Anthropology and Feminism: on Violence

Anthropology and Feminism: on Violence1. Lia Zanotta Machado Anthropological thought as well as feminist thought are offshoots of historical and more recent concepts on rights to cultural diversity and gender equality. In this text, I seek to present the difficulties and possibilities for feminist and anthropological discourses to be articulated not only by subjects of knowledge that are at the same time anthropologists and feminists (feminist anthropologists) or social scientists and feminists, but I seek also to establish a fruitful dialog between men and women anthropologists and sociologists, whether there are or aren’t feminists. I believe in the profitability of the debate given its convergences as well as its polemical nature, since the heart of the debate is the challenge arising both from a theoretical anthropological perspective as well as from a theoretical feminist perspective of gender2. Anthropological traditions seem to welcome and to be principally sustained by the concept of cultural diversity. Contemporary anthropological knowledge has contributed to the conceptualization and defense of collective and community rights to cultural diversity. In anthropological knowledge, cultural diversity prevails over questions of gender inequality, either by minimizing or dissipating the perception of unequal forms of power in gender relations. In feminist knowledge, there tends to prevail the understanding of inequality in gender relations. This inequality is understood as transversal to cultural diversity. Plural forms of gender inequality are recognized and considered been generated from cultural diversity itself. Or, sometimes feminist thought can minimize the effect of cultural diversity relative to plural forms of inequality and violence in gender relations, and maximize its similarity. Feminist traditions in turn consider themselves as constituent of the concept of violence against violence not in the sense of invention, but undoubtedly in the sense of recognizing violent meanings in numerous acts of physical and symbolic force exercised in the context of customary relations between genders. Against this understanding, some anthropologists blame feminists to impose the concept of violence upon some cultures where this concept would be unknown. From the point of view of contemporary Feminist Movements, Violence against women is a concept that supposes that its occurrence may operate at a universal level but in diverse forms. Within feminist thought, they are especially the feminist 1 This text is the English version to the third chapter of published book of Machado, Lia Zanotta Feminismo em Movimento, Brasília, Edit. Francis, 2010, entitled: “Antropologia e Feminismo diante da Violência. 2 Some initial reflections that served in elaborating the text entitled: “Social Policies, Cultural Diversity and Gender Equality”, in: Teófilo da Silva, Cristian (org.), 2009, “Social Problematizations for Plural Societies” (Ed Annablume) are here considered. In this article I develop the problematization of diversity, social policies and indigenous women’s movements. Here, I put forward a theoretical and methodological debate between anthropology and feminism by reflecting on gender violence and cultural diversity. anthropological reflections that address the diversity of modalities in gender relations through the distinct dimensions of social life and cultural diversity. I argue that feminist movement has been able to contribute to making recognizable and legitimizing the linkages between the new concept of violence against women and the already existing different meanings in different cultures through which women in the name of their gender are perceived and perceive themselves as situated at a lower hierarchical value and subject to power and physical and symbolic violence. The names given to signifying this position, situation and interaction could be the most varied but they have as their content and form, distinct possibilities in identifying themselves with the conceptualization of gendered domestic violence. I also argue, that if the concept of violence against women is modern, the same must be stated to the concept of violence as itself. By other side, there are always linkages between the construction of these concepts and already existing meanings in different cultures as well as within the different positions of gender and social status in a same cultural context. The concepts of discrimination and violence against women constructed by feminist movements in the sixties and seventies were adopted by the United Nations’ intergovernmental organization through successive Conferences, international treaties and conventions adhered to by Member States and by new forms of networks of nongovernmental feminist organizations (Guerreiro, 2002). Certainly, such agreements suppose cultural changes and the incorporating of the notion of individual rights with a far-reaching scope. (Convention for the Elimination of all forms of discrimination against women – Cedaw, 1979; Vienna Conference, 1993; Cairo Conference, 1994; Beijing Conference, 1995). The Preamble to the Vienna Declaration on 24 to 25th June, 1993 refers to all human rights: “(…) all human rights are derived from the dignity and value inherent to a human being (…)” (paragraph 2): “(…) the international community must conceive ways and means to eliminating the obstacles existing and overcoming the challenges for the full realization of all human rights (…)” (paragraph 13); “(...) the task to foster and protect all human rights and fundamental liberties (…)” (paragraph 14). In this Preamble, the indivisibility of human rights is in more explicit language than in the 1968 Tehran Proclamation. Parallel to people’s collective right to relative autonomy and respect for their cultural diversity, there are human rights for non violence against women (Alves, 2007). Article 38 of the World Human Rights Conference affirms the importance of working to eliminate all forms of violence against women in public and private life, the elimination of all forms of sexual harassment, exploitation and traffic of women, elimination of sexual prejudice in serving justice and the eradication of any conflicts that may arise between women’s rights and harmful consequences to specific traditional or customary practices, cultural prejudice and religious extremism. Thus, the Vienna Declaration, the defense of rights to cultural diversity cannot prevail if they are contrary to women’s human rights to non violence. Similarly, private life becomes public when women’s rights have to be ensured and this implies family models anchored in cultural traditions should be appropriated to what is agreed upon in relation to women’s human rights. These are individual human rights that must be protected in the face of contrary cultural practices. Moreover, collective rights should always be preserved once they are not contrary to what is agreed upon in individual rights. Thus, the simultaneous defense of women’s rights and rights to cultural diversity of communities and peoples always implies a tense process of cultural re-meaning (Soares, 2001; An-Na’ím, 1991; Wilson, 2 1998; Segato, 2004; Vrede, 2001) in an increasingly globalized world inserted in cosmopolitics (Mignolo, 2000 and Ribeiro, 2005). Between anthropological and feminist knowledge: methodological and political debate Cultural diversity for anthropological knowledge is more than a concept. It impregnates an entire classical methodological perspective of distancing and familiarization; the subsequent question of “difficult translation” and criticism and relativization of anthropologists’ narratives as effects of their cultural insertions (Geertz, 1983; Clifford and Marcus, 1986). In the same way, in feminist knowledge, gender relations are more than a concept or a thematic issue. They involve a methodological perspective. An analysis of gender does not evolve if it is not denaturalized and if it does not deconstruct the familiarity with which gender values are seen and if there is not a distancing from that familiarity. (MacCormack & Starthern,1980; Ortner & Whitehead,1981; Strathern,1988 and 1997; Benhabib and Cornel,1987; Code,1993; Butler,1990; Flax,1991, Machado, 1999; Heilborn,1992). This analysis involves the reflection on social insertion of the authors that use feminist knowledge or gender studies as well as the differences of category of subjects studied by these researchers. Although anthropological debates are facing this dilemma of rights and defending respect to cultural diversity as a right, the debate unfolds as if it were exclusively a question of anthropological method. The anthropological method is considered as demanding respect to diversity and, “as consequence”, criticism of the ingenuous universal gender domination and gender violence. From the point of view of feminist methodology in gender studies, the anthropological argument invoked on cultural diversity as a contrary ex ante to the argument of the violence of gender, supposes a reference to an imagined totality as uniform. In a sense, the induction of this notion of closed totality comes from its presence in pioneer authors in anthropology such as Durkheim with the concept of mechanical solidarity or the uniform construction of feelings from Radcliffe-Brown’s Andaman Islanders. It must be pointed out that, nevertheless, these writers’ perspective at that time sought to outline the character of cultural alterity and its immersion in another symbolic cosmology. In contemporary terms, the diversity of situations and positions of agents in social relations have already been exhaustively focused both by anthropologists be they feminists and gender specialists, or not. There is a recognized political issue, not reduced to a methodological issue, that runs through the intellectual field of anthropologists. In Brazilian contemporary society there is a dispute for a better strategy in the defense of “collective” rights of “people”, and anthropologists are involved. It has to do with a political issue that traverses Indigenous Movements and their rights to have their lands recognized and traverses the more recent Quilombo Movements. Since the new Constitution of Brazil (1988), there is a right to land based on traditional uses of land by black afro-brazilian settlements, beginning on the time of slavery. Since then, these communities are applying for title to their lands. Some have already success in their efforts. Movements created in the name of indigenous peoples tend to emphasize rhetorically totality as uniqueness in representing cultural diversity. From this perspective, the defense of indigenous women’s rights could represent danger and 3 contamination in preserving the cultural diversity of all indigenous peoples, as seen by some anthropologists, as well as in the perspective of some indigenous movements. Politically, feminist anthropologists understand and support the simultaneous – even if tense – the defense of women’s rights and the defense of rights to cultural diversity in all that people’s rights are not aggressive to women’s rights. That is also the understanding of the Indigenous Women’s Movements in Brazil and the ways they have recently been articulating. I point the political dimension of the debate in the anthropological intellectual field as I do a criticism of how in many instances within the anthropological field there are militant accusations against feminist anthropologists. Main anthropological criticism against feminist studies is made as if militancy or the dimension of political positioning were not present in the different modalities of doing anthropology, as the anthropology of indigenous people, the anthropology of traditional and quilombo peoples and other anthropological themes and special issues. The issue of defense of rights to a great extent pervades the most distinct anthropological productions. Without detriment to the political dimension in this debate, and after pointing it, I wish to concentrate on its methodological dimension. I intend to set out here the ethnographical framework for this debate between anthropological methodological priorities, feminist methodological priorities and gender; their possible convergences and disencounters or their fecundity when there are, between them, associations and complementarity. I will base my arguments upon the focused interlocution in recent Brazilian anthropological works, as well as introducing different gender specialists in the larger field of Anthropology. I chose to dialog with two recent anthropological studies, critical of feminist discourse and internationalized discourse on the use of the concept of violence against women in non western societies (Simião, 2005 and Cardoso, L.R. 20053) and to generate a dialog on four other anthropological studies that analyze gender relations in non western societies: Amazon and Melanesian indigenous societies. These are: Strathern (1988 and 2001), Descolas (2001), Stephen Hughes (2001) and Brown (2001). With the exception of Strathern, who identifies herself as anthropologist and feminist, the other three authors don’t identify themselves as feminists. The core of these four studies is the methodology for analysis of gender, nevertheless, all ask about or include, to a lesser or greater extent, the theme of gender politics, sex and violence domination. They distance themselves from the universalization of masculine domination based upon western binary classifications but they make explicit the social dimensions in which there are domination and ‘authorized’ masculine violence through cultural meanings. As Strathern (1989) remembers well, as feminists and anthropologists, we are all westerners and we use our dichotomies so as to establish frontiers between culture and nature, public and private space, domination and subordination, man and woman, subject (and non object) versus non subject (and only object), cruel predator and victim. 3 My debate with the two authors is limited to presenting a counter-argument to the understanding expressed in their two texts in which they argue there is not “violence against women” in Timor and where “beating women” can be understood as a “shared custom”. I consider extremely pertinent Simião’s analysis on the legal means for community procedures analyzed by him in the scope of the work on East Timor. It is also a reply to a friendly provocation from L.R. Cardoso. Over much time, I thought about not responding, however the methodological debate raised led me to develop this text. 4 Anthropological and feminist analyses should thus be wary of falling into the use of binary dichotomies and dichotomic constructions in the combining of these classifications based upon the culture and nature opposition. Starting from the opposition culture and nature, the reflections would always arrive to the women's articulation with the domain of the nature and subordination and the men's articulation with the domain of the culture and domination. These binary classifications are articulated dichotomically and express profoundly modern western cosmology as stated by many anthropologists as Strathern (1988), Descolas (1998 and 2005) and Viveiros de Castro (1996). Female gender anthropologists strongly expressed their criticism of western schematic classifications already at point zero of gender studies in the eighties in the recognized collection organized by MacCormack and Strathern (1980): Nature, Culture and Gender. Shery Ortner already in 1981 reviewed dichotomic use in her famous 1972 anthropological essay: “Woman is for nature as man is for culture?” The 1972’ essay was elaborated based upon feminist knowledge in which it concluded that the response of why women occupied universalized secondary and subordinate positions would be the symbolic universal attribution of women to the domain of nature, whilst men are symbolically associated with the domain of culture. Rather and more precisely, women are universally inserted in the domain of social life in which nature and culture are symbolically more associated: care of children and family. In 1990 and 1996, Ortner was still even clearer in her critics. Ortner recognized his prior insertion in the trap of western classifications and affirmed a fundamental methodological perspective: the logic of gender is multiple and does not move necessarily towards the same sense. Non-existent violence or translation traps From a critical perspective to universal generalization on the feminist concept of violence against women, in proposing to integrate and support gender studies, Daniel Simião’s work (2005) is committed to affirming the character of invention and cultural imposition/intervention of the concept of violence against woman in the East Timor cultural context. Given East Timor culture, this has to do with the invention of international entities since the concept does not have recognition in local culture. Simião (2005) through his ethnographic research called “Os Donos da Palavra” (“The Owners of the Word”) discusses whether or not there is violence against women in East Timor. Luiz R. Cardoso (2005) through his theoretical and ethnographic considerations on moral insult and the relation between insult and pain, considers that when the act of physical aggression is not understood culturally as an insult it does not mean violence. Thus, both in dialog affirm that the harmful East Timor native notion of correction, orientation, beating, would not be qualified as violence since they do not consider these actions as an insult to women, but acts in order to correct them. The concept of gender violence, for them, can only be applied appropriately in the west because it is a western creation. Thus, in relation to East Timor’s culture, the concept is only “invented” in the sense of alien or random. It is “arbitrarily applied” in East Timor. The act of physical “beating” of women and the “physical pain” of battered women are, according to them, legitimated by East Timor men and women: their marital tasks are distinct and complementary and it is up to men to correct women by beating them physically or it is up to men and women to beat reciprocally. (Simião is not precise on this point). There is then neither masculine domination nor gender violence. They raise critical arguments introducing the concept of “violence against women” in 5 societies marked by the distance of its cultural diversity vis à vis the western model. I begin this dialog with Simião ethnography. Simião’s analytical interpretation seems to situate his conviction at a specific ethnographic moment. He transcribes his field notations about a case related to him by a man from Timor stating about his feelings and his wife’s feelings. By these means in turn this case is related by the researcher to the reader: “An East Timorean , a printing technician at a local printer was married for 11 years and he always beat up on his wife. She always felt physical pain, but she was never bothered by it. Up to the moment when she asked for separation. Her husband did not understand. He did not see the motives, obviously he was always within the standard conduct for his behavior for over a decade and it had never bothered her. The novelty was that his wife worked at a local Red Cross post. He convinced her that the foreigners were “putting things” in his wife’s head” (p.94) Simião directly after this excerpt introduces his analytical vision and narrates how the writer with an authorized voice to utter the last word on the incident, that is, his word appears with the context of the narrative as “anthropological truth”: “Certainly in some way this is what happened. The physical pain that she felt over the years could be concentrated into a moral pain. The meaning of an act of aggression had changed and was changing through its consequences. (…) We can state that given the new context the act of physical aggression has become an insulting attitude to the woman’s person. As L. Cardoso de Oliveira (2002), we cannot ignore seeing here a new type of pain, a pain that does not have an ontological existence but depends on the perception of an insult in order to exist in the world.” (p.95) What would be the meaning of this pain if there was not an anthropological existence? Would a moral perception of physical aggression be really homogenous and sufficient to be supported through masculine language to produce anthropological truth? What would be these “natural and normal feelings” relative to physical aggression, which the writer addresses in his brief introduction and conclusion to his work? The first issue to reflect upon is to question within this context a pain that is solely physical that would not be conducted to cover up a sense of insult. I ask myself: this pain would be covered by no feeling? Or the East Timor sense given to beating is that it would not be an insult, but yes a legitimate sense and agreed upon by men and women? Once there is an agreement on different strategies and reciprocal punishments, would not there be subjective meanings that are circulating objectively? Finally what can be understood by correction? Is correction always relational? Does it place subjects always in a same or in a distinct situation? Luiz Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira (2005) initiates his article with a provocation stating: “I did not resist the temptation of provoking an argument on the notion of violence. Can violence be spoken about when there is no moral aggression? (…) By the way, I would dare to say that the absence of moral violence, the existence of physical violence would be an abstraction. Always when violence is discussed as a problem, there is always the idea of the use of illegitimate force”. And this explicits what is understood by “moral insult, a concept that realizes the two main characteristics of the phenomenon: aggression aims at rights that cannot be adequately translated in material proof and always implies a devaluing or negation of another’s identity”. (p.1). Almost at the end, he refers to the East Timor case: "Whilst beating has a moral justification and the victim’s suffering was essentially physical, the practice was accepted”. (p.12). 6 I dare to say also that I understand that his provocation is an invitation to debate. What would be the possible understanding of intentional physical aggressions whose suffering would be only basically physical? Suffering is not always subsumed to values and to what is symbolic? The sense of correction would be so concrete in its generalized legitimacy that both those sides, who beats as well as the abused would have involved the same meanings and feelings? I share with Luis R. Cardoso the attention given to the social circulation of prestige analogous to ‘hau’ from Mauss (1974) and Caillé’(1994 and 2002) as part of sociability in which there are feelings of regard and disregard, respect and disrespect, reciprocity, hierarchy and conflicts (Machado, 2003) and recognition (Taylor, 1993). It is from these same arguments posed by the author that he dialogs. Thus, I do not consider it possible that physical aggressions are not inscribed in disputes regarding consideration/disconsideration, regard, disregard, humiliation, hierarchy and the differential levels of gender powers, especially in family spaces. Certainly, it is a vision of gender that offers methodological and theoretical instruments for a counter-reading so as to interpret the writer. How can an intentional act of physical aggression be devoid of meaning? This may or may not be domestic violence - a modern category - but acts of aggression are not experienced necessarily in East Timor as resentment by women hurt when battered? Or as moments of manifestation of prestige and honor, for subjects that assault? It costs to me think about intentional acts that produce physical pain and that are devoid of meaning. Perhaps it is his emphasis on attention to moral conflicts in the dispute for consideration and disconsideration about which Luis Roberto Cardoso talks so well that it may have been possible to not examine the hypothesis that acts of imposition in the use of physical force are precisely part of the disputes of meanings for consideration and disconsideration. These disputes are present even in dominantly legitimate practices given the idea-value of correction, a category that seems to be native not only in East Timor but also in Brazil, if not, in very different cultures, even if in some very important different ways. It seems that the supposition of the non-existence of moral meaning in the physical act of battery originated in the dislocation of focus from the writer’s attention that is almost solely exclusive to moral aggression, so that physical aggression almost loses meaning. I ask myself if an act of physical aggression would be possible if solely legitimate meanings and equally legitimate for those involved are attributed. And how would this be? Subjects necessarily attribute the same meaning so that we have a prior certainty that there would be physical aggressions and by definition would not produce neither feelings of disconsideration nor any other feelings and meanings? In order to better reply to Luiz Roberto Cardoso’s provocation, I return to Simião’s ethnography, since it is this ethnography that seemed to have led Cardoso to introduce the idea of partition between “physical pain’ and the act of “correcting”. I can think about “only physical pain”, in cases and in social contexts in which the event led to pain did not stem or was not perceived as coming agent intentionality. In this marital relation, physical pain is directly embedded in the perception of an agent being “corrected” by another. Although Simião has not heard women who have identified themselves as battered (given the difficulty, according to the author, as masculine gender representative to establish this dialog), he seeks to find such replies by hearing and monitoring the political process for establishing a national forum to hear communities 7 in order to elaborate a bill on violence against women. This process was coordinated by organizations and national and local women’s movements that have nevertheless used dynamics and gender orientation techniques drawn up by international feminist governmental organizations. They invited men and women from the communities in four different places. It is by speaking about this ethnography for monitoring these seminars that the author reconstructs East Timor cultural meanings, given to physical aggression in family spaces. He reports masculine and feminine speeches that shares the understanding of a man’s right to beat “whenever she is neglecting any one of her duties” (p.84). I refer to field notes and talks obtained by the author in these seminars and focal groups conducted regarding meanings correlated to domestic violence: “In Fatumean, (...) women did not know how to position themselves (...) and murmured “yes” or “no”. Men participated a lot more, they did not have doubts in agreeing that it is possible to beat up on and should beat in order to train a wife”. “Baku atu hanorin, diziam, ‘hahalokdiák’ – beating to teach good behavior” “In Fohorem, (...) men used to affirm: ‘If a woman becomes lazy, the man beats up on her: the man goes off to work the land, if and when he returns and the children are neglected or there is no food, he beats up on the women. He beats up on the woman who is irresponsible; she just wants to idle; when a woman does not fulfill her role’. Women used to say that: ‘when a man goes to work, the woman has to take care of the children, and cook if not her husband can beat up on her. We agree as this (neglecting of chores) is bad behavior.’ (...) A man also cannot force his wife to obey him against her will. This would be an offense to the woman’s right to have her own opinion and respect within the home – once evidently her will does not imply abandoning her duties.” (p.84). “In Macautar, (...) the logic goes like this - by beating up on the woman, we will understand each other, this was valid for both men and women (…) The group of women agreed affirmatively and added by explaining that a woman can also beat up on her husband to train him. As, however, women are the weaker ones, they normally would punish in other ways by ripping up the men’s clothes when washing or intentionally messing up when cooking. And motives for punishment are not lacking: it was enough for the man to lose his money in cock fights or get drunk frequently. Baku malu, beating – a way of restoring desired behavior. Baku was the way to hahalok diák.” Simião’s interpretation is that men and women share the same understanding: beating is correcting. I believe that the author over emphasizes the category of reciprocal “beating”, even if he informs that beating up on men by women is occasional. There is a methodological trap: he presents what is similar among the subjects: sharing values on reciprocal correction. He does not identify distinct positions in the interactional space that induce to a constant dispute and intense disconsiderations among agents. Methodological debates from a gender perspective According to my perception, as anthropologist, feminist and gender researcher, it is possible to aver that there are aspects of perception that are common to the two genders, however, at the same time, there are evident differences between women’s and men’s discourses. The author only works with similarities. He does not focus his attention on what I consider to be gaps in meaning and divergent polyphonic tendencies 8 between the genders, which could have been made to emerge methodologically. He stresses and underlines common aspects by constructing the idea of a uniform culture in which feelings are presented as lived equally, independent of subjects’ positions and hierarchical positions of gender categories. If we were to list methodologically from Timor ethnographic elements what are feminine activities monitored by male spouses and what are masculine activities monitored by women, we would see that the same differ in scope. Feminine activities that seem to be under masculine evaluation and monitoring represent an intricate set of “almost everything” referring to what women may or may not do: be they chores, outings or rest periods. For women, what pertains in evaluating masculine activities is more precisely monitoring referring to provider functions, especially the demand to work and to not waste money. The said “feminine preference” for hidden strategies in order to apply their power to correct indicates then clearly unequal powers. It thus cannot be affirmed that they are equivalent in the marital space: the exercise of power and attribution of prestige. I wish to address this issue as the first methodological problem that is posed by the debate between feminist and anthropological knowledge: Feminist knowledge indicates the methodological principle of examining situated knowledge and criticizing the methodological presupposition of a single and uniform vision of perceiving sociability relations within any social or cultural borders. In contemporary times and at the risk of simplifying, there is in the anthropological field, at least two forms of understanding methodologically the meaning of “sharing cultural values”: 1) cultural diversity is conceptualized as expressive of a unitary whole metaphorically conceived as an “individual entity”; 2) cultural diversity is conceived as referring to different cultural modalities of establishing social interaction, where social agents are distinct by their perceptions and distinctly guided by their different symbolic actions according to their positions and subjective investments. In this sense, the terms “society” and “culture” cannot be methodologically metaphorized as unitary entities that operate as individual entities. Certainly then anthropological feminist knowledge are included in those forms of anthropological knowledge that think about cultural diversity in which distinct positions of subject/agent are never subsumed by a fixed whole and rhetorically thought of as uniform. The second methodological problem in the dialog between anthropological and feminist knowledge is a fundamental question in which are the modes of articulating gender relations at the various dimensions of social life. The author addresses this methodological issue by opting to situate the thematic of a eventual “marital violence” or “forms of conflicting marital relations” looking for a general thesis of gender asymmetry in East Timor society. The author believes that a thesis on gender asymmetry within marital relations would be only sustainable if validated based on the recognition of an encompassing and operational social asymmetry of gender in all dimensions of East Timor society. The author identifies as pertinent several gender studies (such as Atkinson, 1990) relative to some of the various ethnic cultures in the region as they conclude that gender categories in that geographical area are hardly operational and that there is symmetry in gender in the region (p.24). Once the literature review is carried out and whether or not there are virilocal rules, including payment with gifts or not (according to the ethnic groups), none of these differentiated systems produce a significant asymmetrical gender differentiation, excepted for a general and almost absolute absence 9 of women in the political sphere in community decisions and the possibility to exercise the adat in mediating conflicts. In seeking to find a single reply on the asymmetrical or symmetrical gender relations in a society was one of the traps in western dichotomic feminist thought in the seventies, present still today in some feminist works, but already been criticized. The author is trapped in the permanence of a first feminist reply that gender relations were univocal in all social dimensions and social spheres: encompassing asymmetry, encompassing domination or encompassing power. However this is another trap in western thought given the binary cosmological principle in the distinction between culture and nature through which there is a univocal and unilateral work within a complex set of dichotomic oppositions. Among them, the dichotomy: sex/gender. The author similarly to other first feminist texts, such as Sherry Ortner in 1972, seeks to find a single answer on the mode of gender relations. Whilst Ortner found women’s symbolic universal position as a dimension of Nature and men as the dimension of Culture, Simião looks for one single and encompassed theory, or there is gender assimetry or gender symmetry in all dimensions of life. By consequence he accepts native theories of masculine and feminine vision that men and women in Timor always establish symmetrical relations whether or not they be in spaces for community decision-making or in marital physical correction. It would be also possible to him, based in his interpretation and field notes to conclude through agreed consented (?) asymmetry in favor of men, but, on the contrary, he concludes for gender symmetry turned to truth. East Timor men and women are symmetrical because there is agreement on distinct positions? The women do not speak because they are not allowed to (and this would be asymmetrical) or “because they are less skillful” and “do not have time” (and this would be symmetrical, as men and women agree (?) on having distinct positions. According to a masculine vision, women do not speak not only because men are the holders of the floor (the owners of the word) but because women are “less skilled at speaking’ and men are more skilled since they are more accustomed to having a more rhetorical pose. For them, it is not because women cannot speak. Women are less skilled because they are “hot headed’. Even if the men considered themselves as the owners of the word, and the author has listened to the women only in this mixed “public scene”, he accepts the feminine reasons: they do not participate in the community decision-making sphere because they “do not have time” and because they “feel ashamed’. The author does not even ask about the ambiguous meanings and contradictions in masculine and feminine emotions and expressions that are contrasted and juxtaposed so as to women not speak in public space. The presupposition of equal levels of symmetry or asymmetry of genders in all social dimensions may perhaps be a myth that feeds western cosmology, divided between an imaginary “world of gender equality” and a “world of gender inequality”. If political affirmation of equality between men and women is recent, the legal frameworks, that have legally printed inequality and legitimated in social and cultural memory, are long-lasting, maintaining the idea of “gender natural inequality”. Nothing more today methodologically in gender studies that allows for the unquestionable belief in one single gender logic. Gender logic in diverse dimensions in social life can be multiple and it is important to question how they are articulated. In my view, any hard core principle of coherence should be avoided among the forms of gender relations in diverse dimensions. 10 I agree with the author when he concludes certainly that there are no clear and dual frontiers between perceptions and representations of masculine and feminine agents. All them socialize and belong to a same cultural context and to a same code articulated of meanings. However I consider it quite risky to bet on an interpretation in which there is total agreement between distinct gender positions. I don’t agree with this implied monolithic use of notion of “culture”. It is even more risky to think that “symmetrical agents” could pre-agree in terms of power through asymmetrical forms to “correct themselves”. For some time now in classical literature on feminism, Matthieu (1985), french feminist anthropologist identified that “yielding does not imply consenting” in his response to Godelier (1982), in context of different positions of power. I understand that the case is similar and it is possible to apply the Matthieu’s arguments. All the same, the opposition between yielding and consenting is more effective when we think about the interactional space between agents in dispute and their relation and not as merely valuing expressions. I argue that the focus should be the interactional context of gender relations. To affirm the presence of shared meanings between men and women in present East Timor cultures on the legitimacy of a set of normative morals with distinct duties for men and women in public space and in daily marital relations is not synonymous with agreement on forms of evaluation, judgment values issued or physical corrections practiced. Men and women could share the same division of different duties: for men there are duties as providing family and for women there is that of taking care of the home and children. For both there is belief on mutual monitoring, but focusing on gender interactional, they don’t share the same expectations about being evaluated or respected. If men correct women by beating them or women correct men by tearing up their clothes and intentionally spoiling food, nothing allows us to conclude by any inherent logic in meaning that the evaluations received are well accepted… In the interactional space, subject positions are not equivalent. They are not the same. They are always open both for agreement as well as for questioning. It is does not suffice it to include as Dumont (1977 and 1985) that the classification is also always a value attribute. This has to do with classifications of activities and value attributes that operate in an interactional space in which agency relations (Strathern, 1989 and Descolas, 2005) should always bear in mind subjects’ differential positions and the disputing of attributions. From this perspective, a gamut of resentments and disconsiderations are unequally distributed among those involved. A feminist and a gender perspective in interactional space that privileges the situations of social agents’ differential positions is also a highly desired anthropological perspective: that of respect not only to cultural diversity but also a differentiated position among agents. I understand that are quite distinct the subjective investments for practicing acts of physical aggression, such as perceived by the subject of the act and such as perceived by the subjects who suffer the act of aggression - those who are placed subjectively as the target of aggression. Before going in depth on the male and female meanings of men’s corrective acts regarding women in the East Timor context, I will present a brief overview on new perspectives in gender studies such as those realized by anthropologists who do not identify themselves predominantly as feminists but show how they perceive in nonwestern contexts issues of gender domination and domestic violence. 11 Gender violence from a Melanesian and Amazon perspective Strathern (1988 and 1997) in the dialog between anthropological and feminist knowledge, criticizes the monolithic western vision, including feminist views in that gender forms of domination are universally the same. In the same way, she criticizes western anthropological knowledge that imagines “cultures” to be uniform. In describing Melanesian sociality, she affirms that women’s and men’s positions are different according to crossed sex relations or same sex relations, so that sociality has to do with the person’s position within the network of social relations, men’s and women’s agency depending on relations as husbands, brothers or sons towards wives, sisters or daughters. Reciprocal actions between men and women imply circulation and metamorphosis in feminine and masculine qualities present both in men and women. For Strathern, the gender problem for anthropology and for feminist studies is the researcher’s intellectual supposition that gender is some fixed and unitary issue. And it is not. A Melanesian in his/her “state of rest” would be androgynous or of mixed sex in the sense that this he or she is always derived from the relation between parents. When the person acts in entering a specific relation with another, he/she assumes one pole of identity but he/she always operates in terms of a relation of exchange/gifts. Given this criticism of identity as a fixed gender in constructing a person and given the person’s immersion in relationships, Strathern itemizes that the processes of “genderization” occur through multiple acts of exchange, indeed, even the different forms of objects and domestic animals are “genderized” and appear as feminine or masculine attributes in relations of exchange. Strathern insists at the same time that a Melanesian person is always divided since he/she is always situated among another persons; there is always in the person a “dividual”, a “divided duo”. As a person, he/she is situated in the movement of interaction with the other, as a “wedge”, between two points of reference. Strathern differentiates from the Melanesian person, the form in which the modern individual perceives him/herself and sees him/herself as isolated and autonomous. However, as she also insists, there is always in the Melanesia person, an individual who acts or relates. For being a person, he/she places him/herself in the relationship as a “wedge” between two points of reference. Situating him/herself as a person, at this same act, there is always an individual who acts. There is always individual agency. For Strathern the distinct positions of agencies are extremely complex but always point to distinct positions in the context of sociality. Far from being a uniform society. Her focus is sociality: the interactional space. Strathern underlines a genderized division of labor and a genderized system of gifts, the value of gender complementarity in exchanges. Nevertheless, she does not omit to indicate that in the marital world of sociality, a relation is engendered in which “beating up on the woman” implies masculine prestige and this “beating up on the woman” is a more prestigious condition for the men in masculine community space: hence the replication of masculinity so that they become “big men”. This not only establishes a hierarchical relation between man and woman but within the masculine and feminine categories. If in general beating up on women occurs within marital relations, the visibility of ‘big men’ does really matter in the men’s group’s relations. As a category, they reinforce among themselves the visibility of characteristics of “big men” in beating up on “small women”. In this way, agency’s points of view are distinct given people’s positions in their relations. 12 Strathern distinguishes the forms of gender domination in societies governed by economy of the merchandise from forms of gender domination in societies governed by the system of gifts. A economy of merchandise makes possible the objectifying and reification of persons and objects in such a way that women may also appear as objects, goods and objects of violence. In Melanesian societies, masculine domination established in acts of beating up on women is circumscribed within forms of masculine agency that seek to double men’s prestige within their group due to wife beating. This replication of men’s prestige through beating up on women is a form of gender domination. Even so, that form of domination is not capable to encompass “or explain” all relations between men and women. Strathern’s criticism stands out against the notion of masculine domination as universally encompassing all relations in all societies. However, in spite of her fear in repeating a simplified feminist discourse, she relates and recognizes the set of forms of men’s domination over women through physical acts and humiliating moral acts, directed towards women. Beating up on women and devaluing them through words double men’s prestige over men and men’s among men’s. Although masculine violence is not expressed in an encompassing manner of all masculine domination based upon a supposed universal bipartition between the domestic and public spheres (an inadequate bipartition to encompass Melanesia sociability), masculine domination and violence are present in Melanesian sociality. Further, women’s and men’s viewpoints differ with respect to this sociality. According to Strathern, Melanesian men’s beating up of their women marks therefore a dispute for prestige. If we are far from the coherent and uniform domination of men over women in Melanesia, the prestige contested between genders is what indicates a dimension of dominion of men over women. I argue that one of the effects of feminism’s entry into the field of social and historical sciences is the demand to think about internal diversity within a culture resulting from differently situated positions of their feminine and masculine agents/subjects. The alterity of gender is understood as always operating a fracture in modes of interpreting shared values. Even if shared, perspectives through which they are lived and appreciated are differentiated between men and women. Descolas (2001) follows Françoise Heritier (1996) when he affirms that sexual contrasts are universal instruments in constructing social categories. This does not imply, however, that societies in all locations attribute the same weight in defining gender differences in their social philosophy or elaborate these gender distinctions with the same level of depth. In comparing the Amazon area with Melanesia, he understands that the presence of gender is very much marked in Melanesian societies than in indigenous Amazon societies. The preeminence of a cosmocentric philosophy in which animals (undomesticated) are seen as agents in human relations makes Amazon philosophic concentrations to be made between human relations and non humans and not in gender relations, although they are clearly present in Amazon societies. As in Melanesia, there is domestication of animals and the system of exchange/giving is fundamental, he considers that the preeminence in philosophical elaboration occurs in the relation between humans of the male sex and humans of the female sex. The most sociocentric Melanesian philosophy according to Descolas can explain why flute initiation rites are more commonly found in Melanesia than in the Amazon region, although similar rites are found in some of the Amazon areas: indigenous societies in Central and Northeast Brazil. According to Descolas, societies in these regions emphasize unilineal descent 13 not cognatic descent , as predominant throughout the rest of the Amazon region. As in all societies, nevertheless the symbology of gender is present in the indigenous philosophy throughout Melanesia and the Amazon. For Descolas the plurality of logic (cosmocentric or sociocentric) does not signify that it is not possible to seek its articulation between types of logic as it is understood ‘that the language of affinity qualifies relations between generic categories, men and women, insider and outsider, friend and foe, dead and alive, humans and natural species, humanity and divinity, and at the same time this establishes frontiers between categories and their associated contents”. However, each culture appears as focusing upon a small cluster of this contrastive stock to the detriment of others. The result: the diversity of cultural styles is due to the unifying effect in systems of relations due to the attention given to one or other classification. In other words, if Amazon cultures present similarities in the philosophical elaboration of contrastive elements, the diversity of styles is very present and does not subsume or induce towards an analysis that reduces a sharing of values to unitary relational positions. Among the Achuar, the Amazon people of his ethnography, Descolas affirms that in spite of their being cooperation between men and women in hunting and gardening, hunting and gardening are strongly gender biased activities. Among the Achuar, the division between hunting and gardening is marked by the sexual/gender division between men and women. “Each gender deals with humans and non humans according to their specificities, skills: women transform affinity in blood ties and treat their plants as children; men are in charge of associated relations and try to deal with forest beings as associated beings”. In spite of the focus that Descolas attributes to autonomy and complementarity of the sexes, he states that in his analysis, this autonomy ‘cannot blur the effective and frequently brutal domination of men over women in Achuar’s society. Men are the owners (nurintin) of women: parents and brothers control the destiny of their single daughters and sisters, even if they have to renounce a part of their authority in favor of their tasks after marriage. A married woman is thus subject to several and frequent conflicting rights of authority between their male blood relatives and their related males.” Further, concerning the men the following is said, “they are naturally predisposed to rage, to beat excessively, this is therefore a possibility derived from their tendency.” The expression of this propensity or tendency in native talk occurs particularly “when men are displeased with their women or when they suspect infidelity (p. 99) Descolas points to the dimension of productive cooperation of men and women, the valuing of their specific skills, but presents an entire social dimension of men’s control over single blood-related or other related women and even the legitimate practice of “beating up on women”, especially when displeased with them or when they suspect infidelity… Here, among the Achuar, according to Descolas, there is a close correlation between beating and correcting, punishment and revenge. Physical acts of beating unfold in meaning in conflicts between men and women, in processes that seek to give prestige or discredit even if according to collective meaning, it is expected and authorized that men beat up on women. The meanings of controlling single women’s destiny or to be controlled, even if this control is legitimated, leaves space for a field of disputes between intra-men and intra-women. The distinct positions are not thought about as lived in a single manner, meaning or feeling. Descolas warns on the significance of seeking the plurality of gender logic (complementary, opposite, mixed) but also signals the presence of 14 domination and violence among the Achuar and possibly in several other Amazon societies. Stephen Hugh-Jones (2001) adopts Strathern’s destabilizing experimenting so as to rethink the plurality of the place of gender, given that fixed and unitary places of gender were first considered. He rethinks particularly the plural meanings of masculine initiation rites that involve distinct modalities to articulate feminine and masculine concepts. If the systems of rites are reasonably ordered, “they are also the location of disorder, subversion by describing or stimulating attitudes and behavior that are simultaneously violent, aggressive, terrifying, attractive, exciting and provocative”. He points out that these rituals are acts emotionally charged with an open scenario of Oedipus sexual themes that create an atmosphere of contradiction and moral ambivalence. He is concerned with modes of analytical construction of the anthropologist build up in the dialog with the different performances, the different perspectives of their agents and some way of interweaving them. Finally “their analyses ‘state’ and ‘make’ many things without arriving at some true evaluation”. It would seem to me that his stronger impressions in experimenting the forms of methodology inspired by Strathern’s destabilizing analysis were that of analytically finding a world of contradictory emotions and moral ambivalence. In facing this simultaneity in distinct perspectives and multiple agencies with distinct meanings, he states that he is not convinced of the discussion, conclusion and affirmation on the gender domination made by Strathern. Stephen Hugh-Jones adheres especially to the analytical and methodological plurality of gender logic proposed by Strathern and the plurality of positions and emotional subjective investments, found by him. Based upon this position, he declares that he has not been convinced that there is gender domination. Stephen Hugh-Jones’ reflections lead us to relate analytical constructions with political positions concerning what to conclude on what is a heated discussion for the western world on gender domination. At any rate, given the insertion of dichotomic divisions in the western modern world, he points out how the destabilizing of a perspective on symbolic modes of operation of gender categories exerts an impact. Michael Brown (2001), presents discussions on the need to reflect on the symbology on gender relations and the politics of sex both in pre-colonial as well as in post-colonial times. According to him, there are ethnographies that identify that even before the era of globalization, women in Amazon and Melanesian societies criticized their collective status regarding men and that they were already skeptical of masculine affirmations on male moral superiority. This puts at stake the predominant references in that traditional societies were comprised of submissive women on the whole. He questions whether or not in post-colonial times, women could or will manage to assume more power in public space and more power and prestige in millennium religious movements. For Brown, recent events among the Canela indicate that there may be a contradiction between the increase in women’s religious power and the growth of their relative subordination, since the logic of gender is multiple. Brown highlights the complexity through which men and women can either represent for each other tradition or negotiate with greater lobbying power their positions. According to him, there is no way to foresee or suppose greater or lesser access to power positions be they in internal community relations or in relations with non-traditional societies with a broad scope. According to Brown’s thinking, I understand that globalized world relations intersect with traditional native societies and more and more require cultural diversity to be thought about within its traditional elements and its cosmology (its origins) as well in 15 its current modified state of insertion in the globalized world. The anthropological reflections must seek for the possible and contradictory re-meanings of cultural diversity values in the post-colonial world, focusing methodologically the differential situations of subjects/agents. I argue that if feminist thought in the sixties and seventies was anchored in an idea of universal patriarchy, in many instances dehistoricized, especially in contemporary times, the feminist use of the concept of gender allows to think about the multiplicity of logic and the complexity of power relations in gender. If gender is not only power, but it is a symbolic instrument of a plurality of dimensions in social life, gender is also power and violence. Power and violence as well as other affective and esthetic dimensions are traversed through the symbology of gender. It is possible, in my understanding, and absolutely fundamental, to generate an analysis that respects both a methodological approach to cultural diversity as well as respects the distinctions of gender and agent/subject positions. Instead of searching for ordered and closed totality, it is necessary to seek out the forms of sociality and the forms of establishment of social relations and the distinct forms through which the agents of relations are nominated. In this way, less risks are run to make societies uniform as if they were individual and unitary entities. The forms of sociality have been thought out by feminist anthropologists as fractured in relation to their subjects’ different situations. Within this fractured and situated perspective, feminists are followed by many other anthropologists – postmodern, post-colonial or lovers of ethnography. Contemporary cultural diversity supposes furthermore reflection on cultures understood as dynamic and subject to change, conflicts and intersections with other cultures in a world much more influenced and articulated due to the process of “cosmopolitization”. How not to think then about the ambiguities and contradictions and double senses of the symbolic in gender in marital relations in the most different societies? Thinking about gender violence is to establish forms of comparability in which what matter are, at same time, similarities and radical distinctions. It should not be the search for the confirmation, literally, of the question as to “whether or not there is domination”; or “whether or not there is violence against women”. There are plural forms with plural native meanings that, however, can increasingly make themselves “echo”, speak in distinct ways, some can be articulated, others not, with movements in favor of generalization of human rights, creatively ‘incorporable’ and re-signified by traditional societies. Echoes: between Correction and Marital Violence. Timor and Brazil. Undoubtedly, Simião has lots of arguments so as to affirm that in East Timor’s society it is not the category of violence against women that is used to classify the aggregate of feelings and meanings given to marital physical aggressions. It is a category of correction that is invoked for this aggregate of meanings and feelings. Nevertheless, if correction is a native category used to identify and name the aggregate of feelings and meanings in relation to physical aggressions, this aggregate can also be invoked by the modern category of violence against women because this is where there are reverberations. There are echoes or reverberations because the term violence manages to articulate meanings and feelings between one and another aggregate that violence against women although conforming paradigmatically to bases for thoughts 16 generated from the strong tension between individualist values vis à vis family ones, has managed to expand and to impact. The category of violence against women is not a native category in any traditional culture. It is in fact a dated construction that claims to be able to traverse various cultures and societies, always in dialog and contradiction with their expressive and hegemonic community values. The concept is disruptive everywhere but it is also able “to create a symbolic link” with more distinct aggregate values and correlated feelings with physical and symbolic aggressions of gender. It is a category that interpellates for the re-signifying of gender positions within private space. It interpellates the aggregate of feelings around the gender relations between social agents that belong to a family arrangement in which the values of marital and kin relations and the values of individuals/agents (even if they may be “divided”, as Strathern points out) are always at stake. Within a family arrangement, affectivity circulates in the same circuit of considerations/disconsiderations, prestige/humiliation, conflicts and unequal powers. In agreeing with what Simião affirms, the hierarchies between genders present in the family sphere in East Timor cultures are not the most accentuated whether or not they are compared with other ethnic communities of the region, non-western societies and especially with the west. East Timor society does not rule legally the right to physically punish its women as it was done in western cultures. The East Timor society does not present the same asymmetry or the same idea of subordination, as present in the “memory” of traditional western cultures. However, I understand differently from the author’s conclusion that gender relations are asymmetrical in East Timor in different social dimensions, and that the idea of correction implies in humiliation and can be seen by women as illegitimate suffering, and so, can be articulated to the modern sense of violence. Simião’s analysis contributes to signaling the dangers in feminists’ perspectives that uniformize the concept of violence against women in that there is a loss in anthropological sensitivity regarding diverse cultural modalities and divergences coming from gender conflicts in their different forms of moral and physical-moral aggressions. All the same, Simião does not seem to see the dangers (that feminists hardly would incur) of an interpretation of a “traditional culture’ as uniform as if they were monolithic, strongly anchored around legitimacy without any ruptures and where the differential values attributed to genders would not operate. The value and meaning of physical aggression as correction nevertheless cannot be treated as if it was totally characteristic of sui-generis in East Timor cultures. Descolas posed a question relatively to Achuar’s. Strathern looked at the dispute for prestige among Melanesian men and intra-men through women. On the Brazilian scenario, the category of violence against women is not native, contrary to what alludes the author. This category, increasingly, becomes more native each time it is being associated by women with their feelings and meanings along their experiences in their marital relations. It is a word that is becoming a reference in order to give sense to physical and moral aggression occurred in family (beating, humiliating, physically correcting). To the contrary of the idea that correction is a almost unique meaning of marital beating in East Timor, research studies that I have conducted leave the notion extremely clear that long term native Brazilian meanings present an analogy to the meanings of East Timor culture. Brazilian men talk about beating to correct their female 17 companions. Violence against their women is nothing more than a “native” form of correction, punishment. The hidden strategies of East Timoreans of tearing their cloths and spoiling men’s food in East Timor are similar to the power to complain, make sermons, provoke and carry out revenge present in the forms of secondary power exercised by women in Latin-American culture in censoring their companions (Machado, 1999; Gregori, 1992 , Grossi, 1999 e Fonseca,1987). Tearing men’s clothes or spoiling men’s food in East Timor may indicate that women dispute with men the right most legitimated by the community to specifically comply with men and the latter’s monitoring of women’s activities… The strict and hard meaning given to masculine physical aggressions in a family space as correction is strongly rooted in popular Latin American cultures, a meaning that has been for much time sustained in our legislations and were therefore legal. However, although the impacts of Portuguese colonization in Brazil and East Timor are different, there was some level of indoctrination from Catholicism. It is because of this perhaps that some similarities can be noted regarding the idea of correction and are noticeable in historical terms. If there is not greater investigation, these may just be speculation. Who knows if it is possible at the same time to think about possible distinctions in the meaning? The Brazilian idea of “correction” is perhaps more associated with “censoring” and “punishment’, whilst East Timor “correction” can be associated more with one form of “directing good behavior” as Simião expresses well. Evidently, if there are analogies, the cultural characteristics of their ethnic configurations differentiate them. I will explore here possible analogies. In family conflicts, be they in East Timor or Brazil, moral and physical acts of aggression are involved, at same time, physical forms of employing the infliction of marks to bodies and forms of verbal and gestual communication. Correcting or punishing or censoring have strong moral meanings and always imply making effective a form of communication that seeks to limit or restrict another’s action. Correcting implies forms of consideration and/or disconsideration. If there are aggressions or moral corrections without physical aggression, at no moment is it possible to state that there are intentional aggressions or physical corrections that are not embedded with moral and relational meanings. The acts of insulting and being insulted or of considering and being considered pass both through aggressions or physical interactions as well as verbal aggressions or interactions. These acts are not recognized with the same meaning. Similarly, the acts of imposition of physical force over female or male others, are always interpreted according to meanings in which consideration or disconsideration are present. In family contexts researched in Brasília, the dominant category used to give meaning to physical aggression is that of correction. Even if this meaning is shared by those involved, it does not mean that divergent meanings cannot be attributed, according to positions of the punished or punishers and what feelings of disconsideration are being inserted or felt. I begin with the discourse from two aggressors4: “So , I tried to correct through conversation but it didn’t work and I got to the point of aggression…[…] It was not really an aggression, I tried to get her attention, but she went away, she escaped, the way she escaped, 4 I include examples from accounts from research studies from the Specialized Police for Violence against Women, where I participated in the Núcleo de Estudos e Pesquisas sobre a Mulher – Research Unit for Women’s studies and Research (NEPEM/UnB). Machado and Magalhães (1999) and Machado (2007) 18 this ended up being a pain in the neck…” […] If God were to be my judge, he’s going to have to judge her and not me. I was wrong to have beaten her but she saw too that a man’s honor cannot be ignored […] She knew that she was wrong, she came and then she escaped”. “Our daughters went to a birthday party for a fifteen year old and as it started to get late, I ordered the woman (wife) to get the girls, she said that she wouldn’t be going and that was how it all started.” Correcting is the word used by aggressors in a broad and naturalized sense in that it is their role to always use correction both in cases of any type of disobedience (the second aggressor uses the word order, followed by the non realization of the action expected by the woman) as in cases in which correction is seen as legitimate when it is alleged that women do not see to their men and their daughters’ honor. Among the women battered, the word correction does not appear but the description of scenarios in which men accuse women and monitor their actions. Where men hit in reply to women’s railings or in a situation of jealousy: - ‘What hurts me most, what really leaves me marked is when he says things that I am not, when I did something that I didn’t do. He said that I have lovers and that I go out to work to go after men… I find this very humiliating for a woman to have every time she has to go out, when are you coming home, your husband only wanting you to open your legs to shove in his finger to see if you got screwed by someone.” -“When I begin to talk a lot, he immediately goes for the knife, I became bite of rage, because the first thing he does is to dullen the blade. Well, the motives were drugs, you know? Then, when he starts to use them, I started to fight with him […] The other motives that we had was when he saw me , as he is extremely jealous, he would see me talking to a friend and then…He started…, he wanted to hit me.” “Because I worked as a maid (diarist), once in a while. If I ran late, he would say that I was with another man that I was out picking up guys. I arrived at home, he always said he never believed that I had got a ride with his brother, that I was with a man in the street. Then, when I least expected it, he came with full force and said; I’m going to kill you…” Women’s eyes just like masculine eyes share the recognition that in family relations, masculine expectations are to expect obedience and to not be betrayed. They do not give reason to masculine accusations, but they seem to share the idea that women can be accused of betrayal or jealousy and of not taking care of children. The “marriage contract” is understood as reciprocity between the fidelity of feminine sexuality and the tradition role of men as providers. They distance themselves significantly from masculine eyes regarding the basic value of obedience due. They perceive themselves as subjects that participate in a dispute in values with their companions on how a couple’s life should be developed. They talk a lot, they rail and criticize men’s attitudes and actions, they get jobs, they talk, they go out on the street. They interpret the order given and the monitoring made by husbands, as in fact a unilateral masculine imposition, the defense of their companions’ desires and not as the legitimate meaning that men and women should attribute to the mode approved or inherent to a marital relation. They do not grant the right to men to impose their vision by beating or by threatening. The two-fold vision of anthropologists and feminists led me to pay attention to the differentiation made by masculine and feminine perspectives on violence although they do share the same cultural code in understanding a marital contract and in understanding physical aggression as an act of correction or jealousy. 19 In hearing aggressors in violent marital relationships, it is based upon the marital contract that they make sense of their violent acts: they are considered “corrective” acts. They allege that women have not obey or have not do what they should have done as taking care of children or because they have provoked jealousy. Aggression is always narrated as a ‘disciplinary act”. In research on battered women’s perceptions, it is not difficult to find an idea of a “husband wanting to correct her”, he hit her on her face, but “nevertheless he did not have the right”, and for other women, “he took advantage of physical force” or “he was not right”. Although women share the social meaning of a corrective act, their position is lived in a different way: they understand, they give in but they do not consent. According to my anthropological understanding, it is not possible to think that beating does not come loaded with some moral sense, some communicative message between aggressor and battered, from some dispute of meaning between those involved. The key point able to produce asymmetrical gender positions in marital relations is the legitimate moral authorization coming principally from the idea that it is the man’s prerogative to hit. And even if this may be legitimate and authorized in the eyes of the community, the idea-value of “beating to correct”, the act of beating or being beaten is lived out differently. There can be varying levels of resentment and disconsideration perceived by women. Much is in conflict. For example, what would beating moderately mean and what would be the just motives to be alleged and accepted by husbands for not having beaten their wives when they did not fulfill their duties? Moral resentment even if not deemed as just in the eyes of the community majority, they can be perceived and represented subjectively by women as disconsiderations. The set of aggregate feelings and emotions experienced differently in function of different situated positions, if they had been stressed by the author in his research, could confirm to the contrary the author’s conclusions, that gender relations are not as hardly operational and not as symmetrical as he prefers. Even if physical aggression in a marital relation is not a collective moral insult in the community’s eyes, this does not mean that it should not be in the eyes of battered women, perceived as disconsideration and provoking resentment. I understand that an analytical perspective that privileges the whole and cultural diversity as a coherent and homogenous totality produces a reification of the notion of cultural totality that gender anthropology has been criticizing. In general, in the name of all, there are only masculine discourses – only men speak and are heared -, then these discourses become shared meanings to the eyes of anthropologists as if they were one only armor without meanings differentiated by gender. Masculine has been taken as a paradigm of all that refers to meanings given to physical aggression practiced by men against women. For Simião, in my understanding, the East Timor specialist interviewed, the husband of the wife who wanted a divorce has been taken over by an overall meaning given to the “cultural custom of marital beating”, not as if his speech were just a partial metonym. More than this: this overall sense erases other metonymic partialities in referring to the totality. Women are silenced and they become silent in complete conformity with the community’s space. The wife of the government officer and all the women seem to not have any problem with physical aggression. They are not even moral aggressions or even acts seen as disconsiderations. The problem comes exclusively from pressure from international entities that invent and impose adhesion to the concept of violence against women. The invoking of cultural diversity seems to 20 superimpose itself over any other invocation to pay attention to ruptures or differences between genders. Diverse meanings attributed to violence In Luiz Roberto Cardoso’s provocation, there is a proposal to exercise a logical abstraction between physical aggression and moral aggression. I prefer to understand that the allusion to “pure” physical suffering derived from the intentional act of battery can be “good to think about”. And, immediately, I move on to think about what seems to be significant: the diversity and multiplicity of meanings and feelings aggregated to the physical act of battery or imposing force over another person. Physical acts of aggression can be replete with different categories and experienced as encompassing different aggregate meanings and feelings. The very concept of violence given its semantic plurality can lead us to the discussion on the different forms of aggregating and disaggregating meanings and feelings involved in acts of physical aggression. In reflecting on mediations and on the echoing of different discourses on violence among them , this is what can direct both proposals for designing combating violence programs as for trying to identify the traps in anthropological translations that female and male researchers face. According Zaluar (1999), “violence comes from the Latin ‘violentia’ that refers viz (forth, vigor, use of physical force or the body’s resources to exert its vital force). This force turns into violence when it exceeds a limit or disturbs tacit agreements and rules that direct relations by acquiring a negative or evil energy. It is therefore the perception of limits and disturbance (and suffering that provokes) that will characterize an act as violent, a perception that varies culturally and historically”. (in Adorno, 2002: 88). In talking about the core of the idea of violence refers to the use of force and stating that it is its ill-intentioned disturbance which characterizes the use of force as violence, we are only using the concept of violence in their negativity. In this sense, we are placing the focus only on the position of subjects submitted to violence. It is this negative meaning that is expanding throughout the contemporary period of the civilizing process as Norbert Elias identified. (Elias, 1990 and 1994 and Fletcher, 1997). Thus the social meaning of violence as negativity and the illegitimacy of violence focus the subject’s position, inflicted with suffering. In the contemporary modernity, the value of physical aggression as correction in private space becomes almost forbidden as well as all conflict resolution in private and public spaces. Therefore, the idea of violence as negativity is increasing more and more in modern cultures. Thus, this increases the negativity of the concept of violence. The concept of violence as negativity is applied in a semantic field that is expanding. According to Rifiotis, 2003: “We notice immediately a play with languages in which different types of phenomena come together, being interweaved in a discursive network whose scope is always growing. In our daily lives, we refer to violence in sport, in the traffic, on streets, in prisons or even in relation to precarious living conditions, hunger and obviously in relation to criminality; further, there is violence against women, children, nature, violence in sacrifice rituals, physical, psychological, symbolic, cognitive violence… This series whose configuration rule is invisible can even include: force relations, tensions, hierarchies, social inequalities and conflict situations in general. It 21 is said that all this is contaminated by pests and it is essential to eradicate the same, before they become uncontrollable and dominate everything and all. This is the framework for the paroxysm of violence”. However, I invoke possible understandings of the positivity of the meaning of violence based upon subjects, categories or societies that positively generate acts of physical aggression. The positivity of violence in modernity as social sciences traditionally described violence present in and constituting social and political movements that demand social and political revolutions (Sorel). Moreover, Soares (2003) points to the positive character of violence - it refers to the positive meaning of violence assumed by subjects in practices from groups organized criminally: “The criminal reaction and especially, a violent criminal reaction do not represent a natural, universal response and do not correspond to a logical-rational, ideologically schematized solution [misery and economic inequality]. This reaction only presents itself as a real possibility when incorporated to the intelligible and valued repertoire of a social group’s practices, that is, when culturally accessible and morally assimilated in the universe of symbolic and affective references and in moral codes from specific groups and age segments. (…) Being captured by this psycho-moral-symbolicpolitical-practical web requires some prerequisites for which in my view the hunger to exist, to be welcomed, recognized and valued as a singular person and human being is much deeper, radical, emotive and impacting, more able to sensitize agents, providing them with courses of action and adhesion to alternative cultural and moral configurations than physical hunger even if this may be evidently of great importance at all levels. At any rate, let there be no doubt as to this last aspect so that my position is not reduced to simple idealism” (Soares, 2003: 90). My discussions on juvenile delinquents’ perceptions (Machado, 2004) allowed me to deal with the constitution of a new “warrior ethos” makes violence positive in relation to young people’s rebellion against the world of ingenuity and where values of recognized prestige are recognized only with the use of physical force, courage, bravery and cold-bloodedness against others, values that propitiate the forming of delinquent groups and gangs (Zaluar, 1994 and 2001) and present in the society of the spectacle (Debord, 1967) and the ill-feeling of modernity (Birman, 2000). Even in this culture of exaltation of violence, there are always the counterpoints of resentment (Nafah Neto, 1997). Rosana Alexandre dos Santos (2007) in her study on the political process to approve the Disarmament Statute in the Brazilian Parliament identifies the different positive and negative senses given in the practice of physical aggression with fire arms. The negativity related to violence makes sense within the parliamentary context that defends proposals seeking the ideal of a culture of peace and seeks to reach “pacification” through the ban to prohibit arms commercialization so that civilians do not have access to fire arms. Nonetheless, these proposals do not obtain the conditions possible for approval in Parliament. In this way, an agreement was made to approve a clause to prohibit arms commercialization through a national referendum. Once the referendum is made, the pacification proposal for banning the sale of arms loses. The parliamentary front against disarmament proposes the positivity of physical aggression, proposed for the sake of fire arms use by “men of good” under the pretext of legitimate defense and the defense of relatives. The meaning of positivity of violence in light of these previously mentioned factors and for these “men of good” is present but it is subsumed to the value of legitimate use of physical force and arms in the defense of 22 life and family. The negativity of physical aggression and the use of firm arms are attributed to use by ‘bandits”. It is here denominated and qualified as violence marked according to the semiotics of negativity. The parliamentary front in favor of peace attributes the meaning of negativity to violence due to the use of physical force and fire arms not only to ‘bandits’ but also to use by ‘men of good’. This use was seen by the negative semiotics of violence since fire arms can be used in situations of family conflicts against family members and against women, thus allowing for the effectiveness with which family aggressions can turn into homicides. There is thus a dance between native negative and positive meanings attributed to acts of physical aggression either understood as positive or negative acts of violence or as legitimate acts of defense or protection of family members. What is important to stress theoretically is the attribution of violent meanings, be they positive or negative, this depends not only on the scenarios of specific practices as well as the different positions of subjects “vis à vis” physical acts of aggression and the differentiated position between subjects that nominate the acts of others as violent, and subjects whose acts are nominated as violent. The meanings attributed to physical aggression always vary according to subjects’ position and not only based upon differences in the contexts of practices. This variability in meanings expels the belief of a univocal legitimate meaning given to physical aggression. In my studies on the value of ‘relational honor’, physical aggression understood according to its positive meaning value in facing challenges among men for the sake of honor are practically considered to be positive. It can be said here that violence becomes positive. However, in native discourses a positive value is more present and it is attributed to feelings and meanings related to the duty of acts of aggression concerning the category of honor. This notion is not understand as violence but mainly as forms of exalting power and the obligation to respond to challenges. I think about the positive value of the masculine challenge in which a “good fight” is seen as positive and not as negative and in which the tendency is not to understand these acts of aggression as violence. These “fights” are not even termed as acts of violence and as producing victims even by young people interviewed in quite complex situations such as a hospital emergency room due to stab wounds. They led to believe that they are not victims because they did not really beat up their enemies… It is just that “a good fight is not violence”. Nonetheless, ambiguities in sense immediately surface when they refer to the way in which they are wounded or how they were wounded so much so that it is difficult to think that a “good fight” be seen univocally even by the same subject. The meanings vary but always circulate and dispute other meanings. If a “good fight” may be a location to think about an act of physical aggression with a unitary legitimate moral sense, there is deception. This ‘good fight” also covers a multiplicity of meanings. Conclusion: The prevalence in anthropological production on the notion, that goes by in many instances unperceived, on the reified idea of culture can lead to a proximity with a ‘singular and homogenous cultural whole”, thus prohibiting the explicitation of what are code values and shared meanings. Code values and shared meanings do not impede but rather suppose conflictive interactions and distinct perceptions of subjects due to their different positions. 23 In contrast with the idea of traditional societies as unitary totalities, in anthropological terms, many of the societies or communities considered to be traditional such as African societies or East Timor (Simião, 2005) seem to have as a specific difference from “modern societies”, the triangulation of complex power disputes: family powers, the State and community powers. It is this triangulation that outlines principally the difference for resolutions on the issue of “domestic violence”. The subjects/agents in these societies are not radically distanced from the notion of individual rights or totally immersed in a “holistic tradition”, anthropological suppositions that can be result of translation traps. Thus, in a time of globalization and interpenetration, dispute and articulation of “modern values and traditions” become an illusive desire accuse feminists of perceiving the cultural imposition of the perception of aggression as illegitimate. This accusation implies that anthropological view would be establishing the truth that masculine and feminine perspectives are always the same and equally read with the same “naturalness’ without any distinct aggregation of meanings and feelings of disconsideration or resentment. In perceiving anthropologically community customs as “natural”, equal for all subjects, it seems to imply falling into the trap of “savage slot” (Trouillot, 1991) and into the trap of considering cultures as inert and uniform through a reified cultural totality. This can even give margin to contributing to the arbitrariness of the proposal that “women are the ones who should be the guardians of traditionalism”, given that so many other modernizations and reworkings of other cultural meanings are easily accepted, especially at such moments as in the constitution of a new national state, the case with East Timor. In observing the context of Brazilian society, the feminist invention of the idea of violence based on individual rights did not eliminate the presence of values of “family harmony’ and the defense of family as society’s nucleus cell, so evident as legal “juridical goods” in the current Brazilian Penal Code. In current jurisprudence, the prevalence of the idea of family harmony is still prevalent in spite of changes that have occurred. From the forties up to the start of XXI, there is the dispute between the prevalence of juridical goods: “individual rights”, “family unity values” and “social welfare and social peace”. The challenges for feminist anthropological perspectives are to face the methodological dangers to not reify the concept of culture neither that of abstract and uniform universality nor reproducing the eternal dichotomy between societies purely individual and holistic but to give these concepts flexibilities and compatible porosities through the continuous construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of cultural values relative to gender relations. At the same time, feminist anthropological views at all times demand an analysis of multiple meanings and interpretations and contradictions in which the processes of internationalization of the notion of human rights and economic globalization are being produced and which political and social responses are being outlined, far from any idea of a reified and illusory universality. The category of “violence against women” that sustains the definition of women’s rights as human rights to non violence, should be continuously overviewed so that all the necessary mediations be established together with different cultural aggregates of meanings and feelings that cover the field of interpersonal conflict of gender. The category of “violence against woman” should not be taken as aggregating unitary and univocal meanings and feelings. It is a notion constructed as a subversive and non-closed category because it always generates different reverberations to 24 meanings and feelings experienced through acts of gender aggression whether or not they be only moral, or physical and moral and lived in private as well as public spaces. Modern anthropological knowledge increasingly insists on the importance of overviewing native perspectives on research subjects according to their different situated positions, leading up to question the guarantee that cultures make feelings uniform. If cultural communities are identified with sets of shared values, the diverse positions of subjects in societies and cultures impact on different modalities of their experiences and representations. The construction or social fabrication of feelings does not suppose any uniformity of feelings or the suppression of conflicts. Constructed sociality are always establishment of social ties and conflicts. Thus, social processes of considering and disconsidering and the unequal distribution of privileges are always at stake. The social circulation of privileges occurs at the interactional level with defined symbolic sets of value and hegemonic definitions of what would be legitimate or not. This does not means that subjective readings are multiple. On the contrary, it supposes multiple readings depending especially on differentiated positions of the subject. Western cultures are also diverse and hold contradictions between the values of women’s individual and human rights and the values for the defense of the family unit, social welfare and social peace (they allow for distinct and opposite interpretations) and cultural diversity. If I disagree with Luis Roberto Cardoso’s affirmation in this text in that where there is legitimacy in the forms of physical aggression, there is no moral aggression, I see as extremely pertinent the author’s given proposal to reflect “on the impacts and difficulties of programs for combating violence against women”. 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