Civilized Violence

Civilized Violence provides a social and historical explanation for the popular appeal of cinema violence. There is a significant amount of research on the effects of media violence, but less work on what attracts audiences to representations of violence in the first place. Drawing on historical-sociology, cultural studies, feminist and queer theory, masculinity studies and textual analysis, David Hansen-Miller explains how the exercise of violence has been concealed and denied by modern society at the same time that it retains considerable power over how we live our lives. He demonstrates how discourses of sexuality and gender, even romantic love, are freighted with the micropolitics of violence. Confronted with such contradictions, audiences are drawn to the cinema where they can see violence graphically restored to everyday life. Popular cinema holds the power to narrate and interpret social forces that have become too opaque, diffuse and dynamic to otherwise comprehend. Through detailed engagement with specific narratives from the last century of popular film - The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Sheik, Once Upon a Time in the West, Deliverance - and the pervasive violence of contemporary cinema, Hansen-Miller investigates the manner in which representations can transform our understanding of how violence works.

Civilized Violence provides a social and historical explanation for the popular appeal of cinema violence. There is a significant amount of research on the effects of media violence, but less work on what attracts audiences to representations of violence in the first place. Drawing on historical-sociology, cultural studies, feminist and queer theory, masculinity studies and textual analysis, David Hansen-Miller explains how the exercise of violence has been concealed and denied by modern society at the same time that it retains considerable power over how we live our lives. He demonstrates how discourses of sexuality and gender, even romantic love, are freighted with the micropolitics of violence. Confronted with such contradictions, audiences are drawn to the cinema where they can see violence graphically restored to everyday life. Popular cinema holds the power to narrate and interpret social forces that have become too opaque, diffuse and dynamic to otherwise comprehend. Through detailed engagement with specific narratives from the last century of popular film – The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Sheik, Once Upon a Time in the West, Deliverance – and the pervasive violence of contemporary cinema, Hansen-Miller investigates the manner in which representations can transform our understanding of how violence works.

Civilized Violence provides a social and historical explanation for the popular appeal of cinema violence. Drawing on a range of disciplines, Hansen-Miller explains how Modern society has concealed and denied the exercise of violence even though it retains considerable power over how we live our lives. Through engagement with specific narratives from the last century of film and the pervasive violence of contemporary cinema, Hansen-Miller investigates how representations reassert the significance of violence and how they can transform our understanding of the way violence works.

In "The Dream of Civilized Warfare, Robertson presents the compelling, story of the creation of the first American air force--and how, through the propaganda of the flying ace, a vision of "clean" or civilized combat was sold to politicians and the public. She traces the long history of the American desire to exert the nation's will throughout the world without having to risk the lives of ground soldiers--a theme that continues to reverberate in public discussions, media portrayals, and policy decisions today.

From its beginnings in the early twelfth century, the Western civilizing process has involved two interconnected transformations: the monopolization of military force by sovereign states and the cultivation in individuals of habits and dispositions of the kind that we call "civilized." The combined forward movement of these processes channels violent struggles for social dominance into symbolic performances. But even as the civilizing process frees many subjects from the threat of direct physical force, violence accumulates behind the scenes and at the margins of the social order, kept there by a deeply habituated performance of dominance and subordination called deferentiation. When deferentiation fails, difference becomes dangerous and genocide becomes possible. Connecting historical developments with everyday life occurrences, and discussing examples ranging from thirteenth-century Languedoc to 1994 Rwanda, Powell offers an original framework for analyzing, comparing, and discussing genocides as variable outcomes of a common underlying social system, raising unsettling questions about the contradictions of Western civilization and the possibility of a world without genocide.

The term ’progress’ is a modern Western notion that life is always improving and advancing toward an ideal state. It is a vital modern concept which underlies geographic explorations and scientific and technological inventions as well as the desire to harness nature in order to increase human beings’ ease and comfort. With the advent of Western colonization and to the great detriment of the colonized, the notion of progress began to perniciously and pervasively permeate across cultures. This book details the impact of the notion of progress on the Nagas and their culture. The interaction between the Nagas and the West, beginning with British military conquest and followed by American missionary intrusion, has resulted in the gradual demise of Naga culture. It is almost a cliché to assert that since the colonial contact, the long evolved Naga traditional values are being replaced by Western values. Consequences are still being felt in the lack of sense of direction and confusion among the Nagas today. Just like other Indigenous Peoples, whose history is characterized by traumatic cultural turmoil because of colonial interference, the Nagas have long been engaged in self-shame, self-negation and self-sabotage.

While there is a tacit appreciation that freedom from violence will lead to more prosperous relations among peoples, violence continues to be deployed for various political and social ends. Yet the problem of violence still defies neat description, subject to many competing interpretations. Histories of Violence offers an accessible yet compelling examination of the problem of violence as it appears in the corpus of canonical figures – from Hannah Arendt to Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault to Slavoj Žižek – who continue to influence and inform contemporary political, philosophical, sociological, cultural, and anthropological study. Written by a team of internationally renowned experts, this is an essential interrogation of post-war critical thought as it relates to violence.

The myth of the peace-loving "noble savage" is persistent and pernicious. Indeed, for the last fifty years, most popular and scholarly works have agreed that prehistoric warfare was rare, harmless, unimportant, and, like smallpox, a disease of civilized societies alone. Prehistoric warfare, according to this view, was little more than a ritualized game, where casualties were limited and the effects of aggression relatively mild. Lawrence Keeley's groundbreaking War Before Civilization offers a devastating rebuttal to such comfortable myths and debunks the notion that warfare was introduced to primitive societies through contact with civilization (an idea he denounces as "the pacification of the past"). Building on much fascinating archeological and historical research and offering an astute comparison of warfare in civilized and prehistoric societies, from modern European states to the Plains Indians of North America, War Before Civilization convincingly demonstrates that prehistoric warfare was in fact more deadly, more frequent, and more ruthless than modern war. To support this point, Keeley provides a wide-ranging look at warfare and brutality in the prehistoric world. He reveals, for instance, that prehistorical tactics favoring raids and ambushes, as opposed to formal battles, often yielded a high death-rate; that adult males falling into the hands of their enemies were almost universally killed; and that surprise raids seldom spared even women and children. Keeley cites evidence of ancient massacres in many areas of the world, including the discovery in South Dakota of a prehistoric mass grave containing the remains of over 500 scalped and mutilated men, women, and children (a slaughter that took place a century and a half before the arrival of Columbus). In addition, Keeley surveys the prevalence of looting, destruction, and trophy-taking in all kinds of warfare and again finds little moral distinction between ancient warriors and civilized armies. Finally, and perhaps most controversially, he examines the evidence of cannibalism among some preliterate peoples. Keeley is a seasoned writer and his book is packed with vivid, eye-opening details (for instance, that the homicide rate of prehistoric Illinois villagers may have exceeded that of the modern United States by some 70 times). But he also goes beyond grisly facts to address the larger moral and philosophical issues raised by his work. What are the causes of war? Are human beings inherently violent? How can we ensure peace in our own time? Challenging some of our most dearly held beliefs, Keeley's conclusions are bound to stir controversy.