words, without any references to direct, physical violence or to harm inflicted by a bullet, capture the embodiment of the multisided violence in the form of poverty and lack of access to decent wages and social services, as well as the mistreatment and humiliations that the poor endure, all of which are part of the everyday experiences in the lives of the ladinas I came to know in Oriente. The violence exposed in Hortencia's words intertwines with more direct forms, such as those inflicted through insults and sometimes physical injuries. Hortencia's story, I learned, was not at all atypical.
A key point in my examination is that the different manifestations of violence are mutually constitutive. Thus the injustices that a despotic regime breeds and that are manifested in overt political conflict are manifested in the micro-processes of life, in addition to being linked to the structural violence existing in the form of profound inequalities in access to well-paid work and social services. At the same time, these inequalities feed into and shape different expressions of everyday and symbolic violence, including social exclusion, humiliation, contempt, self-depreciation, and mistreatment, and make up the very frames that individuals use to guide their actions and understand the world around them. They coalesce with gender and gendered forms of violence to create a context that gives rise to, but also naturalizes, suffering in the lives of women. It is in such a context of “social violence” (Kleinman 2000: 226) that the killings of women, the phenomenon of feminicide, can take place. Thus in order to understand this wave of crimes against women in Guatemala today, I argue, one needs to understand (and recognize) the multiple strands of normalized violence that shape their lives. By focusing attention on different forms of violence in several areas of women's everyday lives, my analysis can contribute to identifying sources of suffering that are so entrenched in the social milieu as to appear part of tradition. Misrecognition, Nancy Fraser (2007) notes, is fundamental to gender inequality.
THE STUDY OF VIOLENCE
Violence has been studied from different disciplinary angles and in different areas of life. At a very general level, most studies typically have centered on the physical, visible aspects of violence, such as injuries inflicted on an unwilling victim by force, although violence that leads to psychological injuries also has been examined. A focus on physical, corporeal injuries no doubt comes from the ease of recording actions that can be counted, categorized, and tabulated. Indeed, in a recent treatise on violence, Randall Collins (2008) notes that the way sociologists have understood and studied violence has been guided by the way data are collected, namely, by examining individuals and their actions. Thus, Collins observes, we have achieved an understanding of violent individuals but not of violent situations. He sees an opportunity for sociologists of micro-processes to make a key contribution to explaining violent situations across varied contexts.
In her overview of empirical studies of violence, Mary Jackman (2002: 388) notes that “a narrow, legalistic concept of agency has led scholars to highlight interpersonal violence.” In Jackman's view, two dominant assumptions have guided most examinations of violence: it is conceived as being motivated by the willful intent to cause harm and is presumed to be prompted by hostility; and it is assumed to be socially or morally “deviant” from mainstream human activity. Indeed, Collins (2008: 4) noted that “violence…is about…the intertwining of human emotions of fear, anger and excitement, in ways that run against the conventional morality of normal situations.” Therefore, Jackman (2002: 388) observes, “violence has come to be viewed as comprising eruptions of hostility that have bubbled over the normal boundaries of social intercourse. When violence is motivated by positive intentions, or is the incidental by-product of other goals, or is socially accepted or lauded, it escapes our attention.”
Thus examinations of violence have tended to overlook other than interpersonal forms, such as those that can reside in social and economic institutions. However concrete, observable, and measurable (see also Collins 2008) the physical injuries that have been studied, they provide only a partial picture of the wide array of injuries that human beings find consequential (Jackman 2002). As Jackman (2002: 393) insightfully notes, what is left out are sources of material injuries: “destruction, confiscation[,]…or loss of earnings; the psychological outcomes of fear, anxiety, anguish, shame, or diminished self-esteem; and the social consequences of public humiliation, stigmatization, exclusion, imprisonment, [and] banishment…are all highly consequential for human welfare.” Often, the effects of nonphysical injuries are more enduring and traumatic than those caused by direct physical violence. For instance, verbal insults that humiliate and denigrate another person can inflict profound, long-lasting injuries that may alter an individual's sense of self, without there being a single punch or any other recognizable form of violence. Jackman (2002) acknowledges that social injuries are the least likely to be acknowledged in discussions of violence, although they are sometimes mentioned, as, for example, when it is argued that pornographic materials are acts of violence against women because they are demeaning to women.3 Ignoring the often nondramatic, quieter forms of injury results in a “patchy, ad hoc conception of violence” (Jackman 2002: 395). I heed Jackman's general call to open up the optic through which we examine violence so as to include and acknowledge the power and consequential effects of indirect forms of violence. Thus I seek not only to include other methods that individuals can use to inflict pain on one another, such as words, threats, insults, neglect, or even the actions of abusive employers. My aim is also to open the lens to include a wide range of sources of pain and injury that are not found in the actions of individuals, though often they are carried out by individuals, but in the “social order of things.”
To accomplish my goal I have borrowed from a number of intellectual traditions and have used a lens that is broad and inclusive. In organizing a framework to help me to make sense of my observations in the Guatemalan Oriente, I have been cognizant of the diverse forms of violence that coexist in the Guatemalan context (see Green 1999). Many of these, mostly in their political form, have been skillfully studied by several scholars, both inside and outside Guatemala (Falla 1994; Grandin 2000; Green 1999; Manz 2004; Nelson 1999; Zepeda López 2005). And though I do not build directly on this scholarship, the body of work these scholars have produced has been influential in helping me to construct my analytic lens and shape my viewpoint. I follow Philippe Bourgois (2001) in including structural, political, symbolic, and everyday interpersonal forms of violence to unravel the interrelated strands that shape the lives of the women I came to know in eastern Guatemala. I add gender and gendered forms of violence as they coalesce in everyday events of life, not only in the extraordinary events of the women's lives. Iris Young's (1990) “five faces of oppression” (exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and random acts of violence) come close to the different facets of violence I include in the framework I have composed. Although these illuminate my work in many ways, I have employed some of these “faces” but not others. Having composed the framework I use here inductively, I have included those aspects of oppression that allow me to grasp the experiences of Guatemalan women more fully.
I also borrow from the work of critical anthropologists, such as Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Arthur Kleinman, and Paul Farmer; and I rely on Pierre Bourdieu's reflections on violence, on Javier Auyero's and Veena Das's writings on noninterpersonal violence in other regions of the world, and on the work of intellectuals preoccupied with the different varieties of everyday political and symbolic violence that coexist in Latin America, such as that of Edelberto Torres Rivas, Ignacio Martín-Baró, and other Latin American social scientists. From these scholars’ writings, I have culled an ample supply of interpretations that focus not only on interpersonal, purposeful, physical, or more evident forms of violence but also on hidden, though equally damaging, forms of violence such as abuse, ill-treatment, neglect, indignities, inequalities, and victimization that take place in the quotidian normality of life. I lay out this framework in detail in chapter 2.4
I also find Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois's (2004: 4) notion, “to ‘trouble’ distinctions between the visible and invisible, legitimate and illegitimate forms of violence in times that can best be described as neither war nor peacetime,” relevant for the case I examine here. As
