Frauke Mennes defends her PhD thesis at Department of Antropology

Candidate

Frauke Tom H Mennes, University of Copenhagen

Title

The Scapegoat: Productions of Violence and Peace in Rural South India

Assessment Committee

• Professor Henrik Vigh
  University of Copenhagen, Denmark (chair)
• Professor Lucia Michelutti
  University College London, United Kingdom
• Associate Professor Bert Suykens
  Ghent University, Belgium

Host

Head of Department, Professor (MSO) Bjarke Oxlund

Time and venue

For invited guests only: The defence will take place in room CSS 35.01.06.

Time: Friday 13 November 2020. The defence begins at 2 PM (GMT+1). The defence is scheduled to last a maximum of 3 hours.

Summary

Over recent years, we have witnessed a marked resurgence of crime in politics, especially in large democracies such as India. Violent and criminal actors participate prominently in political campaigns and elections.

This thesis offers an ethnographic window into the intimate environments in which these politics play out, specifically in Rayalaseema, an area in the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, where they formed the backdrop to highly violent, village-level conflicts between the mid-1980s and the mid-2000s. Based on extended fieldwork in one such village, Chinnacheruvupalli, as well as in wider Rayalaseema, this thesis aims to respond to critical anthropological questions regarding the production of violence in democracies, as well as the production of peace in the conflict’s fragile aftermath.

My ethnography shows how notions of masculine pride (garvam) and kinship moralities are interwoven in a social, and even bodily, intimacy that underpins practices of violence and murder. These practices acquired new importance in the mid-1980s, when a second popular political party was established in Andhra Pradesh, creating a political climate in which violent behaviour became a particularly effective tool enabling political careers in Rayalaseema.

I argue that rather than serving to annihilate an essentially different Other, this violence advances a socioeconomic and political Self. Yet, in order to produce peace, I suggest the Self-interest motivating the use of violence must be discursively denied. Fear of the return of violence, as well as an aspiration to establish prashantam, a ‘harmony’ beyond the simple absence of violence, motivates residents of Chinnacheruvupalli to carefully monitor the understandings of the conflict expressed and performed in public. The dominant narrative constructs violence as something that happened to (rather than because of) the villagers, thus displacing blame and responsibility away from its perpetrators.

At the same stroke, other expressions and understandings of the violent past are silenced – pain and grief, for example, are seldom publicly expressed. I argue that in this way villagers negotiate understandings of violence not only so as to produce peace but also to produce themselves as a ‘moral community’ that believes itself innately ‘good but angry’.

By exploring questions surrounding the production of both violence and peace, this thesis aims to contribute to the political anthropology of bossism and violent politics, wider studies on post-conflict practices of memory, and resurgent interest in social formations and imaginations in the villages of India.