Why Reconciliation? A Response to Critics
In my essay “Reconciliation after Ethnic Cleansing” (Public Culture 14 [spring 2002]: 281–304), I seek to identify processes that might enable departures from violent conflicts. How is it possible to reconcile—to render no longer opposed— in the aftermath of extreme violence, such as an ethnic cleansing? I elaborate two conditions, both centering around redress of loss, that must be confronted to break most cycles of contemporary ethnic and racial violence: (1) reproduction and relations of affinity and (2) retribution. All four commentators address the latter issue while avoiding the first. Why this silence about global ideologies of reproduction?
This omission is all the more striking given how pervasive such tactics are in the very examples cited by the respondents themselves. In nearly all of the empirical cases mentioned—in particular, South Africa, Israel, Bosnia, Kosovo, Lebanon, and Northern Ireland—violence operates through the use of marital and reproductive strategies that have long been subjects of anthropological investigation. Studies critical of these strategies tend to talk technically of “demographic imbalances” or “population control,” without naming or addressing the ideologies of reproduction and marital form that are responses to the human face of loss. Marriage and reproduction are indeed human projects, but, as forms of human affiliation, neither can be deemed more necessary or natural than male domination, the oppression of women, or child exploitation—all, at one time or another, assumed to be universal.
The relation of reproduction to both the specific character of human violence and contemporary majoritarian politics deserves more attention. Whereas other animals change their reproductive patterns only after they have been sterilized, humans have more options. Alternatives to reproductive ideologies tend to revolve around less ideological and less coercive relations of care: with the elderly or neighbors not related by blood or adoption, as well as practices of gay, interethnic, intersectarian, and binational affinity. But they remain largely anecdotal because they are not systematically documented in fieldwork.
End of Excerpt | Access Full Version