Show Time: The Logic and Power of Violent Display

SHOW TIME

The Logic and Power of Violent Display

Lee Ann Fujii

Edited by Martha Finnemore

Epilogue by Elisabeth Jean Wood

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS    ITHACA AND LONDON

Contents

Preface by Martha Finnemore

List of Acronyms

Introduction

1. Fixations: The Making and Unmaking of Categories

2. Rehearsal

3. Main Attraction

4. Intermission

5. Sideshow

6. Encore

7. Fictions: The Making and Unmaking of Boundaries

Epilogue by Elisabeth Jean Wood

Notes

References

Index

Preface

List of Acronyms

Introduction

1. Fixations: The Making and Unmaking of Categories

2. Rehearsal

3. Main Attraction

4. Intermission

5. Sideshow

6. Encore

7. Fictions: The Making and Unmaking of Boundaries

Epilogue

Notes

References

Index

Preface

Filling another scholar’s shoes is hard, particularly when those shoes are leopard print boots, which is what Lee Ann was wearing the last time I saw her. At the time of her death, Fujii was polishing this manuscript for submission to Cornell University Press. I had seen her give a talk on the book the week before she died (available on YouTube) and knew how good it would be. Like all of Fujii’s work, the project was intellectually eye-opening and urgent. It dove deep into acts of public racialized violence done by and to ordinary people. It asked not just why and how these public displays of violence happen but how processes of enacting public violence transform everyone concerned. Particularly compelling was Fujii’s treatment of racial violence in the United States, specifically lynching, as being of a piece with violence in Rwanda and Bosnia, episodes Americans often treat with detachment, as bizarre events happening over there, to other people. The book needed to be published, but I had no copy of the full manuscript; neither did Roger Haydon at Cornell.

Devorah Manekin, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, supplied the most complete draft we were able to locate, sent to her by Fujii four weeks before her death in March 2018. That version was polished but lacked a conclusion. Elisabeth Jean Wood graciously agreed to fill this void with an epilogue that not only draws together important themes of the book but situates the project in larger conversations and in the arc of Fujii’s work.

Research for the book depends heavily on interviews conducted on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, in Bosnia, and in Rwanda. Fujii thought deeply about interview techniques and the ethics thereof, and the book reflects both concerns. Her detailed comments about the importance and reliability of interviews for qualitative research can be found in the chapter Intermission in this book and in her Interviewing in Social Science Research (Fujii 2017). She conducted her interviews with the aid of research assistants. We know the identity of one of them—Linda Duyer, who is mentioned in the text and who graciously helped answer questions about Eastern Shore materials and made some of these available to us. Other primary sources are briefly described in the section The Data and Sources in the introduction to Show Time.

Fujii followed an informed consent procedure with all informants, detailed in an agreement on confidentiality (technically an Ethics Review Protocol Submission to the Office of Research Ethics at the University of Toronto) that has been made available to us by Antoinette Handley, chair of the political science department, and her colleagues at that university’s Research Ethics Office. As Fujii noted in the original Protocol Submission,

The main risks [to participants] are psychological and social. With survivors and witnesses of violence, there is always the danger of retraumatization. . . . The social risks have to do with making neighbors or acquaintances suspicious or jealous of their participation in a research project and/or their perceived relationship with an outsider (and generally an elite outsider by local standards). I try to minimize these risks by promising anonymity in any published work to all participants. I also promise confidentiality and tell people that I will not share anything they have said to me with anyone besides my research assistant, including government officials.

Confidentiality for interview participants is assured in this instance not only by these binding agreements with the Office of Research Ethics but also because Fujii’s laptop is password protected (as she had agreed to do in the Submission). No one has yet located the password.

Citations to interviews are thus cryptic. Fujii told Haydon by email in May 2014, about an early chapter draft, The cites and the other nomenclature (e.g., ‘Fil’ and ‘Col’) which are ‘code’ for my interview sources, I will clean up toward the end to make the prose readable. . . . I will also include a footnote to explain however I end up citing my interviews. She was unable to complete that work, we do not know to whom the citations refer, and they were not standardized in the version of the manuscript we have. Fujii also used several primary documents. We have left all citations as Fujii presented them in the manuscript with which we have worked. The mixture of sources, and citation challenges they created, vary across the three research sites.

Bosnia: Quotations from Fujii interviews are sourced in text in square brackets, for instance, [Bra #1/2]. Quotations from testimony given at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) are noted in the same form; for example, quotations from the Brdjanin indictment appear as [Brdj XXXX] and are taken from https://www.icty.org/en/case/brdanin. English-language transcripts for all ICTY cases are at icty.org.

Maryland: Quotations from Fujii interviews are sourced in text in square brackets. Some interviews are dated, some are not. In this, the oldest of the case studies, most information comes from local newspapers as well as the recollections of elderly residents of the area and court and inquest testimony. Testimony Given before Coroner Edgar A. Jones, at the Inquest of George Armwood on October 24, 1933 is quoted from Johnny Robins IV private papers, a PDF given to Fujii and Linda Duyer. Access information for this PDF appears in the references section of this book.

Rwanda: Quotations from Fujii’s interviews are sourced in text variously, in square brackets as [Chau #7/8 22] and in parentheses as (Fieldnotes, Dec. 2011), sometimes dated and sometimes not.

We could not have undertaken this task without the gracious permission and assistance of Carey Fujii and the Fujii family. They, and a great many friends of Fujii’s, helped with the search for a polished manuscript. In the end, it was Dvora Yanow who put us in touch with Devorah Manekin and alerted us to the existence of this version. Grants and material assistance from an array of sources supported Fujii’s research and writing. Those we know of are the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, the Ford Foundation’s Diversity Fellowship program, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the University of Toronto’s Connaught Fund, the United States Institute of Peace, and George Washington University’s Dilthey Fellowship program.

Lee Ann herself would have had a very long list of people to thank for the many, many forms of assistance and kindness that go into any research project of this size. She was always generous about giving credit. We can only hope that you know who you are and regret we are unable to acknowledge so many of the people who made important contributions to the creation of this book.

Martha Finnemore

Acronyms

BCS Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (language)

Brdj. Brdjanin indictment at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The indictment appears at http://www.icty.org/x/cases/brdanin/trans/en/990712IA.htm .

CDR Coalition pour la défense de la république. Radical wing of the MRND party in Rwanda.

ICTR International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

ICTY International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia

JNA Jugoslovenska narodna armija. Yugoslav national army.

MDR Mouvement Démocratique Républicain. Rwandan political party founded in 1991.

MRND Mouvement Révolutionnaire National pour le Développement. Ruling party in Rwanda, 1974–94, led by Juvenal Habyarimana.

NDH Nezavisna Država Hrvatska. The independent state of Croatia, created in 1941.

PSD Parti social démocrate. Opposition party based in the south of Rwanda.

RPA Rwandan Patriotic Army. Military wing of the RPF.

RPF Rwandan Patriotic Front. Ruling party in Rwanda since 1994, led by Paul Kagame.

RS Republika Srpska. Proclaimed a sovereign state 1992–95. Since 1995 one of two political entities comprising Bosnia and Herzegovina.

SDA Stranka demokratske akcij. Muslim party in Bosnia, headed by Alija Izetbegović.

SDS Srpska demokratska stranka. Serb nationalist party in Bosnia.

Introduction

A man is dead. Everyone knows who did it. Just as everyone knows who added a few extras as they killed him: a gratuitous kick, some well-chosen words, a finger cut off as a prized souvenir. Many cheered as the scene unfolded; others gawked in amazement, while a few looked away, not wanting to see more.

The people responsible for the killing are the man’s neighbors, many of whom exchanged hellos with him each morning. Daily greetings are like ritual in small communities. They mark time and space, drawing boundaries between those who belong and those who do not. Here, as elsewhere, people live like families do—with gestures of kindness and generosity, but also with long-standing resentments, jealousies, and prejudices. Most resentments and jealousies are personal while prejudice, by its nature, is impersonal. Rarely, however, had any of these sentiments erupted in violence, let alone in murder.

The day after the killing, people talk amongst themselves, some to brag, others to hear what they missed. Many stay quiet, shocked or cowed into silence. Time passes. Years, decades. The talking ends, yet details persist. They remain stuck in people’s minds, like flies trapped in amber. No one who was there can ever really forget, for memory has a life of its own. Some remember what they saw, others what they heard. Many try not to remember at all, because doing so may implicate their families in ways they would rather not face.

In Bosnia, this scene occurred against the backdrop of nationalist wars that vivisected the country then known as Yugoslavia. In Rwanda, the context was genocide, a campaign of mass murder aimed at exterminating an entire category of persons. In the United States, the setting was the Jim Crow South, where white supremacy ruled through law, custom, and violence. Taken singularly, each episode evokes a particular history and setting. Taken together, they raise similar questions. Why execute a man in such a drawn-out way? Why go to all the trouble? Why include extralethal acts, such as mutilation and degradation? Why not just shoot the man and go home? And why do all this with so many neighbors in attendance, laughing and cheering with delight? The answers lie in how we view these incidents. I argue that each is an instance of violent display. Violent displays are collective efforts at staging violence for people to see, notice, and take in. This book investigates specific episodes across diverse contexts with the aim of explaining and theorizing how and why collectives of all sorts—neighbors, nationalists, and nobodies—express themselves by putting violence on display. The main contribution is to shine a light on an underappreciated dimension of collective violence: the critical importance of embodied action in transforming how people see and experience themselves and others. But for bodies moving and acting in particular ways, these displays would never come to be; nor would they have the power to draw in new audiences over time and place.

The Concept

What does it mean to put something on display? Rendering something visible is not about revealing that which is hidden, but bringing to life that which exists in the imaginary (Goldstein 2004; Handelman 1997; Taylor 1997, 2016). Display makes the imagined real by giving it materiality, visibility, and three-dimensional form. In doing so, it draws attention to certain realities while keeping others hidden or tucked away in the background. By structuring what people see, displays simultaneously structure what people do not see (Ferme 2001).

When actors put violence on display, they are bringing to life ideas about how the world should be and more specifically, how it should be ordered—who should have power and who should be included and on what basis people should claim belonging. Defined as a collective effort to stage violence for people to see, notice, and take in, violent display is both a social and aesthetic affair. The term collective points to the highly social nature of this act. When putting violence on display, people work together, not at cross purposes. The notion of staging means that participants share a general concern for creating a certain "look and feel" through the display process. For people to see, notice, and take in means that actors have a sense of playing to an audience or to multiple audiences at the same time. These audiences might include those present at the scene physically (spectators) as well as more distant publics throughout the world.

The key element that constitutes an episode as a violent display is staging, a theatrical term that refers to how the director physically arranges bodies, objects, lights, sound, and set pieces to create a particular stage picture. Just as in theater where the possibilities for staging a play are nearly limitless, violent displays, too, can take many different forms. Staging might involve forcing bodies to enact crude, pornographic scenes, as American soldiers did at Abu Ghraib when they made prisoners create naked human pyramids (Danner 2004; Fisher 2004; Norton 2011). It can also involve precise positioning of bodies, as when ISIS videotaped the beheadings of American hostages James Foley and Steven Sotloff and British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning. To record these murders, ISIS members scouted the location, set up multiple cameras, adjusted the lighting, shot the scene from different angles, then edited the various takes before uploading the videos to the internet (Callimachi 2014)

Staging might also involve choreographed movement and forcing people to don costumes and props. In Nazi-occupied Belarus, for example, German soldiers forced six thousand Jews to enact a mock parade commemorating the Bolshevik Revolution. The soldiers had the prisoners wave Soviet flags, sing revolutionary songs, and smile for the camera as they paraded in two columns. At the end of the parade, the soldiers killed the captives en masse (Snyder 2010, 225–26). Perpetrators, too, might don costumes and props and put themselves in the scene. One of the most infamous photos from Abu Ghraib shows Lynndie England gesturing with her hands toward a line of naked prisoners forced to masturbate in front of her. A cigarette dangles from her mouth, adding to the mocking tone of her stance.

Another form of staging is showcasing souvenirs taken from a violent encounter (which may or may not have been a violent display) (Bourke 1999; Sledge 1981; Wood 2009). These mementoes might include body parts, such as the skull of a dead Vietnamese that General George S. Patton III, son of the famed World War II general, kept on his desk during the Vietnam War (Turse 2013, 264); or photographs of the violence, such as the thousands of pictures that soldiers at Abu Ghraib snapped of the prisoners at their most degraded. Actors might also showcase entire dead bodies. During the Dirty War in Argentina, one of the favorite practices of the junta was to disappear alleged subversives by snatching them off city streets in broad daylight. After torturing and executing their victims in undisclosed locations, the junta would reappear their dead bodies by leaving them in places where people would be sure to see them, such as on sidewalks or in trash cans (Taylor 1997, 98).

Despite varying in all manner of ways, violent displays share a common logic—one that is focused on aesthetics. When actors put violence on display, they are creating a certain look and feel that engages the body and all its senses: sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. From American soldiers at Abu Ghraib to ISIS in Syria, Nazis in Belarus, and the junta in Argentina, actors do what they do in the way they do to create an immediate, bodily experience for all who participate as well as those who look on from afar or after the fact.

The Puzzle

The puzzle of violent displays is why they occur at all, given the risks and costs. One of the biggest risks is undermining larger political goals or interests. The sexual tortures that American soldiers inflicted on Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, for example, were not simply detrimental to the reputation of the US military; they also harmed US-Iraqi relations at the very moment when the Bush administration was trying to rebuild the country after toppling Saddam Hussein (Hersh 2004).

Violent displays might be counterproductive in other ways as well. They may draw the wrong kind of attention to the region or town where the displays took place. Lynchings in the United States, for example, tended to provoke virulent criticism and condemnation of the communities where they occurred (Carr 2006; Phillips 2016; Smead 1986; Tyson 2017). This negative attention had far-ranging economic and social ramifications. As Arthur Raper (1933, 41–42) concluded in his study of all mob executions that occurred in the United States in 1930: The lynchings focused attention on these communities, not as places where labor conditions are settled and life and property are safe, but rather as places where human relations are unstable and life and property are subject to the whims of a mob. Every lynching gives unfavorable publicity not onto the immediate community involved, but to the whole section. More recent studies support Raper’s claim. Cynthia Carr (2006) argues that the double lynching of Tommy Shipp and Abe Smith in her hometown of Marion, Indiana, on August 7, 1930, is the principal reason why Marion never developed economically over the ensuing decades. Patrick Phillips (2016) tells a similar story about Forsyth County, Georgia. He argues that a 1912 campaign of relentless antiblack terror stymied local efforts at developing the county economically and transforming the county seat into a regional hub.

Putting violence on display is also costly at the organizational, institutional, or group level. It takes time, energy, and resources to pose dead bodies, stage a mock parade, or cut off body parts as souvenirs. Resources are always in limited supply, particularly during wartime when engaging in violent display means diverting energy and attention from other tasks and priorities. Such diversions can be counterproductive to campaigns that put a premium on speed or efficiency, such as mass killing or ethnic cleansing.

Putting violence on display is also costly on an individual level. Participating can exact an emotional and psychological toll that can last a lifetime (Fair 2016; Stone 2004, 57; Vietnam Veterans Against the War 1972). Numerous memoirs and testimonies from former soldiers who served in Vietnam and Iraq, for example, attest to the psychological, emotional, and physical costs of committing atrocities, many of which fit my definition of violent display. Varnado Simpson, for example, was a soldier in Charlie Company, the unit that committed all manner of atrocity against unarmed civilians at the villages Americans called My Lai. Before taking his own life at the age of forty-eight, Simpson lived as a total recluse, having literally locked himself inside his home, taking numerous medications as a result of his wartime activities (Sim 1989).

Putting violence on display also entails individual risks. Participants can face censure, demotion, reprimand, prosecution, and even prison time. One of the first to stand trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), for example, was Duško Tadić, accused of committing atrocities at the Omarska prison camp. Similarly, the American soldiers responsible for committing sexual tortures at Abu Ghraib also learned firsthand the risks of putting violence on display. The US Army eventually tried and sentenced eleven of the soldiers and reprimanded, demoted, and dishonorably discharged others. Several officers also received reprimands and demotions (though only one was tried but was later acquitted of all charges) (CNN Library 2016).

Given these risks and costs, the puzzle of violent display is why they occur at all, especially when the option to engage in less show-y forms of violence remains. In fact, in many situations, un-displayed violence may be just as or more effective at helping actors to achieve their goals than violence put on display.

The Argument and Theory

I argue that despite these risks and costs, actors put violence on display because such displays can do things that undisplayed violence cannot. By putting violence on display, actors are telling others who they are. In this way, violent displays reinscribe what it means to belong to a specific category, group, or side and make going along with the violence the basis for belonging. They also enable actors to bring to life a new political order and to broadcast power, authority, sovereignty, and other political claims in the most graphic terms possible (Richards 1996).

This argument draws from an eclectic literature on violence, performance, and race and ethnicity. Its singular contribution is to expand the analytic lens to view violence as a process of group making rather than a product of groups; to examine how all those on the scene make a moment special, rather than focus solely on those committing physical violence; to take seriously the effects beyond actors’ intentions, such as inscribing meaning and transforming how actors see and experience themselves.

In this effort, the book draws insights from scholarship that points to the strategic value of putting violence on display. Actors in a civil or interstate war might use violent displays to issue warnings or to punish defectors to a rival side (Grossman 1995; Kalyvas 1999, 2006). Armed groups might also use violent displays to give the impression of greater military strength than actually exists, as the RUF rebel group did when it began cutting off the arms and hands of villagers during the war in Sierra Leone (Coll 2000; Richards 1996).¹ Putting violence on display might also enable actors to demonstrate their compliance, devotion or enthusiasm to those in power (Hinton 2002; McCord 2001; Su 2011); and/or to induct new recruits into the norms and expectations of their group or organization (Checkel 2017; Cohen 2016; Rodgers 2017; Theidon 2007).

In addition to its strategic value, violent display might also be important for its expressive capacity. Actors might put violence on display to talk back to those in power, for example. During the Vietnam war, when the men of Charlie Company tortured, burned, and raped their way through My Lai with abandon, they were sending a powerful rebuke to the military command and its obsession with body counts as the only measure of success in the war (Fujii 2013). At the same time, the men were also talking back to the elusive Vietnamese enemy, which fought the war not through open battles but hidden booby traps, minefields, and ambushes (Greiner 2009).

Scholars have also offered possible answers to the related question of why actors would participate in a violent display, especially one that features overkill or more force than is necessary in a given moment. For Randall Collins (2006, 2008), the answer lies in a specific situational dynamic that he calls forward panic. Forward panic occurs when pent-up tension and fear in a conflict situation (such as war) can finally be released. In these moments of release, soldiers do not retreat quietly but instead surge forward in an emotional rush, which generally involves a frenzy of aggression and using more force than is necessary. Collins uses forward panic to explain such incidents as the US attack on Hamburger Hill during the Vietnam war (Caputo 1977) and the Rape of Nanking during World War II. Stefan Klusemann (2010) builds on Collins’s theory to explain Ratko Mladić’s order to have all the male refugees at Potočari (near Srebrenica) killed after the UN peacekeepers surrendered to him.

This body of work provides an important starting point for the study. Violent displays may well have both strategic and expressive value. Microsituational dynamics might also be key to explaining certain outcomes of violence, such as displays that feature more force than is necessary. Many questions remain, however. What explains violent displays that seem to undermine rather than serve larger goals or displays that occur outside forward panic? The guards at Abu Ghraib, for example, were under orders to soften up the prisoners for interrogation; no one ordered them to subject the detainees to endless sexual tortures, which resulted in little to no actionable intel. In addition, the men were not releasing pent-up tension or fear when they forced prisoners to degrade themselves while they snapped endless pictures to amplify the humiliation.

Similarly, when actors use violence to talk back or when they do find themselves in a situation of forward panic, why do actors respond to the same situational dynamics in such different ways? The men of Charlie Company, for example, responded to the situation at My Lai in varied ways. Some soldiers shot at people, animals, and structures while hooting and hollering while some wandered through the carnage without firing a shot. Some raped women and burned hooches but refused a direct order to fire into a group of villagers (Fujii 2013; Hammer 1970; Hersh 1970).

The framework I adopt focuses on the performative dimensions of violence—or the importance of doing things in a particular way in a particular context because such actions constitute a particular identity (gender, national, local) and order, rather than just referencing those ideas (Butler 1999; Taylor 1997). In much the same way, certain speech acts—I do or I bet—uttered the right way in the right moment constitute actions in their own right, rather than simply describing or referencing those actions, as John Austin (1962) points out. Viewing violence and violent displays performatively means paying attention to what participants do with and through their own and others’ bodies. By participants I do not only mean those shooting a gun or wielding a machete. I mean anyone and everyone who takes part in whatever way they take part, such as those who bring a rope or gasoline to the scene, gawk or jeer at victims, cheer on others, snap and circulate photos of the scene, or grab a souvenir and show it off later. In addition, participants might include the unwitting passer-by or neighbor who, by dint of their proximity to the scene, cannot help but see and hear what is happening. I analyze the sum total of these actions, rather than parsing them singularly, to understand how collectively doing things in a particular way helps to generate a special occasion or mark off the moment as special (Burke 2005). Gauntlets and manhunts, for example, are not just opportunities to beat or chase others; they are also occasions for taking part in a special type of collective act.

By focusing on the meaning-making power of embodied action, I seek to add to a large literature that explores how actors perform social identities such as fascist, citizen, nation, or gender (Berezin 1997; Butler 1999; Goldstein 2004; Guss 2000; Hinton 2005; Jarman 1997; Taylor 1997). I also draw on theories of the body that point to the ways the human body can signify larger, more abstract, social bodies and the relationship between these two different kinds of bodies (Foucault 1995). As Mary Douglas (1966, 1996) points out, the human body does not just represent anatomical concepts; it also signifies the social values, distinctions, taboos, and boundaries that order daily life. The physical body, she observes, is a microcosm of society, facing the centre of power, contracting and expanding its claims in direct accordance with the increase and relaxation of social pressures (Douglas 1996, 80). Douglas’s insights could not be more applicable when talking about violent displays. Through violence enacted through and with the individual bodies of victims, violent displays can simultaneously speak to larger, societal concerns about order and ordering, such as who should have power and who should not, which segments of society merit which rights and privileges over which others, and which parts of the social body should be amputated or excised completely.

The body’s communicative power stems from its capacity to stand in for entire categories of persons. This capacity is not limitless. As Douglas (1996, 69) points out, The social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived. It is social bodies that invest physical bodies with various kinds of meaning. These meanings are not random or fixed. On the surface, they may appear static or taken for granted; but underneath often lie contradictory layers. These layers are evidence of the emergent nature of meanings and the meaning-making process more generally. Meanings are always in the process of becoming; they are never endpoints. They do not adhere or affix to bodies in unproblematic or automatic ways, for no body comes premade or prepackaged in a particular category. Rather, social bodies construct and deconstruct notions of rich or poor, foreigner or native, real or unreal Serb, and other distinctions through everyday interactions as well as extraordinary moments of collective violence, such as violent displays. Violent displays are not necessarily about affirming extant understandings about what it means to be white or black, Tutsi or Hutu; often, they are radically rewriting what it means to belong to a given category. What it means to be white before a lynching is different than what it means after taking part in one.

Violent displays create new meanings by harnessing the fungibility of the human body—its capacity to stand in for larger social bodies and entire social categories. Putting violence on display turns the body of the victim into a stand-in for an entire imagined category of persons. The body becomes a canvas for the whole, such that what perpetrators carve on one (individual body) is automatically inscribed on the other (collective body). In this way, the body serves as both content and carrier, billboard and slogan. It is both the object of display as well as the medium for inscribing meanings.

In addition to constructing or rewriting what it means to belong, violent displays also transform and reconstitute actors in new and novel ways. The process of putting violence on display can certify participants as members of a group, such as a mob, fraternity, street gang, or army. Indeed, this is precisely the reason that many organizations use violence to induct new members and to socialize them to group norms and expectations (Checkel 2017; Cohen 2016; Garot 2007, 2010; Winslow 1999). In addition to constituting participants