The construction of Dominican state power and symbolisms of violence

• Published in: Ethnos Vol. 62; no. 3-4; pp. 49 - 78
• Main Author: Krohn-Hansen, Christian
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basingstoke Taylor & Francis Group 01-01-1997; Taylor & Francis
• Subjects: America; Antecedents; Conflict; Cosmology; Dominican Republic; Ethnology; Hegemony; Masculinity; National Identity; Nationalism; Political violence; Power; Social organization, political organization and power, relations with the State; Social structure and social relations; State; State Power; States; Symbolism; Terrorism; Violence; Century 19-20; Dominican Republic; Central America; Greater Antilles; Leadership; Male power; Political power; Myth; Formation of the State; National identity; Demon; State Management; Symbol; Hegemony; Magic; Purity; Ritual; Gender; Military power; Repression; Moral Values; Coercion; Origin of the State; Political domination; Bloch (M.); Political Violence
• ISSN: 0014-1844; 1469-588X
• DOI: 10.1080/00141844.1997.9981552

Maurice Bloch has argued that, under certain circumstances, aspects of a particular cosmology can become an idiom for expressing and justifying the necessity of using bodily violence in relationships of domination and subordination. This article seeks to develop this key idea with the aid of historically and ethnographically specific material from the Dominican Republic. The author attempts to show that both hegemonic Dominican nationalist imagery and hegemonic Dominican masculinity imagery contain certain - different - ideas about conquest. These ideas have supplied idioms for the legitimation and exacerbation of state violence and terror. The article also argues that symbolic and social complexes familiar to anthropologists under the labels of 'religion', 'nationalism', and 'gender', can furnish idioms for the legitimation of the illegitimate. We should not primarily conceptualize and study forms of political violence as phenomena outside a daily and ritually constructed reality of a particular kind, but, on the contrary, as practices and meanings which belong to a cultural, social, and political logic.