Mediating Infanticide - Theorizing Relations Between Narrative and Violence

CA
MEDIATING INFANTICIDE: Theorizing Relations

between Narrative and Violence
CHARLES L. BRIGGS
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley
For Feliciana
It didn’t take me long to realize that I had been duped. The young woman who
sat opposite me in jail, hands clasped tightly, one on top of the other, bore little
resemblance to the “victim” I had been asked to interview or the popular figure, al-
ternately villainous and heroic, who seem to be everywhere on the street. Herminia
Gómez’s hair, long, straight, and black, cascaded over a tentlike green blouse, and
she wore pastel slacks, equally oversized. She cried softly, looking mainly at her
hands. She deflected the intense gazes of two surrounding circles of people—her
uncle and aunt, my partner Clara Mantini-Briggs and compadre Hector Romero,
fellow activists in this racist town on the edge of a Venezuelan rainforest, and three
guards, who listened intently to words that they couldn’t comprehend.
I tried to occupy my assigned subject position. “Ms. Gómez is ‘indigenous,’
they told me, so she didn’t understand what the police and judge had said to
her”; her conviction on infanticide charges was thus a misunderstanding. The group
asked Ms. Gómez, in turn, to participate in a politics of truth and voice, to tell
her story in Warao, her “native language”; then I would translate it into Spanish,
misunderstandings would vanish, and the truth would set her free. She was to
provide a simple, linear narrative that could be transparently decoded as the real
story of her daughter’s birth and death.
But Ms. Gómez did not want to supply content for an imposed narrative
form. Denying the linguistic signs of racial Otherness on which the interview was
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 22, Issue 3, pp. 315–356. ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. C 2007 by
the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce
article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/
reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/can.2007.22.3.315.
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 22:3
predicated, she noted: “I understood perfectly. How could I not know Spanish? I
went to school, and I worked [as a maid] in criollo houses for more than two years,”
using the term that locates people across the racial divide. Refusing to project the
temporality that structured state narratives, she started not with the “crime” itself
but with her birth and the death of her mother. Rather than challenge dominant
narratives with a heroic tale infused with the authority of a first-person witness,
she fractured their assertions with silence and uncertainty. “When I got pregnant,
I didn’t say anything to the Mrs.,” referring to her employer. “Since I didn’t say
anything to the Mrs., I was scared.” Sixteen years old, never having discussed
pregnancy or childbirth, she misinterpreted occasional bleeding as her period; she
was unsure that she was pregnant. “That’s why I didn’t know. But at that time I
could have said something.” Confusing labor with intestinal pain, Ms. Gómez gave
birth while sitting on the toilet. “But when the child came out, I fainted. From then
on, I don’t know anything.”
Expressing her inability to tell the solicited narrative, her story became a story
about other people’s stories, her own constraints as a narrator, and the profound
consequence of these stories—her conviction on a count of first-degree murder,
for which she was facing 18 more years in prison. She had no illusions that a
gringo anthropologist who could shift inexplicably into a language that stigmatizes
its speakers could magically end her nightmare. She spoke of her mistreatment in
prison, receiving one meal of inedible food a day, and being forced to sleep on
the floor: “That’s why I wanted to talk with you.” A second request: having lost
contact with her family in the rainforest, “I want to hear what has happened to my
relatives.”
It took me longer to realize that I had been doubly duped that day in 1994,
a duplicity in which I participated even more intimately. Ms. Gómez distanced
herself from the politics of truth embraced by the state and activists alike, using a
politics of silence, doubt, and forgetting—and a radical reformulating of modes of
speaking about violence—in challenging her assigned subject positions of monster,
victim, embodiment of racial inferiority, martyr, and cause célèbre. She swept
away the narrative ground on which I intended to stand—as interpreter, advocate,
perhaps hero. It took time, political and epistemological growth, and the loss of
my own child, Feliciana, to see that the activist project reproduced the narrative
used in convicting Ms. Gómez—and some 24,000 people racialized as “Warao.”
All parties, except Ms. Gómez, seemed to take it for granted that two bodies,
hers and her newborn daughter’s, provided the natural ground for representing
the state, a racialized population, citizenship, violence, history, and “the national
316
MEDIATING INFANTICIDE
society.” After four years of incarceration, it took a rape (by one of the gazing
guards), a coerced and nearly fatal abortion, and a grant of clemency for her rapist
to secure her freedom. Condemned to wander ceaseless between sites of public
humiliation, only her disappearance—and possible death—granted her freedom
from the appellation “that crazy Indian girl who killed her baby daughter.”1
This spectacle was repeated frequently in the 1990s as the media transformed
women and men accused of infanticide into monstrous mothers and fathers,2 images
that jumped scale from a failed domesticity to represent a failed state and deeply
fractured nation. I became interested in how infanticide transfixed Venezuelans,
generating steady streams of conversation and public outrage. Most were depicted
not as indigenous but as “residents of poor barrios,” along with a few campesinos and
middle-class women. One of my defense mechanisms is turning issues that trou-
ble me into research projects, hoping to reveal broader interruptions and unwind
other discourses and practices. I inhabited courthouses, police stations, newsrooms,
morgues, jails, streets, and living rooms, learning how detectives, forensic physi-
cians, prosecutors, judges, defense attorneys, expert witnesses, defendants, family
members, and “the people” represent infanticide. I collected newspaper articles
and television stories, did a quantitative and qualitative content analysis, conducted
interviews with crime-beat reporters, followed them around, and talked to their
sources. Ten years later, I interviewed other women convicted of infanticide in
a prison near Caracas, the capital; there, I heard echoes of the radical narrative
epistemology advanced by Ms. Gómez. At that point, I realized that Ms. Gómez’s
problematic relationship to the narratives that imprisoned her had inspired her to
make an important theoretical intervention. She may have been silent with respect
to the elements of a politics of truth that were imposed on her (“how did the baby
die,” etc.), but it took me a great deal of theoretical reflection of my own to ap-
preciate how her account opened up new insights into the very grounds by which
violence can be narrativized.
My narrative was disrupted a third time when I organized focus groups to
gauge reception. Spanning a broad class spectrum, some of these discussions were
held in Caracas barrios often depicted in crime news as epicenters of violence.
One took place in the summer of 2004, when Clara’s aunt gathered neighbors in
her patio. I presented them with newspaper articles that described the defendants
and their “barrios” in sensationalist and derogatory ways and reported outraged
reactions of neighbors. I was ready to romance resistance, to feel pleasure and
solidarity as my interlocutors critically engaged these representations, revealed the
political-economic and historical dimensions they concealed, denaturalized their
317
immense leaps of scale, and decried their politics. But the participants noted,
“we do say those things,” that they indeed commonly call for iconic reenactments
of the forms of violence inflicted on the infants. I was unable to find anyone who
challenged these representations, except defendants and some of their relatives.
These responses puzzled and, frankly, bothered me.
In the preceding lines, I told an origin story of the emergence of my narrative
about narratives of infanticide. Rather than establishing narrative authority (Clifford
1988) or the metaphysics of presence (Derrida 1974), my goal was to disrupt a
narrative that I have hardly even begun by relating how it was disrupted as it
emerged. My starting point is thus a pivotal moment of what Annelise Riles (2004)
refers to as the “unwinding” of the foundational assumptions on which my narrative
rested. These two disruptions complicated the simpler story of gender, class, race,
and oppression I wanted to “find” and tell, and they forced the issues I raise here.
Interventions by Ms. Gómez and other women convicted of infanticide helped me
see how both the state and activists assumed that the relationship between narrativity
and violence is immanent, that particular acts of violence prompt specific types of
narratives; justice consists of revealing the proper relationship between violence
and narrative. Detectives pry clues out of witnesses, physicians, and the material
world of “evidence” and force confessions. Judges retell violent narratives in their
decrees and sentences. Reporters expose lies and provide “the public” with the
“real” story. Activists and defense attorneys resignify the same plot elements as
counternarratives of violence.
Querying these relationships provides a fascinating site to scrutinize anthropol-
ogy’s claims of authority by locating ethnography in terms of its similarity to other
technocratic (legal, medical, financial, etc.) endeavors, showing resemblances of
methods, objects, and perspectives (Briggs 1996; Mauer 2005; Riles 2000, 2004;
Strathern 2000). Having started this article with my own experience in reading
and writing violence narratives, I move here between several sites. First, I explore
four ways in which anthropologists portray relationships between narratives and
violence and trace a similar debate in media research and policy. Next, I draw on
Charles Peirce’s concepts of icon and index, not in presenting a semiotic or lin-
guistic account of the politics of violence narratives but in theorizing one specific
part of my argument—how connections between narratives and violence get con-
structed. A middle section returns to Venezuela, exploring how reporters create
such seamless narrative-violence connections that their creations travel infectiously
between genres, media, institutions, social classes, and voices. The conclusion re-
cruits Veena Das’s powerful research on anti-Sikh “riots” in Delhi in exploring what
318
all of this can tell us about violence, anthropology, and the dangers of talking—or not
talking—about violence in the contemporary world.
VIOLENCE, NARRATIVES, AND PERFORMATIVITY IN

ANTHROPOLOGY AND MEDIA STUDIES
Here, I trace four types of positions evident in anthropological writings that
comment explicitly on relationships between narratives and violence. The first three
tie narratives and violence together closely, differing in the ways they attend to the
poetics of narratives and the sorts of causal relations they posit between them. The
fourth examines narratives and violence by refusing reference, looking away from
the violent acts recounted in narratives to think about the violence that accrues to
their production and the political effects of telling and retelling them. In each case,
I focus primarily on the work of one scholar in order to examine more closely how
these positions are constructed.
First, Teresa Caldeira’s City of Walls opens with a rich discussion of how “talk of
crime” in Sao Paulo is lodged in “everyday conversations, commentaries, discussions,
narratives, and jokes” (2000:19). She argues that more than simply reflecting life
in a violent and unequal city, stories “organize the urban landscape and public
space, shaping the scenario for social interactions” (2000:19). Crime narratives
provide affectively charged, “contagious” vehicles and a language for talking about
“economic crisis, inflation, poverty, the failure of the institutions of order, city
transformations, citizenship, and human rights” (2000:20). Caldeira suggests that
criminal acts shape stories so as to resignify all elements of social life in the “after”
slot. She envisions narrative-violence relationships as doubly immanent: violence
automatically engenders narratives, and crime talk “symbolically reorders” a society
disrupted by the collapse of meaning, order, and coherence “by trying to reestablish
a static picture of the world”—but thereby reproducing violence and fear (Caldeira
2000:20).
A second line of reasoning similarly locates narrative-violence connections
as immanent but grants them a positive functionalist valence. Although Caldeira
identifies a number of rhetorical features, her concern is not with poetic pattern-
ing. John McDowell’s study of how “Afromestizo” ballads inscribe violence within
communities on Mexico’s Costa Chica details poetic and musical features. He notes
that composers “conduct research,” drawing on local authorities and news media
(McDowell 2000:177), and he explores how intertextuality—particularly reported
speech—infuses ballads with multiple subjectivities and visions of social life. Rather
than using this insight in complicating the relationship between narratives and
319
violence, however, McDowell adopts a similar position of psychosocial naturalism.

Suggesting that “violence is inherently dramatic” (2000:19), McDowell argues that
“corrido narratives are anchored in our awareness of violence as an essential—
perhaps the quintessential—human experience and in our shared ability, or shall
we say, compulsion, to inhabit reports of violent episodes” (2000:22). Violence, in
its impact and representational requirements, “radiates outward from its epicen-
ter” (McDowell 2000:22)—“victim,” immediate kin, close friends, and bystanders.
Unlike for Caldeira, the narrative-violence connection helps take people beyond
the effects of violence—corridos have a “healing mission . . . in these situations of
public trauma” that works on individuals and toward “the reintegration of the body
politic” (McDowell 2000:196).3
A third approach finds immanent connections between narratives and violence
but locates them as ideological effects of narrative economies. In his work on
Lebanon, Michael Gilsenan comments that “The particular act or event is held to
demand to be told in the way it is proclaimed self-evidently to have ‘really’ happened”
(Gilsenan 1996:60). In particular, for situations involving bloodshed, “they could
imagine narratives flowing from the wound as conventionally and ineluctably as fairy
stories follow ‘once upon a time’ ” (Gilsenan 1996:60, 164). Gilsenan distances
himself, however, this politics of immanence at the same time that he traces how
the pragmatics of narration also foreground a contrasting ideology that departs
from a politics of reference in stressing that narratives are treated as multiple,
contested, and the result of confrontations between narrators with quite different
degrees of access to symbolic and material capital. Picking apart the supposedly
intrinsic relations between narrative and violence in other people’s stories was
deemed to be great fun (see also Herzfeld 1985). This logic also emerges in studies
of ritual lament; both I (Briggs 1993b) and C. Nadia Seremetakis (1991) point to
constructions of wailing women as producing counternarratives that are deemed
to be ipso facto true stories by virtue of their collective composition, “acoustic
violence” (Serematakis 1991:118), the bodily signs of distress that accompany them,
and women’s transcendence of ordinary states of consciousness.
A fourth position takes up precisely this connection between violence and
the performance of narratives, extending the argument to exclude reference al-
together from the analysis. Michael Taussig, a persistent critic of psychosocial
functionalism, denies the naturalness of the narrative-violence connection. Narra-
tives of violence gain power by creating différance, that is, difference and deferral
(Derrida 1974), between referent and representation and magically connecting
them: “If terror thrives on the production of epistemic murk and metamorphosis,
320
it nevertheless requires the hermeneutic violence that creates feeble fictions in the
guise of realism, objectivity, and the like, flattening contradiction and systematizing
chaos” (Taussig 1987:132). Placing scholarly writing in the same frame, Taussig
traces how narratives of violence circulate apart from their always absent refer-
ents. Like Caldeira, Taussig denies that narratives of violence restore individual
or social equilibrium but contrastively asserts that their ability to reproduce colo-
nial chaos and fetishize violence springs from disjunctures between narratives and
referents.
Unlike scholars who characterize the narrative-violence relation as immanent
and see circulation as a merely mechanical process, Taussig (1987) calls the former
into question and views the latter as productive, locating violence in the imposition
of reference through circulation between works of fiction, state discourses, news-
papers, travel literature, and the myriad evening conversations with boatmen and
the owners of small stores and inns during journeys to the Colombian Putumayo.
Crucially, his analysis of narratives attends to stories about stories, narratives that
focus on specific acts of narration. Taussig does not banish reference to the extent
that he claims—his juxtapositions of widely differing narratives are organized, in
the end, on the basis of common reference to cannibalism, tobacco-pot rituals, and
the like. Stressing, like McDowell, the poetics of narrative, albeit from a different
analytical stance, Taussig suggests that rather than violent referents “it was the telling
of tales that mediated this inspiration of terror” (1987:122).
Unfortunately, Taussig’s ethnography of narrative circulation is less rich than,
say, that of shamanic rituals, and is largely contextual, describing scenes in which
stories circulate. The “hours of stories” he overheard in a store in 1978 are reduced
to one narrative theme and several picturesque contextual details. How do narrators
structure their stories to shape the routes they take and how they will be passed
along? How do representations of violence come to be what Bruno Latour (1988)
refers to as “immutable mobiles,” seemingly able to travel anywhere, crossing scales,
social fields, genres, institutions, countries, and racial boundaries without shifting,
presumably, meaning? Why do some narratives circulate and achieve effects of power
while others do not? The field of circulation that Taussig depicts spans from the Incas
to the present, indigenous peoples, traders, missionaries, explorers, ethnographers,
and diplomats, and from Putumayo to Paris, London, and the Congo. After carefully
tracing the differences and similarities between narratives and narrators, Taussig
seems to collapse distinctions between stories and their politics of circulation into
a single colonial episteme or “colonial work of fabulation” (1987:121). Despite his
desire to place all narrators in the same critical frame, Taussig’s dismissal of the
321
violence that narratives purport to describe divides anthropological practices of

interpretation from what concerns people who worry about violence a lot. Talking
about narratives of violence apart from their referents is a luxury that my Venezuelan
interlocutors—rich and poor alike—deny me every time I try to invoke it. They
critique it as claiming a “First World,” colonial subject position, one they cannot
afford to occupy. Scholarly efforts to denaturalize narrative-violence relationships
perform symbolic domination if they deny by fiat the force of the acts that preoccupy
narrators.4
Anthropological discussions of narrative and violence seldom get connected
to media studies and policy debates on whether violent media representations
promote violence. There, examining relationships between violence and represen-
tation becomes largely statistical—proving a “causal link” between them, and some
300 laboratory and field studies have argued both sides (see Potter 2003:29).5 The
camp favored by conservative lawmakers claims to have proven a causal link between
viewing substantial numbers of movies, television programs, and other media with
violent content and a huge list of behavioral, physiological, emotional, attitudinal,
cognitive, and societal effects, including copying violent acts, desensitization, mal-
formed superegos, exaggerated fear of violence, programmed thinking, opinion
formation, excitation transfer, and becoming more accepting of violence.6 The
heterogeneous list of effects reads like Foucault’s (1970:xv) account of Borges’s
story of “a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia.’ ” The subject of at least 28 major
hearings by Congress over the last 50 years and pronouncements by numerous
state agencies and a daunting list of professional and public-interest organizations,
Potter (2003:27) confidently asserts that “belief in a connection between expo-
sure to media violence and negative effects now seems intuitively obvious, akin
to other beliefs that seem intuitively obvious to us, such that criticism of the be-
lief seems unreasonable.”7 Assertions of immanent media-violence links are often
depicted rhetorically as demanding policies that restrict violent content in the
media.8
The counterarguments are nearly as legion in number. Critics challenge the
causal link thesis by accepting its terms but disputing the numbers, accepting the link
but reversing the directionality, and claiming that media violence reflects the me-
dia’s inhabitation of a culture of violence (Gerson 1968). Some critics argue that
causal-link proponents are reacting to perceived dangers of new information tech-
nologies and emergent genres (Starker 1989). Others suggest that media violence
critiques enable neoconservatives to find scapegoats for the violence of late capital-
ism (Sharrett 1999).
322
The latter debate covers a wide range of media, genres, and violent objects—
from news stories to CSI to the Matrix to video games—but it similarly requires
particular sorts of assumptions about representation. If a rumor or media story is
“about” a particular crime, we assume that a referential relationship exists between
them. Yet, how do we judge a narrative as being “about” a particular event? What
gives us the feeling that it “captures” what “really happened”? If we adopt a Derridean
(1974) skepticism of origin stories, we might ask how a narrative projects its erup-
tion from—and thus direct relationship to—an act of violence. Anthropological,
media studies, and policy debates grant a central role to performativity, whether it
is accorded to acts of violence, narratives, or both. Dismissing by fiat connections
between narratives and violence does not illuminate how narratives establish and
naturalize these links. Although it is crucial to deny their facticity and transparency,
power effects that accrue to the perceptions that these links are automatic and
natural suggest that we should scrutinize their conditions of possibility.
A PEIRCEAN ANALYSIS OF NARRATIVITY AND VIOLENCE

These questions challenge us to provide an analytic framework for grasping how
particular links get established, naturalized, and become powerful. I find Peirce’s
work on icons and indexes useful here. I am not following E. Valentine Daniel
(1996) in pursuing a Peircean account of narrative and violence in general but,
rather, seek to illuminate particular ways that they get intimately connected. In
defining the icon, Peirce suggests that icons share at least one quality or perceptible
property with the objects they represent (1932:142). He draws attention to one type
of icons, diagrams, “which represent the relations . . . of the parts of one thing by
analogous relations in their own parts” (Peirce 1932:157). Displaying the same parts
configured in the same relations can infuse narratives with powerful iconicity, the
ability to project seemingly direct, automatic, and natural connections with violent
objects on the basis of sharing the same features in the same relations, a capacity
that Taussig (1993) explores as mimesis. How is this diagrammatic correspondence
established? Few students of narrative now accept Labov and Waletsky’s (1967)
claim that narratives establish one-to-one relationships between a series of clauses
and a sequence of actions. Rather, by virtue of their capacity to construct events,
to fashion aspects of social life into discrete, spatiotemporally ordered events and
senses of agency and causality (Bauman 1986; Crapanzano 1984), narratives project
temporalities that seem to mirror the temporality of violent events.
Nevertheless, iconicity between sign and object, narrative and violence does
not project etiological relationships between them, the illusion that the violence
323
produced the narrative or vice versa. Here, I recruit Peirce’s concept of the index,
a sign that projects “having some existential relation to that object” (1932:142).
Peirce notes that “an index is a sign which refers to the object that it denotes by
virtue of being really affected by that Object”; an index thus becomes “a sign of fact”
(1932:142). If we accept a sign as bearing an indexical relationship to an object that
we take to be real, its presence seems to offer proof of the existence of that object.
These concepts present us with two questions. First, how can violence narra-
tives exploit the representational possibilities of both indexes and icons? Second,
what sort of analytic foothold on these complex questions can be gained by keep-
ing the notion of indexical icons in mind while examining the seemingly magical
capacity of violence narratives to project immanent relations with violence? One
of the ways that Peirce illustrates the character of icons is in characterizing pho-
tographs as “in certain respects exactly like the objects they represent” because of
“having been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced
to correspond point by point to nature” (1932:142). To be sure, this statement
reflects a late 19th-century view of photographs more than an appreciation of their
complex semiotics (see Lutz and Collins 1993). But perhaps Peirce’s realism itself
is instructive here, suggesting that we might examine how narratives of violence
make themselves seem to be “exactly like the objects they represent” by projecting
the conditions under which they are imagined to have been produced. How can acts
of violence and acts of narration be brought into such an intimate relationship that
stories can be read as forms whose features provide a reliable way of knowing acts
that are hidden from us—and whose reality we accept by virtue of their indexical
connection to an act of narration?
Where might we locate narrative modes of production in analyzing how narra-
tives get intimately tied to violence? Most anthropologists only examine the refer-
ential content of narratives; Peirce’s framework would suggest that such analyses in-
volve a category mistake—reading as symbols signs whose power is shaped by iconic
and indexical relations. How might we analyze violence narratives without simply
reifying our own readings of iconic similarities and indexical connections, thereby
infusing anthropological narratives with authority derived from feeble claims that
only the anthropologist knows for sure how narratives are connected to violent ob-
jects? How can we unwind the powerful effects of violence narratives on reporters,
judges, readers, anthropologists, and policy wonks alike? What is to be gained by
exploring the character of stories about violence as stories about stories, examining
how their metanarrative (Babcock 1980) qualities enable them to tell stories of
their own origins?
324
NARRATIVIZING THE UNSPEAKABLE

Here, I turn back to the stories whose telling I disrupted earlier, focusing on
infanticide stories in the Venezuelan news media. As I noted above, the project as a
whole involved extensive ethnography of narratives about violence, as observed in
police stations, courtrooms, newspapers and television stations, morgues, streets,
and living rooms. Here, I focus largely on a textual analysis of the newspaper stories,
as informed by the ethnography, which I report elsewhere. The reason is that I want
to pinpoint how the politics of truth of narratives about violence are shaped by
how stories construct themselves as epistemological objects through projections
of their own making, dissemination, and reception. I examine how their status as
synecdoches of violence, social inequality, and a failed nation-state project emerges
from how they create origin stories of their own production. These narratives are
emplotted as tragedies in Hayden White’s (1978) terms, where there are few heroes
or redeeming acts. They are highly generic, producing the sense that the cartography
of infanticide is familiar, knowable, and contained within the stories. A politics of
fear and rage seem to flow from a stable psychosocial pattern, giving the sense
that narratives and emotional reactions to them grow not out of the imaginations
of police, medical, or journalistic professionals but horrid events themselves. The
discursive gap that generally separates El Nacional and El Universal (which used to
be the national reference newspapers), the daily tabloids, and the Crónica Policial,
a sensationalist weekly specializing in crime stories, is vastly reduced here through
similarities in narrative techniques.9
A common Monday-morning activity is reading Caracas newspapers for the
weekend body count. Conversations dwell on statistical imaginations of a violent
society, particularly periurban slums or “barrios” in which most articles are sited.
Readers often discuss the features of the most newsworthy—read most gruesome—
murders. Framed by page titles such as “The Weekend’s Violence,” infanticide
articles are juxtaposed in metro or crime sections with stories reporting the most
violent murders, next to clothing and household-product commercials. This framing
is explicitly incorporated into some articles, often as the lead. A story in the crime
tabloid Crónica Policial (1999) begins:
It was the scariest of the crimes that shook the metropolitan region of Caracas
this past weekend, where crime occupies first place among causes of mortality
among the population.
It’s the same story as always, every weekend. The emergency rooms overrun
with injuries caused by liquor, excess speed, and crime, at the same time that
325
the doors of the morgue are always afflicted by mothers and wives, fathers and
brothers, waiting to receive the corpses.
The indexical relationship between infanticide stories and violence is enhanced by

their insertion in a textual field of violent crime.
Stories commonly open with the emergence of the crime into discourse, such
as when a body was discovered, an automatic transformation of actions into words.
Here we see the birth of an indexical icon, a narrative that is directly related to an act
of violence and that bears two important similarities—they both begin at the same
point with the same event and include the same words. These openings indexically
link three phenomena: a death, the reporter’s narrative, and objects, persons, and
actions that tell the story of “solving the crime.” I refer to the last as the crime story,
meaning the narrative that seems to emerge directly from criminal acts and their
bodily, material, and discursive traces, transformed into discourse by neighbors,
police, physicians, judges, and reporters. Just as bodies and objects become political
agents in situations of political violence (Feldman 1991), they become discursive
agents in criminal cases—their tales seem to unfold automatically once the proper
human interlocutor is listening. The iconicity of common parts and relations lies not
between stories and murders but news stories and crime stories. The sequentiality
of the iconic sign and object are shaped by structuring the linear form of the story
as a reproduction of this linear unfolding of the events that constituted the crime
story, a feature shared with murder mysteries.
Then emerges the vox populi, the discursive explosion occurring as news of
the murder reached neighbors and the expressions of horror and condemnation it
produced. A story entitled “Death Penalty Requested for Assassin of Child” asserts
that “this crime has provoked profound consternation among the neighbors of the
Juan XXIII of the Barrio La Dolorita, who have asked for the application of the
death penalty” (Arcángel 1998). Vox populi invocations imagine a natural process
where information spreads through “the public” like waves transmitted across the
surface of a body of water. When a group of boys found the body of a newborn
and ran home to tell their families, the news “was propagated like gunpowder,
shocking the district, where they had never before seen such an act” (Silva 1990).
An accompanying photograph of dozens of people is captioned “Numerous curious
onlookers, including children and youth, showed up in the site where the discovery
was made of the semi-buried cadaver of a strangled baby.” The vox populi becomes
visible as well as audible.
326
In some articles, neighbors transform a narrative that police are telling as an

accidental death into a crime story. In one case, speaking of the Technical Judicial
Police (PTJ), “PTJ officers opened up the case as a simple confirmation of the death,
but later the revelations made by various witnesses effected a 360 degree change
in the investigations” (Crónica Policial 1996b). Neighbors “surprised” the PTJ by
reciting the defendants’ criminal record; their “gossip” provided the motive, noting
that other neighbors had tormented him by singing a popular song about a cuckold,
implying that the child was not his (Crónica Policial 1997). The eruption of the
story thus lies not with the state or reporters but with “the people” themselves,
who demand that police investigate until the truth unfolds. The cartography of
narrative-violence connections then projects the narrative’s development and its
projected circulation, which can come to embrace neighborhoods, cities, states,
and Venezuela as a whole. Reported speech is crucial. Direct discourse (“quoted
speech”) iconically presents utterances as forming parts of both the crime story and
the reporter’s story; accordingly, reading these words on the printed page inserts
audiences into crime scenes as witnesses to the drama of discovery.
The focus then shifts to narrating the crime—presented as a narration of
criminal rather than discursive events. Reporters sentimentalize tiny “victims” and
dehumanize defendants, distancing them as bearers of “monstrous” or “beastly”
subjectivities, sexualities, and domesticities.10 The contrast between romanticized
children and dehumanized parents is encoded visually by juxtaposing studio portraits
of smiling infants with mug shots or threatening poses of defendants behind bars. Like
charts and photographs inserted into scientific texts (see Latour 1988), photographs
indexically link crime and crime stories to reporters’ narratives by inserting artifacts
gathered at crime scenes (domestic spaces) as a part of journalists’ participation
in developing crime stories into the article itself. Postmodern critics (and Adobe
PhotoShopTM aficionados) may not see photographs as indexical icons demonstrating
the reality of their referent, but interviews and focus groups suggest that journalists,
photojournalists, and audiences read them in this fashion. As one crime reporter put
it, “we need photographs. An illustrative photograph—people can locate themselves
in the place where the events occurred.”11 Photographs and quotes complement
the alignment of temporalities in fashioning articles into icons of crime stories and
indexically demonstrating the authority of the latter as true accounts that spring
from the murder itself.
Newspaper stories then frequently shift to reporters’ efforts to overcome the
treachery of villains—not just criminals but anyone who attempts to interrupt the
327
crime story. A common theme among reporters, prosecutors, detectives, neigh-

bors, family members, and judges alike is that of a woman who hides her pregnancy.
Relatives of a young Peruvian could not provide reporters with a story because “we
didn’t know she was pregnant” (Crónica Policial 1998b). Judges often cite the silenc-
ing of bodily and verbal signs as demonstrating homicidal intent and justifying harsh
sentences (see Briggs and Mantini-Briggs 2000). More commonly, defendants are
characterized by a surplus of speech, lies concocted to hide murderous deeds. A
couple accused of killing their one-year-old child is described as “drowning in a sea
of lies in order to try to hide the true causes of the death” (Crónica Policial 1996b).
State officials who do not play their proper roles in revealing the crime story are sim-
ilarly cast as villains. Violence is sometimes depicted as directly producing silence
(see Daniel 1996:142–143), but, as Gal (1991) suggests, silence is not connected to
experience, power, and speech in fixed, predetermined ways. My analysis suggests
that silence, lies, and true speech are rather generated from a common source—a
construction of the natural flow of discourse from violence, and they are all en-
meshed in a shared politics of truth, criminality, and ethics. Idelogical constructions
of communication enable powerful actors to determine what will count as silences,
lies, and surpluses, just as they create silences of their own—these cartographies of
communication write issues of critical poverty, domestic violence and sexual abuse,
and the violence of the state out of infanticide narratives.
Lies automatically give rise to two additional classes of actors—physicians and
detectives—who return the narrative to its true course. Crime stories lurk beneath
the surface of reality, and “professionals” must use scientific techniques to com-
plete the archaeological process, fully revealing crime stories and separating them
from faux competitors. Physicians open up specialized, authoritative technologies
of truth, layering sensationalist narratives with clinicians’ descriptions of the bod-
ies of parturient mothers and the cadaverous interiors of infants. One story pits
Colombian immigrants who claim that their 16-month-old child began suddenly to
convulse, against the physician’s gaze, who recognized abused child syndrome, a term
that medicalizes a legal category (Crónica Policial 1997). During interrogation, the
parents charged that “the child had died as a consequence of medical malpractice,”
but the autopsy reveals “diffuse hematomas in the mesenteries (prolongation of the
peritoneum, . . . cerebral edema, indentation from compression, malnutrition, and
abused child syndrome” (Crónica Policial 1997). Like the photographs, quoting the
autopsy iconically inserts “evidence” into the reporter’s narrative and links jour-
nalistic and state inscriptions of the crime story. Biopolitical knowledge drives the
linear temporality of both crime and news stories as what is suspected in clinical
328
examinations is confirmed in autopsies, similarly reconfirming the subordination of

clinical knowledge to examinations that penetrate bodily surfaces. Because both the
examining physicians and pathologists who perform autopsies generally work for
the state (generally the Ministry of Health or the PTJ), the shift from lay to scientific
voices parallels a transition to the dominance of the narrative by state voices.
Next, PTJ detectives enter the scene as scientific experts who use specialized
techniques and heightened rational intuition guided by experience with criminal
mendacity in advancing the narrative transition to scientific voices of the state and
bringing the truth-telling movement to its moment of greatest transparency and
authority. Reporters project the detectives’ work as involving the extraction of
fragmented and misleading bodily, material, and discursive evidence and, using a
scientific hermeneutic, allowing it to reveal its effects of truth, stripping away all
elements that insert indexical gaps between crime stories and criminal acts. The
voice of the state then shifts from science to law as detectives announce criminal
charges. The dramatic crux often comes as clever police work crushes the defen-
dant’s lies and launches stories into dramatic resolution in the guise of a confession.
Rather than revealing new elements of plot, a confessional biopolitics that reveals
pathological interiors seems to strip away the faux narrative elements that the de-
fendants themselves introduced. Of a stepfather accused of killing a one-year-old
child: “immersed in his lies, the beast showed his true character and, in the middle
of a rage, confessed” (Crónica Policial 1998a). Here, the truth of photographs of
monstrous defendants, brutalized infant bodies, and defective domestic spaces and
descriptions of brutal actions is confirmed by iconic iteration through the subject’s
act of revealing a pathological subjectivity. Recontextualizing what had previously
been stated in the voices of physicians, police, relatives, neighbors, and reporters,
confessions declare that the news story about the telling of a story about a crime is
indeed the real crime story.
The denouement often reinserts the now authoritative crime story into the
vox populi and imagines its circulation and discursive effects. Here the moral
force of the vox populi fully emerges as a demand for state retribution. With
regard to a woman whose four children were reportedly devoured by carnivorous
fish after she threw them into a river, “The community of Apure state, having
condemned the act, asked for the maximum penalty for the woman” (Bastidas
Poleo 2000). A “diabolical couple” that reportedly killed their toddler for eating
two tomatoes concluded: “ ‘Death would be insufficient punishment for those
beasts, but they should treat them the same way they treated those children, to
see if they like it,’ asserted a neighbor” (Crónica Policial 1996a). Linking national
329
and penal imaginaries in projecting the Venezuelan state as exhibiting a modernity

not evident in countries that execute murderers, a reporter surmises: “The death
penalty would be insufficient punishment for this beast. . . . Nevertheless, for the
‘gringos’ he would be a sure candidate for the electric chair; in any Arab country
he would have already been decapitated, and in China he would be hung or shot”
(Crónica Policial 1998a).
The vox populi constitutes an important point of difference between El Nacional
and El Universal, aimed at elite readers, versus tabloids, regional newspapers, and
crime-focused weeklies. El Nacional and El Universal focus on recounting crimes
and declarations by police; evaluative labels (“denaturalized” defendants, “horrible”
crimes”) generally are framed as indirect quotations from officials. The vox populi
is seldom directly quoted in such a way as to make it seem to speak, through the
reporter, directly to the reader but speaks to state officials, who then pronounce
moral and legal verdicts to readers; in the elite press, the people are characterized
as “denouncing the latest infanticide” and feeding “the rumors of neighbors” to the
police (El Universal 1990). Other dailies and regional newspapers invoke the vox
populi about half the time. On the other end of the spectrum, all Crónica Policial
stories invoke the vox populi, generally begin and end with it, and feature lengthy
considerations of how the vox populi projects crime stories through time, space,
and scale.
At the same time that defendants, physicians, and detectives are defined in
relation to the crime, all participants—including relatives, neighbors, and entire
neighborhoods and cities—are defined through their narrative roles. Reporters are
often invisible; because their story is an icon of the crime story, they have faithfully
and transparently reproduced its emergence. This invisibility reproduces profes-
sional ideologies of journalists (Hallin 2000), most closely held by the credentialed
journalists of the elite newspapers. Journalists in regional and tabloid papers, how-
ever, sometimes construct themselves as key participants in the crime story, cajoling
officials who shirk their narrative duties. Stuart Hall and colleagues (1978) observed
that reporters turn officials into “primary definers” who shape how crime stories
are told. My ethnography of the production of crime news suggests that detectives
and reporters collaborate in determining what becomes a crime story, where these
stories begin and end, who are the protagonists, and what roles they play. My anal-
ysis suggests that reporters place themselves alongside physicians and detectives as
playing a central part in revealing the crime story and rendering it authoritative.
Beyond the use of journalistic rather than scientific (medical or criminological)
techniques, the difference lies in that the reporters’ role in this process only enters
330
into the referential content of the narrative when their state counterparts can be
characterized as having failed to play their proper roles in revealing the truth.
NARRATIVE, VIOLENCE, AND COMMUNICABILITY

Newspaper stories, like narratives told in courtrooms, police stations, and
everyday rumors, raise important issues about how violence gets ideologically sep-
arated from the violence of modernity, extracted from history and political economy,
individualized as products of pathological subjectivities and defective domesticities,
and made to represent entire populations, thereby naturalizing representations
of class, gender, space, state, and nation. Given the widespread distribution of
both ideologies that envision narrative-violence connections as immanent and of
the spectacles associated with media representations of violence, it seems worth-
while to reflect on the particulars of these infanticide articles in exploring how
violence narratives in general produce truth, authority, affect, ethics, and, often,
consent.
Let me begin to sort out the power of the relationships established between
narratives and violence by returning briefly to Peirce. Insofar as we take them
to be indexical icons of violence, narratives enable us to grasp an object that,
unless we witness or participate in the violence, we do not know directly. Peirce
writes that representation is the capacity “to stand for, that is, to be in such a
relation to another that for certain purposes it is treated by some mind as if it
were that other” (1932:155; emphasis mine). If we judge narratives to be indexical
(and therefore representational), they seem to prove that violent was enacted, and
they enable us to enter spaces of violence, death, and terror (Taussig 1987). Peirce
(1932:158) writes that “a great distinguishing property of the icon is that by the direct
observation of it other truths concerning its object can be discovered,” referring to
this quality as a “capacity of revealing unexpected truth.” Narrative icons of violent
acts enable audiences to explore the perceptible features of accessible mediated signs
in such a way as to discover those same properties in inaccessible objects. Peirce
(1932:162) suggests that indexes seem to put us in real contact with the object.
News stories achieve their powerful indexical iconicity by framing themselves as
verbal photographs, if you will, telling the story of their own production in such
a way as to prove that they were produced through the very actions that produced
the crime story, which itself was produced by the material and verbal traces of the
crime. Highly charged quotes and photographs intensify engagement with media
signs inviting particular sorts of affective relationships to the acts and actors they
depict. Their formulaic character leads us to expect that every crime story—and
331
thus every infanticide, pathological subjectivity, and defective domesticity—will

conform to the same pattern. In each case, a “crime” that is often referred to as
both “unspeakable” and as involving silences and mendacious surpluses of speech is
seemingly converted into just the right words to reveal precisely what took place.
Nevertheless, because each crime story follows the detailed spatial, temporal, and
social contours of a specific criminal story, its unique features enable us to experience
it as a genuine index of a unique, horrendous act of violence.
Narratives of violence or even narratives in general are not unusual in this
regard. Discourse projects cartographies of its own production, circulation, and
reception (to use terms contained within the projections), which I refer to as
communicability (Briggs 2005). The term puns on the various senses of the word.
Communicability suggests volubility, the ability to communicate readily and be
understood transparently, and microbes’ capacity to spread. I add the sense of
infectiousness—the ability of communicative ideologies to find audiences and locate
them socially and politically. In invoking the notion of “communicability,” I am not
suggesting that such ideological constructions universally project transparency,
volubility, and infectiousness, as the usual sense of the term would suggest. The
term rather points to the way that texts project specific, unique cartographies
of their own locations in the movement of discourse. In the present case, each
infanticide article revolves around the communicable cartography that it creates,
picturing how the crime story emerged, developed, is circulating, its social effects,
and its future impact.
This perspective draws on several theoretical perspectives. European critical
discourse analysis and Pierre Bourdieu’s practice theory suggest that discourse can
be seen both as sets of practices that produce objects and modes of infusing cultural
forms with value, siting their acquisition within institutions, controlling access to
them, and using differential distributions of forms and practices as bases for natu-
ralizing social categories and inequalities (“misrecognition”).12 Michael Silverstein
(1976, 2004) argues that pragmatics, the way that signs are placed in the world,
goes hand-in-hand with metapragmatics, how signs represent their own being-in-
the-world. Michael Warner suggests that the creation of publics through interpel-
lation by public discourse requires that “the pragmatics of public discourse must be
systematically blocked from view” (2002:116). Communicability rather suggests
that public discourse precisely places its pragmatics on public display—imagining its
own emergence in selective and strategic ways. These metapragmatics render some
dimensions visible and construe them in particular ways, erase others, and project
the subjectivities, social relations, and forms of agency required for circulation and
332
reception. Communicability is a central dimension of self-regulation—individuals

structure schemes of self-surveillance and self-control by interpellating themselves
vis-à-vis categories, subjectivities, and discursive relations seemingly presupposed
by communicative processes.
This framework also builds on media theory; using Hall’s (1977) work on
“ideological effects,” we can see how “preferred readings” of media texts encode not
only meanings but communicable cartographies that project subject positions, which
in turn seem to emerge directly from the mechanics of the production, circulation,
and reception of the texts. Rather than directly “encoding” or reproducing relations
of power, these cartographies project hierarchies that structure and are structured
by (but are not coterminous with) hierarchically ordered social relations.
I also build on research on the anthropology of media and the way it has ex-
plored, through ethnographies of media production, circulation, reception, and
technologies, the importance of media to social relations and concepts of identity,
language, consumption, gender, nationalism, class, sexuality, and age.13 Commu-
nicability emerges within what Bourdieu (1993) calls social fields, arenas of social
organization that produce social roles, positions, and relations. Communicable car-
tographies create positionalities that confer different degrees of access, agency, and
power, recruit people to fill them, and structure practices of self-making within
their respective fields. I also transpose Tsing’s (2000) critique of the metaphor of
“circulation” in anthropological studies of globalization, urging that such metaphors
as “production,” “circulation,” and “reception” or “consumption,” when they emerge
in scholarly and other contexts, should be treated as objects of scrutiny rather than
assumptions—even if we do not have a language that would enable us to talk about
discursive processes without using them.
This framework provides me with a new angle to revisit why my attempts
to grapple with narratives of infanticide were disrupted. The scene of my initial
entrance was overdetermined by the communicable cartography in which I was
interpellated. What a script: legal professionals, reporters, and townspeople had
misconstrued the crime story. Ms. Gómez’s relatives recruited a socialist attorney
and public health physician known for proindigenous activism, who then recruited
an anthropologist-translator. I would collaborate with Ms. Gómez in revealing the
true story; Hector and Clara would translate it into the medical and legal languages
and reinsert it into the court. Once obstructions and detours had been stripped away
to reveal the real communicable channel that extended from inside Ms. Gómez,
passed through legal and media institutions to reach the public, Ms. Gómez, like
the truth, would be set free.
333
Ms. Gómez and I played our assigned roles, but she refused to occupy a subject
position that emerged from the communicable map collectively constructed by the
state, reporters, activists, and “the people.” And she was right—three activists,
her uncle and aunt, and Ms. Gómez could not produce a “truth” that would force
a racial state (Goldberg 2002) to declare its own culpability. She perceptively
grasped how the dominant cartography authorized a set of discourse practices that
made it impossible to construct an effective counternarrative; by reproducing state
communicability, we helped legitimate the conditions of possibility of the narrative
against her. She could not locate herself in a different subject position within this
same communicability—her racialized status, the “monster stories” (Tsing 1990)
used in dehumanizing her, and her criminalization precluded her insertion into the
space of the public. What she did was even more radical than simply denying the
state-cum-activist communicability—she deconstructed it bit by bit, revealing the
gaps between discourse pragmatics and their communicable representation as well
as the economic, political, medical, and racial relations and the violence—including
torture—that underlay its dominance.14
By the time that I organized focus groups, I had followed around people
who make and manage violence stories for years, and I had my own communica-
ble cartographies to sell. My map, which replaced linearity with gaps, iterability,
reversibility, and short circuiting, was different, but I was just as certain that it
described how knowledge about violence was produced and circulated. Crucially,
I wanted to trump physicians, detectives, and legal professionals to become both
author and arbiter of the true cartography. I would then share the romance of
communicable resistance, of collaborating with “barrio” residents in revealing the
collusion of reporters and the state in constructing an oppressive faux cartography.
But I didn’t find any buyers. The only people I encountered who questioned re-
lationships between stories and their violent objects were defendants and some of
their relatives.15 The power of these stories is shaped by their infectious iterability
as they move rapidly from television news to newspaper, from one newspaper to
the next, to informal commentary, and to courtrooms and jails. My ethnography
of news production suggests that news stories recontextualize narratives told by
detectives, relatives, physicians, and neighbors—whose narratives are shaped by
the experience of receiving and talking about mediated infanticide tales. Once
they are broadcast and printed, “the crime” becomes inseparable from these nar-
ratives. A chief justice of the Venezuelan Supreme Court (Tribunal Supremo de
Justicia) whom I interviewed flinched when I mentioned infanticide, noting that
it is “public opinion” that convicts defendants and decrees harsh sentences: “There
334
is nothing that judges can do except ratify public opinion.” Even when they have
doubts about the evidence or believe that less jail time would be appropriate, he
noted, judges feel compelled to impose long sentences. The narratives’ performa-
tivity is apparent in prompting calls for executing or lynching defendants. Men are
frequently lynched in prison, condemned to death by the stories about their crime—
which reach the prison before they do and get incorporated into elaborate moral,
spiritual, and political imaginaries that flourish in Venezuelan penal institutions
(Salas 2003).
These effects accrue in part to powerful images of gender, class, space, do-
mesticity, subjectivity, and violence evident in the infanticide narratives that in-
habit newspapers, television, morgues, courtrooms, and everyday conversations.
Research on the anthropology of media reception by Lila Abu-Lughod (2005),
Purnima Mankekar (1999), Jacqueline Urla (1995), and others would lead us to
expect significant disjunctures in how different people respond to these mediated
images. I thus anticipated that people would talk back to projections of their voices,
and that working-class Venezuelans would complicate or challenge communica-
ble cartographies that fixed them and communities in spaces of irrationality and
violence, discursive and physical. Differences emerged in which stories people re-
membered and how they positioned themselves in relation to particular voices and
subject positions, but the degree of consensus surprised me. I was struck by the
near unanimity with which working-class participants interpellated themselves as
outraged neighbors and recirculated the words of the vox populi as their own. A few
individuals were skeptical of stories in crime weekly Crónica Policial, but others took
them as valid, and no one questioned the television coverage. After reading articles
and watching television segments, no one volunteered comments on journalistic
practices. When I asked about the role of reporters, participants suggested that
journalists simply wrote what they saw and heard, then quickly changed the subject
back to defendants and crimes.16
These readings did not generalize to other press beats. Venezuelans often read
the news with a relatively critical eye, commenting on how journalistic practices
shape what gets covered, what angles reporters take, and how people are portrayed.
By the time I conducted the focus groups, this skeptical attitude was much more
pronounced on the part of most working-class Venezuelans. The alignment of
the mainstream press with the anti-Chávez Opposition and the media’s role in
the April 2002 coup that briefly deposed President Chávez, famously captured
in The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, turned working-class participants, most of
whom were pro-Chávez, into even more critical readers of mainstream newspapers;
335
according to many, they “tell nothing but lies.” Nevertheless, nearly all interviewees
and focus-group members accepted newspaper and television infanticide stories as
fact.
Every focus group produced critical commentary that centered on the amount
of violence in the media and how violence makes people, particularly children
and youth, violent. Media and violence debates are often reported as news and
commentary in the media, and they help shape how people read the performativity of
media-violence relations, an iterative effect of the media studies debate. One group
discussed “the Venezuelan Bobbit,” suggesting that press coverage of Lorena Bobbitt’s
severing of her abusive husband’s penis had been copycatted by a Venezuelan woman.
Some participants suggested the perceived negative effects of this coverage leads
them to avoid reading or watching crime stories, even though most participants
noted that this is the first section they read and that they looked for this sort
of coverage on television news. No one argued, however, that the press should
not cover crime stories. One participant who criticized violence in the media
nonetheless noted: “but at the same time, it has to come out—this is news, this
is news that can’t be hidden. . . . It’s good [that they cover such stories], because
the press can’t hide them. How would I find out about things without journalism,
without the press?”
How can analyzing the communicable cartographies projected by infanticide
narratives help us come to terms—if not necessary “make sense of”—the scarcity of
critical commentary? At first glance, Venezuelan stories of infanticide—and urban
violence in general—would seem to accord lay subject positions greater discursive
freedom and agency than, say, news coverage of health issues (Briggs and Hallin
2007). Not framed as criminological tales, their indexical basis lies in the vox
populi, and police professionals are called in by “the public” to move narratives
along their proper channel. But what subject positions do their communicable
cartographies offer? Unless we can interpellate ourselves as doctors, detectives, or
journalists, we can take spaces assigned to child-killing monsters, infant victims,
traumatized family members, or enraged collectivities. So where would you want
to interpellate yourself? Small wonder that the participants distanced themselves
from the criminal, sexual, and educational “marginality” projected on them as
residents of “violent barrios” and pressed themselves so anxiously into the space
of moral, legal, and rational citizens—by iterating the voice of the vox populi
in expressing outrage and condemning infanticides. As neoliberal “reforms” were
increasing social inequality and further eroding the economic position of working-
class Venezuelans in the 1990s, the massive popular revolt of February 27–March 3,
336
1989, dramatized a challenge to the political dominance of a modernizing elite (see

Coronil and Skurski 2006a). Through state repression and the elite-controlled
media, the poor—59 percent of Venezuelans in 1990 (Márquez et al. 1993:155)—
were blamed for the collapse of the national project and the growing demise of
the state. Press coverage of crime and violence in poor neighborhoods and the way
it “spilled over” into wealthy sectors provided a language that placed the seeming
demise of modernity (Ferguson 1999) on the shoulders of the poor at the same
time that it provided the working class with a means of distancing themselves from
the forces of irrationality, disorder, and antimodernity—by entering into the vox
populi.
My goal here is not to replace a complicated story with a single narrative that
can encompass and explain everything. The vox populi is not simply a creation of
journalists, politicians, or the oil-igarchy but is voiced by people from all social
classes. The pragmatics of this discourse are powerfully iterative—in reproducing
voices, reporters shape the voices of millions who interpellate themselves in the
communicable slots that reporters open up as they recontextualize the voices of the
people. Herein lies the mediated circularity so beautifully captured by Jesús Martı́n-
Barbero (1987): media shape the categories through which we make ourselves and
the social world even as their power and effects are contingent on and shaped by
socially distributed practices of active reception. Because the people supposedly
launch crime stories, they seem to make the rules. Massive leaps of scale are pro-
jected by communicable cartographies as a natural process and a mode of asserting
one’s citizenship. Most crime stories suffered from inflation—there we so many
of them that only a few narratives could be converted into spectacles. During this
period, however, the repositioning of infanticide stories as spectacles was virtually
automatic.
Debord (1995:15) suggests that spectacles are “out of reach and beyond dis-
pute.” If one envisions spectacles, such as the moral panics that follow the publication
of infanticide articles, solely in terms of the content of their representations, this
statement seems accurate. But communicability incorporates spectacles into the
intimate experience of everyone who can interpellate themselves into the commu-
nicable cartography of their discursive circulation—as particularly sustained by the
media (incl. now the Internet) and rumor—that is, just about everyone. As each
infanticide story transformed a few broken bodies into national discourses on social
bodies (esp. of poor communities) and the body politic (Scheper-Hughes and Lock
1987), press coverage offered elites a chance to confirm their sense that the poor
in general partook in the brutality, irrational, and subhuman qualities of monster
337
mothers and fathers at the same time that working-class citizens could attempt to
distance themselves from the images and accusations and enter the space of the
good citizen—to which they enjoyed so little access—by creating (for reporters),
revoicing, and identifying themselves with the vox populi.
I suggest that this process relied not simply on the power of the images contained
in newspaper and television accounts but in the cartographies of communicability
they projected. Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) suggest that symbolic domination
involves controlling the production of authority and value and inducing others
to struggle for position and resources within a system designed to favor those in
power. Communicable cartographies perform this work of reification, projecting
a small set of shared and predictable circuits, creating subject positions, arrang-
ing them in spatial, moral, and legal terms, and making only a very limited range
of responses thinkable. These cartographies model the social effects of infanticide
stories, thereby providing preferred readings (Hall 1977) that project how these
stories can be extended to shape gender, class, sexuality, domesticity, family, and
violence. If media producers do not just create mediated texts but produce them-
selves in relationship to others (Peterson 2003:162), then the state officials who
served as the primary definers in constructing these narrative could project them-
selves as occupying legitimate and authoritative roles—during a period in which
working-class acceptance of the state as more than the cheerleader and guard dog
of (trans)national elites and multilateral enforcers of neoliberal policies was wan-
ing rapidly. Indeed, these communicable cartographies would lead us to believe
that it was the people themselves who demanded that the state talk and act like a
state.
Communicability is indeed an excellent vehicle for producing and ordering
subjectivities and social relations. On the one hand, communicable cartographies
are visible rather than hidden or unconscious, drawing attention to themselves
and their ability to root out false maps. Nevertheless, crime stories are ultimately
about crime—these criminal imaginaries are so repulsive that their embeddedness
in acts of discourse rather than criminal acts seldom warrants attention. The sleight
of hand that directs audiences’ attention away from the production of infanticide
narratives—and the possibility of counternarratives—is tied to their reading as
stories about crimes, not stories about stories. At the same time that they embed
the story directly in the crime story, the arresting and attention-grabbing power of
the images inserted in photographs and quotes directs readers attention to crimes,
criminals, and “victims.”17 After all, if the communicable contour is real and virtually
inevitable, then it hardly warrants scrutiny or debate.18
338
CONCLUSION: ANTHROPOLOGY, VIOLENCE, AND

KNOWLEDGE MAKING
I believe that many social scientists would agree that violence is imbricated
with representations of it. The role of narratives of genocide in creating the political
and affective ground for genocide has similarly been documented (see Briggs and
Goldberg in press). I have argued here that violence is inseparable from how we
imagine knowledge of it to be produced and circulated and how we are interpellated
in this perceived process. This perspective can help us appreciate the value of much
recent research on the anthropology of violence as well as suggest some ways of
complicating it. Given the scope of the available literature,19 I focus on the work
of Veena Das, who has written a number of insightful and disturbing works on vio-
lence against women in the Indian—Pakistani Partition (2000, 2006) and anti-Sikhs
massacres (1985, 1990, 1998). The latter work is particularly interesting, because
her ethnography provides detailed information on violence, its representation, and
situations in which “the anthropologist cannot remain uninvolved” (Das 1985:6).
The assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on October 31, 1984,
reportedly by Sikh bodyguards, initiated three days of collective violence directed
against Sikhs. Although the army intervened on November 3, it did not document
what had happened or hold the killers accountable. Thus, “the entire burden of
collecting and collating information about the crimes, of which the evidence was
disappearing everyday, as well as the organization of camp, fell entirely on the
voluntary efforts of citizens” (Das 1985:4). With several colleagues Das formed the
Delhi University Relief and Rehabilitation Team, which “decided to enquire into
the pattern of riots by going into the affected localities” (1985:5). Das’s work on
rumor enables us to see how tightly communicable cartographies are woven into
violence and its legitimization. She points to the “perlocutionary” power of rumor to
reproduce stereotypes, erase the subjectivity of the other, evoke powerful images of
unfinished pasts, and engender fear, distrust, and rage. Das (1998:117) argues that
“the essential grammatical feature (in Wittgenstein’s sense) of what we call rumour
is that it is conceived to spread. . . . Instead of being a medium of communication,
language becomes communicable, infectious, causing things to happen almost as if
they had occurred in nature.”
Das’s poignant work provides, like the Venezuelan tales of infanticide, iconic
representations of what she characterizes as the communicable cartography of
women in Sultanpuri, where she worked for more than a year (2006:142–143).
Das tells the story of the emergence of her story of how she was immediately
communicably incorporated:
339
When we went into the locality we expected that providing for the physical
needs of the victims would take priority over all other matters. The people
were, indeed, hungry. But more than their need for food, we discovered,
was the need to tell us all that had happened to them. In fact, as soon as they
discovered that we were university teachers, they impatiently brushed aside all
other questions and took us from house to house insisting that we immediately
record the names of the dead, the sequence of events during those two days of
violent outrage, and the names of the criminals and the police officials involved.
[1985:5]
Her account is organized around a very common type of communicable cartogra-

phy, which moves from experience to its articulation in interpersonal settings to
public discourse. Das emphasizes “a great need on the part of the survivors to tell
their story over and over again” (1990:346). The experience of collective violence
prompted a particular type of narrative: “To the victims, the horror of the violence
consisted in the details. They wanted their suffering to become known—as if the
reality of it could only be reclaimed after it had become part of public discourse”
(Das 1985:5). Only successful realization of this communicable movement into
public discourse seems to have fulfilled an individual and collective need for cog-
nitive reordering, establishing meaning, universalizing (and thus depersonalizing)
suffering, reformulating the social world, envisioning the future, and fulfilling the
survivors’ sense of obligation to the dead.
Das’s narrative interrupts this image of a natural flow from experience into
speech into public discourse by introducing a range of characters who attempted
to silence the survivor’s stories. First, Sikh men often silenced Sikh women, par-
ticularly young widows.20 Second, the murderers, many of whom lived in the same
community, sent in a “self-styled social worker” to track the narratives Sikhs told;
women were informed that “their children had been spared but had been threatened
with dire consequences if they spoke about the murderers” (Das 1990:362). Third,
the state sought to silence the survivors through the failure of police and the military
to gather evidence and via camps set up by the Congress (I) Party, which moni-
tored what was being said and controlled what information reached the press and
relief agencies. Fourth, “public broadcasting systems, working arms of the state,”
suppressed information on the rioting and covered up the culpability of the state,
and the press and creative writers failed “to restore the feel of the real-life suffering
of real people, through studies of individual families and communities” (Das et al.
1984a:22,23). Finally, it was “an intellectual and moral failure of the intellectual
340
community that we have not given a voice to the victims of violence” (Das et al.
1984b:23), and she suggests that this community attempted to thwart public circu-
lation of detailed narratives. Naturalization of a linear communicable cartography
thus entails problematization of anything that seems to obstruct it as unnatural and
nefarious; state power, political interest, and patriarchy are constructed, in part,
by characterizing them as foes of communicability.
Das tells a heroic tale of how Sikh women partially circumvented this censorship
and told their story publicly. She beautifully describes the way women narrated
silently by politicizing their bodies and domestic spaces—refusing to shed the
corporeal signs of the pollution of mourning or remove ashes, blood, and other
household signs of violence. Das describes important changes in how older widows
developed an enlarged (but still linear) communicable cartography and created
new roles for themselves. Putting aside laments that ordinarily transform grief into
discourse (Das 1990:364), women articulated their demands in meetings with high
officials and risked their lives to testify; accordingly, “the plight of these women
came to be better known and publicized” (Das 1990:371). Das suggests that this
transformation goes beyond projecting words into new spaces: “Although their
demands were not eventually met, the women had established their capacity to
reorient themselves to their reality in terms of the external world, a world of which
they had been totally ignorant just a few months back” (Das 1990:374).Thus, they
moved from what Das describes as a purely local, bounded communicable vision
to develop awareness of broader communicable cartographies, including those of
bureaucrats and relief agencies. Modest compensation received by widows “was
then translated by women into an obligation to speak up, to recount events, and to
engage the governmental agencies and processes of law” (Das 2006:197), that is,
translated into a duty to enact roles accorded by this expanded communicability.
The title of Das’s 1990 article reproduces the charge given to one of her
colleagues—“ ‘It is our work to cry and your work to listen.’ This paper is arranged
so that the reader may ‘listen’ to the ‘speech’ of different women and children as they
narrated the stories of these deaths to us” (Das 1990:346). This statement constructs
the article’s rhetorical form as an icon of the women’s communicable cartography.
Nevertheless, Das’s poignant testimony suggests that she did not simply help the
women embody pre-riot communicable models but collaborated in coproducing
new cartographies. The Delhi University Relief and Rehabilitation Team was valued
precisely because of the differences between its members’ metapragmatic and prag-
matic repertoires and those of Sultanpurians. Das’s activism was discursive as well
as material, seeking to help the women embody their communicable cartographies
341
as well to help them in extend them in ways that would foster justice and “recovery.”
For example, fearing that survivors’ narratives would give rise to revenge killings,
the team urged a different link between narrative and violence—retelling narratives
in criminal trials.
This work demonstrates that scholarship can be insightful and deeply engaged,
and I applaud Delhi University Relief and Rehabilitation Team members for their
bravery in publishing accounts of the violence and critiques of the role of the state
in the massacres in the popular press (Das et al. 1984a, 1984b).21 At the same time,
Das’s account raises two issues on which we can fruitfully reflect. First, Das creates a
heroic narrative of communicability overcoming barriers and bringing the “language
of the victim” into state and media discourse, and Das and her colleagues are clearly
protagonists in this story. Following Spivak (1981), I suggest that positioning oneself
as occupying a linear communicable trajectory that seems to emerge from subaltern
“victims” of violence and ends in hegemonic public spheres (such as the press) and
the state reproduces dominant communicable cartographies, including the subject
positions and constructions of agency they project. By suggesting that scholars “learn
to speak to (rather than listen to or speak for) the historically muted subject,” Spivak
(1981:297) urges us to unwind our communicable cartographies and consider
alternatives.
Second, Das’s work on the anti-Sikh violence anticipates and speaks powerfully
to contemporary efforts to view anthropological knowledge making through its
similarities and differences vis-à-vis other modes of inquiry. I have tried to show
that communicable models provide an important focus here. Rather than remain
content with mapping overlaps and parallel circuits, however, we should take a
lesson from the Sultanpuri residents who astutely wove considerations of political
economy into their assessments of differences between themselves and scholars,
state officials, reporters, and relief workers. They immediately saw how command
of English and polite speech, literacy skills, a job in the university, and other markers
of elite status could be useful. Reifying communicable models naturalizes material
relations and the coconstitutive relationship between them (Briggs 1996, 2004).
Retelling this story 20 years later, Das speaks less of how “the speech of
the victim must occupy the central place in the narrative of the anthropologist”
(1987:13); she begins Life and Words by suggesting that “the burden of the book is
not to render their trauma visible or knowable; . . . my concern is with the slippery
relation between the collective and the individual, between genre and individual
emplotment of stories” (2006:2).22 Chapters on violence against women in the time
of the partition powerfully scrutinize the politics of representation by exploring
342
how histories of violence shape everyday life even decades later. She traces the limits
of narratives of terror and heroism in the silent reluctances to recount these events,
arguing that “how these passionate moments are carried forward into everyday
life requires a different kind of story to be told, and my uneasiness with many
such accounts of passionate hatred or heroic moments is that we don’t see how
such moments are then carried into everyday life” (Das 2006:73). Here, she traces
a very different sort of communicable cartography, one that is far less linear and
invites, as she suggests, a rather different mode of scholarly insertion. Nevertheless,
Life and Words retells the story of how her story was made by describing women’s
communicable cartographies, how the Delhi University Relief and Rehabilitation
Team was inserted into them, and how Sultanpurians and scholars collectively
challenged communicable obstacles.
I am not urging a politics of purity here, the idea that we could somehow
avoid entering into the complexities, contradictions, and reifications that spring
from communicable cartographies as we conduct research and write ethnography.
Perhaps what is needed is a strategic essentialism of communicability, a process
for identifying as clearly as possible which cartographies are at play, the symbolic
and material capital and social effects associated with each, making explicit choices
about where to locate oneself, and remaining cognizant of how you are accordingly
inserted into processes of communicable reification.
There is a methodological point to be made here with regard to how narratives
are presented in ethnographic writing. Countering claims that verbatim transcripts
constitute the only valid source of data for studying narratives, Allen Feldman
(1991:12) and Liisa H. Malkki (1995:57–58) rightly reject the notion that face-to-
face dialogue is primordial and that texts should attempt to replicate it sound for
sound. The communicable ideology of textual transparency, the ideal that scholarly
texts can and must transform “oral” discourse as emerging in a face-to-face encounter
into a transparent “literate” mimesis without loss or “distortion” is indeed a powerful
and problematic mode of infusing texts with authority (Briggs 1993a). These authors
make the point that principled editing of narratives is necessary. The difficulty,
it seems to me, is that all such efforts are guided by the anthropologist’s own
communicable cartographies, which are inscribed in their presentation of narratives.
This is unavoidable—there is no “outside,” no way that scholars can view discourse
“objectively” apart from its communicable representation.
But I do see two problems here. One is that anthropologists generally take
discourse “circulation” for granted, as a mechanical process that merely transmits
meanings, denying it the sense of cultural and performative significance attributed
343
to discourse “production” (Lee and LiPuma 2002:192); researchers accordingly

seldom see the need to transform their own communicable constructions into
objects of scrutiny. A second problem arises when narratives are presented as
summaries or composite versions. Most anthropologists focus on the referential
content of violence narratives.23 Malkki claims for the Hutu narratives that she so
beautifully documents that versions “constituted variations on a single, shared grand
narrative” (1995:57); constructing and entextualizing this composite narrative rests,
however, on the assumption that it is the content of narratives that matters, should
be preserved in ethnographic texts, and should be the focus of analysis.24 Blindness
to communicability and the reduction of narratives to their referential content will
lead to stripping away the communicable cartographies that are, at least in the case
of interviews, jointly constructed by anthropologists and their interlocutors on the
basis of distinct interests, subject positions, and forms of symbolic and material
capital. In short, the published record has largely precluded our ability to see the
communicable cartographies constructed by research participants and how they
might not only differ from but enter into relations of conflict and cooperation with
those projected by researchers.25 If we wish to study how multiple and competing
communicable models are constructed and how people place themselves and are
interpellated within them rather than impose our own, these narrative features
must be evident in anthropological texts and become objects of analysis.
I have tried to show that when anthropologists ipso facto construe narra-
tives as immanently and performatively connected with violence, they run the
risk of reproducing and extending communicable models that help make violence
thinkable, doable, and legitimate and that regulate its representation. However, by
critically analyzing communicable cartographies rather than simply presupposing
them, practitioners can examine the maps that people create of their knowledge-
making projects, anthropological and other. Because communicable maps and the
people interpellated by them are generally projected in moral and ethical terms—as
being heroic, rational, and agentive by virtue of their placement in desirable subject
positions or malevolent, irrational, ignorant, or passive because of their insertion
in villainous slots—this perspective can help us discern how moral and ethical
stances are created and naturalized and how anthropologists construct themselves
as ethical and moral beings (Rabinow 2003; Strathern 2000). Das (2006) and Anna
Tsing (2005) have recently argued that we should not presume that cultural forms
or analysts can move smoothly and automatically between individual and collective
experience, everyday and planetary social worlds. By attending to communicability,
344
we can see how people project differences of scale, naturalize them, and attempt
to situate themselves within and/or outside of them.
Jumping scale myself, these reflections point to the stakes with regard to
how narrative and violence are getting linked in old ways in the new social and
political circumstances in which we are living. Declaring a “War on Terror” and
constantly reminding U.S. citizens that danger is all around them has enabled
President George W. Bush to amass and deploy extraordinary, unconstitutional
powers “at home” and to wage war and create institutions of torture “abroad.” As
travelers are repeatedly asked to report baggage left unattended, warned that the
airport they are traversing is on “orange” alert, or asked not to congregate in the
aisles of aircraft, they are interpellated into narratives of violence. “Terrorism”
seems to require narratives to occasion it, produce narrative representations that
synecdochally stand for acts of violence, and require violence on a massive scale
(such as the Afghan and Iraqi Wars) in “response” to it. Tales of Iraqi weapons of
mass destruction seem to require no evidence or produce little skepticism when
placed in a field of immanent narrative-violence connections. Politicians, security
agents, and financial institutions now track the seemingly coterminous circulation
of violent narratives, capital, and bodies.
Just as producing narratives of the Holocaust helped define both modernity and
violence (LaCapra 1994), hopes for peace and healing also revolve around assump-
tions about immanent narrative-violence links. The work of truth and reconciliation
commissions (TRC) in particular revolves around communicable cartographies of
violence narratives and assumptions about narrative-violence links. Culturalizing
storytelling as quintessentially South African, Section 3c of the act that established
the South African TRC asserts that the commission will “restore the human and
civil dignity of victims by granting them an opportunity to relate their own ac-
counts of the violations of which they are the victims” (Ross 2003:78). In their final
report, the TRC asserted the centrality of narration in its proceedings, suggesting
that the legislation that governed it “explicitly recognized the healing potential of
telling stories” (TRC 1998[1]:112) and that telling individual stories was “also a
healing process for the entire nation” (TRC 1998[5]:169). Critics suggest, how-
ever, that an official communicable cartography that envisioned a movement from
experience to trauma to narration to dialogue to public dissemination to a pro-
cess of parceling out the pain of state terror across the nation (Sanders 2002:67)
simultaneously “individualized the victims of apartheid” and turned individual into
collective amnesty (Mamdani 2002:33).
345
I am, of course, in no position to adjudicate whether or not narratives are

immanently connected to violence or to suggest how communicable cartographies
might be most useful in “preventing” violence or “healing” its effects. I would cer-
tainly not want to suggest that we should stop writing about violence or participating
in institutions that use narrative means to seek truth and justice. My goals are more
modest. I no longer harbor illusions about single-handedly disrupting imperial com-
municable cartographies. I do not claim to reveal a “hidden transcript” (Scott 1990)
or the secret to state power. My father, long a skeptic of academic institutions and
their jargon, is given to ironically complimenting scholars for having “a brilliant
grasp of the obvious.” Here, I think that grasping the obvious indeed requires what
Walter Benjamin referred to as presence of mind. It would be wrong to simply
lump together international and civil wars, genocide, and infanticide on the same
page under a single aegis—that is, violence. One of the things that I would like to
distinguish is how what seems to be the same violent object may have been produced
by quite distinct communicable cartographies and practices. I am, thus, looking at
complex hybrids of acts and ways of knowing about them. Communicability is, I
surmise, altogether too obvious, being right there in front of us and held up for
display and participation. But it is, at the same time, so deeply imbricated with the
phenomena we study and so automatic, insignificant, and mechanical that it only
seems to warrant attention when our idealized cartographies seem to get hijacked
or obstructed.
The same can be said for ideological constructions of relationships between
narratives and violence. What I argued here is that the two sets of ideological con-
structions, communicability and narrative-violence relations, necessarily intersect
when we (re)tell violent stories. I have suggested that a crucial basis of the social,
political, and corporeal effects they often achieve lies in their now-you-see-me,
now-you-don’t character, simultaneously right up front and woven carefully into
objects and social landscapes. As with so many things, anthropologists are just as
caught up in these complexities as anyone else, and there is no escape. What I have
tried to do here is to explore the profound consequences of Ms. Gómez’s inter-
vention into the very grounds by which we narrate violence. By joining narrators
who open up assumptions about narrative-violence connections for scrutiny and
debate and doing the same for communicable cartographies, I think that we will be
able to tell more interesting and complicated stories about our own narratives. By
developing a new window on what makes narrative-violence connections powerful,
we might just become more useful in disentangling some of the most dangerous
stories of our times and in exploring alternatives.
346
ABSTRACT
Much anthropological research on narrative and violence treats their relationship as
immanent and performative, an assumption shared by many media, legal, medical, and
other professionals and lay persons. This view is predicated on constructing the production,
circulation, and reception of knowledge about violence in particular ways. In this article,
I examine newspaper accounts of infanticide in Venezuela, along with interviews with
reporters, detectives and legal professionals and focus groups. This analysis suggests
that these articles, which receive widespread attention, become stories about stories—
specifically narratives that recount how the story of the crime unfolded naturally and
automatically from material and corporeal evidence, and the words of relatives, neighbors,
doctors, detectives, defendants, and the vox populi. These constructions of discourse about
violence create a very limited range of subject positions, generate standardized scripts for
persons interpellated in each slot, and make it difficult to advance counternarratives,
thereby inscribing the legitimacy of state institutions during a period (the 1990s) when
the nation-state project seemed to be collapsing.
Keywords: Narrative, violence, language ideologies, media, Venezuela

NOTES
Acknowledgments. It took several years to complete this research project and then over three years and
numerous analytic first takes to find a way to talk about these difficult issues that I found satisfactory.
I have run up a lot of intellectual debts in the process. Most of all, Herminia Gómez and the women
convicted of infanticide (homicide) were willing to return to difficult subjects with honesty and
insight; I learned an immense amount from our conversations. I would like to thank colleagues in
the Faculty of Law, the Institute of Penal and Criminal Science, and the Department of Anthropology
at the Universidad Central de Venezuela and the Faculty of Law of the Universidad Católica Andrés
Bello (UCAB), Puerto Ordaz, especially Julio Avalo, and to criminological, medical, judicial, and
penal institutions across Venezuela. Reporters, editors, and producers for numerous newspapers and
television stations took the time to answer my questions and walk me through their beats. Francia
Medina, Humberto Rodrı́guez, and Marı́a Alejandra Romero patiently sifted through thousands
of newspapers. Katie Jo Slaughter helped with the quantitative content analysis. Elizabeth Kelley
assisted with last minute sources. Clara Mantini-Briggs and Hector Romero provided inspiration
and insight all along the way. Howard Waitzkin helped translate medical terms. I thank Donald
Brenneis, Fernando Coronil, Elizabeth Kelley, Edward Murphy, Julie Skurski, Anna Tsing, reviewers
from Cultural Anthropology, and editor Michael Fortun for insightful comments on the manuscript,
and audiences at Brown University; University of California, Berkeley; University of California,
Santa Cruz; University of Illinois; University of Michigan; University of Toronto; and the Institute
of Criminal Law, Universidad Central de Venezuela for excellent critical reactions. Thanks also to
the Law and Social Science Program at the National Science Foundation for funding the research. I
dedicate this article to Feliciana Briggs and Herminia Gómez.
1. See Charles L. Briggs (1997) and Briggs and Mantini-Briggs (2000) for analysis of Ms. Gómez’s
conviction on murder charges.
2. Tsing (1990) comments on representations of infanticide in the United States and how images
of monstrous mothers reinscribe categories of race, gender, and class. In the sample of 121
newspaper articles on infanticide that I analyzed, 51 percent reported accusations against
women, 40 percent against men, and 7 percent both. (The other articles report cases in which
police had not identified a suspect.) Some of the accused are stepparents.
347
3. Eleanor Wachs similarly suggests that New Yorkers tell crime-victim narratives about a social
order that is continually disrupted by crime; these stories become “a vehicle for restoring order
and justice in the victim’s, potential victim’s, narrator’s, or listener’s perspective,” enabling
them “to humanize the problem, reduce a nebulous fear of crime, and attempt to gain some
control over their lives and actions” (1988:87–88).
4. These remarks pertain specifically to Taussig’s Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man. Taussig
adopts different strategies in disrupting narrative-violence connections in different works. In
Law in a Lawless Land, for example, the violent referents—killings by paramilitaries in one
Colombian town—are accorded substantial narrative space and detail. Presenting the book as
a diary, Taussig (2003) suggests that he juxtaposes the linearity of entries recorded over two
weeks with notes and afterthoughts that are “not synchronous” (2003:151).
5. For example, Hamilton (1998:8–9) provides a formula for calculating the number of crimes
that a given violent program can be expected to produce.
6. James Potter (1999, 2003) provides summaries of this vast literature.
7. Anthropological intervention into this debate is evident in the work of Arthur Kleinman
(Kleinman 2000; Kleinman and Kleinman 1996); accepting the notion that mediated images of
violence exert automatic effects on viewers, he suggests that they create “a form of inauthentic
social experience: witnessing at a distance, a kind of voyeurism in which nothing is acutely at
stake for the observer” (2000:232).
8. Violent content in the media seems to raise two problems of regulation—the seeming failure
of media institutions to self-regulate and the projected inability of viewers to self-regulate their
reception of violence and their own subsequent actions. Because self-regulation has failed,
external constraints in the form of public policies are required. As debates move from statistics
to calls for media surveillance and regulation, they provide a classic example of how public
policy functions as “a major institution of Western governance” (Shore and Wright 1997:6; see
also Strathern 2000).
9. See Bisbal (1994), Capriles (1976), and Giménez and Hernández (1988) on Venezuelan media.
My comments on Venezuelan media refer to the situation prior to 2002. After that point, the
alignment of most commercial media with sectors opposing the Chávez government has vastly
transformed Venezuelan media and their place in politics and society.
10. In a sample of 121 articles, 44 percent referred to the defendant(s) as “monster,” “beast,”
“bedeviled,” “unnatural” (desnaturalizado), and or a similar label.
11. Reporter for Ultimas Noticias, a daily tabloid, interviewed on July 27, 2004. Note that Venezuelan
law now restricts the publication of photographs of defendants and does not permit the corpses
of dead children to be displayed.
12. See Norman Fairclough (1992), Jan Blommaert and Jef Verschueren (1998), R. Wodak and
M. Reisigl (1999), Bourdieu (1991), and William F. Hanks (2005).
13. See Nelly Askew and Richard Wilk (2002), Dominic Boyer (2005), Faye Ginsburg et al. (2002),
Mankekar (1999), Mark Allen Peterson (2003), Debra Spitulnik (1996), and Urla (1995)
14. Torture was used in forcing Ms. Gómez to sign a “confession,” a document that juxtaposes
so many perspectives and registers that we could call it, following Ann Banfield (1982), an
unspeakable text (see Briggs 1997).
15. I discuss below how some focus-group participants questioned stories printed in weekly crime
magazines.
16. My ethnography of reception also included observation of how people view and recontextualize
media (in the absence of interviews and focus groups) and a survey of media consumption.
17. Judith Irvine suggested this point.
18. Hayden White (1978) suggests the effects of truth achieved by historical narratives are achieved
by first imagining the past and then using narrative techniques that background the process
of construction, thereby making narratives seem to reflect what “really” took place. At the
same time that his insights point to how these formulaic narratives are taken as true reflections
of events, tracing the way that narratives project cartographies of communicability provides
348
us with another window on how these mimetic effects are achieved in historical and other
narratives.
19. See, for example, collections by Fernando Coronil and Julie Skurski (2006b), Das et al. (2000),
Deborah Poole (1994), Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois (2004), and Jeffrey Sluka
(2000).
20. We learn relatively little about male communicable cartographies; Das (1990:387) reports
that the men did not want to talk about the violence. One reason she gives is survivor guilt,
given that Sikh men and male adolescents were singled out for death. Das also relates the men’s
reluctance to confide in a woman and men’s preferences for nocturnal performances, which
took place after the researchers had left the community. What the men did talk about constantly
was their “loss of face,” which might seem to suggest that their stories focused on who was
telling what to whom. Exploring them might thus have revealed quite different communicative
cartographies.
21. The Delhi University Relief and Rehabilitation Team thus immediately clashed with elite
communicative cartographies, being criticized by academics as unethical, irresponsible, fanning
passions, and possibly inspiring vengeance killings and by two Delhi High Court judges as “worse
than wretched” (Das 1985:5).
22. Some interesting changes in the story emerge. In Das’s description of how women enlarged their
cartographies, “totally ignorant” (1990:374) is replaced with “relatively ignorant” (2006:199).
23. For exceptions, see Steven C. Caton (1990), Gilsenan (1996), Michael Herzfeld (1985), and
Michael E. Meeker (1979).
24. I do not mean to suggest that Malkki reduces narratives to their ability to describe what “really”
happened. Indeed, she describes these stories as forming a “mythico-history” that classifies the
world according to cosmological, political, and moral principles, and, simultaneously, creates
it (1995:54).
25. I am not projecting a “theirs” versus “ours” division of communicable cartographies; as I
suggested in my discussion of the work of Das and her colleagues in the wake of the anti-Sikh
violence, fieldwork and advocacy provide both sites for the coconstruction of communicable
cartographies as well as for conflicts between competing perspectives.
Editor’s Note: Cultural Anthropology has published a range of articles on violence in different
contexts. See, for example, Rosalind Shaw’s “Displacing Violence: Making Pentecostal Memory
in Postwar Sierra Leone” (2007); Bruce Grant’s “The Good Russian Prisoner: Naturalizing
Violence in the Caucasus Mountains” (2005); and Daniel Jordan Smith’s “The Bakassi Boys:
Vigilantism, Violence, and Political Imagination in Nigeria” (2004).
Cultural Anthropology has also published a number of articles that examine how journal-
istic accounts are configured, circulate, and play into the processes they document. See,
for example, Malkki’s “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorial-
ization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees” (1992); Catherine Besteman’s
“Representing Violence and ‘Othering’ Somalia” (1996); and Michael G. Peletz’s “Neither
Reasonable nor Responsible: Contrasting Representations of Masculinity in a Malay Society”
(1994).
REFERENCES CITED
Abu-Lughod, Lila
2005 Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press
Arcángel, Miguel
1998 Pena de muerte piden para asesino del niño. El Mundo, March 30: 22.
Askew, Nelly, and Richard Wilk, eds.
2002 The Anthropology of Media. Oxford: Blackwell.
Babcock, Barbara
1980 Reflexivity: Definitions and Discriminations. Semiotica 30(1–2):1–14.
349
Banfield, Ann
1982 Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction.
Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Bastidas Poleo, Néstor
2000 Ahogó a sus cuatro hijos tras discutir con su esposo. Diaro 2001, March 16:
19.
Bauman, Richard
1986 Story, Performance, and Event: Contextual Studies of Oral Narrative. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Besteman, Catherine
1996 Representing Violence and “Othering” Somalia. Cultural Anthropology
11(1):120–133.
Bisbal, Marcelino
1994 La mirada comunicacional. Caracas: Alfadil Ediciones.
Blommaert, Jan, and Jef Verschueren
1998 Debating Diversity: Analyzing the Discourse of Tolerance. New York: Routledge.
Bourdieu, Pierre
1991 Language and Symbolic Power. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson, trans.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
1993 The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loı̈c J. D. Wacquant
1992 Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity.
Boyer, Dominic
2005 Spirit and System: Media, Intellectuals, and the Dialectic in Modern German
Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Briggs, Charles L.
1993a Metadiscursive Practices and Scholarly Authority in Folkloristics. Journal of Amer-
ican Folklore 106(422):387–434.
1993b Personal Sentiments and Polyphonic Voices in Warao Women’s Ritual Wailing:
Music and Poetics in a Critical and Collective Discourse. American Anthropologist
95(4):929–957.
1996 The Politics of Discursive Authority in Research on the “Invention of Tradition.”
Cultural Anthropology 11(4):435–469.
1997 Notes on a “Confession”: On the Construction of Gender, Sexuality and Violence
in an Infanticide Case. Pragmatics 7(4):519–546.
2004 Theorizing Modernity Conspiratorially: Science, Scale, and the Political Economy
of Public Discourse in Explanations of a Cholera Epidemic. American Ethnologist
31(2):163–186.
2005 Communicability, Racial Discourse, and Disease. Annual Review of Anthropology
34:269–291.
Briggs, Charles L., and David Theo Goldberg, eds.
In press Discourses of Genocide. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield.
Briggs, Charles L., and Daniel C. Hallin
2007 Biocommunicability: The Neoliberal Subject and its Contradictions in News Cov-
erage of Health Issues. Social Text.
Briggs, Charles L., and Clara Mantini-Briggs
2000 “Bad Mothers” and the Threat to Civil Society: Race, Cultural Reasoning, and the
Institutionalization of Social Inequality in a Venezuelan Infanticide Trial. Law and
Social Inquiry 25(2):299–354.
Caldeira, Teresa P. R.
2000 City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo. Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press.
350
Capriles, Oswaldo
1976 El estado y los medios de comunicación en Venezuela. Caracas: Universidad
Central de Venezuela.
Caton, Steven C.
1990 “Peaks of Yemen I Summon”: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Coronil, Fernando, and Julie Skurski
2006a Dismembering and Remembering the Nation: The Semantics of Political Violence
in Venezuela. In States of Violence. Julie Skurski and Fernando Coronil, eds. Pp.
83–143. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Coronil, Fernando, and Julie Skurski, eds.
2006b States of Violence. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Crapanzano, Vincent
1984 Life Histories. American Anthropologist 86(4):933–960.
Crónica Policial
1996a Lo mataron porque se comió un par de tomates que tenı́an para una espaguetada.”
Crónica Policial, September 23: 10.
1996b Mató a su hija de 9 meses porque no dejaba de llorar. Crónica Policial, September
9: 5.
1997 Mató al hijito porque nació de un “cacho.” Crónica Policial, May 19: 12.
1998a Bestia mató a su hijastra de patada en la cabeza. Crónica Policial, October 5: 2.
1998b Mató al hijito de 60 tijerazos. Crónica Policial, 27 July: 7.
1999 Madre endemoniada mató al hijito. Crónica Policial, May 20: 8.
Daniel, E. Valentine
1996 Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence. Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press.
Das, Veena
1985 Anthropological Knowledge and Collective Violence. The Riots in Delhi, Novem-
ber 1984. Anthropology Today 1(3):4–6.
1987 The Anthropology of Violence and the Speech of Victims. Anthropology Today
3(4):11–13.
1990 Our Work to Cry: Your Work to Listen. In Communities, Riots and Survivors in
South Asia. Veena Das, ed. Pp. 345–398. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
1998 Official Narratives, Rumour, and the Social Production of Hate. Social Identities
4(1):109–130.
2000 The Act of Witnessing: Violence, Poisonous Knowledge, and Subjectivity. In Vi-
olence and Subjectivity. Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Mamphela Ramphele,
and Pamela Reynolds, eds. Pp. 205–225. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
2006 Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Das, Veena, Arthur Kleinman, Mamphela Ramphele, and Pamela Reynolds, eds.
2000 Violence and Subjectivity. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Das, Veena, Ranendra Kumar Das, Manoranjan Mohanty, and Ashis Nandy
1984a A New Kind of Rioting. Illustrated Weekly of India 105(121):21–23.
1984b Only widows and orphans left. Indian Express, November 16: 1, 7.
Debord, Guy
1995 [1967] The Society of the Spectacle. Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans. New York:
Zone.
Derrida, Jacques
1974 [1967] Of Grammatology. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, trans. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
351
El Universal
1990 Detenida una mujer que habı́a matado a sus cuatro hijos. El Universal, October
4: 6.
Fairclough, Norman
1992 Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity.
Feldman, Allen
1991 Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern
Ireland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ferguson, James
1999 Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian
Copperbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Foucault, Michel
1970 [1966] The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York:
Vintage.
Gal, Susan
1991 Between Speech and Silence: The Problematics of Research on Language and
Gender. In Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the
Postmodern Era. Michaela di Leonardo, ed. Pp. 175–203. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Gerson, Walter M.
1968 Violence as an American Value Theme. In Violence and the Mass Media. Otto N.
Larsen, ed. New York: Harper and Row.
Gilsenan, Michael
1996 Lords of the Lebanese Marches: Violence and Narrative in an Arab Society. London:
I. B. Tauris.
Giménez, Lulú, and Angela Hernández
1988 Estructura de los medios de difusión en Venezuela. Caracas: Universidad Católica
Andrés Bello.
Ginsburg, Faye, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Parking, eds.
2002 Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Goldberg, David Theo
2002 The Racial State. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Grant, Bruce
2005 The Good Russian Prisoner: Naturalizing Violence in the Caucasus Mountains.
Hall, Stuart
1977 Culture, the Media and the “Ideological effect.” In Mass Communication and
Society. James Curran, Michael Gurevitch, and Janet Woolacott, eds. London:
Edward Arnold.
Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts
1978 Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. London:
Macmillan.
Hallin, Daniel C.
2000 Commercialism and Professionalism in the American News Media. In Mass Media
and Society. James Curran and Michael Gurevitch, eds. London: Arnold.
Hamilton, James T.
1998 Channeling Violence: The Economic Market for Violent Television Programming.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hanks, William F.
2005 Pierre Bourdieu and the Practices of Language. Annual Review of Anthropology
34:67–83.
352
Herzfeld, Michael
1985 The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in Cretan Mountain Village. Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press.
Kleinman, Arthur
2000 Violence and Subjectivity. Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Mamphela Ramphele,
and Pamela Reynolds, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kleinman, Arthur, and Joan Kleinman
1996 The Appeal of Experience; the Dismay of Images: Cultural Appropriations of
Suffering in our Times. Daedalus 125(1):1–23.
Labov, William, and Joshua Waletzky
1967 Narrative Analysis. In Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts. June Helm, ed. Pp.
12–44. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
LaCapra, Dominck
1994 Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-
versity Press.
Latour, Bruno
1988 The Pasteurization of France. Alan Sheridan and John Law, trans. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Lee, Benjamin, and Edward LiPuma
2002 Cultures of Circulation: The Imagination of Modernities. Public Culture
14(1):191–213.
Lutz, Catherine A., and Jane L. Collins
1993 Reading National Geographic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Malkki, Liisa H.
1992 National Geographic: The Rooting of People and the Territorialization of Na-
tional Identity Among Scholars and Refugees. Cultural Anthropology 7(1):24–
44.
1995 Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory and National Cosmology among Hutu
Refugees in Tanzania. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mamdani, Mahmood
2002 Amnesty or Impunity? A Preliminary Critique of the Report of the Truth
and Reconciliation Comisión of South Africa (TRC). Diacritics 32(3–4):33–
59.
Mankekar, Purnima
1999 Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Wom-
anhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Márquez, Gustavo, Joyita Mukherjee, Juan Carlos Navarro, Rosa Amelia González, Roberto
Palacios, and Roberto Rigobón
1993 Fiscal Policy and Income Distribution in Venezuela. In Government Spending
and Income Distribution in Latin America. Ricardo Hausmann and Roberto
Rigobón, eds. Pp. 145–213. Washington, DC: Inter-American Development
Bank.
Martı́n-Barbero, Jesús
1987 De los medios a las mediaciones: comunicación, cultura y hegemonı́a. Mexico:
Ediciones G. Gili.
Mauer, Bill
2005 Due Diligence and “Reasonable Man,” Offshore. Cultural Anthropology
20(4):474–505.
McDowell, John H.
2000 Poetry and Violence: The Ballad Tradition of Mexico’s Costa Chica. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press.
353
Meeker, Michael E.
1979 Literature and Violence in North Arabia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Peirce, Charles Sanders
1932 Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 2: Elements of Logic.
Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Peletz, Michael G.
1994 Neither Reasonable nor Responsible: Contrasting Representations of Masculinity
in a Malay Society. Cultural Anthropology 9(2):135–178.
Peterson, Mark Allen
2003 Anthropology and Mass Communication: Media and Myth in the New Millennium.
New York: Berghahn.
Poole, Deborah, ed.
1994 Unruly Order: Violence, Power, and Cultural Identity in the High Provinces of
Southern Peru. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Potter, W. James
1999 On Media Violence. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
2003 The 11 Myths of Media Violence. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Rabinow, Paul
2003 Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment. Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press.
Riles, Annelise
2000 The Network Inside Out. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
2004 Real time: Unwinding Technocratic and Anthropological Knowledge. American
Ethnologist 31(3):392–405.
Ross, Fiona C.
2003 Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South
Africa. London: Pluto Press.
Salas, Yolanda
2003 Imaginaries and Narratives of Prison Violence. In Citizens of Fear: Urban Violence
in Latin America. Susana Rotker, ed. Pp. 207–223. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press.
Sanders, Mark.
2002 Remembering Apartheid. Diacritics 32(3–4):60–80.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, and Philippe Bourgois, eds.
2004 Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, and Margaret M. Lock
1987 The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology.
Medical Anthropology Quarterly 1(1):6–41.
Scott, James C.
1990 Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press.
Seremetakis, C. Nadia
1991 The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Sharrett, Christopher
1999 Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media. Cris Shore and Susan Wright,
eds. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Shaw, Rosalind
2007 Displacing Violence: Making Pentecostal Memory in Postwar Sierra Leone. Cul-
tural Anthropology 22(1):66–93.
354
Silva, José Laurencio

1990 Estranguló a su bebé y lo enterró a orillas de la laguna Los Francos. El Bolivarense,
December 8: 6.
Silverstein, Michael
1976 Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description. In Meaning in Anthro-
pology. Keith Basso and Henry A. Selby eds. Pp. 11–55. Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico Press.
2004 Cultural Concepts and the Language-Culture Nexus. Current Anthropology
45(5):638–639.
Sluka, Jeffrey, ed.
2000 Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror. Philadelphia: University of Penn-
sylvania Press.
Smith, Daniel Jordan
2004 The Bakassi Boys: Vigilantism, Violence, and Political Imagination in Nigeria.
Spitulnik, Debra
1996 The Social Circulation of Media Discourse and the Mediation of Communities.
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 6(2):161–187.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty
1981 Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Cary
Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg eds. Pp. 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press.
Starker, Steven
1989 Evil Influences: Crucsades against the Mass Media. New Brunswick, NJ: Transac-
tion Publishers.
Strathern, Marilyn
2000 Afterword: Accountability . . . and Ethnography. In Audit Cultures: Anthropolog-
ical Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. Marilyn Strathern, ed. Pp.
279–304. London: Routledge.
Taussig, Michael
1987 Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1993 Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York:
Routledge.
2003 Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza. New York: New Press.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)
1998 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report. 5 vols. Cape Town,
South Africa: Juta.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaput
1990 Monster Stories: Women Charged with Perinatal Endangerment. In Uncertain
Terms: Negotiating Gender in American Culture. Faye Ginsburg and Anna Lowen-
haput Tsing, eds. Boston: Beacon Press.
2000 The Global Situation. Cultural Anthropolology 15(3):327–360.
2005 Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press.
Urla, Jacqueline
1995 Outlaw Language: Creating Alternative Public Spheres in Basque Free Radio.
Pragmatics 5(2):245–262.
Wachs, Eleanor
1988 Crime Victim Stories: New York City’s Urban Folklore. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Warner, Michael
2002 Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books.
355
White, Hayden
1978 Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Press.
Wodak, R., and M. Reisigl
1999 Discourse and Racism: European Perspectives. Annual Review of Anthropology
28:175–199.
356

Mediating Infanticide - Theorizing Relations Between Narrative and Violence

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Mediating Infanticide - Theorizing Relations Between Narrative and Violence

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

CA

MEDIATING INFANTICIDE: Theorizing Relations

VIOLENCE, NARRATIVES, AND PERFORMATIVITY IN

violence, however, McDowell adopts a similar position of psychosocial naturalism.

violence that narratives purport to describe divides anthropological practices of

A PEIRCEAN ANALYSIS OF NARRATIVITY AND VIOLENCE

NARRATIVIZING THE UNSPEAKABLE

The indexical relationship between infanticide stories and violence is enhanced by

In some articles, neighbors transform a narrative that police are telling as an

crime story. A common theme among reporters, prosecutors, detectives, neigh-

examinations is confirmed in autopsies, similarly reconfirming the subordination of

and penal imaginaries in projecting the Venezuelan state as exhibiting a modernity

NARRATIVE, VIOLENCE, AND COMMUNICABILITY

thus every infanticide, pathological subjectivity, and defective domesticity—will

reception. Communicability is a central dimension of self-regulation—individuals

1989, dramatized a challenge to the political dominance of a modernizing elite (see

CONCLUSION: ANTHROPOLOGY, VIOLENCE, AND

Her account is organized around a very common type of communicable cartogra-

to discourse “production” (Lee and LiPuma 2002:192); researchers accordingly

I am, of course, in no position to adjudicate whether or not narratives are

Keywords: Narrative, violence, language ideologies, media, Venezuela

Silva, José Laurencio

You might also like