Title:

Authors:Denyse A. Lemaire (Rowan University)

David Kasserman (Rowan University)

Pierre Lemaire (University of Pennsylvania)

ABSTRACT

In September 1961, the Dutch colonial government effectively ended warfare among the Grand Valley Dani in the highlands of New Guinea. Karl Heider, then a young ethnoarchaeologist studying the Dani’s stone axes, worriedly tried to prepare the Dutch for the worst consequences of their seemingly beneficial accomplishment. With war ended as “an outlet for violence and aggression,” ^[1] violence was sure to reemerge somewhere else in their culture, possibly with even more disruptive effects. Elsewhere in New Guinea, pacification had ended warfare among the Mae Enga in the 1950's, but pig theft, brawls, homicide, housebreaking, and arson had all subsequently increased alarmingly in frequency.^[2]

The expected outburst of redirected violence did not occur, leading Heider to reconsider the holistic view of the interdependency of systems within a functioning culture that led him to his (happily) inaccurate prediction. However, it may not have been his perception of the nature of culture that was at fault; instead it may have been his perception of the nature of violence. Possibly stemming from the origins of modern psychology, and more recently compounded by sociobiological musings,^[3] it is popular to conceptualize violence as an impulse more than an action. This assumes that the impulse, once activated, will inevitably find an alternate outlet if it’s original intended expression is frustrated. Such a theory seems plausible enough, when applied to the behavior of the Mae Enga, until their experience is compared to that of the Grand Valley Dani and the context in which their culture operated is examined closely. For the Mae Enga, warfare had been a mechanism used to redistribute land among kingroups whose fluctuating size made access to sufficient territory a continuing-and changing- problem. The suppression of warfare by the Australian Protectorate was accompanied by the institution of land courts, whose role it was to adjudicate conflicting claims peacefully. Unfortunately, the western concept of land ownership neither corresponded with the Mae Enga commitment to usufruct nor responded creatively to the inevitable pressures resultant from the growing disparity between family size and access to land in the Mae Enga community. Their return to violence, then, was a simple return to a system that effectively met the need for recurrent land distribution, and a rejection of an artificially imposed system that did not.^[4]

Their example does not, of course, suggest that a more effective nonviolent solution to their problem could not have been established by a more culturally aware (or lucky) national administration. What it does suggest is that violence can be a cultural tool, and its operation in any society can potentially be understood in terms of its culturally determined purpose and effect. In effect, then, all violence is not the same thing, and need not be understood in the same way.

This apparently unremarkable statement seems unnecessary to make, until one recognizes that belief in the unitary nature and meaning of violence appears to underlie much of this country’s current social debate over public safety. How else can one explain the grim and unwavering commitment to “zero tolerance” policies by humorless administrators all over the country who prosecute accidental transgressors whose misdeeds are at their worst minor or technical, and who enforce draconian inappropriate punishments even in the face of public outrage and ridicule?^[5] How else can one understand the equation recently expressed by opponents of the death penalty between the execution of Timothy McVeigh and the act for which he was executed? An act of violence is an act of violence.

However, if one takes the position that violence is culturally formatted, and that in many societies, including our own, violence has been systematically codified in such a way as to superimpose on it a hierarchy of value and meaning, a different picture arises, a different understanding of the causes of violence emerges, and a different approach to dealing with the problems of violence becomes apparent.

If cultures do in fact structure the meaning of personal violence differently, then it is reasonable to believe that both the causes and the pattern of violence should vary cross culturally in predictable ways. There are some social structures which surely would have the effect of forbidding all violent expressions of self–slavery, for instance, or peasantry, or oppressed ethnicity, class, caste, race, or gender. In these cases, successful enculturation would equate all forms of violence in the minds of the controlled community, identify them all as immoral, and make the process of ensuring their submission to the controlling elite infinitely more certain. In societies (or classes or castes) in which violence is an accepted form of self-expression, the inevitably destructive effects of random acts of violence would require that the form and context of appropriate violence clearly distinguish the appropriate from the inappropriate. It would also require that this essential distinction be taught as a fundamental element of their culture to all its members, since condoning violence also must condone maintaining the means of violence, making the possibility of tragic error very real in daily life.

Should this distinction in cultural types exist, then could one expect that violence will only become a social problem in those societies that teach their members that it is an appropriate response to given circumstances? Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that there are patterns of violence that plague non-violent cultures. Peasants, for instance, often perceive the world as divided into at least two realms: the one in which they operate (and where their cultural prohibitions against violence are in force), and an exterior one in which the upper classes operate by a different standard. That exterior world, also the abode of outlaws and occasionally spirit beings, is marked by an enthusiastic disregard for social structure. It is a world that the peasant only rarely enters, usually through the mechanism of ritual or drunkenness. It is also a world in which violence–all violence, since all violence is ideologically identical–is allowable. It would hardly be surprising, then, to find that when peasants are thrust into extreme circumstances, for instance in periods of revolution, the level and extent of their violence far exceeds the functional requirements of their situation. Once engaged in violent acts, peasants are outside the pale of cultured behavior, and all violence is equally accessible because all violence is equivalent. Similarly, might not the (to westerners) shocking levels of gratuitous violence associated with the breakup of Yugoslavia be understood as the structural consequence of revolution in a society that for many generations was controlled by a series of extremely centralized totalitarian regimes?

Certainly, if this hypothesis is correct, then slave communities, in the process of gaining their freedom, could be expected to exhibit forms of violence that are fundamentally unrelated to the structural demands of their intent. An interesting example lies in the actions of Nat Turner’s ‘army” during the Virginia slave revolt of 1831. Though a young historian, Stephen B. Oates, tried desperately to describe Turner and his fellow rebels as heroic freedom fighters in his 1975 Fires of Jubilee,^[6] and sympathy for revolting slaves ran high in the United States in the end of the twentieth century, a catalog of the rebels’ actions hardly casts them in a heroic light. At the Whitehead farm, the rebels hacked an old woman to death, and Turner himself chased a young woman into a field where, unable to kill her with his sword, he beat her to death with a fence rail; later his “cavalry” attacked a school and butchered all the children (except one who had managed to hide herself in a chimney.)^[7] Nineteenth century white Virginians took this as evidence of the barbarity of their slaves, and took harsh measures to insure that no laxity in their system of control would ever allow its expression again; late twentieth century historians such as Oates have tried hard to cast these atrocious behaviors as justified by the inhumane conditions under which the slaves labored. Neither interpretation is satisfying. Perceiving slaves as (perhaps unwilling) adherents to a culture that teaches that all violent self-expression is unacceptable suggests a third hypothesis; in revolt, slaves, like peasants, having no cultural mechanism to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable violence, can be expected to engage in gratuitous or excessive acts of aggression.

In the dominant culture of the post-Civil War United States, until recently there has been a fairly consistent message concerning personal violence. Deviating from the English model of much of our common law, the United States has accepted and developed the concept of “the true man” who has “no duty to retreat.”^[8] Essentially, it is a simple code that asserts that a “true” (honorable, brave) man is within his rights to stand his ground and defend himself--even with lethal force--when attacked. This model has profound cultural effects, actually promoting violent encounters; no “true” man would shrink from defending his rights, or by an easy extension, the rights of others unable to defend themselves (women, children, small nations). It, of course, makes sense of our national penchant for responding to international aggression (remember the Lusitania, the Maine, the Alamo, Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin) rather than taking forceful steps to forestall it. But, most importantly, it demarcates a clear line between acceptable (defensive) and unacceptable (offensive) violence which leaves many acts of monumental violence well within the bounds of cultural acceptability. In this tradition, engaging in violence does not separate one from a cultural context; if the violence is of appropriate form, it integrates the perpetrator more closely with the society to which he or she belongs. In a society that so perceives violence, several consequences are predictable. First, there will be a continuing level of personal (not governmental) violence as individuals respond to threats to their positions/prerogatives. (Thus, castigating the United States as the most violent of all modern industrialized nations misses an essential cultural point;[9] a high level of violence does not necessarily reflect a high level of social disorganization.) Second, the means of violence will be kept generally available as an essential tool of the system (the Second Amendment, as President Clinton’s detractors often told him, is not about duck hunting), and restrictions upon their availability will inevitably be interpreted as restrictions on the individual’s fundamental rights. Third, the courts will be kept at work evaluating the appropriateness of specific cases of violence as individuals interpret (and act upon) the precise applications of a general principle. Fourth, most violence will be socially purposeful--presented as a response to aggression--rather than random, and proportional as defined by its social purpose rather than merely emotionally gratifying.

If this approach to understanding violence and its distribution in human cultures is valid, it has some significant implications. It appears to suggest that no cultural system can eradicate violence; different systems merely control and direct it in different ways, with different costs. Systems that suppress all violence as equally reprehensible create a cultural environment in which violent outbursts can be expected to be random and excessive, the product of disaffected individuals who fail to differentiate between appropriate and inappropriate aggression. Precisely because the individual is ill-equipped to generate socially beneficial violence, it behooves the government to insure that he or she has neither the opportunity nor the tools with which to become violent. Systems that build social constructions of acceptable violence solve the problem of random and excessive aggression through communal and individual commitment to an accepted pattern of violent behavior, but by making violence purposeful they insure its continuance. Judicial evaluation of specific acts will remain a constant necessity, particularly when the cultural waters are muddied by the introduction of individuals or communities bringing new perceptions of personal prerogatives into the system. If bursts of random violence will be less frequent, the daily threat of purposeful violence will be greater.

In the United States today, we are apparently suffering from the predictable effects of both systems incongruously superimposed. Though academics are often loathe to admit it, the current president of the National Rifle Association, Charlton Heston, may be quite correct: we are currently engaged in a “culture war,” whose goal is the establishment of a consistent system that will ensure a meaningful and reasonably secure life for its members. But which system?

Of course, the assertion that there is something cultural to fight over that has implications for controlling the level and form of violence in American society is based on the assumption that this model of the cultural basis of violence is both valid and applicable to the American experience. The traditional approach of cross-cultural analysis in cultural anthropology, to which I (David Kasserman) have been long accustomed, demands the demonstration of a consistent pattern of response in a variety of cultures, combined with an evaluation of context that results in construction of a logical hypothesis concerning the cause of that pattern (and its variations). Unfortunately, that approach, while it constructs some very intellectually satisfying models, fails to convince many scholars that the plausible explanation is, in fact, the correct one. Anecdotal evidence is always suspect, particularly when dealing with cultural systems, in which individual variation and deviation can easily confuse and misdirect the most diligent researcher. Some other body of evidence, more logically compelling, is needed.

The question is, then: is there a body of evidence concerning violence in the contemporary United States which, when appropriately evaluated, can shed light on the relevance of this model for understanding American violence? If so, is it accessible, and how best might it be employed to test this hypothesis? In these areas, I plead ignorance, and defer to my co-authors (Dr. Denyse Lemaire and Pierre Lemaire, Ph. D candidate).

In order to assess the patterns of violence in the United States, we obtained the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR), a master file that the FBI, surprisingly enough, still publishes in a tape file format. The UCR is a city, county, state, and Federal law enforcement program. It represents a nationwide cooperative statistical effort of over 17,000 city, county, and state law enforcement agencies, voluntarily reporting data on crimes. The files in the collection we used, contain counts of arrests and offenses.

Since 1930, first year of its publication, the UCR has considered several offenses as part of its index on crime. The following seven offenses were used until 1979: murder, non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft; arson was added to the index after 1979.

For each offense known to the police, the record indicates the type of crime that led to the arrest of the perpetrator.

Crimes against persons are those whose victims are always individuals, e.g., murder, forcible rape, assault. The object of crimes against property is to obtain benefit, property or money, e.g., robbery, burglary, or larceny. In 1999, a murder occurred every 34 minutes, a rape every 6 minutes, a violent crime every 22 seconds, a robbery every minute, one aggravated assault every 34 seconds, a burglary every 15 seconds, one property crime every 3 seconds.

The many agencies collecting data are identified by a code that indicates some demographic information about the area where the crime was committed. Demographic variables such as the age, sex, and race of each offender are provided. Geographic variables in the tapes do not include the census tract, or community area, and they do not contain Federal Information Processing Standards or FIPS codes, so useful to map the information in a geographic frame of reference. Besides the difficulties using a mainframe computer to extract the data from the tapes, much time is spent in matching the reporting agencies to their counties and then linking the data to the FIPS codes.

No information in our database is reported on the relationship of victim to offender. This information is available in the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which records whether the victim or offender had previously committed a violent or nonviolent offense, time of occurrence and place of homicide, type of weapon used, cause and motivation for the incident, whether the incident involved drugs, alcohol, gangs, child abuse, or a domestic relationship, if or how the offender was identified, and information on the death of the offender(s).

This paper describes the preliminary stage of a fifteen months study. At this stage, we have examined the information of the UCR only and for good reasons. First, the absence of FIPS code is a major problem. The Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan has created a crosswalk program, a kind of bridge designed to allow researchers to match the codes of reporting agencies with the Federal Information Processing Standards or FIPS codes. Unfortunately, some errors in the program often force the researcher to manually supply the codes in the database. Second, the length of the database - more than 220,000 lines in 1999 and 2000 - necessitates breaking this gigantic spreadsheet into smaller ones that can be later joined to the ArcView shapefiles. Finally, there are about two percent of missing values in the database. Once the UCR data is in a table format, by county, it is possible to join any table to the county shape files supplied by Esri, in the ArcView 3.2 software package, and map the geographic distribution of crime.

When all the problems of accessing the information are solved, this database provides us with the opportunity to map the distribution of certain characteristics of both crime and criminal. We have chosen to begin with a consideration of murder and non-negligent manslaughter among juveniles, assuming that if the cultural hypothesis is accurate, it will be the persons growing up under the impact of a revised educational system who would first show its effects in the pattern of their violent behavior. If we take 1968 as a watershed year in the political response to violence in America (indicated by the passage of national gun control legislation in response to the recent assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King), and 1992 as an at least symbolic transitional point (with the election of a Democratic administration committed to ending the American “culture of violence”), it seems reasonable to hypothesize that young people enculturated in the 1990s are reasonably likely to have a culturally based view of violence distinct from that of their predecessors, and are likely to show noticeably different patterns of violent behavior than that of their current elders, and that of their equivalent age groups in the past.

Of course, one must be aware of the possible reporting errors in the data being used. Crimes are more likely to be reported if they involve an important economic loss or a serious injury. For example, the National Crime Victimization Survey for 1996 found that only 55% of aggravated assaults, 31% of sexual assaults, 51% of burglaries, and 54% of robberies were reported by victims. "Overall, victims reported only 43% of violent crimes and 35% or property crimes."[10] It is then important to bear in mind that the crimes reported in the UCR should not be used as a precise way to measure the number or the proportion of crimes actually committed by juveniles, persons under the age of eighteen or adults. Furthermore, a person can be arrested more than once in a year or a person can be arrested once for committing more than one crime. Research shows that "a single crime with multiple arrests is more likely to occur with juveniles than with adults, because juveniles are more likely than adults to commit crimes in groups."[11] The UCR data indicate the most serious offense for which a person was arrested.[12] The UCR underestimates the real occurrence of crime. The juvenile contribution to crime is not simply proportional to the number of juveniles in the total population. For example, juveniles commit fifty percent of all arson crimes; they are responsible for forty percent of vehicle thefts, seventeen percent of forcible rape, thirty percent of aggravated assault, and fourteen percent of murders.

The first map represents the distribution of murders committed by females younger than fifteen and the second shows the distribution of murders committed by males younger than fifteen. While urban counties such as Los Angeles, California, seem to have a higher occurrence of murders, the ensuing research will focus on finding reasons for this distribution. While this distribution may result from cultural differences, obviously it may also be the product of other factors such as higher population, higher population density, poverty or drug use.

The map representing the murders committed by males younger than fifteen years of age seems to indicate that Los Angeles and its surrounding counties have had many murders. Other metropolitan areas such as Chicago and Dallas have also reported murders committed by young juveniles. Few counties out of the 3,141 counties of the United States have reported murders committed by young juveniles. The small sample is of course not conducive to drawing general conclusions about persons growing up under the impact of a revised educational system. The following stages of our research will compare the evolution of juvenile murders over the last two decades.
 

The last map represent the murders committed by males older than fifty years of age. These people were brought up at the time preceding 1968. The large metropolitan areas have seen more murders than rural areas. Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans, Dallas, and New York have all been victims of murders committed by males older than fifty years of age. In the following months, we will examine all age groups, sexes, and race data and analyze statistically and geographically these data in relation to offenses and offenders.
 
 

^[1]Karl Heider, Grand Valley Dani: Peaceful Warriors (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979), p. 20.

^[2]Mervyn Meggitt, Blood Is Their Argument: Warfare Mong the Mae Enga Tribesmen of the New Guinea Highlands (Palo Alto, California: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1977), p. 163.

^[3]See, for example, Michael P. Ghiglieri, The Dark Side of Man: Tracing the Origins of Male Violence (Reading, Massachusetts: Perseus Books, 1999).

^[4]See Meggitt, op. cit.

^[5]See, for instance, “Policy Lands Top Student In Jail,” The News-Press, Lee County, Florida, May 22, 2001.

^[6]Stephen B. Oates, The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1975).

^[7]Stephen B. Oates, op. cit., pp. 75-84.

^[8]See Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty To Retreat (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994).

^[9]David B. Kopel has made essentially this point in his The Samurai, The Mountie, And The Cowboy (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1992).

[10] Howard N. Snyder, Melissa Sickmund, Juvenile Offenders and Victims:1999, National Report, Chapter 5,p.2.

[11] Howard N. Snyder, Melissa Sickmund, Juvenile Offenders and Victims:1999, National Report, Chapter 5,p.3.

[12] Howard N. Snyder, Melissa Sickmund, Juvenile Offenders and Victims:1999, National Report, Chapter 5,p.2.