centre for Global Criminology at the University of Copenhagen. He has researched issues of youth and conflict in both Europe and Africa and is currently researching the intersection between war and crime, focusing on criminalized movement of people, goods, and drugs from Africa into Europe.
