The Meaning of Violence

• In Event: Interpretive Approaches to Political Science

Abstract

This paper highlights how the interpretive approach is particularly well-suited for analysing situated meanings of violence and argues for the use of ‘embodied writing’ as way to write up interpretive work in a sensorial way. Drawing on the process of developing an interpretive approach to an extensive fieldwork study with Danish jihadist foreign fighters, it discusses the process of interpretation of violence and the ethical considerations involved at multiple stages.
Firstly, it argues for the interpretive approach’s unique suitability in analysing situated meanings of violence because of its methodological principle of bracketing truth claims and approaching the research process with an openness to the emergent nature of analytical themes, rather than through a reproduction of potentially unhelpful etic frameworks. It highlights how the odd relationality of the analytical themes - violence and ethics - as both contradictory and enabling of each other, allowed each analytical category to support the analysis of the other, while assuring that neither became too rigid and ‘neat’. This part also provides considerations on how an interpretive approach allows the researcher to navigate ethical considerations situationally and analytically in a reflexive way, and thereby seeks to contribute to efforts to include actor-perspectives into research on extremist violence as well as other participant-sensitive topics.
Secondly, it presents an argument for more ‘embodied’ writing up of data that better communicates the embodied nature of these meanings, as a form of resonance. Given that interpretations are subjective texts in the sense that the reader either grasps an interpretation or does not, there is a subtext to the provision of this sort of information that goes beyond the purpose of elucidating situated meaning, but rather seeks to convey the sense of ‘being there’ that is so crucial for contextualising interpretations. William Braud and Rosemarie Anderson (1998: 73) suggest that the concept of ‘resonance’ captures how research has the capacity for immediate apprehension and recognition of an experience spoken by another as relatable. Rather than place emphasis on thick descriptions of how participants relay violent experiences, this paper argues for the adoption of a writing style that allows the reader to make a less rational and more sensorial sense of their descriptions. This part engages Thomas Csordas’s (1990, cf. 1994) warning against dealing analytically with the experiences of the body without much sense of bodylines in the analyses. If the phenomenological claim is true, that meaning may arise from a sensorial experience, the best way to accurately communicate such meanings may be by activating the interpretational ability of the reader’s own senses. The aim is then not to place the reader in the stead of the analyst, but rather in the stead of the participant, in order to understand both what meaning participants ascribe to fighting, but also how meaning arose from those experiences, by gaining some ‘sense’ of them. Furthermore, this approach to ‘embodied writing’ relates to Vivian Sobchack’s (2004) argument that because ethics emerge first corporeally as sense-ability and response-ability, it is exactly our reversibility as subject and object when we interpret that provides us the foundation of recognition of others that establishes the possibility of ethical relations. By doing so, it adds to the conversation about how to communicate interpretive insights given the close association in interpretive work of writing style and validity claims.

Author

• Maja Touzari Greenwood, The University of Edinburgh