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Abstract
This article takes its stance in the fruitful perspectives with which anthropology may contribute to peace and conflict resolution studies, a field seemingly dominated by political science. Not only the relativity of ‘peace’ and ‘war’ is at stake when anthropologists intervene with their epistemologies applied to human interaction in violent contexts. Challenging the methodology of registering such interaction and asking for gender perspectives are pivotal parts of the anthropological endeavour within peace studies. Trying to emphasize the opposite of ‘normal’—which is concentrating on war—anthropologists have a longstanding tradition of focusing on peaceful societies as well as documenting the resocialization of peoples suffering from atrocities.
Notes
[1] ‘Physical hurt’ is by no means an uncomplicated term: Persons may feel themselves physically hit also by words and texts (e.g., speech acts). Within biomedical reasoning, mental pressure may exert more bodily harm than physical hurt. The whole Carthusian discussion of body vs. mind lies in this problematic division.
[2] ‘What I dream of, what I try to think as the “purity” of a forgiveness worthy of its name, would be a forgiveness without power: unconditional but without sovereignty. The most difficult task, at once necessary and apparently impossible, would be to dissociate unconditionality and sovereignty. Will that be done one day? It is not around the corner, as is said. But since the hypothesis of this unpresentable task announces itself, be it as a dream for thought, this madness is perhaps not so mad’ (Derrida, Citation2001, pp. 59–60).
[3] The definition of ‘the third,’ the superaddressee, differs according to the two different contexts of the court and the conference. This difference needs to be precisely analysed: in court it is ‘the word of law’ (written, but also orally interpreted by the judges at the moment of sentencing) which seems to be ‘the third,’ created over centuries by politicians, legal bureaucrats, and lawyers, whereas it may be ‘popular reason’ or ‘popular interpretation of right’ which constitutes ‘the third’ in a conference, created by the dialogues between the parties and the facilitators. Interestingly, these analyses may be complicated by linguistic differences: for example, in English as well as in Norwegian ‘law’ (lov) and ‘right’ (rett) are two different words, whereas in French the word droit means both ‘law’ and ‘right.’