ABSTRACT
Sociological (including anthropological) approaches to violence are marked by ambivalence. Violence is seen as emergent in the absence of the social or else its product, often the two positions are simultaneous in analysis. Thus in a Durkheimian analysis violence takes different shapes as a function of the kind of normative and social integration involved. This was most famously developed in Durkheim's own path-breaking study, Suicide. Here the violent taking of one's own life, self murder, is, for example, a function of over socialization (altruism) or else of radical isolation within the social (egoism, anomie). Other perspectives, but not necessarily unrelated, conceive violence as both a force of and against social and political control and regulation. Thus the state is a violent order, appropriating violence to itself. Resistance to the state, especially from within a statist conception of the social, is conceived to be intrinsically violent. It denies the state's appropriation of violence and its ordering claims. Such claims are often viewed as the repressive, overordering, oversocializing functions of state apparatuses that are thoroughly violent, excluding and marginalizing, in these aspects and provocative of the violence of resistance. Approaches as diverse as those of Durkheim, Weber, Marx, Freud and Foucault approach violence as intimately connected with sociality or social and political dynamics. Violence is a force emergent in relation to the social, produced through the social or anti-social dynamics. It is not something beneath or outside social and political and social forces, something intrinsic to human beings as essentializing socio-biologists often argue. Broadly, violence can be conceived of as the paradox of the social and strongly functionalist approaches have, for instance, described rituals as the institutional means for ridding the social of its destructive violence (e.g. Gluckman 1954, Girard 1972). But as so much research has demonstrated ritualized violence (an example is sacrifice, see Kapferer 1997, Bloch 1996) far from expunging violence engages violence to social formation, violence is intimate with social generation.
