The editors, Jacky Bouju and Mirjam de Bruijn, introduce this volume of nine essays by defining ordinary violence as, ‘recurrent mental or physical aggression occurring between closely related people’ (p. 1). The book originated in the work of a comparative three-year project of conflict and ordinary structural violence in eight African villages sponsored by the Centre d’Études des Mondes Africains, Aix-en-Provence, France. The chapters cover seven countries, all but two former French or Belgian colonies. Written by social anthropologists and based on fieldwork, the essays deal with many circumstances of interpersonal violence: seclusion practices among the Iraqw of Tanzania (Jonathan Baker and Hege Wallevik); extra-marital pregnancy in Burkina Faso (Fatoumata Ouattara and Katerini Storeng); domestic work in Mali (Jacky Bouju); itinerant Koranic schools in Chad (Mirjam de Bruijn); family experience of structural violence in Zimbabwe (Otrude N. Moyo); kinship relations in DR Congo (Sylvie Ayimpam); Lubumbashi's street children (Olivier Kahola Tabu); witch-hunting in Central African Republic (Aleksandra Cimpric); and domestic violence in Mali (Sébastien Le Potvin).
In a book covering such a diversity of subjects and places, one relies upon the editors' introduction to pull it together. Bouju and de Bruijn describe the anthropologist's intellectual task of categorizing violence and the ethical problems associated with investigations of an admittedly delicate subject. In Africa, they say, violence is classified either as acts of coercion or of disrespecting accepted authority and threatening the social order. This definition differs significantly from that of ordinary violence (recurrent mental or physical aggression occurring between closely related people) and raises questions about the validity of the generalization. What is the meaning of collective responsibility on the micro-level in a structurally adjusted Africa? Does the transgression of norms, which ‘do not automatically lead to social conflict, coercion or violence’ (p. 8), hold the same meaning for a family in Bulawayo and an Iraqw community in Mbulu? Is family violence, structured by Zimbabwe's political economy, comparable to the exclusion of women who bear children out of wedlock or suffer miscarriage, stillbirth, or infant death in northern Tanzania? Is the violence practiced by and upon Congo's street children comparable to the mistreatment of Chadian children in itinerant Koranic schools or the exploitation of teenage girls who leave their farms to look for work in Djenne?
What is the difference between ordinary and structural violence and is there interplay between the two? What is the gender dimension of ordinary violence – not just the disparate experiences of girls and boys or women and men, but the embedded constraints expressed in ‘reinvented traditional customs’ (p. 2)? The editors note that currently many books focus on violence in Africa. The contribution of this volume of interesting essays would have been enhanced by an overview and extended discussion of two central themes in the chapters: the impact of increasing inequality on the changing place of children in families and the manipulation of gender roles as a ‘paradoxical aspect of modernity’ (p. 9).
The book is recommended to all those interested in questions of various forms of interpersonal violence, and it is especially of interest to ethnographers confronting the difficult task of reconciling their moral perspectives on violence with those of the subjects of their research. Anthropologists often come from ethnocentric worlds whose views of what constitutes violence differ from that of the victims, perpetrators, and witnesses they are interviewing. Whether or how to respond to acts that they observe and deem to be brutal may challenge their academic stance of independence and objectivity.
