The Identity of Violence?

I finished reading Amartya Sen's book Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny last week, and have (and had) been thinking about the issue of identity in relation to fundamentalism, sectarian violence, and also in relation to nationalism and the nation (and of course I like ruminating upon violence anyway). This is not really a review of Sen's book, but some musings related to his book and otherwise. But let me make some observations....

1. Sen's book is wonderfully woven together, and his major thesis is how advocacy of a single identity – including but by no means limited to religious identity – is employed to sometimes initiate and justify continuous instances of violence and how this unique and single identity receives special focus to the exclusion of all other identities that an individual may possess.

2. This advocacy for a “belligerent” identity is not just employed by the religious fundamentalists and the proponents of religious violence – but the curious thing, as Sen points out is that the same religious identity and the same religious component is employed by also those who effectively seek to fight religious extremism/violence/fundamentalism of different kinds – in this instance most specifically that of Islamic fundamentalism, and the content of the particular discourse ranges from either bashing up the said-religion or in trying to find a middle-ground, which consists of locating the “true” voice of the religion (Islam). But as Sen notes why use religion or the religious identity alone to fight against religious fundamentalism? Why harp on this singular identity based on religion? Why not instead concentrate on the many other identities that Muslims have apart from their Islamic faith based identity?

3. Sen also points out how social theories (and I had always imagined that social theories never really get to the public!), which do explicitly divide the world into divided categories of “us” and the “other/s” and claim to have “discovered” pre-existing social boundaries, and therefore the lines of contention and confrontation, have a particularly insalubrious effect in that these reductionist theories are welcomed and used by the extremists to further their own goals of promoting fundamentalism (case in point: Sen points out to the annoying and rather revolting theories of Samuel Huntington and not just his infamous Clash of Civilizations..., where he is considered by many from his own discipline to be at his confrontational best – but also see “Twenty-first Century America: Vulnerability, Religion, and National Identity” in Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster. 2004 – where he starts off by talking about extremist Muslims (and I don't really remember how they exactly enter the picture) but then out of nowhere all Muslims are suddenly viewed as harbouring hostile feelings and sentiments of envy and animosity towards the U.S because of the latter's wealth and economic progress).
This is a perfect example of social construction. The social categories are created, defined, and hardened through the said social theory; the social lines of separation are reified through the process, but then these categories, the boundaries, and the lines of confrontation are seen to have a reality of their own. The social theory and its proponents then use the said theory to defend the same categories that are created by the theory in the first place!

Sen's theory is simple and exceptionally elegant. Even if one were to go out and conduct an empirical study and find instances that were to confirm his theory or to locate instances where his theory did not hold good – that would be hardly as interesting or as elegant an operation as the theory itself. But more about this later.

4. The parts that I found particularly enlightening, fascinating, and indeed captivating were the threads that he pulled out of historical “storage spaces” in relation to how non-western societies – including India, The Middle-East, and China have contributed to the very foundations of the European enlightenment, and how the Eastern contributions to what is now known as western science and mathematics have been completely forgotten (scattered bits and pieces I have not been completely unaware of – yet the origins of the term sine was a particularly delightful example among many others in his book), and how “democracy”, if one starts with what it means (“public deliberation and reasoning”) instead of the unbroken linguistic concept or as certain practices related to the concept can be seen to have existed in different countries in the east (such as India and Japan), and how when Akbar was speaking of religious tolerance in India, across Europe heretics were being burned at the stake and The Inquisitions were not making for happy lives....
Sen does not flinch from giving the western world credit where it is due as he takes us through a historical journey tracing the travel of ideas from East to West – and not just spiritual ideas but fundamental ideas and concepts central to mathematics and the sciences, and he cites many more instances related to the same through chapters 3-7 of his book. Yet he does so in an extremely well-balanced, matter-of-fact, and inoffensive way – even when he points out to the complete and utter ignorance of some of the British colonial ideas regarding the Indians or to the more recent instance of provincialism contained in the “blaring” of U.S Lieutenant General William Boykin) – a far cry from the rather belligerent tone adopted by many post-colonial scholars or subaltern study specialists.

5. The above pointer is used by Sen to demonstrate in the main that Muslims have many other identities (mathematician, scholar, poet, artist, scientist...) so there is no reason for either Muslims themselves to view themselves through their Islamic faith based identity nor for the rest of the world to engage in the same although it may jolly well make sense for the extremists themselves to view themselves through this singular identity.

6. Another point that I personally found pertinent is that a secluded cultural community or one that is given the “freedom” to remain sequestered ends up by not providing its members with the freedom to choose (so much for practicing cultural relativism/celebrating multiculturalism!), while the chapter connecting poverty, globalization, identity, and violence was an illuminating and absorbing read.

7. Sen's focus is on the main that of the singularity of religious identity although he does touch upon other instances where a single identity is stressed – he briefly touches upon the clash between the Hutus and Tutsis, but in the main Sen provides a rubric, a general-enough social perspective wherein he decries the advocacy of a single identity, any single identity, given the fact that human beings are a composition of multiple identities. And of course he writes amazingly well, is stunningly lucid, never uses a jarogonized term, and is very witty in a wry and quiet way right from the priceless prologue.

So far so good. Now, it's time for my own musings I guess.

1. As elegant a perspective that it is – I am left wondering about some related and semi-related things. Theoretically it makes sense of course. Being viewed or viewing others in terms of a single identity ends up as being an extremely partial (and also untrue!) view of human beings - in most cases. Even in the simplest terms, an individual, as Erving Goffman said (four decades ago), has as many identities as the roles s/he plays. That identity can and should be seen in contextual terms, even in everyday encounters, has been talked about.

2. Social psychologists have been talking about the hierarchy of identities within our identity pyramids for a while now. The problem is that not many social psychologists write popular books, and many of the frameworks which start out by being interesting are waylaid by academicians who just end up making the focus of concern exceptionally narrow. A neat theoretical idea “introduced” by Sheldon Stryker (who was initially influenced by G.H. Mead’s work on identity) – which started out as neat anyway – was the notion of identity salience, which talked about the importance of taking into account the multiple identities of an individual and of looking into the salience/prominence of an identity depending upon the particular context. Salience was connected to the individual investment in the projection of a particular identity in a given context. In many ways the theory became much more complex than it needed to be (there were some layers that do make sense) and there was the in-built need to make it appear very scientific and it was therefore made messier and very smartly quantitative but in its bare bones this is how it stood. The problem also lay in the fact of how identity salience was measured and what it was used to study. And maybe this is why many social psychological studies (and I can think of at least a couple of really interesting and insightful ones), including the ones on identity never did become as important as they should have and could have been. Although some studies by Henri Tajfel in particular and also by John Turner looked into the relation between discrimination and identity and the construction of in-groups and out-groups based on identity.

Maybe indeed it does take somebody like Amartya Sen to redirect our attention to something that the social psychologists have been working on for years (!) and to explain it in a lucid and meaningful manner.

3. All this said, I somehow feel that Sen seems to refrain from commenting on the rapid and rather scary outbursts of religious intolerance that have been felt over India over the last three decades and the rise of Hindu fundamentalism in its current form. Sen points out that India “has produced very few homegrown terrorists acting in the name of Islam” and for this Sen gives thanks to the “nature of Indian democratic politics, and to the wide acceptance in India of the idea, championed by Mahatma Gandhi that there are many identities other than religious ethnicity that are also relevant for a person’s self-understanding and for the religions between citizens of diverse backgrounds within the country” (168). So that explains why we don’t have homegrown Islamic terrorists but I don’t know whether it’s just me who’s left wondering – for he indeed does mention the recent instances of religious riots – how then does he explain the explicit advocacy of the Hindu identity by the Hindu fundamentalists or am I just picking at something that shouldn’t be picked at?

4. In conclusion: I’ll end off with one of my musings in relation to the highlighting of a particular identity: the reason it seems to me that the religious identity/ethnic identity is the specific identity that is invoked is because that this is the identity which becomes the most pertinent and prominent one given the specific context under consideration. And then again it seems to me that in every “social” movement, individuals are and have been categorized both by themselves and also by others by that primary identity, which the social movement is said to “represent” – be that the women’s/feminist movement, the civil rights movement, or even a particular environmental movement or a class-based movement. One cannot of course say that a terrorist movement is a social movement in the same sense but the issue of the primary/prominent identity (or if we want to call it the salient identity) does remain constant across all instances.

It’s not that I don’t think Sen has a point in saying that to invoke a single identity is insular – and more so by the very individuals intent on addressing/resolving the problem, and that they must at least refrain from picking on that one identity - yet the differences that are framed in any movement, (and particularly those that involve violence) are framed around a particular social identity (be that of race, caste, religion, sect, class). If that category and the differences seen to be “contained” within that category were not made explicit then the particular identity would not be invoked – for in some sense it is that particular social identity, which is bringing people together to form a collective identity. So this is true of “peaceful” social movements too. A single identity is resorted to as being the most prominent identity. The fight for certain rights is structured around this primary/prominent identity. However, once violence enters the picture – and systematic violence of any sort is engaged in between one identifiable social category and another then the question is how do so many others “buy” into the notion of a singular identity so much so that they are willing to engage in violence against the other group? I am not even sure that identity and identification with that single identity has much to do with it at this stage – not even by the ones who are engaged in violence. So I’m not really sure whether remembering that an individual is composed of more than just one identity would help curb widespread and intense ethnic/religious violence. There is much good in the sentiment per se, and I’m sure if we adopted a less insular view and stopped pegging people into single identity holes and desisted from stereotyping people based on a social identity much good would come of it otherwise – but I don’t know whether it can help address race/ethnic/religious/nationalistic conflicts and particularly violence….and the violence that we see today is of course not something that emanates out of nowhere. Where then does it come from?.......
I’ll have to end this right here with the above question.

There are many other thoughts that would like to be written and others that are yowling to be written about but the problem for the nonce is that I need to come up with a decent idea for a class that I’m taking on Nation and Nationalism. After all the class readings and the other assortment of stuff that I’ve been reading, skimming through, and whatever and what-not (in my usual way) – I’m still scratching my head to find a lucid, interconnected, and interesting idea. Maybe that’s because for the nth time I’m left thinking that the most important things have been said 97, 7799 times at least, which is not entirely disconnected from something else I read today.
P.S: Incidentally, this book by Amartya Sen has been my favourite one out of the whole pile of academic and related readings....