(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Slum Acts is an excellent book, both very enlightening and very uncomfortable to read. Veena Das (78) is a former research professor at Johns Hopkins University, she is an award-winning anthropologist and has researched extreme violence for many years. Hailed as "one of anthropology's most distinguished ethnographers", she carefully presents her findings, leading to conclusions that are significantly different from conventional wisdom.
The urban slum of modern India.
Now the professor has turned his attention to the urban slums of modern India. Extreme violence is not the exception, but the rule – violence is not something that disrupts life, but an integral part of life. It is not a totalitarian phenomenon, on the contrary – Veena Das convincingly demonstrates that extreme violence is closely intertwined with life in modern democratic government regimes. Torture, as the most heinous form of extreme violence, is anything but the very last resort to prevent extreme events from taking place, as its proponents like to believe.
Torture is often used by the police to extract confessions for events that have already taken place – such as terrorist attacks. And these confessions are false most of the time, since their main purpose is to satisfy the public demand that the police do their job and find the guilty.
Extreme violence
The implications of this insight are enormous, as it shows that virtually everything we thought we knew is wrong. The political philosophers from the last century claimed that contemporary power mechanisms are increasingly distant from immediate physical violence, relying instead on sophisticated 'dispositions of power' (Foucault), and that the state apparatus replaces physical violence with ideology as a means of domination (Althusser).
The belief in a progressive distance from violence was so strong that Western social science and the humanities developed notions of human nature, agency and subjectivity in relation to outbreaks of extreme violence. Incidents of murder without obvious motives in the 19th century inspired the development of psychoanalysis (represented in the television series The Alienist, 2018–2020); the atrocities of World War I inspired Baudelaire's work and Lacan's theory of subjectivity; while the Second World War and the Holocaust made Hannah Arendt define the 'banality of evil'.
Regular use of extreme violence outside Europe – often committed by Europeans – such as the genocide of black Africans during the slave trade and indigenous peoples during the colonization of America has been excluded from this reasoning – and Das is aware of it.
Democracies have developed their own mechanisms to accept the fact that torture routinely occurs, including within the legal apparatus.
She has identified a similar bias in modern discourse on violence and the distinction between "civilized violence from state-initiated wars and barbaric violence attributed to others, whether colonial subjects or Islamic warriors". The notion of the 'banality of evil' allowed the scale of killing in genocide to be attributed to the machinery of the totalitarian regime – but democracies have developed their own mechanisms to accept the fact that torture occurs routinely, including within the legal apparatus, writes Das. Could the absurd distinction between so-called civilized and barbaric violence be part of the answer to her question "why are we less haunted by the apparatus of a democracy that engages in systematic torture than by the apparatus of the totalitarian state"? (Ibid.)
Lots of empirical material
A fascinating aspect of Slum Acts is that Das is in no rush to give answers or draw conclusions. It is known that she is "passionately interested in the question of how ethnography creates concepts", and in this book too she establishes a rare balance between the empirical and the conceptual.
She presents a great deal of empirical material and voices that would otherwise never be heard. But she also ensures a conceptual rigor that safeguards the credibility of the findings and creates opportunities for new ones. Her central concept is 'the abnormal knowledge', defined by Stanley Cavell as "dangerous not because it is hidden, but because we dare not acknowledge it". Das carefully presents his approaches to gathering this knowledge, beginning with the question of "how catastrophic events produce forms of knowledge that can circulate in the slums but are usually handled with euphemisms, evasions, and even silence."
The bomb blasts
As an anthropologist specializing in extreme violence, Professor Das is known for in-depth studies on the partition of India in 1947 and the massacre of Sikhs in 1984 after the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. IN Slum Acts she has addressed recent events, primarily the bomb blasts that took place in Mumbai in 1993, 2003, 2006, 2008 and 2011. She shines a spotlight on the stories that "were not obvious", the stories of the people who stood accused of being complicit in the terrorist attacks.
The accomplices may have been involved in a number of less serious acts such as cheating and smuggling, but as far as the bombings are concerned, they were innocent, writes Das. One of them, Wahid Shaikh, was arrested in connection with the 2006 train bombing and spent nine years in prison, but was eventually acquitted of all charges.
While in prison, he began writing a book about his experiences as a torture victim. The Innocent Prisoner (Begunah Qaidi, 2017), with subtitles Memories of a Torture Survivor is "written as an educational book for the oppressed", "an instruction manual for how to behave under torture", and shows, according to Das, the importance of folk literature in informing social theory.
Another story that is thoroughly analyzed in the book is that of an anonymous girl who, when she was eight years old, lived in the slums of Delhi. She was abducted, forcibly held, tortured and raped for four months before she was rescued.
United States: "Torture has been regularly used disproportionately" against African Americans, to obtain "confessions known to be false but used to legitimize torture by claiming that its techniques are successful."
Among the author's written sources are also documents about the United States, which show that "torture has been regularly used on a disproportionate scale" against African Americans, to obtain "confessions known to be false, but used to legitimize torture by claiming that its techniques bring success”. Andrew Wilson, one of the torture victims, was arrested in 1982 – that is, long before the terrorist attack of 11 September 2001, which was widely believed to be the reason for the use of torture.
This book is important reading material for anyone who wants to get to know the contemporary world better, and is also relevant far beyond the main field of research.
Translated by Iril Kolle
