During their lives, each person has contact with violence, whether they are the victim, the perpetrator, an observer, or a combination of these roles. The culture of a certain group of people emphasizes and explains these violent actions in different ways. It can be described from an anthropological perspective as well, but that description can vary from the explanations given within a specific culture. Through a series of interviews with university students, I found that their explanations of violence were actually quite similar to the anthropological perspective. Specifically, both the interviews and the anthropological studies emphasized the relationship between violence and culture, the ways that social structures determine the practices …show more content…
This similarity is important because it was a core part of all their perceptions and one of the first aspects mentioned during the interviews. In anthropological studies, there has also been discussion of other types of violence beyond physical altercations. One example is the story of Chouchou. For him, the military coup in Haiti created “anger…soon followed by sadness, then fear…” (Farmer 269). This mental fear created by the military was later enacted physically when Chouchou was beaten for a remark on public transportation near an out-of-uniform officer. Especially after his beating, the emotional violence caused by the fear and paranoia of the government’s physical aggression remained with him. The violence was not just physical, but also mental as “…he lived in fear of a second arrest…and his fears proved to be well-founded” (270). The government’s stimulation of fear in their citizens had a major impact on Chouchou’s mental state, afflicting him with the mental violence of fear and paranoia. While physical attacks were certainly involved in Chouchou’s situation, it permeated a lingering fear in his mind of future arrest. In this case and others, violence is not just experienced physically, but can be broadened to include other aspects, such as the mental, emotional, or …show more content…
As explained by one student, violence is not always necessarily physical, but can still have physical impacts associated with it. In particular, they provided the example of PTSD. While the traumatic event that caused PTSD may not have been a physically violent action, PTSD is a physical response to it. This broader explanation of violence can be seen in an anthropological sense too. In Anne Fadiman’s book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, the young girl, Lia Lee, is a victim of structural financial violence. The public hospital where she is taken to be helped for her seizures is suffering from a lack of funding and has been “…plagued with financial problems throughout the last twenty years” (Fadiman 24). As a result, the doctors at the hospital were overworked and the necessary translators needed to provide medical information to the Hmong community were absent (30; 41). Even with such a translator, the cultural differences considering healing make it difficult to confirm, for example, “how ‘Your physician has a brain scan utilizing computerized tomography’ was rendered in Hmong” (30). Ultimately, Lia was the victim of the results from the structural lack of funding because her parents were unable to understand the reasons for the medications or how to properly administer them. With more funding, the hospital could