Summaries VERSÃO PORTUGUESA

Lesson 1. 2014; 2015; 2017; 2018; 2019; 2020; 2021

Lesson 2. 2014; 2015; 2017; 2018; 2019; 2020; 2021

Lesson 3. 2014; 2015; 2017; 2018; 2019; 2020; 2021

Lesson 4. 2014; 2015; 2017; 2018; 2019; 2020; 2021

Lesson 5. 2014; 2015; 2017; 2018; 2019; 2020; 2021

Lesson 6. 2014; 2015; 2017; 2018; 2019; 2020; 2021

Lesson 7. 2014; 2015; 2017; 2018; 2019; 2020; 2021

Lesson 8. 2014; 2015; 2017; 2018; 2019; 2020; 2021

Lesson 9. 2014; 2015; 2017; 2018; 2019; 2020; 2021

Lesson 10. 2014; 2015; 2017; 2018; 2019; 2020; 2021

Guide lines

You are not called to develop field research on violence. What we will do is to develop an idea about how to research about violence that can become a research project in the future, after the course.

First assignment: description of a case of violence (10%)

Second assignment: experimental application of the theories studied, as the definition of violence as a reduction to the body, to the case of violence described. Use zoom out (how the micro experience influences macro life) and zoom in (how the macro influences the micro). (20%)

Third assignment: doing science is not about giving answers. It is about producing good non solved and asking for data questions. Methodology for information collection to develop an analysis of violence more rigorous (reduction to the body as formative activity and reduction to the body in the limits or beyond the resilience of the people involved) at the micro-level (formation of more or less deteriorated identities), at the macro-level (empire, the global network of states, and dominant states of mind) and at the meso-level (social care organized to enhance good violence and minimize bad violence). (30%)

Final assignment: learning synthesis and a future study project. Final report delivery (25.000-70.000 characters): complete sociological analysis of violence involved in the case study, framed by social values in use.  (40%)

Schedule information

Scientific theory in the social sciences (2020) the secrets of the Empire

The social sciences method (2020) self centred zoom out and zoom in

Censorship of knowledge production: a demonstration (2020)

2021

Types of violence: fusional group panic violence; training educated violence; sacrificial violence; professional violence, such as military or police violence; Stockholm syndrome - kidnapping; abuse and rape; social integration (minorities, such as women or children); love-seduction: passion; conversion; condescendence, etc.

Theory of violence and Imperial rationality (2021) slide shows

Violent deaths, the redundant paradigmatic case of violent physical violence commonly used in modern societies as part of moralistic apparatus

Why we must avoid moral when doing science? Because accepting mainstream moral one is taking side: those in charge of victorious violence became right and those losing became wrong, like a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is the main result of violence: people learn how incorporate victorious strategies of action and mind (Stockholm syndrome). 

The Decline and Fall of the American Empire (2021)

How to overcome social theory´s imbedded censorship (2021)

Sociological contradiction: centred on power and omitting violence (anti-history), surrender Imperial Húbris

Lesson 7 - Methodological plan

Violência à luz de Damásio - Violence under Damasio´s theory

Presentations´ schedule

To draw a methodological plan is not enough to choose a research technique or between a quantative versus qualitative approach.

What is the main exercise I ask the students to develop for the next and third assignment is a) to find what is there to be discovered b) how to manage the data production in a way it deliver evidence about what we want to discover.

Science is about discovering, uncovering what is hidden. Violence is hidden and those who engage on it, both as victims and as abusers, have especial interest on hiding violence. Social science theories also hide violence, for instance, declaring it rare (as Collins does) or anti-social (as Wieviorka does). Conceive violence as half part of life experience, compared to breathing in, alternating with estado de espírito production, compared to breathing out, violence as reduction to the body (as Reemptsma define it), one has a lot of violence to uncover.

To do the job one has to avoid moralism. Moralism presents violence as rare as the violent person, as anti-social as the enemies. This humanity divides between those few violent enemies and the rest of the non-violent humanitarian humans is moralistic and unrealistic. Orwell famously describe this in Animal Farm, stating that we are all equal but some between us are more equal than others.

Scientific approach to violence must break with moralism and with mainstream social theories that engage in hiding violence in human societies, as a way to discriminate between allegedly sacred human life (of part of humanity) and the rest of the world to be explored (nature and its human resources). Please, be critical to legal, social sciences, institutional definitions of violence.

One way to develop scientific social theory is to bridge to biology. You may read António Damásio´s books for inspiration. I wrote a short note on this you can link at the begging of this summary.

To develop a discovery methodology on human violence is hard. We need to engage in in-depth dialogue with those few interested in this uncover work. That is what we will do in class for the next three zoom schedules that will end our course. I need your initiative and cooperation to discover the difficulties we experiment, and we will try to overcome them together.
 

Lesson 6 - Caring and identity violence

Iceberg tip of society is what social sciences esteems to be society: it comes top down as imposition to individuals that are naturally obliged to sacrifice to comply with social roles regulated by social control 

Violence and enemy moralistic taboo incorporated by trauma

Time and space analysis of an event (zoom in: incorporated past, and zoom out: wishes for the future)

Bottom-up zoom-in: Boby&Soul - Wacquant, to whom violence os not a sociological subject For a Sociology of Flesh and Blood, Loïc Wacquant, 2015 (Daniel Mendes reports)

Top-down zoom-out: Terrorism - Wieviorka feared for his academic carreer: “Violence and/or Non-Violence in the Success of the Civil Rights Movement: the Malcolm X – Martin Luther King Jr. Nexus”. New Political Science 38:1, 1-22, August H. Nimtz, 2016 (Guilherme Serôdio and David Branquinho report)

Science is not about a perfect description such as a map of the same size of reality it describes. One must choose the way to make a reduction of the description making sense of it. This sense must be higher than reality itself: science is making simple mindful sense out of empirical complexity. Moralism, religion, dogma, ideology are non-scientific ways to do the job. Social science must learn how to reconnect with real human flesh and blood emphatic experience, delivering short structural descriptions open to renewal.

Objective structure is not found in the specificity of events. Specificity hides what is going on, because humans look with their minds: we reduce in our minds what happens to make sense of it. Science oppose to other forms of knowledge to maximize empirical events influence in the process of knowing and open it to social collaboration of anyone who wants to contribute.
One finds objective structures of human social life in what each event has in common with all the events one can imagine. Describing structures is a productive cognitive way of descriptive reduction. Structure means what is common to humankind and not only to each culture. For science sake, one needs to overcome cultural biases. Looking for the social structures is having conscious of what unite humankind as opposed to over value what divide human beings. What unite humankind is also what divide us: the structures we build and pass through heritage to those that follow.

Violence is structural within life experience on Earth, let alone within humankind experience. The common sense and common social theory divide in good violence and bad violence is religious driven. It hides the heritage of incorporated violence that is transparent to us. The incorporated violence becomes habitual. So, violence structural consequences for the life chances of humanity and of each person is hidden by moralistic modernity ideologies. One can opposed to it zoom out and zoom in scientific analysis to deconstruct moralism. Time analysis and hope and endurance analysis of personal and social growing from experience (including violence and estado-de-espírito, looking to breathing in – reduction to the body; incorporating – and breathing out – expressing oneself; developing capabilities – alike dynamic).

Galvanizing people, as social movements, is not a rare event. What is rare is many people sharing the same “emerging as new” (estado-nascente, Francesco Alberoni´s Genesis).

Modern knowledge, including social sciences´ knowledge, is about avoiding fusional estados-de-espírito, big mobs united for a long time. Modernity worship revolution as much it fears it. Modern moralism on violence is about dealing with worshiping good violence and fearing bad violence. History shows that bad and good violence, violence and estado-de-espírito, are not distinct: they come together.

What science needs to understand is what makes violence glorious (as in sport) even when one loses, and what makes violence abusive even when one is dominant.
 

Lesson 5 - Making science

Science is about difficult questions production. Scientists work to give answers to these questions, rarely obtaining full answers. The same should happen with social sciences.
Most of the time, unhappily, social sciences provide moralistic answer to quite weak questions. For instance: violence is bad. This kind of approach to social phenomenon is so weak that one prefers not consider violence as a social phenomenon. One can say that violence is anti-social (as Wieviorka does) or say that violence is rare (as Collins does), to conclude that mainstream theory do not need any change because violence, one way or another, is marginal to society.

We do not need research or science to understand that violence is structural to society and life. Why social sciences contradict the evidence and get way with it?

Professional social sciences, since the 1930´s, established as scholar business, praise modern society, and avoid as much as possible to present the dark side of modernity (misogyny, racism, discrimination, institutional manipulation, etc.). Social sciences present violence and other negative modern characteristics as remains from the past to be overcome. Unhappily, war and violence, as well as other problems, stay and grow as social problems.

Let’s follow Merton suggestion of starting with middle range theories closed to empirical cases that will turn to a bigger picture when possible.

We need a case of violence (common violence, sequences of violence, incorporated violence, violence endured without complain by the people) and explore it as part of a holistic subject (society). That is the propose of sociology of violence. Zoom in (looking for the past of the case of violence as it may been incorporated in those people who are protagonists and by standers) zoom out (looking for the consequences of the case to those involved and to the bigger picture where many violent cases happen) are required analysis for the second assignment.

For those students that did not reached to an empirical case in the first assignment, the second assignment must describe first the case of study.

Science and learning (as teaching) are about organizing discussions. Not abstract and moralistic discussion around ideologies. Science needs experimental discussions about the use of concepts in social analysis. Zoom out zoom in exercise should show how the concept of violence value empirical data to a contribution to understand what society is about.
 

Lesson 4. Why to adopt the “reduction to the body” conceptualization of “violence”?

Scientific, political and health raisons:

1. Scientific raisons show that the Empire support/opposes the development of science. The New Deal supported the professionalization of social sciences and opposes the continuation of the path from social philosophy to sciences of society.

Holistic “universal subtract” is avoided. Local “elite power” is presented as the main structure of life and zenith of cosmos. This national or economic power conception hides both social and psychological aspects of Imperial power built by caring and identity activities.

Society (power) is conceived as separated from people (human resources cared and identified by people). Caring and identity building arising from bio-social bases and are neglected by social analysis that oppose discussing biological aspects of human beings.

Violence is presented as a divine like power. Only God or Lucifer, elite, state or cruel criminal, terrorists, poor people, use it. Instead of a natural practice that accept different intensities and end results, like sportive health, reproduction, or death, common to all animals, violence is wrongly represented as an extraordinary rare event for middle classes.

2. The scientific conceptualization of violence should deal with the social credits and the social malaises regarding the Empire strategies. Glory and shame regarding Imperial violence are the bases of social life, prior to capitalism and modernity.

Good and bad aspects of capitalism discussion should be included in discussion about good and bad aspects of the Empire project of exploiting the Earth. Capitalism is a modern instrument of the Empire, not the other way around. Pandemic showed one can stop capitalism to defend Empire. And capitalism can endure all the blame, hiding its victim-accomplices Empire and its supporters – modern populations, CEO, and professionals.

Structural violence is legitimated by Imperial “estado-de-espírito”: a holistic six thousand years old social event that evolve as global incorporated individualistic versions: each one of us, we all are the Empire and we denies it.

3. We represent ourselves as insecure potential victims of violence. The same violence we join playing Imperial “estado-de-espírito” in family, professional, gender, sport, political roles.

We accept to change liberties for security because we feel freedom as a menace and state violence as a life insurance.

Our main enemies are inside us and nearby, as family and friends that integrate us in the society.
 

Lesson 3 - Theory of violence in practice

Costa Caparica, 2.3.2021, COVID free preparation of the lesson

In the post-war, the beach, where the sea and the land separate and come together, became a symbol of leisure, marginality, luxury (surfing lifestyle) for those who visit it outside of vacation time. However, confinement and telework make it possible to work on the beach and prepare lessons while walking on the beach.

From a simple photograph, one can find violence (class violence, class status symbol, distinction) in the landscape, according to time (day, hour) and activity (is it work walking on the beach? Is it work to read a book? Must a teacher work?). One can find structural violence without any communication (aggressor-victim-bystanders) event: the full location of one person (time-space) does give the social analyst information to understand violence as a reduction to the body. This is especially true in the Big Data Era when databases know best who each person is than the people who give life to his/her persona. Each body in action continually builds each person as people/individual, both virtually, and physically, symbolically, and bodily, evolving as life do, together with all society, and all environment.

Using this holistic approach one can look for, discuss, and understand violence (including social-incorporated-violence, symbolic violence) where common sense does not find it.

The case of the David Christian conference on education for the future generation shows huge (incorporated, naturalized) violence operating through a zoom event. A very well-organized event presented to thousands of scholars from Frontiers platform (an open-source scientific and global publishing business corporation) a Christian´s project sponsored by Bill Gates charity work, for 10 years now.

The message was contradictory: the founder of Big History (as Big Tech or Big Farm) propose a holistic approach to science and culture – this means bringing together all sciences to draw an alternative to the religious story about the creation and meaning of the universe. Scientists know that it breaks with cartesian hyperspecialized common scientific work (because they work in science). Then, the proposal follows a contradictory path, regarding the revolutionary purpose: it would be enough to turn the Christian´s project a worldwide success to produce the social revolution that is needed to deal with the unknown challenges of climate change. When all children will be educated believing in Big History instead of creation myths, substituting religion with science at the basis of epistemology teaching, everything will change for the better. For that purpose, it would be enough for every school program to include one more discipline: Big History.

Asked for how it would help to deal with social and economic inequalities, Christian do not have an answer. Asked for merging his project with a similar project of a colleague that wishes to work together, the answer was: “This is another project!” You must look for a sponsor on your own.

It is not possible for one project to change the world except it is an imperial project that lasts for thousands of years. To add an item in the scholar curriculum does not change schools or people. No one does holistic science alone, within his own project serving advertisement to Bill Gates imperial project as a keynote speaker to a global conference of a growing scientific publishing platform.

It is common for corporate sponsors to support scientific conferences. It is not common to present Bill Gates as a partner, as an inspiration, not as a sponsor. It reminds me of the communist hero propaganda of the chief.

To drive through analysis such as this, regarding a case you have in mind, I propose to you to consider holistic approach to human nature. Violence, as “reduction to the body”, is like a breath-in that works together with breath-out estado-de-espírito (it merges mood, state of mind, zeitgeist: biological, individual, and social levels working together). Violence is incorporated as experience in each person. From experience, each person draws a set of estados-de-espírito. Each person uses each estado-de-espírito (family spirit, profissional spirit, sport spirit, corporate spirit, national spirit, disciplinar spirit, etc.) according to with the situation and his/her momentaneous decision making. Violence will feedback: the experience of the responses of the situation to the estado-de-espírito used incorporate on each one´s body related to the memory of the usefulness of the used estado-de-espírito.

Each cycle of experiencing estado-de-espírito by one person, as well as by many people, eventually all the people, reduce each type of estado-de-espírito in the flesh, in the body, in the bodies.

Half a dozen of thousands of years did produce experiments and diffuse Imperial estado-de-espírito. This is Big History´s violence imposed by imperial societies on everyone. Education and sciences are strong ways to diffuse this kind of estado-de-espírito. That is why family and school education imagine science a set of dogmas and science (the practices of the doubt) accept to be (violently) reduced to school dogma to serve the imperial elite that funds both schools and science.

That is why David Christian accepted to reduce his holistic approach to a Bill Gates sponsored project managed exclusively by him, as a scientific prophet, in contradiction of his holistic science project.

 

Lesson 2 - Break up with common sense

The course is not about doing research. It is about using available data about violence and think about it differently.

Violence conceived by common sense is moral. Aggressors (mostly bad people) make victims (mostly innocent people). Social sciences avoid referring violence. Most of disciplines take violence as anti-social, as a destructive and irrelevant kind of action. International relations, history, criminology, take violence as their main subject without any conceptual discussion on what violence is. They accept moralistic (nationalist and state centred) common sense understanding of violence.

Sociology of violence should not be a watertight specialization of sociology. Conceiving violence as a special extraordinary phenomenon that happens within borders of violent environment separated from social life is obviously wrong. Even common-sense separate nature and wildlife from human society and civilized life, in the real-world humankind and its societies are part of nature and cannot survive out of nature. Culture, civilization is very violent. Empire is very violent.

Wieviorka understanding of violence as caused by cruelty is a moral common-sense understanding of violence. The main types of violence he designs (the hyper-subject – or hero – and the anti-subject – the anti-hero) are moralistic and represents the war of civilization between Christianity and Muslims. Collins definition of micro violence is designed as a communication theory: the emission comes from the rare violent and the victims are those who endure the consequences of the violence out of any chance of resistance, protection, prevention, as a dummy.

The violence as reduction to the body (as a scientific conceptualization you may test) integrate a different kind of social sciences that avoids moral, avoids accepting as dogma the common-sense way to submit to status quo.

Violence is not what breaks with peaceful lives. Violence is part of peaceful life. Reduction to the body is a motion that play with the opposite motion of growing out of the body, as the breath means inspiration together with expiration. One can use “estado de espírito” – Portuguese phrase that merge the sense of mood, state of mind, zeitgeist, together at one single idea, regarding emotions, psychology, social ambience as one – to represent what plays with violence in the process of production of personal-social identity (Bourdieu´s social disposition and Elias´ social configurations).

To build family spirit, disciplinary spirit, professional spirit, sociological spirit, etc., both growing up from the living body and violence work together against and with each person, each group, at different social levels (face-to-face, institutional level, political level). This is the conceptual frame I propose to you to use to deal with your case in a scientific, amoral, and analytic way, conceiving human life as part of nature and violence as part of life.

This understanding of social life means that one need to develop knowledge bridges (not walls) between biology and social sciences. (For those who read Portuguese, you can use http://home.iscte-iul.pt/~apad/estesp/estesp.htm to look at the museum of my research lab on this conceptualization).

One example of estado-de-espírito is Imperial spirit, or Empire. Its is a very effective and old estado-de-espírito, used by Alexander the Great. He and his group proposed to every chief he meet to join him on becoming and elite. The elite will do what other people could not do: to link long distance business. The problem is that locally the people may not accept elite privileges. Since then, new essays of Empire developed and all of them break. And it raises again.

There is no violent problem when leaders take leadership. The problem is when elites want to remain leaders for life and in every situation, including through generations. People do not like that and fight back. Elite learned how to stay as elite, submitting the people.
How elites do that? Everybody knows how: people divided and fighting each other do not have a chance to break the elites. That is why elite (and its culture) developed may ways to divide and rule, such as social sciences do. Culture discriminate (as it uses words) and moralize discrimination (point out what is good and what is bad, like religions do). Doing so, culture can incorporate competing identities in people (starting with gender identities) as divisions tools, as cultural chips in each kid, for life. This exactly what moralistic concepts teaches at schools do. That is what science of societies must avoid.
 

Lesson 1 - Presentation

Violence is a very emotional word hidden by social secrecy. The most violent action, like sexual abuse, is part of patriarchal way of live without complains. We know that today because few years ago the women movements push to disclosure this secret. Still, it continues working and sexual abuse still is pandemic and do not stop the economy.

Violence against foreigner, such as refugees or immigrants, is not a big problem. Few people raise the human rights principles and the law, no consequences. Still dying crossing boarders or Mediterranean Sea. Police violence against Hong-Kong demonstrators is violent. Police violent at European ghettos are restoring the order. In the US, these days, big struggle to classify police violence as racist or “law and order”. The later still winning.

The same activity is named as violence or opposing violence depending on ideological and moral relativist grounds. Violence coming from friends is not violence, is self-defence, maybe heroic self-defence. Violence targeting us is cruel violence. “Us” being the state-patriarchal-imperial persona we all follow since Rome integrate Christian movements as Empire praise ideology.

Civilization, or culture, is a way to say we, modern people, did emerge from nature (as Darwin teached us) and break up with it. We break up with community and nature. Civilization is the exploitation of the Earth and its resources, including human resources. We are seeing the results of this half a millennium imperial mission. Still, victims of genocide resist with their ancestral Earth friendly cultures. Humanity still have choices.

Social sciences are not part of the solution. They claim not be part of science (natural science. They prefer to comply with social discrimination that are used by the elites and the powerful to divide and rule. Social sciences hiper-specialization make it watertight the communication between natural sciences and social sciences, between social sciences disciplines, between subdisciplines of each discipline. Social sciences practices divide to reign power technique inside and outside of it.

The path that aim to turn social philosophy into science of society is still working, outside mainstream institutional activities. We will follow this trend in this course. We will consider the subject of social sciences the singular humankind experience in the Earth, within the ecological and cosmic environment that allow life evolution to give space to the emergency of human thinking.

Violence is “reduction to the body” (Remptsma). Violence is everywhere. As breathing expires and inspires, the similar way life expands (grow, think, evolve, pray, plans) and engages on violence (good and bad, as sex, and sport, and schooling, etc.).
The recommendation is to suspend as much as possible moral evaluation of the violence cases (as better methodological option to push forward science) and see discrimination as it is developed by societies, states, social sciences. After seeing it, after overcoming social secrets, then we can do morals in the base of better thinking and evidence, scientific thinking and evidence.

2020

Lesson 8 - Evolution of organized violence

Lesson 7 - Social secret

Social secrecy is a broad-spectrum phenomenon, such as violence, which can make violence an imperceptible phenomenon and its revelation a surprise and even a scandal. We have an idea that because we are awake we are aware of everything going on around us. We do not realize that the habitual and the extraordinary escape permanently to our senses and to our conscience.

This characteristic of human nature (to be aware only of a small part of what happens around us) must be associated with the empire, which is a mode of organization of the expansion of competences and qualities of elites particularly effective and that has developed under the strictest organized violence (organized violence between the elites and in the military form also, way of imposition of the superiority of the elites and their maintenance through territorial expansion, capable of nourishing the ambitions of increasing the number of people forming part of the elites). Social secrecy is manipulated (to build specialties, people that should pay attention to a specific aspect of reality and forget all others), along with violence, to allow the maintenance of these elites (Novak, Hirschman).

During the war, people lose memory of what they have been and become other people, who may not want to acknowledge after the end of the war (Levi). Eventually causing problems of identity and self-flagellation or post-traumatic stress, in turn also objects of secrecy.

During the revolutions this also happens. Revolutionary periods reveal a new personality when experiencing new situations. The same happens when people fall in love or get involved in social movements.

Social secret is the reverse of social consciousness: people's focus is limited to five or six themes and is conditioned by propaganda. Propaganda organized by the nation-state, with the support of newspapers and television, which makes its agenda according to the political interests of the moment, even in the opposition.

Examples of social secrets can be read in Graeber, Elias, Hirschman, Robben, Klahr, stories of sexual predators, domestic violence, in the Tintin books, and many others.

Each one of us acquires a series of social life codes and skills, such as social genetic code. Some are mobilized to become active and others are deactivated and dormant. When we decide to study science, we fall asleep to our artistic skills and vice versa, to give a simplified example. When the situation changes, by passion, by war, by revolution, by crisis, by scandal, by the group of friends getting involved in social activities, especially younger people can change the lot of active and active skills and orientations and change personality. The memories of the first self are obscured and distorted by the new orientations that come to organize the mind.

The secrets, therefore, result from the limitation of human attention capacity and the organization of selective memory in terms of orientations and ideologies. Secrets can re-emerge in the mind and memory when there is a change of social regime that favors it. The secrets are also the target of manipulative uses of people's lives, such as practices of marginality and eventual consolidation of alternative social regimes.

Graeber speaks of three economic regimes: the communist (used in many families), the hierarchical (used in associative and church membership), the market. The latest has overshadowed the formers. Economic theory (social theory) has a central ideological role here.

Elias speaks of the repugnance towards the violence that the civilizational process incorporated in the modern people, compared with those that lived to the 400 years.

Hirschman mentions the transformation of bourgeois ideology, which has since become dominant, between the feudal regime and modernity. When it was not dominant, the bourgeoisie was very sensitive to violence and denounced it as a vice of aristocrats. When it became dominant, it ignored the existence of violence by the state that fulfilled its business-friendly policies. Even today, countries that are not allies are portrayed as violent and allied countries as non-violent.

Robben refers to the emergence of the mothers of May, women mothers of young left-wing activists in Argentina murdered in secret by the general’s regime. The mothers complained against the disappearance of their children and assumed the ideologies of their own children. The intention of the state, which was to end the race of leftist activists, was frustrated that other activists - their mothers - continued and continue to assume and develop these ideologies today. Already after the generals were condemned by history and the courts.

Klahr reports the consequences of the war (zero tolerance) against the young children of foreigners in California who eventually endorse narco-regimes in Central America through the circulation of California-born youths of Honduran and Mexican who were expelled to the countries of origin of their parents by unruly behavior. These youths were used from prisons by criminal networks that sent them back to California with guns and drugs, mingling and assaulting migrants.

References:

Lesson 6 - Methodology (Collins vs reduction to the body)

Violence and other forms of reduction to the body

The methodology for studying violence that pulses within life - before understanding what is good or bad, formative or destructive, producing identity or disgust in each case - should follow three main lines of investigation, namely: identifying the polarized classifications around which violence is organized, such as gender, classes, streets or cities, nationalities, etc .; the elites in dispute, such as males, proletarians, civil servants, citizens, marginals, etc .; contra elites concerned, such as victims, workers, consumers, children or the elderly, etc .; forms of camouflage, such as escapes, seeming dead, hiding behind social roles, homeless, etc.

Lesson 4 - Methodological questions

Lesson 2 - Body+soul; living conditions+organizations; case+struture.

Loïc Wacquant is a pupil and friend of Pierre Bourdieu who worked his PhD in Chicago University, in the black ghetto. He becomes famous because he finds out the consequences of the huge incarceration rates of afro-american male juveniles and wrote about it. He works as teacher in Berkley Univ. and he is today a specialist in Bourdieu thinking, now a day very appreciate in the US.

His PhD thesis was about his own experience of incorporating boxing spirit as a way of socializing and auto-identification. Especially useful where there are few opportunities to build a satisfying social net and a strong social identity.

His methodological recommendations go in the sense of personal and body involvement of the students with their empirical subjects. One should know better than by rational means, such as news and storytelling. One need to know by feelings the situation, using the shoes of one actor or comparing the case with one´s own experience, for instance. This will enable the researcher to discuss with him or herself what is involved in the action, as human condition. He or she cannot just accept any version of a story that there is no way to access the accuracy.

One can separate micro analysis from macro analysis, as most sociology do. The course is about criticizing the approach of splitting what comes together. Be careful whenever you use structure to avoid discussing empirical cases or when we use description out of an explanation. The best is discussing the ways society produces and destroys the situations and technologies that oppress and develop it.

Lesson 1 - Violence as reduction to the body

2017

Violence in society (2014)

Violence taboo here: http://www.ipvr.eu/people/steps/research_projects?token=gqu2G7_rE1MKZ4J7D1b06Q)

Lesson 10 - Final Balance of the Course

Social theory about violence is an insight persistently absent on social sciences. It is not enough to make violence a subdiscipline of sociology to assess the role and place of violence in social life. It is necessary to adopt another general social theory, a theory that admits the existence of violence as part of social experience.

Social morality designates violence as morally reprehensible. State violence against criminals or enemies, however, is not reprehensible. Mentioning it as violence is avoided. Legitimate violent actions are socially denied as violence, as a reprehensible behavior. Reactions to risks and dangers is presented as legitimate defense, not violence.  An example of this is police violence. It is not spoken of as violence, but as enforcement of law and order, proportionate use of force, maintenance of peace, etc. War violence of our side is presented as side-effects, casualties, etc.

It is not irrelevant that important sociologists as Wieviorka and Collins, in their studies of violence, discarded the study of state violence. Traditionally social theories uses deviance, conflict interaction, labeling, as concepts to deal with violence. Crime classifications or social profiles of criminals are held hostage to criminology, biased as much as common sense moralistically controlled idea of violence. Moralistic politicization of violence is accepted by sociologists.

Wiewiorka theorizes the moral / political evaluation of violence. He thinks one needs to extrapolate from sociology to deal with theory of violence. Political philosophy, the philosophical notion of Touraine´s "subject," guides the author in a well-defined moral defense of western civilization. It is this philosophy that organizes the typology of violent subjects. The author acknowledges the intrusion of morality into social analysis, but instead of alienating it he organizes its extra-sociological validation.

Collins, interested in sociological micro-analysis and in the study of aggressor-victim interactions, discards symbolic violence. He discarded the analysis of the reasons why people end up engaging in violence. He discarded the fact that there are those lives and institutions dedicated to create the situations that make people violent, in the police and in the military, for instance. Collins ignores police and military training. He only shows how, even high trained men instead of becoming violent, the military resist engaging in violence. Being rare those who overcome the violence tension / fear barrier just because they are given orders.

Wacquant's theory of penal state - and his method of embodying social objects of study - offer interesting clues to establish studies on state violence, namely its dual aspect: symbolic violence (left, social, integration and assimilation side of the state) and direct physical violence (right-wing, police, stigmatization and exclusion side of the state), as well as the role of prisons in enhancing state power vis-à-vis the people.

Using the definition of Reemtsma, violence as reduction to the body, violence is a way of dealing with sociability problems and challenges. It reveals what is commonly called the animality of human beings. It's neither good nor bad, at first. Violence is certainly necessary and indispensable, as pain is. It can have harmful effects in the immediate, and good in the medium or long term; or vice versa. Moral evaluation is important. But it can be suspended by social theory, until a more extensive general evaluation in time and space can be done.

As Wieviorka will say, there are violence that promotes progress and well-being. There are deaths and injuries that are not in vain. They produce, in the long run, good results for people (albeit at the cost of the suffering). When people do sports, or go to school they risk death, physical and moral injury. Schools and sport promote destructive inferiority complexes for many people who fail to compete and who are therefore frustrated and diminished. However, morally, schools and sport are among the most benevolent institutions, perhaps the ones that contribute most to avoiding violence, in society. Hospitals and vaccines are also responsible for preventable injuries and deaths. But not only hospitals and vaccines are a unique contribution to the longevity of the human species, as health scientists use animals and even people as guinea pigs for their experiments to find solutions that can save lives for many others and make money to corporations.

Bio-ethics and an educational and professional ethic have full right to be scholar disciplines. Medicine, however, can avoid morals for a large extent. Such as sociciology of violence can do. Sociology needs to be attentive to moral kinds of discussions. But, to study violence in society, to stop the present denial of social theory about violence being everywhere, we recommend suspending moral judgments, during social analysis. Many good violence is denied to be violent. Just because common sense presume that it is indispensable and even good in the long run.

Instead of mixing good and bad intents with violence analysis, and separating aggressors and victims, one can look for reduction to the body effects, out of morals. One can consider separately the processes of incorporation - of habits, dispositions, knowledge, information – and the assessment of if violence/reduction-to-the-body is good or unsuccessful (for instance, because incorporation process is forgotten, do not remain in memory).

Society needs to abandon the theoretical ghetto in which it has been placed in the last century, describing a society without contact neither with the environment, not even with the bodies and the emotions of the people. Individuals in society are not hangers where one can assign same properties as each one respond to questionnaires or interviews. Society also needs to lose the pro-statist moralism that characterizes it. It needs, therefore, to open itself to biological (and environmental) studies and to normative (moral, ideological, theological) studies and to the ignorance that underlies our wisdom, per the wise quotation from Socrates: "I only know that I know nothing." I know that the scientific study of violence has no place in current social theories, although violence is present in all social action. Changing the working parameters of the social sciences is not an easy task. But preview social changes for the next years can give the strength to do it. As social changes are under way, there is a historic opportunity to open the social sciences to violence. One needs to the study of the human species as a unique experience, and to the study of the social character of this species.

Lesson 9 - Violence and social sciences

Violence as anomie, APD

Why to deal with physical violence as distinct from other kind of violence? Who do that? For what propose?

Why to deal with political violence as distinct from other kind of violence? Who do that? For what propose?

What should social sciences do about it? Should one accept as dogma criminal justice decisions and military propaganda? Should one give priority to political and power problems? Should one be able to approach criminal justice decisions and military or political propaganda as one look to the evolution of social configuration, in history; referring to the better or worse social quality of these configurations?

Should social science take the side of nation-states? Should social sciences aspire to survive the historical epoch of nation-state domination, where they emerge as knowledge disciplines? Should social sciences aspire to universalization, to the representation of human spirit out of nation-state constraints?

Social sciences should be able to take nation-state as a distant subject of study, as any other. State institutions activity, as state violence, should not be considered “good” or “normal” as opposed any (real or imagined, violent or not) treat to the utopian vision of a preconceived eternal harmony presented as “evil” or “exceptional”.

Violence is not abnormal or exceptional. Violence is part of life experience, as pain is. It takes everyone and all of us. However, per circumstances, including social circumstances, the posture and sensitivity of people, violence do occur more in certain territories and social configurations than others (why?) with different causes and consequences regarding incorporation processes, disposition and character formation of people, social groups, through generations.

There is people to whom violence is a second nature, eventually non-conscious. How self determination to violent action develops in society? Is it reversible? Can one avoid it?

Lesson 8 - case studies on violence

Violence as anomie, APD

Different method approaches, APD

Looking for cases to develop some perspectives on studying them, one student brought to the class the violence around the case of independence of his country. Under the Ottoman Empire, his people shear the same Christian faith, language and writing characters (Cyrillic) and the same fate of discrimination over rights and taxation. Many people upheaval in several points of the territory. But when they tried to come together, killing the leadership were the reaction of the Empire. Stopping the building capacity to oppose to its power. Made by kidnapping children, the first born of each family, and train them to become warriors of the Empire.

Ottoman Empire finally fall. And several countries raise from this. Many of them aspiring to become the center of a new empire.

This is part of the history told to everyone. National heroes were former rebels against the Ottoman Empire, used by new emperors to be as symbols of nobility and strength.

Every national history is about killings and pain, heroes and devils, bad empires and good empires. Even traditional histories of people without a state are about killings and survival under big ideas that can be turned and oppressive practices.

In social theory, English or French modern states are the historical references for a modern society. Even all societies did start working before that historical time. They worked differently. With different orientation ideas (ideologies) and process of legitimation of power (arguably more violent in the Middle Ages). This means that social theory applies better to the history of these two countries and western Europe then to the history of other nations and states.

To the present national history, one can apply Wieviorka violence paradigm theory and characterize what is the difference between Ottoman Empire paradigm of violence and today paradigm. From a micro analysis point of view, one can also to look at the importance of identity (national identity) in the life of common people. How state history presented at schools by teachers do incorporate children (and adults) personal identities as an emotional part of themselves, revering their heroes, their violent heroes? What kind of consequences this emotional incorporation of national identities has in the life of the people? In political decision making or in everyday life?

The other violent situation that was raised by the students was about an episode of violence in an amateur football field. A player (with good reasons) get violent against the referee. One can use micro analyses and ask how can the player manage to overcome emotional constraints against violence when he was violent against the referee. The answer can be given by injustice: when people feels, injustice is being done, they get violent. Which is a situation not mentioned by Collins. In macro analysis one can think of staging the violence as a modern commercial procedure, including industrialization, entertainment of workers, globalization of media, building a world though as inhabited by individuals, alike. Differently from the former idea that each town each tradition. One can also think of the incorporation of social identities – such as a fair good football player, and the importance of the confirmation of this characteristic on the views of friends and partners in the period of life when sex mating is one of the main concerns to men (and women, as well).

Lesson 7 - Bodly analisys of violence, Wacquant

Loïc Wacquant (2015) For a Sociology of Flesh and Blood

Both authors, Wieviorka and Collins, do not refer to state violence. War, interinstitutional violence, intrasocietal violence are always bad news. Police use of force, army defense of population at risk, state violence is sometimes good news.

State do help to get peace situations. Even they can also make war. Many times, it is not clear if state violence will develop in more violence or if it is the end of violent situations. Depending of the point of view and the social e geographical situation of those who are judging.

Besides the aggressor and the victim of violence, there is the state and its juridical-political frame work. Intolerable actions and events in some moments of social life are unnoticed and tolerated in other moments or in other societies at the same moment. Depending on the law, the habits, the historical situation. To do science one needs to suspend moral judgments and find adequate definitions of violence, as scientific concept. As Reemtsma definition: violence is reduction to the body.

Loïc Wacquant is a disciple of Pierre Bourdieu. He develops a theory of the penal state. He works within flesh and blood method, using habitus as an analytical concept and as a methodological tool to record information in the all body of the sociologist. Both intellectual e body experience, that is how it should be social research.

Per Wacquant, the state as two wings: leftwing, workfare and management of class, and right wing, prison fare and management of race. (In different papers, the author refers to these state wings as female wing and male wing). Both wings expand to penal practices as well as urban scene. Towns and states impose residential sites to working class and race communities with stigma.

This approach reveals the roots of social organization: differentiation (as gender) and hierarchy (as elite formation) dissimulated by ideologies that legitimate inequalities. They naturalize inequality as deserving or resulting or merit. Social theories do also dissimulate the roots of social organization. They are found of apologies to modern societies, apologies of modern as only the better that comes with modern societies. The negative aspects of modernity are neglected or minimized or separated form modernity abstract concept.

To discuss or understand violence should have in mind the link of violence and society concepts. For instance, separating macro society from micro society, thinking of society as frame work for individual action, as Wieviorka do, or thinking of society as a search for energetic kind of experiences, as Collins do, presents violence in two different ways: violence is natural, in Wieviorka, and violence is rare, in Collins.

If we refer to society as a way human kind link biological evolution that authorized our existence to efforts to understand cosmological activities, that authorized life on Earth, violence, as Reemtsma defines it, is what causes reduction to the body, a defensive reaction that revert the expanding movement of each one to exterior, to expand; using desires and expectations. Using recursivity: building social identities and developing dreams of the future.

Methodological problem of objectivity. (Thank you for the question)

Wacquant proposes to use the body as a methodological tool to gather and record sociological information on the field. He recommends sociologists to use not his mind at a safe distance of social struggles for identity and survival, both social and communitarian. He recommends we use all body to learn how people are living in a local situation.

Is this approach subjective, since we become part of the struggle? Yes, it is subjective. In the sense that each sociologist will feel differently, per his unique (Bourdieu´s) habitus and per the contrast that habitus on the field of research produce with sociologist life before research. That is why this subjectivity is more objective than the common distance objectivity developed in inquiries only by questionnaire or by interviewing. Comparing and feeling different habitus, using habitus as a research tool on the field, sociologist collect much more data and data much more integrated than it is possible to do with other methodological approaches. Questionnaire and interviewing seems superficial comparing to body (flesh and blood) method. Learning process required by body method is absent in the common methods. The data record on the body stays forever. The reverse happens with the common method: they produce superficial data and big waist of data and experience at safe distance from the social subject of study.

Lesson 6 - Micro analisys of violence by R. Collins

After a presentation of Wieviorka´s macro social analysis of violence, centered on the characterization of two different paradigms of violence experienced in the West since World War II - developing the theory of action by Touraine, and ending with a typology of Social subjects who use violence – the hyper subject, the anti-subject, and others – one present today a micro-social analysis of violence by Randall Collins, a North American sociologist.
With a well-known work of great merit, Collins uses concepts produced in previous works. As the "domination of the space of attention" (used in his work with the title of sociology of philosophy) and “interactions ritual chains” that presents society in the some sense anthropologist Durkheim does. People look for situations that can benefit them by increasing their emotional energy (self-esteem, social relations, social networks, social recognition). By doing so, they weave their identity and society at the same time, though at different levels.
The study of more than thirty violent situations led the author to conclude that "people are not violent, situations are violent". Contrary to common-sense thinking, people flee as much as they can from violence, although violent situations do not stop producing themselves.
For example, joining the military, professionalized people are put into violent situations and have to react to them. The available data on how troops react to violent situations reveals that, even trained and ordered to be violent (i.e. killing or doing other people harm - Collins's violence has a definition: direct and physical violence, excluding symbolic violence) most of the troops do not perform violence and most of the violent minority of the troop is not effective in enforcing violence. Doing it, being violent, is disturbing to the deep nature of people.
People's repugnance to violence creates an emotional tension whenever a violent situation arises. The tension serves to hinder the exercise of violence and the violent will have to overcome this barrier to be violent. There are two main ways of overcoming this barrier: panic (or a version of what is a moral holiday, as in riots or genocide) and emotional detachment, which allows rare among specialists in violence to become violent professionals (learn to entertain themselves with the technologies of death as if the target were not a person; they play with extreme violence, as if it were not real). A recurrent form of facilitating the use of violence is to "attack the weakest" those who have no defense possibilities and do not risk being able to contra attack: such as at home, against subjugated women or children or old people, or on the street against isolated or stigmatized people. As the kidnappers or bullies do, too.
There are also scenarios of violence that deceive it. For example, there is the idea that violence is contagious, lasts for a long time, and aggressors smile when they produce violence. This is a mix of staging (like in duels or sports) and entertainment (cinema, tv). In reality violence is limited (as in the case of large hooligan groups where only one or two are violent, to rise to the degree of intragroup prestige), do not last long (what matters is to create an incident on which to dramatize an appropriate character to the identity of the aggressor / assaulted within the group) and no one is happy or controlling the situation when performing violent.

Violence arises from the need to maintain social bonds; that is, from producing situations from which emotional energies can be produced for the group and its members through the practical confirmation of the self and hetero identities attributed to each one. The violence proceeds to the effect of creating a situation of domination of the emotional attention of the people around the violence. Like the criminal who does it to be a protagonist, to appear as a subject.

Lesson 5 - La Violence by M. Wieviorka

Michel Wieviorka is a French sociologist. He was presidente of International Sociology Association in 2010. When the World Sociology Congress declare violence a subject in need of attention by sociology community. Wieviorka, himself, and Collins come together in the same sense. In 2005 and 2008 were published books of Wieviorka´s macro analysis and Collins micro analysis of violence in society.

In the present curse, after presented a description of a case of violence to be dealt by each student, the next classes will present the content of these two books and, in the third class, the presentation of Reemtsma definition of violence and same criticism on these sociological approaches to violence.

La Violence is a book on French sociology. Dedicated and inspired by Alain Touraine´s theory of the subject. It evolved from the theory of then new social movements: women, students and ecological movements that Touraine supposed, in the 70´s, they will challenge the protagonist of workers movement and unions on contributing to design a new progressive society.

From the theoretical and methodological point of view, Wieviorka, following Touraine, uses sociology to discover now a day subject of changing action that produce new forms of society. Sociologists as Wieviorka like to follow these leaders form a critical perspective. As sociologist, he supports societal changes designed by social subjects in a progressive direction.

Wieviorka´s book has three parts and 12 chapters. The first part shows the differences between two paradigms of violence during the first three decades after the II World War and since the 80´s till today. The first paradigm are able to develop conflicts, to produce elaborated interpretation of different interest at stake in each moment and open the opportunity to negotiations between different social groups. Mainly workers and bosses. Conflict avoid violence.

The second paradigm has to face globalization and social exclusion. Welfare state is no longer able to translate in conflict every important problem, such as too much immigration and run way of capital to avoid taxes. Money shorts to support social integration processes.

Wieviorka wrote about meta politics (above the state to deal with globalization issues) and infra politics (under the state and out of its control). Fundamentalism of religion, economics, and politics at the same time that grows exclusion and victims become more aware of they own immobile condition. At the same time, media become private and internet explode the ways people get information. Symbolic and real violence became business; and advertising of violence too.

In the second part of the book, Wieviorka presents the way some author deal with violence, from different points of view. He conclude they are to disciplinary - more economic, more political, more social, but fail to draw a framework to study violence. In the third part the French author present his own view on violence. A five type typology of violent social subjects. He works under the Weberian theory of action. So, what sociologist have to do is to find sense to the actions of the people they observe.

He propose two main subjects of social violence: the hiper subject and the anti subject. Both are probably more effective in changing societies than the other three type subjects. The difference between them is that the violence hiper subject uses is directed to progressive goals of society changes. Anti subjects work on violence to destroy existing social bonds, not to build better societies.

There also violence coming for other type of social subjects: the floating subject - lost sense of what to do and hesitate the direction of action; the no subjects that do not know any sense that can organize the action - they just obey orders or run the same direction that everyone else seems to run; the survivor subjects that engage in violence in order to avoid to be massacre by society that ignore them or become genocide about them.

To common sense, violence is cruelty, caused by pleasure of harm other people, by revenge or else. For sociologist, violence is cruelty but is also a very common phenomena, sometimes accepted by society as normal and useful. So, it is worth to differentiate types of violent social subjects to be able to know what position to present when choices about violence has to be done.

Lesson 4 – improving use of Reemtsma definition of violence

Look at the agenda

Descriptions of situations of violence should be investigated. For example:

A) Does this type of violence have a known name? Are there studies and / or statistics on this type of violence? In the country of the occurrence, are there many or few episodes of this type of violence, compared to other countries or regions?

B) Did the violence have a well-identified cause, a person or group that wanted, planned and executed violence against others, unaware? Or did the violence arise spontaneously, without anyone wanting or could foresee it? Who watch the violent situation could avoid it? Or did bystanders encouraged it?

C) What is the point of view adopted by the researcher to observe the violence? Is the information we have about the case of violence direct information or mediated by other people or institutions? What are the interests of informants in the violent situation - do they want it? Are against it? Are you struggling to know more how to avoid violence? Do you feel any kind of responsibility in this regard? Guilty? Can you describe the situation uncompromisingly?

D) Do you anticipate any practical possibility of abolishing this type of violence? Does this type of violence have a human or social function that can be understood? If so, which one? Was violence exaggerated, in the case? If so, what sense of the exaggeration? For what purposes was it exaggerated, by whom?

E) Are there relations between politics and this type of violence? Are there legislative processes to address the issue? Have there ever been public debates, in the newspapers or on the television, about this? Are there associations dedicated to supporting the victims of such violence? What is being discussed and what positions have arisen?

Trying to attain moral distance from the violence and taking as reference the characterization of human organization as misogynist, elitist and dissimulated, one will: a) study the conditions that turn violence in a good experience and what turn violence in a bad experience. Can bad experiences turn to be good in the long run? Can adequate intensity of violence, as punishment for instance, be good immediately (to stop bad behavior) or in the long run (teaching lessons to wrong doers)?

b)  identify functional violence: gender violence or hierarchical violence used to organize society and to develop it;

c) identify structural violence, directly or indirectly organized by institutions;

d) identify naturalized violence, able to dissimulate real causes or long term causes of violence, misleading people to false understanding of what is going on. Namely to support stabilization of corrupt powers;

Lesson 3. Case study - applying sociological definitions of violence

Conceptual approach to cases, studying the differences of using common sense, strict definition of violence as physical violence only (not symbolic violence) and violence as reduction to the body.

Consider three proposals of studying violence:

a)       Wieviorka calls for definition of epochal violence paradigm. Violence paradigms are the main risk of violence used against progressive development of western civilization. During Cold War, for instance, we have the risk of polarized violence. Since the collapse of USSR, the global police, US, faces with its allies the risk of multiple little stateless terrorist groups. Internally each country faces the calls for recognition of victims and their rights to security from risks of violence. Specialized NGO develop campaigns to pressure the states to prevent violence and to punish perpetrators;

b)      Collins defines violence as a cause of physical violence. Symbolic violence should be discarded. It not possible to reach a scientific agreement on what is in and out of symbolic violence. The causal nexus is not clear and undisputed. There are lots of types of physical violence to be discovered, characterized and discussed. This should be what sociologists will do, for the time being;

c)       Reemtsma propose to focus on the effects of human action. Violence is any action that reduce someone to the body. Violence can cause reduction to the body both to a perpetrator or to a victim. Both symbolic or physical (or mixt) causes can result on violence.

Most of the time, Wieviorka´s macro analysis is out of the scope of an episode of everyday life violence. That is the case of a bank robbery or a protest of pro-animal rights activists. Collins´s micro analysis can be useful. He stresses that violence should be defined as physical violence and symbolic violence should be excluded from scientific perspective, since it is vulnerable to subjectivity and it is difficult to design a frontier on what is and what is not symbolic violence (in the sense Bourdieu use the label).

Collins though focus on the relation of aggressor/perpetrator and victim, as cause and effect. It is good enough to present the robbery case. Victim´s trauma, both physical and psychological, are centered on the memory of the violent action on the crime scene. One does not know much about the identity of the aggressors, since only one out of five has been caught. One just know he was a student and it is common knowledge in Senegal that students do not have how to live. One knows also that is not common bank robbery and less common bank robbery by students. So, there is not much information about the case, even we have the news of the newspaper and the testimony of victims.

There is many times few information about what is the former life of the criminals. Newspaper focus strictly on the violent episode an in the emotions it brings to mind. Readers just have to choose between forgiveness of anger, as if criminals deserve hard punitive time.

However, as mention before, to understand violence it is useful to look to other parts of the events, beside perpetrators and victims. One will benefit of knowing what was the means in use (a pistol or a knife, for instance) and what was the capability of the perpetrators to use these weapons. Who was by standing on the scene and behind the scene, as bankers that organize security of the bank, police or public opinion. How did the newspapers present the case to the public? Did the public respond?

Reemtsma definition of violence, as reduction to the body, needs to be used as part of a broader social theory where people can expand (when violence is not around) and can be reduced to the body (when violence happens). The bank robbery was violent and did not help anyone we know to live a better life. When violence is over, neither the victims or the perpetrators benefit from the experience nor anyone else. The robbery was only waste and only trauma rise from it.

It seems it was not the case of violence on the Circus. In this case, symbolic violence against the Circus, against the traditional use of animals to entertain the public, wins when the legislative power wrote a law forbidding the Circus to use animals for show.

Violence sometimes is just waste and other times is useful for progressive proposes and to avoid bigger violence which are hidden from the common knowledge. The revolt of activists starts as a strange anger against every-day way of doing things. Eventually this revolt changes main culture or the law of the land. It is learning violence.

Lesson 2. Case study

Two students presented two cases.

One about a robbery of a bank, 10 years ago. It went wrong. No money available, security personal was weak and could not prevent the robbery, the police just caught one of the five robbers. Happily, no one gets hurt, except the security guard. He was thrown to the window that separate the public from the bank workers. The robber who was caught by the police was a university student. He and his companions did appear at the bank constantly, few days before the assault. The security guard did send them way. He did not report his superiors. Or, at least, no previsions were taken. Only after the robbery some changes in security system at the bank did happened.

Students in this town have serious difficulties to get along. No much money to survive in the city. Security industry seems to be not very attentive to peril. It was not a violent town. It was a rare case of bank robbery. Newspapers show the case, because it was rare. Eight years in jail, awaiting trial for the robber-student. Robber was condemned to community work for some years. No victim complained about it.

A 11 years old girl get traumatized on consequence of the menace with a gun on her neck robbers did to her mother. And the blood presented all over the face of the security guard when he asked her if she was all right, after the robbers leave the scene. She did not sleep well during a long period of time after the robbery and she felt her character was molded by the event: she becomes defensive with social relations in a way other people fells like being rude.

Incorporation is a concept that can be useful to explain the trauma that change the character of a person for life. Violence can spread in society. It was not the case. But it is in different situations. And it is the case, somehow, when violence against the girl turn her in an aggressive way for life.

The case and its consequences in the personality of the people involved were not treated by those who suffer it. They just shut up about it. The story did not happen in the US, when many people do use psychoanalysis help to deal with their little and big traumas.

The second case was about the violence suffered by animal activists when they decided for an all week-end to pressure circus costumers to avoid to support circus animal abuse for entertainment. The circus personnel used violence against activists. Activists cannot do the same. If they respond with violence it would be bad for their political claims against violence on animals.

Respect, it was proposed, is at stake in this story. Respect for animals and nature. Violence against animals is no longer needed in modern times – someone has argued. A strong exchange of arguments about violence and respect happened. Maybe not by chance, two male students against two/three female students. For men, fighting or killing do not mean lack of respect. For women, violence is always lack of respect.

Genocide is lack of respect. It is the intent of erasing the existence of some people and their culture. War can be respectful. The difference is that war respect the identity of the enemy. Genocide don´t. Genocide is about extinction of social identity of the enemy.

From a female point of view, we know, that the first victims of any war are women, children and old people, as anyone with difficulties to be autonomous. When groups of young armed boys are teached to get what they want, as warriors. Maybe the incorporation of these knowledge for ages make a difference on the character of men and women relating to violence. Men strongly concerned with identity and women concern with avoiding violence.

We can represent this dispute of arguments and characters as opposing sexes and hierarchy. Even and hell, peace and war, both accept hierarchy: organization and conducting war is about groups of people working together and competing with each other. Female, in both situation, are always second.

On other hand, respect by animals is not only with circus animals. It is also with animals that are industrially produced to feed people. What means that evolution, industrial evolution, is not only a good thing. It has it´s dark sides.

Respect concept can be enlarged to include respect for other cultures, especially traditional cultures, as anti-extractiviste cultures developed by people who lives embedded in forests (in Amazonia, for instance). Respect for environment by western civilization. We need another civilization to deliver it.

Lesson 1 - Working goals and main theoretical references

To select and describe a situation of violence in which profanity, dirty words are used, for analysis during the course. This is the first task for each student.

Students should read and follow the website of the course. The different pages were presented to the students.

One will work considering the following notions of sociological approach to violence:

A) Violence is neither good or bad. Violence is present at the social bottom line - the masses or the poor. Violence is also present at the top of the organization and institutions. Violence will be understood as “reduction to the body”. It is used to give birth and to fight for a better life. Violence is used to build solidarity or authoritarian regimes. After violence one feels better or worse. It depends on the experience. Same times one feels good and bad, at the same time. Every aspect of live, such as education, sport, health care, intimate life, they all deal with violence.

B) This definition, suggested by J. P. Reemtsma (2011). Confiance et Violence. Paris: Gallimard: 111-115, presupposes the recognition of movements of expansion of human influence out of the body, so as to be possible, through violence, a movement in the opposite direction.

C) Indeed, people born and grow: violence is our companion. Some kind of violence helps us to live well. Other kinds of violence reduce our personal and social aspirations of ascension. You can tell the same about social groups. For the future, people and social groups play violence with two different intentions: gaming without general practical consequences - by sport or for mating - or gaming to get practical consequences - on war or politics or policy.

D) Common sense uses the word violence, in general, to refer to a bad thing. One refers to who pushes people and anticipate their death or incapacitation. Violence, in this sense, opposes life. As if death was anti natural. The descending cycles of illness, incapacitation or death are hidden. As if magically modern society could avoid them by ignoring them. Only personal and social ascendant moves are considered. The caring needed to grow and live, the long incorporation of identities, are treated as natural, with no need of work. As much as traditional women work at home is unconsidered.

 This conception of violence demands a proper social theory: sociology of instability.
A) People are both growing body from childhood to adulthood, and access to the virtual world - thus they are distinguished from other animals. People grow developing the body as their capabilities of manipulation of the virtual world, through which they identify person and society.

B) The human species results from the evolution of life on Earth. And its history is itself an evolution. Humans constructed hierarchical levels of power, to which some have access and others do not. One usually describes organization as a pyramid, since the time of the Pharaohs.

C) This organized hierarchy is a way of reducing the instability and vulnerability of some, who live closer to the top, with the sacrifice of others who live at the bottom.

D) However, social organization is precarious and unstable. It calls for mechanisms of social stabilization. (a pyramid up side down). This double pyramid, as a rhombus, stabilize the sacrifices at the base and the privileges at the top.

E) The main foundations of organizations are misogyny (dual differentiation of sexual orientations, with privilege for masculine), elitism (consecration of leaders with privileges) and the concealment of sophisticated means of substitution of practical experiences for discursive experiences, for the purpose of stabilizing the powers of the day, de facto or in becoming.

2015

Violence in society (2014)

Practical and Epistemological  Struggles for Abolitionism (2015)

To look for other Antonio P Dores papers in English:

http://iscte.pt/~apad/novosite2007/ingles.html

http://iscte.pt/~apad/novosite2007/cap%20livros.html

Philipp Reemtsa youtube conference and book on (2012) Trust and Violence

Notes:

Wieviorka - paradigmes of violence

Collins - violente situations

Foucault - place of violence in the history of ideas

Wilkinson e Pickett - social violence and development (Acosta)

Bourdieu - simbolic violence (Generation Five)

Greaber - human and change economies (Citizen Income)

Evaluation:

Charlie Hebdo case and discrimination

https://prezi.com/u8vjjymbmkil/discrimination-and-social-theory

Summary 10. 04.05.2015 - Final conclusions

They hate black people - BBC about Portugal

Final conclusions of the course: a) better than micro or macro violence without connection – two different phenomena – we need to understand violence as a part of sociability experience of mankind; Wieviorka´s epochal violence paradigm and Collins´s direct and physical violence should be represented as sociological views to Reemtsma´s violence: reduction to the body. Violence is everywhere and not always is a bad thing; b) Misogyny, elitism and dissimulation are characteristics of all human societies. If one wants to avoid the discriminatory consequences one should not imagine any of these characteristics to be overcome by modern societies and only backwards societies are dealing with these problems; c) social dynamics are centrifugal or centripetal. Today social science suffer of centripetal hipper specialization. One needs sociology of violence to integrate and transform mainstream sociology by usinf centrifugal strategy that is coming up from society.

Girard´s scapegoat theory can help us to look at victims and aggressors as people linked to social institutions that are able to help them to produce social identities. Reduction to the body comes as result of expanding out of the body, as balanced exercise both of individuals within themselves and between individuals placed inside the same institutions or representing services to different institutions.

Summary 9. 27.04.2015- Prevention of violence - Citizen Income and Anti-extractives politics

Two more examples of social movements that address the prevention of violence, besides transformative justice about sexual abuse of children, are Citizen Income (CI) and Anti-extractives politics (AEP). Strong inequality of income and exploitation of the Earth - as if it was a gift from God - are two big violence against humankind. CI and AEP denounce these violent social structures, economic and technological. And propose to reverse now-a-day trends of deepening inequality and exploitation. Doing so, both movements develop violence prevention strategies.

Citizen Income is about the individual right to get money to live a decent life regardless what each one do with it. Without conditions and the state should send to each one bank account an amount of money (1000 euros? 420 euros?) each month in order to ensure that every one can survive free of extreme poverty and stigma.

Acosta´s anti-extractives politics is to turn our belligerent thinking around conflicting interests on harmony thinking. Harmony between human society and environment, including animals and plants. It means that organization of politic conflicts should be developed on defense of the environment that is common good since it is better to be conservative regarding the rarity of the environmental conditions where human life is possible.

Several initiatives address violence in different ways. Some of them using violence to mobilize people against violence and others (like the examples given) that look violence as part of life, society and human nature not to conform or to magically deny it. Instead one needs to face it. To understand it and change whatever is needed to avoid violence.

Summary 8. 20.04.2015 - Prevention of violence - Transformative Justice (II)

About the prevention of violence on the cases of child sexual abuse a controversy pop up. Looking for the use of Wieviorka theory of violence (epochal paradigm of violence) one stopped by the religion role on this kind of violence. It has been argued that stricter Catholic rules, comparing with other religions, explain or even causes the deeper tendency to abuse inside the Church.

This argument sound very strange to the teacher. But not to the class. The class argue that it is a regular and understandable psychological explanation. Presumably male sexual instincts coercion develops psychological tension that can release violent action, as child sexual abuse. Of course, this does not mean that class approve or is receptive to dismiss criminal accountability of abusers. What this mean is class approve to dismiss social accountability on violence. There is forensic psychology and there is no forensic sociology.

The idea of Generation Five that it is needed to change social conditions that support the continuing child sexual abuse is strange to the class. Class prefer to stress the need for specialization of disciplines and sub-disciplines such as sociology and psychology (in a way that sociology should accept psychological explanation but not necessarily the reverse) and dismiss unrealistic integration of knowledge (nobody is able to get all knowledge available today, so one needs to specialize). The use of most social science is not compatible with each other.

The teacher argued that this understanding of violence is common and it is misogynic, elitist and dissimulated. It shows a (false) link between manhood and violence as instinct instead of looking at it as a social conditioning of manhood: being a man in society is to be able to overcome tension/fear caused by the likelihood of the presence of violence. If you are a man and you want to survive you have to follow the path of showing no fear and strike first on weaker targets and avoid consequences for yourself. That is what some people do to avoid being victims themselves.

In practice this evolved in different kind of directions, in close and private places, such as families or asylums, in economic relations and human nature relations: first the strongest side strikes to show manhood and to avoid insecurity. At the same time those who are in charge work hard to hide the consequences of violence, both directly and consciously and indirectly and ideologically and symbolically. Education, and social theory as part of it, hides bad behaviors and make all references to them taboo. If one wants to be able to look to social secrets, such as child sexual abuse, one needs to transform the way to produce knowledge as well one needs to transform society.

Summary 7. 13.04.2015 - Prevention of violence - Transformative Justice - Lessons from social activism about sexual child abuse

Discrimination imbebed in Social Theory (prezi presentation)

Transformative justice

Social theory is discriminatory. It does not face society as misogynist, elitist and dissimulated regarding gender, power and bodies, turning itself accomplice. Ideology as source of will and energy to people, as well as sexual relations as source of life, or omnipresent violence are turn out as taboos to social theory. Centripetal policy that make subdisciplines to this matters isolate them from mainstream theory. The same movement separates modern societies and modern aspects of societies from other societies and non-modern aspects of modern societies, as if those were not worthy as human social experiences.

One example of the exclusion of the sight both from common understanding of what is social experience and from social theory is sexual abuse of child that happens without notice, in modern societies. Since last years, when scandals showed who pervasive this practices are. Big confusion between what is pedophilia, homosexuality and child sexual abuse shows that the elusive mind still covers the matter. Criminal treatment of cases do not help to clarify or prevent these kind of events. Human perversity is still taboo.

Human ability to adapt goes with our ability to hide many immoral things done. Talk seems very distant of representing fully action.

Generation Five activists on sexual child abuse cases produce a report about how and why they feel the need to change their practices from restorative justice to transformative justice. They fell their activities are nor worthy enough because the same social causes (patriarchy and state power based on that) still produce the same effects: discrimination on women and children as possessions. They fell it is no good to restore that state of affairs. They need to change it, to transform society if one wants to avoid that kind of violence.

Summary 6. 23.03.2015 - Contributions for a centrifugal social theory

Social theory Hiding the face, presentation; The brain, the face and emotions, paper

Discrimination imbededd in social theory prezi presentation

Discrimination and social theory prezi presentation

1.                  There are raisons that explain why modern people fell and think misogynist and elitist and dissimulate these feelings and thoughts.  These raisons should be discovered studying the built of autonomous virtual worlds: the voice (writing and images) as if it is separated from the action (labor, war, for instance). The way virtual world (the voice) use and change space-time living experience. This separation reveals to human experience a double nature that can be use to discover nature as well to dissimulate feelings and thoughs.

2.                  Social theory is not immune to this dissimulation effect. Its criticism to misogyny and elitism is not radical. It is unable to show the full extent of them in society.  Social theory is not yet a science in full power. This is the raison why is so difficult to take violence as a subject and to consider it at its full extend, especially when violence comes from the State: http://www.ipvr.eu/people/steps/research_projects?token=gqu2G7_rE1MKZ4J7D1b06Q

Social theory is not easily able to avoid bourgeois ideology that dissimulate modern state violence as property rights and market places rules (read Hirschmann in the bibliography)

3.                  One of the consequences of this state of affairs is what Collins refers: the idea that violence can be explained by the testosterone of young male when reality is other way around. The most violent place in modern society are homes and social institutions, were children, women and old people are treated violently by who takes care of them or by people around them. Violent as well are the social condition of women and children of prisoners. They are not condemn by court but any way they suffer from staying alone in a misogynous world, becoming a big part of the poor population. Women get poorer jobs and less payment and still have to take care of the children. As Collins state, violence looks for weak people and find them. It looks for the safer situation for violent people, including the State.

4.                  The centripetal thinking, like the water running in the hole, runs from outside in. Social theory becomes extremely specialized, such as sociology of violence, and do not look at its framework on the all of sociology world. What we need to avoid dissimulation effect and to go deeper on misogyny and elitism criticism is centrifugal thinking: to deal with the borders of society at the micro society level (biological conditions of human kind to live) and at the macro level (moral and legal voices that makes sense from social action, such as religion or ideology) and to define society and the level of reality in between this two borders.

5.                  Wieviorka and Collins approaches covers these two limit aspects of violence. Violence paradigms based on mainstream "subject" self determination to action in a special historical epoch relate society and moral environment is Wieviorka´s view. Violent interactive situations that pushes people to act violently and to spend a lot of emotional energy for that propose, against non-violent human nature, is Collins´s view relating society and biological human condition. Both approach do not break clearly with mainstream social theory and accept to become a part of a sub-discipline without deeper consequences.

6.                  The distance and contradictions between social paradigms and every-day states of mind through mimetic and recursive dispositions of mankind indicate the level of social tension at each moment. This is monitored by political and social and security institutions as legitimacy problems (anomie) and it should completed by the assessment about the kind of social spin (energy, intensity) as instituting mud or emancipating mud of voices and action, favoring innovative or subversive kind of social action.

Summary 5. 16.03.2015 The limits of social theories of violence in Wieviorka and Collins

Social theory´s limits, prezi presentation

The students felt, as non-available theoretical concerns at Wieviorka and Collins´s theories on violence to address their subjects about January 2015 Charlie Hebdo case three fields of problems:

a)      How to deal with communication. Violence spread through the media as well as by the consequences it has in people who are out of the field of action (friends, family, and partners)? Most of the information available about what happened is dependent on these social subjects. The scientific inquiry depends heavily on them. Emotions, politics, shared social identities that media and families stand for. There is violence concerning locals and violence (less violent) that concerns all the world. How it works?

b)      It seems clear that there are people looking for violence, as a personal characteristic. Of course, society and specialized institution make it real what else could be repressed. But we know there is desire of violence we can fell. Violence is a universal and omnipresent thing and not really something we can separate from building societies and producing power from nature and environment as well from other people. Different forms of expressing violence depends of history and can be trained: that is right. Is there something in human society and in life that we can call violence, regardless the historical and local shape of it?

c)       Is it violence always negative, destructive? Wieviorka say no. Hiper-subject is constructive and is indispensable for maintaining and changing society and the world. Then, who can evaluate what is destructive and constructive in violent events: Islamic Fundamentalists or western sociologist?

We found conceptualization (what is violence and what is society?) perception (focusing action and disclaiming diffusion processes emotional and media, short and long term) assessment (moral and political and identity) and scale problems (macro and micro split).

These and other social theory problems on violence are social theory general problems. Lahire´s hiper specialization exclude epistemic debate on dominant and old social theory tradition that no one supports (because everyone is a specialist). Wieviorka is macro sociologist and Collins is micro sociologist: how can we merge them approach? That is why something is wrong with social theory, as Mouzelis claim? Should not we consider omnipresence of violence instead of accepting to draw a line between society and violence, as if rarely and only from time to time they merge? How can we understand sociology focusing in power (main stream weberian dimensions) and neglecting violence? Is not it power the same that the use of social violence – as a monopoly of the state, as Max Weber said?

Giddens propose to embed violence in the social analysis dimensions: industrialism, capitalism, warfare and social control. He was not able to use it or diffuse that way of transforming social theory. Social theory remains faithful to misogynist, elitist and dissimulating epistemology heritage of the 19^th century former aristocratic cultivated salons. It is still needed to hidden violence of the state and present violence exclusively bottom up. As physiological caused event. That is way it has been excluded from social theories. Which is not conform Durkheim´s idea of top-down coercion and solidarity as social glue.

Summary 4. 02.03.2015 - Wieviorka´s and Collins´s theoretical use to understand violence

How can “paradigm of violence” Wieviorka´s notion help us to understand Charlie Hebdo case? It relates history, long term history – such as Crusades – and short term history – colonial wars and stigma – with present violence, nor only at political grounds but also at working place grounds. This violent backgrounds of violence are many times hide by the urgency of action to avoid violence to continue. But they are also indispensable when it comes to the violence prevention opportunities.

Staying with Wieviorka´s proposal, it is clear it is difficult to find out a single dimension that explains the main causes of violence, be it politics, economics, culture, or prestige. Every dimension plaid a big role as containing some cause of Charlie Hebdo case. Still, we have to explain why were these three or four people who engage in such a violence and why they get the massive public attention they were looking for. All the time, there were all thinkable sociological causes active and no violence has occur. Why, then, it happens this way?

Wieviorka´s answer is outside sociological cognitive field. We need to frame, he argue, the building of the subjects, social entities able to break habitus and turn out to develop violent activities. We need to include same kind of moral judgment on the motives and consequences of violent acts. Mainly differentiating hipersubject and antisubjects, those subjects that act violently in order to better the society and the world and those subjects who just destroy what has been built before without any constructive propose of bettering what humanity has already conquer. Many subject, maybe the most part of them, are more grey motivated than that two ideal type of action. Fluctuant subjects, non-subjects, survivor subjects are all grey types of subjects, not enough destructive to be anti-subjects and no perspective of bettering      society.

Collins contributions calls our attention to the dirty aspect of violence. Such as the search for weak people incapable of resisting violence. The need of social support for violent few to act violently – guns available, moral support, lack of opportunities to express oneself in pacific manners, etc. For violent situation turns out to be strong enough to downsize the need of energy to overcome the tension/fear proved by violent people – because the target will not be able to act violently – and the energy of the violent few need to be full.

The notion of stage violence used as a way of proving each other as part of the same social strata can be use here to understand the way violent few fells in Eden when they have the opportunity to face the strongest powers on earth as equals. For the weak it is deadly. This includes the victims and the suicidal violent. For the powerful, for each side, it is staged violence: signals of power sent by media to each other.

The specific ways terrorists prepare themselves to action is discussed by Collins as a professional training. The traveling to Syria or to Yemen can be understood as such.  

Summary 3. 23.02.2015 Collins´ views on violence

Wieviorka and Collins look to violence in very different ways: the French sociologist analyses macro violence as action theory. He looks at the different kind of sense that are supposed to cause violence, as an integrated kind of move: normative will plus social capability. The north-American sociologist analyses violence as energy spread and retrieved as social ritual, promoting tension/fear that avoids easy and frequent violent actions (real physical harm). Violence is very short. The person the first to strike wins. The bigger the strength differences between opponents, the higher the risk of actual violence against the weak. The violent few are rare and pushed by the situation they find themselves involved in.

More about Collins´ book HERE

Summary 2. 09.02.2015 - Wieviorka´s views on violence

Presentation of the subjects of research chosen by the students.

Wieviorka´s subjects´ typology on violence

More about Wieviorka´s book HERE

Summary 1. 02.02.2015 - Presentation of the course

The goal of the course is to discuss what society is and what violence is. Even controversial and central to social theory, these concepts and not often discussed. AS it happens with common sense, social theory suffer from the cognitive taboo that surround both concepts.

Society is almost always “my” society (western, class, gender, ethnic). Violence comes with moralism attached, suffering the same bias as society. Would science overcome unilateral concerns and conceptions with society and violence? Can science do it?

The program of the course has three parts. Macro and micro violence as presented by Wieviorka and Collins. Criticism on that theoretical approaches as unilateral. Presentation of different grass root prevention of violence strategies.

My idea is to test a definition of violence taken from Reempsta: violence is the “reduction to the body”. This can be good, in sports, sex, leisure, sleep, education. Can be bad, when time, space, intensity of violence break limits of resilience of people.

This understanding of violence suppose a collaborative conception of society. The juxtaposition of bodies are not a society. Society is upper than that. Not so near the body as psychological level of reality; nor so high as spirituality. Society is something in between. If so, violence will return people and societies to their bodies. Can kill people and diminish society, downsize on communication, knowledge, cooperation, and so on.  

As Hirshman and Foucault argue, modernity proceeds to a denaturalization of violence, turning it to a taboo. Monopoly of violence by the state becomes hidden (look at the available research areas at this site http://www.ipvr.eu/people/steps/research_projects?token=gqu2G7_rE1MKZ4J7D1b06Q)

All other forms of violence, they are cover by the state (and hidden) or they are exposed by the state and become more or less scandalous.

2014

Violence within demonstrations, described by the police side

Where is violence? The dark side of the Chocolate Nov 2012

Strutural violence perception: Americans are completely wrong,

For those students willing to understand my concerns with relationships between sociology and psychology please read Dores, A. (2013). The brain, the face and emotion. In A. Freitas-Magalhães, C. Bluhm & M. Davis (Eds.), Handbook on facial expression of emotion (pp.129-181). Porto: FEELab Science Books.

Summary 10. 20.05.2014 - Final synthesis

A violência da vida APD

Beyond the pioneer value that opened to us contradictory paths to challenge sociological concerns to deal with violence issues, macro political and micro relational stylizations brought to us by Wieviorka and Collins – both important references of sociological trends and traditions – a) both do not conform with statements built by activisms concerned with prevention of violence; b) both suffer  the same epistemological problems pointed to social theory by Mouzelis and Lahire: reductionism and reification; unicity and elitism.

Both theories of violence are straight forwards and rational. However enable to produce an account of observed violent episode characterized by complexity and irrationality. Both theories also are contradictory to each other. It seems they treat of incommunicable worlds.  

Studying Reempsta it seems right to define violence as something that results on a “reduction to the body”. This idea makes sense once one conceives a reverse sense social phenomena: an “expansion beyond the body”. Neural scientists and psychologists (as Corballis) mention consciousness, intelligence, recursivity as different forms of expression of homeostasis (manner by which living symbiotic bodies cooperate with each other by auto-organizational  and virtual modes in the long run and extensively). Developing people – by a frame of age or of civilized acquisitions – is presented as elevating positions, spiritual abilities, sociabilities, using ideologies, religious faith, professional and cognitive disciplines, and so on).

This violence is, at the same time, macro and micro, direct and symbolic. Violence happens to be constructive – when people engage on training or sports. Reduction to the body, even when it is extreme, can stimulate spiritual, status, military, economic, sport or other kind of constructive reactions.  

The moral negative assessment on violence is ideological: the war lords look to violence as a way of honouring the warriors. Bourgois prefer to concentrate on economic and power results, accusing others than themselves to behave violently (even when any one can see the real cause of violence concerns profits).

Sexual abuse, extreme poverty, the continuation of colonial genocides, for instance, has nothing to do with common sense violence. For the street, violence means psychological   motivated actions of bad people. One can concede that there is a violent institution that may be sometimes violent to defensive or attack proposes. That parturition, possessive love, social exclusion arrangements are violence is hard to easily accept and to discuss as being violence related.

For common sense and social theory, violence is strange to human kind: it is a devil incursion in social life. It is a mechanical evil; a temporary presence among us. Only as external to society and human kind one can accept to present violence.

For scientific proposes one think it is better to consider violence as the type of social dynamics that reduces each one to the body. In everyday life as well as for institutional proposes, violence is often stimulating. Other times it is warm full. Most of the time one just does not proceed to any moral evaluation – as in the cases of domestic violence or wars.

One needs to work for other kind of social theory able to built bridges with other kind of knowledge and methods. To learn how to deal with complexity and avoid social specialized closed in itself kind of theory.

Summary 9. 13.05.2014  - The exotism of violence as seen by social theory 

A violência da teoria social APD

The Mouzelis´s reductionism process of reasoning attaches society to a single level of existence. This simplification is completed, in order to make sense, by reification process: it completes the reductive picture with imagination, as Descartes full fill life out of the body by a religious concept of soul.

Other characteristic of social theory is its attraction for discussion power and anything else (cf. Lahire, Therborn). It ignores mechanisms and ambiences that integrate social powers, such as physical strength and determination or xenophobic or solidary social mood dominating the scene. Social design profile and do not recognize natural instability e plurality of potential action to each social entity, that can surprise us all at any time.

Both Mouzelis and Lahire notice the lake of a deeper and dense sociological approach to reality; instead of a superficial approach to power appearances. In-depth analyses should interact with discussions about human nature (discussed by biologists) and about ideologies and theologies (that give us some account on the cycles of life, more and less dynamic, more or less destructive).

Morals and development mix with violence perceptions and assessments. For instance, generally one considers structural violence as legitimate violence (a form of constructive violence) and popular violence (on parades and fests) as bad and uncivilized violence. Most of the time misses to uncover the ambivalence of human nature facing or promoting violence. Violence is training for harder times - as military do with troops - or abuse of power - as in cases of oral arrestment at work. Moral assessment of violent actions depends, beside other topics, on time opportunity (and its epoch) and on lives stories.

Social theory neutralizes time. It takes only modern society as subject, instead of all history of human sociability. It discriminates colonized societies. This mental process split theory (what society should look like) from empirical data (where victims of colonization are everywhere). The same way virtual imagistic world is separated from practical world.

Wieviorka and Collins stay incarcerated each one of them, outside and inside the social bubble. The violence structural paradigm (States vs. terrorist networks) contrasts with after World War II violence paradigm (controlled by the state). Collins refers to efficient and physical violence - parallel to what courts do in order to address violent acts. Wieviorka reifies violence as international and foreigner affairs specialists usually do, in order to present a moral ground to social and political analysis.

The civil society proposals to refrain or abolish violence presents before can be useful for conceiving a new way to deal with social problems and social theory. One needs to conceive different levels of reality and developing each one always taking in consideration the virtual influence and the physical impact of each level in the others; biological aspects below and ideological aspects above, as human nature presents them.

Summary 8. 06.05.2014 Mouzelis critic

Reducionismo e reificação, segundo Mouzelis

One can conceive society above the bio-psychological level of reality and under the spiritual, ideological, theological level. The social theory looks superficially to society. It looks micro at the concaves surface and it looks macro to the convex surface. Both ways, it looks from outside in – from a distance. Social theory does not consider time and space and energy as important variables to look for. Social theory refer to photos of modern societies. It even doubt if non modern societies are societies at all.

Mouzelis present us the epistemological grounds of the non effective work of social theory. The main causes are reductionism (at micro analysis) and reification (at macro analysis). One really are not sure what society one is talking about. It lacks a clear definition. The main concern seems to be to isolate sociology from bad influences, such as positivism or biologism (both ways of claiming for new approaches to hard sciences world and methods). For this propose, tabou (of considering bio-mechanisms and spiritual ambience of social events) is needed.

Social analysis turns out to be superficial and avoiding in-depth progress, looking at the surfaces reflecting separated micro and macro worlds both reduced to two dimension images and reificated as one needs to complete the lack of sense of the reduction operation. Social theory needs to look forward to become a science as any other instead of staying a social science, a second class kind of rationality.

In the first place one need to acknowledge social secrets and the way social theory reinforce them, instead of uncover them. Crime and intelligence worlds, as well as violence, emotions, bodies, transformation, technologies, all are examples of research routes sociologists avoid to integrate in social analysis. That is way it is so difficult to find a better theory of action, consistent with empirical observations. Mouzelis claim that multilevel and articulate analysis would help, thinking society as an onion: several concentric layers.

Summary 7. 30.04.2014

Sociological definition of violence PP

With this class we enter the third part of the course. This part will deal with the criticism to social theories. What avoid them to refer to violence? This time one did present a definition of social violence, according to Reempsta: reduction to the body.

To make sense of this definition one needs to reformulate social theory.  One needs to merge body and conscious in both directions as intimate relationships instead of separate destinies as body and soul. Body expands itself by physical growing as well as by mental development. Violence is to bring down the human efforts of expanding.  For good or bad raisons.

Society should be recognized as a consequence of human sociability nature. There are no people out of strong social bonds; and these strong any one, as individual. Society should not be understood as modern society, as an exclusive. Simpler societies as well as classic societies are societies because they all come from the social nature of human species.

People got biological levels, social levels and spiritual levels – mechanisms and ambience where society evolve using the middle levels. Why, then, should sociologist to avoid biological knowledge as biologism? For instance, is not it relevant to know the existence of neuro mirrors that reproduce movement’s people see or feel in other people? If one knows better biological mechanisms, one knows better how society works.

It is possible to look to society as different from the institutional pillars we are used to think about. We can think society as a level of reality, as Durkheim proposes. One can communicate by conscious with it. It can be nearer or far from our bodies. Any way society is part of each one of us, as well each one of us is part of the society. One live together (by oneself) the cycles of solidarity and of emancipation, when everybody feels safe and enjoying a stable social identity and when one needs to transform one self and society in order to adapt or even survive.

Recursivity is a natural and spontaneous characteristic of humans. That is why sociability works on a special level of reality imposed and make available by this human nature. To understand better what society about one is to get help from biology sciences and their late results. One is call to treat social theory in ways to turn it in legitimate science theories.

Summary 6. 22.04.2014 - Transformative Justice and CI (Citizen Income)

There are various social ways to struggle for preventing violence. This happens most of the time out of public awareness. The proposals happen to be innovative; such the cases are presented briefly. The three examples are very different among them.

David Greaber´s typology on economies is useful to explain the differences between the three approaches. Harmonization in any case is the main logic. It opposes the dominant logic of competition. The auto determination struggle organization opposes the administration of violence prevention work.

Transformative Justice is a North American activists on child sexual abuse. They point out the inability of restaurative justice approach to identify and transform social conditions that support and allow opportunities for sexual offenses against children. These conditions should be address since they are environmental conditions that replicate the support to offenders. They should be transformed instead of restaured. They point out as well the inability of legal justice administration to deal with the prevention needs. For example: charging against the accused person penal system avoids the collaboration of abusers on preventing violence happens again. Moralizing the victim position, justice administration takes away from the victim the ability to have something to say in the process of judgment of the case.

Generation FIVE, the NGO that developed this proposal, claim for political activism that protect victims and make offenders accountable, both process supported by community and avoiding State intervention. Prevention of child sexual abuse is jeopardize whenever the State police and administration are in charge. Victims can be victimized again by State standard judicial procedure. And transforming social conditions that build the condition for child abuse are not as issue for the State.

Citizen Income is another proposal that guarantee dignity of living for anyone and everybody. This would be achieved by an unconditional income given to every citizen without any duty at all. It is a kind of empowerment that free everyone from the uncertainty of raw life. Rich or poor, nobody will be asked if you need or not to take money. Any money spent of social security should not stay with administrative staff (80% of some aid proceedings stay out of the hands of poor people). The simpler the rule, the better.  Since everyone is treated the same way as everybody else. Doing so difference of bigger and worse income will decrease and, as Wilkinson and Pickett show (Spirit Level), this turns out to be a way of downsizing very different kinds of social problems, as well as the money the State spends now a day taking care of the victims.

Summary 5. 25.03.2014

social secrets and development

This session start the second subject of our course. The first part of the program – the presentation of the social theory of two authors on violence – ended. Now we will look at cultural productions aiming abolition of violence (exploitation/development, sexual rape/domination, social closure/stigma).

Social secret notion has been presented, in the first place. The teacher use it to refer the social phenomena of producing ignorance (on propose or not) about information and knowledge that cannot possibly be omitted to one´s senses. The students were invited to try to use it to explore the analysis of each one description of violent actions.

 Social secrets are ways of ignoring boring presences in our daily lives and societies. For instance: we normally do not pay attention to beggars. We just pass ignoring them. Never the less everybody knows they are there. Those who decide not to ignore make the difficult effort to join them (for supper, for instance) as a helping, solidarity, tolerance, charity mood, for a while. After this moment, everything comes back to normal indifference to beggars, criminals, drug addicts, immigrants, ill people, or people insane, one delegate to professional care behind walls.

Violence, as well, knows these phenomena. When it grows a tunnel focus of conscious and action facing an opponent, in a violent confrontation, one just do not see, feel, look, sense, what is outside the tunnel of attention. Sometimes, even it comes aggressions from outside one do not take knowledge of the event. When the media describe a violent event, for modesty raisons or avoiding media information to join causes  of future violence or avoid to describe disgusting situation that indispose the readers and viewers or for political raisons , they overlook parts of the violent events. The same can happen with the description reports students have produce to this course.  

When one chooses a scientific theory or a political ideology to give sense to any observed situation, one ignores many feelings that come and go in our minds. One needs to focus. One avoids thinking outside the tunnel. One produces or reinforces social secrets, eventually.

This phenomenon explains how one knows and one ignores – at the same time – colonial practices used to produce modernity. This the second subject of this lesson.

The original peoples of the Andes at Equator and Bolivia resisted for 400 years to conqueror’s genocide practices all over America. After the II WW, USA proposes the goal of development as a ranking over economic activity in the western part of the world. All other countries were invited to follow the path of USA institutions and economy, under its control.

From the point of view of the original Andes people, protectors of the forest and protected by the forest, development has been the continuation in a stronger path of colonial threat to their cultures and lives in symbiosis within the forest. The every-day violent threat has been reinforced by development politics, organized by local political oligarchies heirs of European colons. For these people abolition of violence is not only a hope and a culture (Sumak Kawsay). It is also a utopia that lends them energy to survive the violent environment. They dream the end of development.

Since harmony with the environment is needed for western global civilization to survive its suicide, Acosta feels it is a good opportunity to accept, study and develop Sumak Kawsay culture as a contribution for new civilized approaches to well being. Boaventura Sousa Santos wrote about epistimicide, the need for diversity of episteme and the political goal of enrich human culture heritage as environment with bio-diversity.

Summary 4. 12.03.2014

reading cases through theory lenses

After describing two sociological approaches to violence and each student to write down one episode of violence, to confront theory and real life is the next step. Two cases have been presented: one about turmoil in recent Turkey where one student has been part in the demonstrator’s side. Police has been considered the aggressor, media cover this aggression, the government controlled indirectly the media by conversations between PM and Director of main media in the country, no much information comes outside the country. People like the student reporter that used to see police as a prevention and defensive tool for population saw the other side of policing (a modern institution) which is repression by violence against peaceful demonstrators, obeying orders from the State. In Greece it happens something like that; even the situation is very different. We are invited to avoid the common thinking of blaming the victim, which goes like that: Turks or Greeks or both are not really civilized people. That is why it happen these violent events. It is because the police should control ancestral violent instincts of the crowd. The same happened in Paris or London or Lisbon; or New York or Cairo; everywhere.

This description calls for a macro theoretical framework, such as provided by Wieviorka – even he does not look at State violence. One needs to understand politics to understand the meaning and the evolution of violence. One needs to realize that several level of problems and conflicts come to join in violent action, from international pressing on Turkish State to become similar to EU state model till religious reaction  to the decline of EU to accept Turkey integration as full member state.

Other case of micro-violence presented referred to striping a female employee in a heating   shop by order of a fake policeman on the phone by several people who join the action. No one touched the girl but the mental pressure was enough to go on for one hour till someone realized it was a bad joke. For micro violence proposes one compare with Collins theory and find that one can say that there is no violence in this episode, if no one touched the victim. If it happened any violence, it would be rare and short. Most of the time, will say Collins, no violence is occurring. It seems unsatisfactory approach for the case.

Summary 3. 25.02.2014

Wieviorka book synthesis can be like this: a) each historical time runs a paradigm of ways to engage on violence; for instance a paradigm more conflictual or more anti-social, more coordinated or with no rule; b) social theories are to specialized and no broad enough to give a perspective on violence; c) outside theoretical contribution is needed to integrate morals and historical stream, such as the theory of the subject of Touraine, to deal with violence social analysis.

Collins, Randall (2008) Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory, Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Randall Collins book propose other reasoning to deal with violence from a sociological point of view. He focus on violent people interaction in a micro approach, by observing the closely. Deepening specialization and focusing on a especial definition of violence: no symbolic but physical violence, no threatening violence but consummated violence.

He proposes to avoid common sense polysemy and focus on an objective subject. He risks controversial declarations supported by hard evidence and challenge sociologist of violence to built new broader and better sociological theories of violence. Himself announce to be developing a sociological macro theory of violence.

Looking at evidence filmed by surveillance camera systems and brought by testimonies of violent action, at war, in urban areas, in close areas, Collins conclude that it is easy and common to quarrel and it is difficult and rare to be violent. To be violent means to build up inside enough emotional energy to overcome tension/fear barrier that normally avoid violence to happen. Even when the barrier is overcome violent people are commonalty incompetent to drive violence to an efficient end. They are to stressed to do so.  Even at war or when violence spreads – hooligans or riots – most people avoid be violent, even they support violent few.

Collins inquiry deals with how people fight – the first two parts – and why people fight – the third part. The name of the first part is “the dirty secrets of violence” (raw and low status violence). And the second part is “cleaned-up and stage violence” (culturalized and high status violence).

Examples of secrets are general imposing the presence of soldiers in battle fields to unwilling young people: most of them do not fight. Just stay in the ground because it is severely forbidden by martial law to walk out. Doing so one stays alone and hunted by both enemies and fellow soldiers. Most munitions and chances to kill enemies are not used and casualties of friend fire are common and ever present.

Heroes and heroic combat actions most of the time results of situational forward panic, when people just flee together and desperate use violence to survive.  

Other secret is to be violent with those who cannot be harmful for the aggressor: weak people, at domestic violence or at bullying experiences at school or at knapping industry. These proceedings are covered by the effect of blaming the victims, since people avoid feeling accountable for what happened to weak people blaming them to cooperate with violent ones. And they probably are right, from a non moral point of view. Victims and weak people “attract” violence events because violence becomes easier for violent people.

Violence is not all secrecy. There are forms of violence that show off. People can claim for fair fights, as a way to become different from common people. Dueling, sports, gang or hooligan fight tours are examples. People make their own social identity out of the shows of violence and organized social hierarchies over the involvement on violent actions.

Why we fight? People are not violent: interactional situations are violent. Few people engage directly on violent episodes. They learn how to build up enough emotional energy and to accept and maintain their social status. They learn to be violent before the opponent, because this is one way to build emotional superiority over the combat. Fights are mostly very brief. The emotional attention space is limited and who ever dominate it will receive emotional support from the crowd of bystanders. Engaging in a fight means to enter a tunnel of focus attention hopefully in the right direction. It would disturb and upset enemy's rhythms.  

Emotional superiority is much more important to fight winning decision than war hardware.

Summary 2. 10.02.2014

Michel Wieviorka, La Violence, Paris, 2005, has three parts. One presents the different paradigm that frame violence before and after the 80´s. Second part presents different sociological approaches to violence. Third part presents the view on violence from Touraine theory of subject regard. Being a subject a built social entity, as a person, as a group, as an institution, as a movement, or else.

The author stresses the distinction between constructive violence and destructive anti-social violence. The first one makes sense to the coming society. The second one does not make sense.

Grey situations are presented at the very end, in a typology of violence. Beside the hiper-subject claiming new senses for social development and the anti-subject protagonist of cruelties, one find the floating subject, driving feelings of injustice; non subject, social entity that act mechanically; survivor subject, fight against the social deny of the its self.

The first part of the book presents arguments in favor of the statement that historically there is a reduction of the opportunities to develop conflicts, opposed to violence such as diplomacy does oppose to war: a) diverging infra-state (less control on economy by privatization) and meta-state (religious ideologies) problems out of state control; b) proclamation of the rights of victims over citizenship; c) media coverage and uncontrolled use of new media.

 The second part of the book presents sociological analysis of violence from psycho-politic, economic and cultural separate points of view. Mass e social movements violence, unionist violence, uncivilized violence do not include any explanation of cruelty, genocide or gratuitous violence. Sociology recognizes instrumental and cold violence, expressive and hot violence. It does not refer non-sense cold violence.  

In order to include that occult kind of violence into the analytical frame work one needs, claim Wieviorka, to come out of sociological views. One needs to find on the subject theory, upstream of socialization, in the sense of history, looking at the built of protagonist entities building societies, the analytical criteria to present violence; including cruelty.

Summary 1. 03.02.2014

Violence: social phenomena or sociological concept?

Violence is a new sociological subject, as a sub discipline. Is it a special social field? Is it another way to look at social relations? Why and how did violence emerge recently as an important sociological topic? Should violence be another social field to be looked at by standard social theory? Or should sociologist use the call to understand violence to challenge and evolve social theory under a fast changing world?

Each student should prepare (5 pages maximum) description of a violent social episode. It should be as neutral description as possible. Never the less, the description should be framed by a brief explanation of the way the writer came to find the chosen empirical episode (be it experienced live or through tales, literature, theater, film or TV) and choose it to the scholar exercise. Each writer can conclude the paper with a personal comment on what and how the episode represents as an opportunity to discuss violence. Teacher hopes everybody could present the paper in the next fortnight.

When it comes to ritualistic reception of new students at university first grade it is controversial what violence is: for those in favor of traditions they say that what happens is not violent; those against, say the ritual is violent. The public discussion started with the decease of six students in ritual practices. Most of the Portuguese people would say that students’ rituals are a youth institution. During the public discussion, secrecy has been disclosed and some victims come to declare what has not been heard before. The families of the deceased call for knowing the truth about the preparation of the ritual and of the public presentation about what happened by the top hierarchy of the ritual. Public claims of police investigation neglect rise suspicion over the will of criminal prosecution bodies.

For the moment, it is not clear what would be the position of Portuguese audience about “praxes”. Anyway, more people will join those few who think that integration assimilation rituals are intrinsically and brutally institutional violence.

This example shows that violence is an action and the way people look at the action.  Habitual action changes over time, as well as the look changes, depending on who is looking. For different people the same actions can be classified as violent or not violent. For the same people, in different time of her or his life, what seemed to be acceptable and non violent becomes unbearable. To be or not to be violence can also depend on the collocutor or on the sequence of the arguing. Sometimes violence seems to be a joke. When people have the opportunity to look again and reflect, they can change their minds. The victims are to blame for her or his status? Is it power exercise an abuse or part of a competition for god life? People acceptance of the legitimacy of violence is also influenced by opinion makers’ statements and for the general social mood.

Gender social use of violence is very different – men are powerful when they present violent potential and women are not supposed to be powerful that way. The victims are more likely to be female gender, poor people background, dominated ethnic groups background. There is a social differentiation about the publicly acceptable relationships to violence. Traditionally women do not fight for power and show subordination to men. Modern times are changing patriarchal thinking. But practical inequality is record anywhere and everywhere in the world. Structural and dominant violence is most of the times developed in secrecy and under the abetment of all power systems, avoiding accountability, using criminal justice to reinforce domination and stigmatization of the victims.

Some societies, now a day, condemn women for being sexually abused, blaming the victim. Western societies are changing our common past. Doing so, sexual assault and gender inequality becomes blamed by society and State. Never the less, rape and sexual abuse is still secret, as private matter. And the number of people involved in sexual violent practices is huge, cross class, most of the time a long with deep emotional feelings linking abusers and victims, as well as economic and social links, as family, for instance. There is no effective policy to address the epidemic gender violence, as a main civilization human rights goal. Each case should be brought to judicial institutions, wait for a decision and mixed up with opportunistic personal use of the fight against gender violence.

To understand violence, the teacher asked each student to decide what side of violent relationship she or he will choose. Because it makes a difference to look at a violent episode from the abuser, the victim, the bystander, the state agent, the activist, point of view. For clarity, to help the reader and the scientific discussion, even each one of us is able to slide from a point of view to another, to avoid slippery; each student is urged to play only a part of the presentation of her or his case, for discussion sake.

A social actor we need to consider, as well, is the crowed or the mood of the people, for historical or ritual raisons: when people are waiting for social change (or not) or when people are used to confront violent situations, in sport for instance, violence becomes different as well as the perception about what is dangerous violent.  

Violence is a polysemous word. In order to make it scientific we need methodic ways to turn it one sense only. This is a non solved problem. Yet.