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War, Grief, and the Auto-Narrative of a Hesitant Killer
| Termin |
Dienstag, 23. Oktober 2012, 16.15 - 18.00 Uhr
|
| Veranstaltungsart |
Vorlesung/Vortrag |
| Einrichtung |
Philosophische Fakultät I |
| Veranstaltungsort |
Max-Planck-Institut für ethnologische Forschung |
| Straße |
Advokatenweg 36 |
| PLZ/Ort |
06114 Halle (Saale) |
Beschreibung
Vortragende: Bilinda Straight; Western Michigan University, USA
Samburu are livestock herders occupying a region in northern Kenya's semi arid lands characterized by chronic, low intensity inter-community violence. Although Samburu experienced a period of relative calm in the early 1990s when I first started working with them, conflict with the neighboring Pokot intensified in 2003 and reached a peak in 2008-10, when they were also engaged in conflict with Turkana and Borana. While my work has focused on a variety of themes, including death, expressive and material culture, and oral history, violence has featured prominently in my work from 2003 to the present. This talk performs a close reading of two moments in one Samburu warrior’s auto-ethnographic theorization of war, death, and grief in order to consider broader questions about masculinity, emotion, and the self-narrativized, psycho-social dimensions of conflict. In this particular case, ideas about the body, dwelling, and movement consistent with East African pastoralist idioms are central. Comparison with other historical and cultural contexts reveal different idioms but the process is arguably similar – the creation of self-justificatory or at minimum – coping – narratives. Ultimately, the Samburu warrior at the core of this particular paper continued to engage in conflict in spite of his self-awareness of the horror he experienced. He did so partly by considering the process of his grieving as qualitatively different from grief outside a war context. In its concluding section, I will consider the interplay between agency at its limits and historically particularized political-economic contexts in the making of hesitant as well as enthusiastic killers. Another reading of the paper is as a meditation on the individualized, culturally modulated mechanisms that facilitate the creation of warrior-killers at the service of communities and nations.
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