The Construction of Dominican State Power and Symbolism of Violence

Ethnos
ISSN: 0014-1844 (Print) 1469-588X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/retn20
The construction of Dominican state power and

symbolisms of violence
Christian KrohnHansen
To cite this article: Christian KrohnHansen (1997) The construction of Dominican state power
and symbolisms of violence , Ethnos, 62:3-4, 49-78, DOI: 10.1080/00141844.1997.9981552
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.1997.9981552
Published online: 20 Jul 2010.
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The Construction of Dominican State

Power and Symbolisms of Violence*
Christian Krohn-Hansen
Downloaded by [El Colegio de Michoacn, A.C.] at 22:17 03 October 2015
University of Oslo, Norway
Maurice Bloch has argued that, under certain circumstances, aspects of a particular
cosmology can become an idiomfor 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', canfurnish 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.
n this article, I seek to support the claim that historically and socially situated cosmology - taken very loosely to mean 'culture', i.e., a repertoire of
symbols and meanings produced and transformed in, and as, practices supplies the idioms in which violence is explained and justified, or in which
the illegitimate is legitimated.1 Under certain circumstances, I shall argue,
particular features ofhegemonic cosmologie visions - features of religion, the
political collectivity's (for example, the nation's) history, and gender imagery
- can become vehicles for communicating and 'sanctifying' the necessity of,
or the life-giving strength and control believed to result from, the use of
bodily violence in relationships of domination and subordination. Max
Weber argued that the modern state is definable as that element of society
ETHNOS VOL. 62:3-4, 1997
Scandinavian University Press, pp. 49-78
50
CHRISTIAN KROHN-HANSEN
which has the legitimate monopoly of violence. We should ask the obvious
questions: how can massive and extreme violence be converted into legitimacy,
into culturally sanctioned relationships of power? How can reason (understood
as the particular rationality of the social world achieved through certain relationships of power cum meanings) and 'meaningless' violence co-exist? What
is authorizedpowerto both dominant and dominated if not bottomless ambiguity - like 'sacredness', or, as Taussig (1992^63) says, like a fetish, which is
surrounded by worship and fear, love and awe, in equal measure?
I will discuss features of a specific historical and ethnographic case: the
construction of Dominican state power in the second half of the nineteenth
and in the twentieth century. The construction of Dominican state power
embraces a particular history of dehumanizing violence perpetrated by the
Dominican state - and 2. particular history of social and cultural production
of legitimacy among Dominicans. I shall in particular attempt to shed light
on certain connections between the construction of legitimacy in Dominican society (or inside the imagined Dominican national community) and the
Dominican state's use of grotesque, massive violence in the (internationally
relatively little known) Haitian massacre of 1937.
In addition to investigating the construction of Dominican state power in
terms ofDominican-Haitian violence, I shall also attempt to examine certain
aspects of the Dominican state's use of terror against its own citizenry. Specifically, I will discuss certain connections between masculinity imagery and
state repression.
It seems fair to claim that previously anthropology, with a number of exceptions, did not typically study ethnographically connections between culture/cosmology, state power, and state violence in different contexts.2 None
the less, anthropology has registered a considerable increase in studies of the
relationship between culture and violence, and the discipline now possesses
a body ofliterature which in particular discusses aspects of relations between
meaning formation, the construction of modern state power, and the perpetration and suffering ofbodily violence and terror (Taussig 1984,1987,1992a;
Kapferer 1988; Feldman 1991; Coronil & Skurski 1991; Warren 1993; Daniel
1994,1996; Malkki 1995).3
One work of central importance to the anthropology of state violence is
Maurice Bloch's recent book Prey into Hunter (1992). This book contains a
universal theory of ritual which states that there is a central minimal structure
or 'core' to ritual processes. It argues that a symbolism of violence or conquest is built into the central minimal structure of rituals, and that in this lies
ETHNOS VOL. 62:3-4, 1997
The Construction of Dominican State Power and Symbolisms of Violence
51
the explanation for the circumstance that religion - or discourse on the sacred - so easily furnishes an idiom, and produces a legitimation, for actual
political violence in a whole range of societies. Bloch discusses linkages between ritual symbolism and the possible legitimation of political violence
only in historical and small-scale societies - not in direct relation to how to
conceptualize connections between constructions of modern state power
and cultural constructions of state violence.
In its narrow sense, the argument in Prey into Hunteroffers an explanation
of the symbolism of violence which is present in many religious phenomena.
Rituals in a great many societies appear to deny the transience of life and
human institutions. Bloch argues that rituals enact this denial by symbolically sacrificing the participants themselves, thus allowing them to participate in the immortality of a transcendent entity. Such sacrifices are achieved
through acts of ritualized violence, ranging from bodily mutilations to the
killing of animals. Ultimately, Bloch can be said to establish a connection
between a ritual construction and the universal human constraints connected
with the processes of birth, growth, reproduction, ageing and death:
[The] irreducible structures of religious phenomena are ritual representations of
the existence of human beings in time. In fact this ritual representation is a simple
transformation of the material processes of life in plants and animals as well as
humans. The transformation takes place in an idiom which has two distinguishing
features:first,it is accomplished through a classic three-stage dialectical process,
and secondly it involves a marked element of violence or (to use a term less familiar in our society than in many of those discussed here) of conquest. I shall refer
to this process as the idiom of'rebounding violence' (Bloch 1992:4).
Central significance is attached to the symbolism of violence in the third
stage of rituals, the one which concludes the entire transformative process by
marking the return to the here and now from the liminal or the transcendental: 'the return to the here and now is really a conquest of the here and now
by the transcendental. In the case of initiation, the initiate does not merely
return to the world he had left behind. He is a changed person, a permanently
transcendental person who can therefore dominate the here and now of which
he previously was a part' (Bloch 1992:5). As Bloch sees the ritual process,
therefore, the third stage is not a return to the condition left behind in the first
stage, but an aggressive consumption of a sacred vitality which is different
from that which had been lost in the first part of the ritual. The importance
of this perspective is fundamental, because it in turn conditions both a criETHNOS VOL. 62:3-4, I997
52
tique of anthropology's traditional ignorance of violence #/*</Bloch's own

analytical connections drawn between religion, politics, and actual violence:
Van Gennep and Turner have little to say about violence.... They completely miss
the significance of the... dramatic violence of the return to the mundane. For me,
however, this conquering and consuming is central because it is what explains the
political outcomes of religious action. First of all, it needs to be violent, otherwise
the subordination of vitality would not be demonstrated. Secondly, thisfinalconsumption is outwardly directed towards other species. In many of the examples
discussed [in the book one may] see how the consumption of animals, for example, can be represented as merely a preliminary to expansionist violence against
neighbours (Bloch 1992:6).
In its broad sense, Bloch's argument therefore amounts to much more than
an explanation of the symbolism of violence present in religion. For he argues
that, in the symbolism of violence built into the ritual core, there also lies the
explanation for the often-noted circumstance that religion so easily furnishes
an idiom, and produces a legitimation, for actual violence in a whole range
of societies. Bloch underscores the potential which sacred imageries of violence have for a justified construction among elites and ordinary people of
'dirty' wars - that is, for maintaining and explaining the most mundane forms
of politics.
It is in this wide sense that his reasoning is of fundamental value to the
anthropology of relationships of power. For while it seems unnecessary to accept Bloch's specific claims about the quasi-universality of the central ritual
structure which he identifies, I do find the various connections which he
draws between particular meanings of religion and political violence convincing.
He emphasizes that the symbolism of violence is a necessary, but not
sufficient condition for the legitimate construction of 'dirty' politics - for
shaping a legitimation of what others consider to be the illegitimate. For
example, in a chapter called 'Cosmogony and the state,' he links the religious
aspect ofjapanese Emperors to the aggressive idiom of some recent Japanese
history, that is, to the movement towards the militarist and imperialist idiom
which reached its apogee during the greater East Asia war: 'All this of course
is not to say that the existence of the symbolism of rebounding violence is in
any way a sufficient explanation of the outbreak of real political or military
violence.Japanese militarist expansionism was very largely caused by contact
with Western imperialism. However, given these circumstances, the religious
ETHNOS VOL. 62:3-4, I997
52
process naturally gave an idiom to such expansionism and may well have
exacerbated it' (Bloch 1992:64; italics added).
State Power and National Cosmology:
War, Memory, and Expulsion of the National Self's Other
The basic view underlying Bloch's argument about the politics of religious
experience is in perfect accordance with the Dominican case after 4 October
1937, that is, after the 1937 Haitian massacre. This slaughter involved the
Dominican state (headed by General Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the country
from 1930 till he was assassinated in 1961) killing thousands of Haitian peasants in the Dominican-Haitian borderlands.4 By 1937 around 200,000 Haitians dwelt in the Dominican Republic's border areas and elsewhere in the
country (Fiehrer 1990:11). The previous year Dominican president Rafael
Leonidas Trujillo and Haitian president Stenio Vincent signed a treaty establishing the official border between the two republics, the latter agreeing to
stem the - in Dominican eyes - tide of illegal migration (Vega 1988). In October, 1937, thousands of Haitian peasants were slaughtered with carbines and
machetes in the Dominican border areas by the Trujillo military state, and all
Haitians were expelled from the country (with the exception of those working on the sugar plantations owned by foreigners, who protected their source
of cheap labour). High uncertainty exists with regard to the number of Haitians killed in the massacre. This is just one of many indications of how relatively little investigation has been undertaken in relation to the whole event.
One scholar, Thomas Fiehrer, has asserted that 'the [1937] event has never
been explained satisfactorily by either participants or succeeding investigators;' his own number for those who died in the massacre is 'some 9,000 to
12,000 Haitian peasants' (Fiehrer 1990:1,12). Some have claimed the number
to have been as high as 25,000 (Garcia 1983:15). The most reliable figure is
presumably provided in a critical discussion of different sources by Bernardo
Vega (Vega 1995:341-353). Vega estimates that between 4,000 and 6,000 Haitians died in the massacre (ibid.:347).
We do not know exactly what triggered the violent events of 1937, events
which in turn shaped the Dominican state's programme of'Dominicanization' in its border regions and today's social and political conditions in the
Dominican-Haitian borderlands (Galndez 1958:197-201; Moya Pons 1990:
517-518). What we shouldszy, however, is that a specific set of imageries of destructive and evil forces and of violence, that were already present in a range of
Dominican (popular and elite) discourses on Hispaniola's two peoples and
54
territories, served both to justify and to exacerbate the outcome ofthat actual violence. For the time being, I take for granted that 'the politics of religious experience' (Bloch's object of study) can, and should, be compared to
'the politics of national cosmology/national identity.' I will return to this
later.
Since colonial times, the area corresponding to the Haitian-Dominican
borderlands has been a region between two states, or, more precisely, these
areas have been on the periphery of two states. The western part of Hispaniola (colonized by France) gained its sovereignty and became the second independent republic in the New World consequent to the Haitian Revolution
(1791-1804). The eastern sector of Hispaniola (which was a Spanish colony
for about three centuries from 1492, and which corresponds to around twothirds of the island) became the Dominican Republic in 1844. In that year the
inhabitants of the former Spanish colony liberated themselves from the Haitians, who had occupied the eastern sector and ruled the whole island for
twenty-two years, from 1822 to 1844. Haitian armed forces invaded thereafter
the Dominican sector several times in attempts to regain control of the entire
island. The Haitian invasions continued until the late 1850s. These years
mark the period of the Dominican-Haitian wars.5 During the nineteenth century and the first few decades of the twentieth century, the Haitian state and
its attendant economic market were more strongly present than the Dominican state in Hispaniola's borderlands. At that time Haiti was militarily, economically, and demographically the stronger of the two countries. However,
in the course of the 1920s and 1930s, the Dominican Republic caught up with,
and even surpassed, Haiti (Vega i988:38~39).6
Yet it was first with the protracted, violent regime of General Trujillo that
the Dominican Republic firmly established itself and was 'constructed' in the
Dominican border areas. After the 1937 Haitian massacre, the border was
closed (a situation that lasted until Trujillo's death in 1961), and the state
launched a major 'Dominicanization' programme in the border provinces in
order to strengthen the political, cultural, and economic relations with the
rest of the country.
The Dominican Republic has a history of constructing its national identity
in relation to Haiti; and the border has had, and continues to have, a principal
role therein, as the locus of the national collectivity's dignity and power. A
traditional and official Dominican historiography (dating from the 1860s and
1870s and which still enjoys a powerful influence) has represented the Haitian domination as 'a death-like dream' (Hoetink 1970:99; Moya Pons 1986a;
55
Derby & Turks 1993) - that is, a rule exercised by 'barbarians' which threatened to undermine and destroy the Dominicans' Catholic beliefs, Hispanic
roots, and racial characteristics.7 Not until 1936 (or 92 years after the birth
of the Dominican Republic) was the first mutually accepted Dominican-Haitian agreement about the demarcation of their common border, ratified. After
the 1937 Haitian massacre, the Trujilloist state embarked on a heavy propaganda campaign to demonize the Haitian other, representing the slaughter
as incidents between Dominican border residents and Haitian livestock
thieves, and the 'Dominicanization' as a necessary and legitimate attempt to
construct a defence against the evil which was infiltrating from the other side.
After more than half a century of anti-Haitian discourses in schools and in connection with national commemorations, most Dominicans today typically
reproduce at least the dominant symbols from those discourses. More importantly and more tragically, however, even before the massacre, Dominicans
(in the border region and elsewhere) had shaped and maintained specific
ideas and practices (tied to constructions of history, magic and race) which
reproduced images of the Haitians as both a feared and a despised other
(Derby 1994). To put it another way, while the massacre was state-sponsored
and directed from Santo Domingo, it came to make moral and political sense
to the majority of Dominicans.
The myths of the nation forged and reproduced through Dominican
patriotic history have interacted with, and been supported by, discourses and
practices among ordinary Dominicans. While the production of patriotic
history has been shaped by Dominican experiences of the Haitian twentytwo year rule and the Dominican-Haitian wars, Dominican concepts of magic
(found in different but overlapping versions in most areas of the country, and
in all social strata (Deive [1975] 1988; Davis 1987)) link the people from the
other side of the border to a particular potential for carrying out destructive
transformations and evil. Devil-pact stories, which are widespread in the
border area, explicitly identify a Haitian community (the coastal town of
Arcahaie) as a centre of demonic power (Krohn-Hansen 1995; Derby 1994:
517-526). To put it in different terms, central discourses embedded in patriotic history and in magic have contained overlapping structures of reasoning about Hispaniola's national boundary. These discourses share a number
of moral (not to say politico-cosmological) premises. Both those who have
shaped patriotic history and those who have reproduced magic have constructed their arguments about the island's main identities by forming what
looks like a geography of good and evil. History and magic together have
56
resulted in the reproduction of a set of Dominican (hi)stories of fear of the

Haitian other.
An illustration: Concepts of magic in 'San Antonio' (a village on the
southern Dominican border in which I carried out fieldwork in 1991-92) are
tied to the locals' moral construction of relationships. People here think
about the effects of magical healing as much in terms of keeping out and
giving shape to evil as in terms of producing health. But no person, people
claim, should be said to be born bad. It all depends on your social way of
being. Locals' daily 'readings' of each other's interactions justify healing or
non-healing: Only those said to have a pure heart (or 'good faith') may possibly be cured with the aid of the power of a saint or spirit. The explanations
of sorcery also have their point of departure in a real human possibility for
accumulating guilt from doing evil. Now, as villagers say, there are a number
of magicians on both sides of the border who know how to engender destruction. People take it for granted, therefore, that guilt exists in many forms
both in themselves and in others. However, they still appear to skew their
own narratives of evil in the direction ofHaitian origins or roots. It is true that
they also mention the existence of some extremely knowledgeable individuals and potent sorcerers in their midst. In San Antonio, many have sought
out reputed sorcerers in the hills near the (Dominican) town of San Juan de
la Maguana. But many have, in addition, crossed the border on errands of
magic. People therefore incorporate those from the other side into an ambiguous understanding which states, like the discourses associated with patriotic history, that Haitians are both strong and inferior. For those from the
other side not only belong to a stigmatized class of people, but are also breeders of dangerous and destructive magic; Haitians are both scorned and feared
as controllers of great sorcery.
The fact that so many Dominican arguments constructing Haitians as the
potent and feared other already existed and were in circulation in society,
created the possibility for legitimating the illegitimate: for explaining the
1937 Haitian massacre, the Dominicanization and the closing of the border
as necessary measures adopted against evil - or, as the state's restoration of
political and moral 'order'. After the 1937 massacre, the state's discourses
about the island's national boundary were shaped as vigorously anti-Haitian.
For example, the speech The meaning of a policy' (Elsentido de unapolftica, written by historian Pena Battle and delivered in the Dominican border
community of Elias Piria in 1942, and generally known as the principal Trujilloist legitimation of the Dominicanization (Cassa 1976)) expressed the DoETHNOS VOL. 62:3-4, I97
57
minican need for a closed border in terms which justified the state's violence
as a fight against evil. As the speech goes,
Trujillo understood that the mathematical layout of a border line only solved one,
the easiest one, of our neighbourhood problems... The clear-sighted statesman has
seen: On one side, the traditional desolation and abandonment, the total negation
of a border policy. That is the Dominican side; and on the other side, the desperate reality of a people whose influence and negative forces infiltrate persistently and
slowly, but certainly, the Dominican side... According to the words of the doctor
Arthur G. Holly, an eminent Haitian physician: 'these people are practitioners of
necromancy, beings who use dead bodies for magical purposes'... The institute of
Brooklings [in the United States] ... recently carried out profound investigations of
the social conditions in the Dominican Republic... I quote the following from this
work: "There is here a wave of coloured people, which increases and will wrap up
any group of whites which is not carefully prepared and protected. In many of the
old communities, the blackening of the whites is almost total'... If we do not act
resolutely and strongly, the moment shall come when the evil among us will be
impossible to cure, as it is on the other side. There is no government of the genuinely cultivated and civilized world that would not adopt definite measures against
such a serious and vital threat. Is it possible that we Dominicans are censured when,
forced by a simple dictate of self-preservation, we devote ourselves to the fight against
elements which subvert our very national essence? (Pena Battle 1954:63-65,68-70)
These Trujilloist discourses, with which Dominicans were bombarded for

twenty years, are rooted in a certain political cosmology. They not only articulate views about Hispaniola's division and two nations but also express a
thinking about political destruction. The post-Trujilloist state's discourses about
what took place in 1937 have been only slightly modified compared with
those shaped before 1961.8 And even though many Dominicans today look
back at the massacre in horror, and although a series of critical works on the
hardships of Haitian migrant labour have been written by Dominicans wanting to change the Dominican-Haitian relationship, the very conceptualization
of the 1937 violence among Dominicans has been given scant attention.9
Among today's border residents, memories of the violence in the Dominican-Haitian relationship revolve around ideas about national 'order' - or
around a specific form of national classification. Such memories shape views
of Hispaniola's division, for example, with the aid of images of purity. A
peasant said about his own participation in the 1937 slaughter: T wanted to
take part in that task, which consisted of cleansing my own place, my republic' Or in the words of another peasant, 'Yesterday we had trouble with the
58
negros, but not today. Now it's a clean thing. We're not struggling with negros,
for the negro is a bad nation.'10 u
The point is that the same social processes which have meant that
Dominicans have pictured their neighbours in these ways, have guaranteed
a potential'for Dominican use, and justification, of violence against Haitians.12
Two corollaries of this Dominican concern with purity and order have been
discourses on 'infiltration' and uses of the 'disease' image. Needless to say, the
disease metaphor is a powerful one, an image with a strong resonance. It connects ordinary people's experiences of the body and the healing thereof to
concepts and images which shape perceptions and understandings of the
nation/the body politic. The disease image used in politics helps construct
the Dominican state and nation as a living organism. Evil is portrayed as a
pain or danger 'inside' the body politic, and as an infectious agent spreading
death : 'If we do not act resolutely and strongly, the moment shall come when
the evil among us will be impossible to cure, as it is on the other side' (Pena
Battle 1954:70). The discourses on infiltration and disease share an important
feature, one which has been illuminated by Ren Girard. According to Girard, such discourses imply that 'active' and 'passive' roles become reversed:
the legitimacy of violence is constructed while the discourses represent the
active ones, those inflicting suffering and death, as the original victims. Once
the 'impure' attributes have been stored in the Enemy, the members of the
latter category who are placed 'on the inside' may logically appear as the
source of the 'trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The
roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of
their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently
capable of destroying them' (Girard 1987:91). The same author has stressed
the tragic relevance of this for the comparative understanding of violence
(and of possible legitimations of it):
At the time of the Black Death, foreigners were killed, and Jews were massacred,
and a century or two later, 'witches* were burned, for reasons strictly identical to
the ones we found [and we presendy find] in our myths... The imaginary crimes
and real punishments .of these victims are the crimes and punishments we find in
mythology. Why should we have to believe, in the case of mythology only, that
if the crimes are imaginary, the punishments and the victims themselves cannot
be real? Every sign points the other way. The texts that document historical atrocities - the judicial records of witch-hunts, for instance - offer the same fantastic
charges as myths, the same indifference to concrete evidence, and the same unexamined and massive conviction that everything is true (Girard 1987:86-87).
ETHNOS VOL. 62:3-4, 1997
59
Returning to the San Antonio peasants' conceptualizations of'before', 'during' and 'after' 1937 in terms of the production or restoration of a certain
'order' and 'purity' ('I wanted to take part in that task, which consisted of
cleansing my own place, my republic'/'Yesterday we had trouble with the
negros... Now it's a clean thing'), we should hardly be surprised by the hideous power associated with such conceptualizations in eastern Hispaniola.
These confirm and reinforce a political cosmology of a specific kind.
One dimension of the reproduction of this outlook ought to be emphasized
in particular. The appeal of the 'purity' metaphors used about the nation and
the state's violence must have been strengthened through the fact that the
categories of'clean' {limpio) and 'dirty' (sucio) are constantly drawn on in everyday life (see below). That appeal must in turn have been reinforced through
the fact that the same 'purity' metaphors have been used to morally construct
personhood and relations between kin and friends. The same symbols are
even basic ones which people use when practising or reflecting on rituals of
healing and sorcery.
The Dominican ideas described here confirm the view that the very conceptualization of (a state's) violence is tied to specific cosmologie processes
- to processes which ultimately feed on actors' 'thirst' for meaning as 'order'.
Conceptual violation (or people's experiences of disorder tied to a significant category, such as 'the Dominican fatherland as nothousing negros or haitianos') should be investigated as a potentially deep source of meanings for
those involved in political violence.13 Both the euphemistic and the primary
meanings of the term typically used by Dominicans in order to refer to the
1937 events, el desalojo, can be seen as 'logical' in light of the above discussion. Eldesalojo ('the eviction' or 'the dislodging') suggests that someone was
thrown out after having violated an established house rule.
While many nationalist imageries revolve around a specific problematic
of violence and evil (Kapferer 1988; Malkki 1995; Kugelmass 1995), it may
not be correct to say that violence is universally a part of nationalist imageries
(Eriksen 1993:112). Nevertheless, the Dominican case at the very least suggests that where the nationalist ideas and arguments represent the nation as
born out of wars with a particular 'other', the very conceptualization of the
wars with that other may be constitutive to the continued building of the
nation. Or, to put it in different terms, we could say that a primary process
of politics is the process of authorized naming. The making of popular and
elite history can serve this purpose, as can, for example, the mapping of territories and populations through censuses, reports, archives and literary ficETHNOS VOL. 62:3-4, 1997
6o
tions.14 After the wars in the first half of the last century in Hispaniola, discourses and practices tied to history, magic, and daily interaction among
Dominicans continued to 'name' the national struggle for Dominicanness by
casting the Haitians as that struggle's most dangerous other. These discourses and practices provided Dominican state production with a certain horizon and direction - or, to put it more clearly, with what Bourdieu (1977:164)
has spoken of as a certain, limiting sense of social reality, that is, with a particular set of ideas expressing le regard de l'autre, the definition of self by means
of the other. Attempts to fundamentally transform the Dominican state have
therefore to be related to the very words employed by Dominicans in conceptualizations of the Dominican-Haitian relationship.
It has often been said that nationalisms are like 'secular religions', and that
they, like religions, strikingly easily appear to supply an idiom for the explanation or justification of intolerance and war. The explanation seems to be
precisely that symbolism of violence and evil present in so many imageries
of nations across the world. Some form of idiom signalling a creative conquest, one which gives birth to or restores the nation, and thereby transforms
its members (by naming them and/or protecting them), has to be widespread
among the world's 'secular' nationalists. This is so simply because nations
define themselves, and are defined by others, on the basis of specific transformative processes, the result of which is a conquest (violent or otherwise)
of particular, sharply bounded, geographical territories. At such a high level
of abstraction, it is therefore more than reasonable to trace connections between religious processes and those anchored in the beliefs and practices of
nationalists. What is common to the two sets of phenomena is that they often
reproduce specific imageries of both creative violence or conquest and destructive evil, which can, under certain circumstances, develop into a deep and
convincing legitimation of actual battles and wars within relationships of
power.15 Such a parallel between the politics of religious and nationalist experiences invites in turn at least four comments.
Firstly, we can draw further on Bloch's conceptualization of the ritual process (as the construction of a transcendental order) related to 'religion' in
order to attempt to summarize two distinct senses in which we should say
that violence (both symbolic and actual) was constitutive of the construction
of the Dominican national imagined community since the 1930s: In analogy
to Bloch's reasoning about ritual, we can say that acts of (sacrificial) violence
allowed members of a Dominican community - that is, participants in national rituals - to participate in the immortality of a transcendent entity (the
61
nation) that denies the transience of life and human' institutions, that effects
a permanent transformation in participants so that they can 'dominate the
here and now of which [they] previously [were] a part' (Bloch 1992:5). In addition, notions of purity - and boundary maintenance - were inextricably
linked to the creation-through-violence of this transcendental entity (the
nation) (see also, for example, Malkki 1995), such that violence against those
viewed as not of the transcendental entity - 'impure' Haitians placed 'on the
inside', or resident on Dominican land - was ritually legitimated as non-violence. The state's grotesque violence was conceptually transformed into 'the
maintenance/construction of purity and order'.
My second remark has to do with our conceptualization of the very relationship between the symbolism of violence and evil on the one hand, and
moments of actual uses of power and violence on the other. Bloch is right in
underscoring the potential of an imagery of violence for furnishing an idiom
which may justify and exacerbate uses of military force by states and other
political entities. However, what the Dominican case shows in addition to
this is that the historical 'birth' of the specific symbolism of violence or
conquest which is drawn on in order to shape legitimation, may itself result
from experiences of actual bodily violence. Real defeats and victories - that
is, actual invasions and an actual territorial conquest in the first half of the
nineteenth century - preceded and conditioned the creation of the discourses of Dominican, patriotic history on the Dominican-Haitian relationship.
In that sense this should be seen as a representative case. To the extent that
nationalist imageries revolve around a symbolism of violence, they usually
do this based on some experienced, actual violence. In the case of religions,
it may well be different. Bloch argues that 'rebounding violence', which he
sees as the core of sacred, ritual processes, is ultimately rooted in universal
human experiences of the transience of life and groups. This may be so, but
it seems worth reflecting on and investigating whether some religious or
ritual representations of a conquest and of evil may have roots in experienced, actual uses of political violence. To put this in another way, we should
always seek to investigate a particular symbolism in specific, historical
terms.
Thirdly, we should operate with an open, flexible methodology when
trying to analyse particular states. Bloch's book and those of others show the
relevance of examinations of rituals. My own work among Dominicans has
concentrated on thought embedded in secular products of history and literature, in uses of magic and healing, and in routine forms of speech and interETHNOS VOL. 62:3-4, I997
62
action. In addition it may be indispensable to examine symbolisms of violence reproduced by mass media (Rowe 1989), cinema (Ferro 1984:97-103),
or sports (Archetti 1992).
Fourthly, in addition to nationalism and religious phenomena, other processes (expressing particular connections between the exercise of power and
features of a cosmology) can help structure and transform states.16 Gendered
processes provide an important example.
Gender and State Power: Masculinity and Terror
Notions of masculinity among Dominicans have played, and continue to
play, a central part in the everyday production of political legitimacy - inside
and outside the political parties and the state.17 Ideas about masculinity
among Dominicans constitute a dominant discourse - or what is summed up
in Bourdieu's notion of a 'legitimate problematic' (Bourdieu 1992:172; Bayart 1991: 64). A legitimate problematic helps produce a field of what is politically thinkable, and a particular set of power relations. Among Dominicans,
the legitimate problematic of masculinity has entailed a particular confinement of society's hegemonic political imagination, i.e. the reproduction
(though a changeable one) of a certain vision of what has constituted political
reality. A number of verbal expressions that are used in daily life in Dominican society in order to classify and shape different forms of male behaviour
(like 'courage', 'generosity', 'eloquence', 'seriousness', and so forth) represent
political categories and expressions: relations between leaders and followers,
or patrons and clients, are given meaning in terms of ideas about masculinity
- far more than, for example, in terms of a version of thinking about Weberian
bureaucracy.18
Here I will only deal with the categories and labels that Dominican men
use to construct differences between themselves as men. The issue of how
the man-woman relation might be said to feed into the masculine relations
which I am considering here, lies beyond the scope of this brief discussion,
as do the specifically female perspectives.19
Dominican men's categories for reflecting on and judging each other's and
(local and national) politicians' maleness, may be discussed in terms of five
sets of ideas: notions (1) oivalentia or courage; (2) of a man's visibility in
public spaces; (3) of the man as seducer and father; (4) of the power tied to
a man's verbal skills; and (5) of a man's seriousness and sincerity. Here, however, I will only consider (and only in order to rapidly illustrate) the first and
last of these items.
63
A central image of masculinity is that of the hombre valiente, the spirited,

courageous, and brave man. People here use two words, valiente and guapo,
largely as synonyms. As a man in the village explained: 'The man who is guapo
is he who knows how to defend himself when he is presented with a problem.
For example, it is not that I come threatening you, saying that "I'm guapo". It
is when you come to me, that I know how to answer you and that I prepare
myself to die defending this [or what is mine]; then I am guapo. It is not the
man who walks about talking nonsense, it's not that kind of man. He is a
boaster [bocon]. The man who fights when it is necessary to fight, he is the
guapo, the valiente; yes, the same man who is valiente, a man who is guapo, he
is the one.'
The fact that people use the word guapo in this way underscores that
fighting is not viewed as necessarily destructive or evil. In Spanish, guapo
means 'beautiful' or 'handsome'; in short, some men engaged in fighting seem
beautiful. There is an image here of the beauty of certain forms of male fighting and violence, the forms said by people to express valentia or courage.20
However, Dominicans do not assume that respect is derived simply from
giving rise to or provoking a fight; what is cultivated is rather a man's ability
to defend himself fearlessly and actively if he is challenged or attacked by a
rival: 'He who is valiente waits for you to fall upon him. Then he will fight.'
The ideal which says that a man ought to be guapo or valiente is used not
only to shape views of actions of ordinary villagers and local leaders, but also
to explain and justify the practices of national leaders and presidents. The
ways in which leaders act when confronted with political conflicts and rivalries - such as in election battles - are evaluated in terms of these categories.
For example, villagers discussed the masculine strength of Juan Bosch and
Joaqun Balaguer. Bosch was the winner of the first presidential election held
after the Trujillo dictatorship; but Bosch's government was overthrown by a
coup after only seven months, in 1963. In 1966, Balaguer 'won' the presidential
election (with the aid of the US, which had invaded Santo Domingo in 1965,
and terror sown by the Dominican Army); Balaguer was 're-elected' until
1978 (when an end was put to the military terror), and later in 1986,1990, and
1994. Bosch has founded and headed two large national parties (the Dominican Revolutionary Party, and the Party for Dominican Liberation) which
have struggled against Balaguer's party (the Reformist Party) in elections.21
A man explained that he had once been a follower of Juan Bosch, but had
changed his political loyalty because, as he said, 'I was a follower of Bosch
in the 1960s. But I don't like Bosch, because Bosch cackles a lot, and politiETHNOS VOL. 62:3-4, I997
64
dans must beguapos, like the men in the pueblos... Bosch is supported by all
the good people of the pueblos, but he suffers from two things, that he isn't
valiente and doesn't "turn loose the peso" [distribute money among his
followers].' In 1990, Bosch's party received more votes thanjoaqun Balaguer's
party; Balaguer only won the presidency with the votes received by some
tiny allied parties. But Bosch and many others claim that Balaguer stole the
victory by fraud (Cabrera Febrillet 1991). For example, a San Antonio man
said laconically, 'Bosch won in the ballot boxes, Balaguer won in the computers.' The same man that criticized Bosch above claimed that Bosch 'had
gone to sleep' on election day rather than practising ruthless vigilance (as the
guapo would have done), and had let them take what belonged to him. As he
chose to formulate it, 'There are moments for eating, and there are moments
for sleeping.'
Another basic concept is that of the person as serio (or, if used about
women, send), i.e. serious.22 To claim that a man isn't serious is to imply that
he is shameless. Used about men, the label sirrvergenza or shameless most
often connotes 'wrong-doer' or 'thief. Bosch and his followers consistently
argue that the other political parties - in particular that of Balaguer - are in
the hands of men who lack seriousness and are siiruergiienzas or shameless.
This discourse is a powerful one because it mobilizes key concepts used frequently in everyday life in all sectors of society; in saying that the other
parties' leaders 'rob' the state, this discourse (the Boschuta discourse) attempts to deprive them of any legitimacy. Another basic pair of concepts
used to characterize actions of both men and women is buenafe and mala Je,
which mark a distinction between good and bad faith, or between sincerity
and insincerity. This distinction, which expresses a thinking about good and
evil, is also shaped in terms of differences in people's 'purity' or blood. People
and hearts are metaphorically spoken of as sucios (dirty) or litnpios (clean),
implying evil or good; and the blood of evil and good persons respectively
are said to be pesada (heavy) and Irviana (light), or agria (sour) and duke
(sweet). The saints too are contemplated through such language. Some mysteries (a common expression for 'saints' or 'spirits') are said to be sweet, and
others sour. The classification of persons' buenafe or malafe, their sincerity
or insincerity, is reproduced in everyday encounters. Everything social
should mature from the respect signalled by an acceptable greeting. As a man
in the village said regarding the connection between sincerity in persons, and
the proper greeting, 'The person who greets you without knowing you, that
person has good faith, but if he doesn't greet you, he isn't completely good.
65
He should pay attention to you, that's good faith, for if he doesn't extend you
the greeting, damn! he isn't whole.'
The politics of masculinity is shaped in conjunction with the daily reproduction ofthese most elementary notions that structure people's classifications
of persons as moral beings. Everyday classifications of men in terms of seriousness and sincerity are constitutive of the formation of relations between
friends and compadres (or the highly politicized links established between
parents and godparents), and between local leaders and their followers relations that in turn give unmistakable form to the public life, politics, and
state making of Dominicans.
The Dominican case suggests that, in addition to nationalism and religious
phenomena, gendered relationships may nurture an idiom which approximates
a representation of violence and which can, under certain circumstances,
provide a legitimation for actual uses of violence in relationships of domination and subordination - that is, in those everyday relations of power
which shape and build the state. A symbolism of conquest can be said to be
condensed in the frequently employed words of valentia ('courage') and
guapo ('courageous'/'spirited'). The ideas about male power built into the
uses of valiente and guapo at the local and popular levels furnished Balaguer
with a measure of legitimacy after his 'illegitimate' election fight against
Bosch in 1990. More importantly, the image of the man who commands
respect because he has proved himself as guapo has been used to represent
selected aspects of the state's use of violence against its own citizens between
1930 and 1961 as having produced 'order'.
The memories of the Trujilloist state mobilize ideas about gendered power - ideas that help shape legitimacy. The reproduction of ideals such as those
of autonomy and valentia means that the Trujilloist state, long after the
general himself had been killed, was still accumulating symbolic capital.
Below is a brief example drawn from my conversations with a village leader;
as he explained, 'They said that Trujillo was bad, but 88 per cent of Trujillo
was a good president... And many times we say "Damn! Why isn't Trujillo
alive?", [for example] when we see a delinquent act somewhere in the
country. We are many who say "Because he was the man." Many old people
say that.' This feature of popular Dominican conceptualizations of power
even guarantees a feared man, such as a wielder of Trujilloist terror among
villagers, a minimum of symbolic credit. The most feared man during the
Trujillo regime in this southwestern part of the country (where I carried out
fieldwork) was an officer named Alcantara. His name was synonymous with
ETHNOS VOL. 62:3-4, T997
66
fear. In the words of two villagers: 'Alcantara was the one [of Trujillo's trusted officers] most familiar with this region, since he was raised in a frontier
community. He travelled frequently through all the areas here. He always
came... I [once] got to know him personally; and he was a man who was
feared, and he spoke with you laughing. [He was] a man, very strong. All
those crimes that he had committed and that he was committing, and I met
him.' 'When he [Trujillo] wanted to set a pueblo straight, he sent Alcantara.
And when the people knew that Alcantara was there, everybody walked
trembling.'23
The minimum of symbolic credit awarded to a man like Alcantara can be
grasped, for example, from the words used to characterize him ('a man, very
strong'). It becomes even clearer in the following words of a villager who
served under him: 'He didn't mind sending the Guards to bed and leave alone
on a patrol, he alone confronting the people... he didn't fear that. It became
common knowledge that he was guapol Trujillo, like Alcantara, was enormously guapo or brave. And as locals would say (for example when criticizing
Bosch) a politician should be guapo, like the men in the pueblos.
Like the symbolism of violence described by Bloch as 'rebounding violence', and like symbolisms featuring national conquests of territories, the
imagery of the guapo is based on the assumption that a stronger control of
social life is generated through winning a fight. The consummation of the
fight is necessarily directed outwardly at one's rivals or competitors. Furthermore, as Bloch underscores with regard to the symbolism in the ritual process, the symbolism shaped through the uses of the category of the guapo has
to be one which is understood by the actors themselves as, in a certain sense,
an aggressive one, that is, as one expressing a veritable conquest, otherwise
the capacity of this symbolism to demonstrate that strengthened domination
over life and social relationships is what in fact results from successful, direct
confrontation, would be highly limited.
Again, this is not to say that the existence of the imagery of masculine
power tied to the uses of the categories of guapo and valiente for purposes of
classifying interaction is in any way a sufficient explanation of the uses of
actual violence, such as in the form of repression or fraud. In addition, it is
essential that we remember that in this specific symbolism masculine respect
is not gained through being the one who provokes a fight. What is cultivated
is the practice of fearless, active defence when challenged or attacked by a
possible rival. However, such an idiom represents a. potential for the justified
construction of relationships of power through actual uses of violence and
ETHNOS VOL. 62:3-4, 1997
67
military force. Given certain circumstances, the daily cultivation of what

could be described as the 'sacred* image of the guapo or the valiente can furnish an idiom for the legitimation of real fights, with far-reaching implications
for the shaping of the state and nation. The production of this kind of legitimation in turn reinforces and reproduces the 'sacred' image of the guapo/
the valiente itself.
It is indispensable to speak of'cosmology' and 'belief. For there is always
a certain cosmology which frames and orients political practices, and nurtures idioms of violence. In addition (and paradoxically, but only at first
sight), this same cosmology is connected with the generation of qualities
which are praised in many, perhaps even most, societies. The politics of religious and nationalist experiences may shape feelings of renunciation of the
self (among elites and masses). The religious rituals that Bloch speaks of are
those which have been, and indeed should be, approached by researchers
in terms of an idea ofcommunitas (Turner 1977). National communities, for
their part, may inspire political love, or what Anderson dares describe as 'the
beauty of gemeinscha (in spite of a common insistence among progressive
intellectuals, particularly in Europe, on the near-pathological nature of nationalism). People throughout the world leave their homes and local communities to go and die for their national homeland, theirpatria or fatherland:
'[T]he great wars of this century are extraordinary not so much in the unprecedented scale on which they permitted people to kill, as in the colossal
numbers persuaded to lay down their lives... The idea of the ultimate sacrifice comes only with an idea of purity, through fatality. Dying for one's
country, which usually one does not choose, assumes a moral grandeur
which dying for the Labour Party... or perhaps even Amnesty International
can not rival, for these are all bodies one can join or leave at easy will'
(Anderson 1991:141-144).
The Dominican uses of masculine notions are associated with the production of opportunities to display one's personal integrity and dignity, and with
the formation of ties in which one may sense 'the beauty of friendship and
leadership' (to paraphrase Anderson above). Precious relations of friendship
are converted into 'natural ties' in the form of compadrazgo; that is, they take
the shape of (fictive) kinships and may produce experiences of a kind of
atmosphere of altruism, perhaps not so very different from the halos of disinterestedness which are, from time to time, felt to exist about religious societies and nations.
ETHNOS VOL. 62:3-4, 1997
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Conclusion: Power, Cosmology, and Idioms of Violence

I have argued that inquiries into the making of politics and states should
be closely linked to examinations of particular cosmologies. Power not only
engenders but is also itself a product of cosmological visions. Such visions include notions of necessary and desirable ways of securing control over existence - that is, of maintaining or constructing 'order', and of combating
danger or 'disorder'. In order to grasp what Philip Abrams describes as 'the
cardinal activity involved in the serious presentation of the state [or of power]: the legitimating of the illegitimate'25 (Abrams 1988:76) - that is, in order
to interpret justifications of what some/others may consider to be 'the illegitimate', it is crucial to examine cosmology. Specifically, I have attempted to argue that - in the case of the socio-historical construction of the Dominican Republic - particular hegemonic conceptualizations of answers to
questions about how to secure control over existence and evil have mediated
socially between actual state violence or terror and popular and elite constructions of legitimate state power.
Others who have written on state, nation, and violence - in particular,
Taussig, Kapferer, Feldman, Malkki, and Daniel - have drawn attention to the
relevance of a broad anthropological notion of cosmology (not to say classical anthropological ideas about myth and ritual) to attempts to analyse
relationships of power that structure modern social worlds - and their horrors. A set of overlaps exist between aspects of these authors' works and features of my own discussion.
For example, Kapferer's discussion of nationalism in Sri Lanka and Australia and Malkki's accounts of Hutus who fled the 1972 'selective genocide'
in Burundi and found asylum in Tanzania deal, as I have done, with the production of nationalism in terms of cosmology making and in terms of history
(in particular, collective-memory) making (see also, for example, Anderson
1991:187-206; Trouillot 1995; Kugelmass 1995). Discussions of particular
national cosmologies in these works are, to a large extent, discussions of
forms, contents, and transformations of particular collective remembering.
Kapferer analyses nationalist ideas based on 'conventional' anthropological
theory of myth (ideas from Malinowski, Leach, Lvi-Strauss, and Sahlins),
and is inspired by Dumont's comparative work on hierarchical and egalitarian
values. Malkki, who quotes Tambiah in order to define 'cosmology', draws on
well-established notions in the discipline about symbolic classification, ritual
liminality, conceptual disorder, and anomalies as conceptual problems, in
her scrutiny of a certain Hutu nationalist thought. These anthropologists
ETHNOS VOL. 62:3-4, 1997
69
show, among other things, the potential inherent in social and cultural anthropology's classical or core concepts and methods (typically developed
through studies of'primitive' or non-Western, small-scale societies) for comparative inquiries into state power, nationalism, violence and terror in different areas of the world at the end of the twentieth century.
Or, to put this in different terms, culturally and morally varying notions
of'order' (and, logically enough, varying notions of'boundary-maintenance')
should be viewed as principal objects of research for any anthropology of
modern forms of domination and subordination. This is instructively brought
out in the following passage in Malkki's book, a passage where she attempts
to clarify her use of the term 'cosmology':
The designation of the Hutu refugees' collective narrative of their past as mythicohistorical [the designation used by Malkki throughout her analysis] is not meant to
imply that it was mythical in the sense of being false or made up... what made the re-
fugees' narrative mythical, in the anthropological sense, was not its truth or falsity,
but the fact that it was concerned with order'xn a fundamental, cosmological sense.
That is the key. It was concerned with the ordering and reordering of social and
political categories, with the defining of self in distinction to other, with good and
evil. It was most centrally concerned with the reconstitution of a moral order of the
world. It seized historical events, processes, and relationships, and reinterpreted
them within a deeply moral scheme of good and evil (Malkki 1995:55-56; italics
in the original).
As we have seen in previous sections, popular and national political culture
in the Dominican Republic in this century - and local and national legitimations of the state's Haitian massacre in 1937 - reflected, and reflect, preoccupations with particular notions of order and pollution - or particular classifications of (national, racial, and personal) purity and danger (Douglas [1966]
1989; Corbin 1977; Taussig 1984,1987:3-135; Anderson 1991:141-154; Kapferer 1988:1-26, 183-208; Feldman 1991:147-269; Malkki 1995:1-8, 197231). Politics is thus driven by, and embraces, actors' continual moral ordering of the world. Specific conceptualizations of evil forces and destructive
transformations represent driving forces in all relationships of power (Parkin
1985)Given such a broad perspective on articulations between forms of power
and cosmology, it is possible to grasp and examine specific cultural or symbolic 'logics' related to uses of violence or terror. For example, Malkki has
represented how Hutu refugees among whom she carried out fieldwork reETHNOS VOL. 62:3-4, I997
JO
membered extreme violence and atrocity perpetrated by 'the Tutsi' - or what

she calls their mythico-history of atrocity (Malkki 1995:91-104). Atrocity
discourse contains a potential for legitimation of new violence or spirals of
violence (see also Taussig 1984; Feldman 1991:59-84). The Hutu refugees'
memories construct an essentialized and dehumanized category - the feared,
cruel and monster-like 'other', 'the Tutsi' (with whom continued or future
contact/mixture represents 'pollution' and 'disorder' par excellence in this
symbolic universe). As Malkki shows, such cultural constructions not only
shape 'the other' as something less than human, but also as a possible legitimate object for own violence; atrocity narratives contain a dreadful potential.
My own general argument about possible links between (i) features of cosmologie visions, (ii) symbolic and other dynamics, and (iii) a state's or another actor's use of bodily violence has consisted of stating that we should
seek to investigate whether particular idioms of conquest or violence are
parts of common cultural constructions in ritual and everyday life - that is,
of constructions familiar to anthropologists under rubrics such as 'religion',
'memory', 'nationalism', 'gender', 'health', and 'self - in different historicoethnographic contexts. We should examine whether, under certain historical
and social circumstances, a particular symbolism of conquest is transformed
into a legitimation, and acceleration, of the use of actual violence or terror in
relationships between actors. I emphasize that it is above all through ethnographically and historically specific arguments that one can make a general
argument. To put it in different terms, what is of greatest interest here is not
a general claim (that a certain cosmology always frames and orients political
practices, and nurtures idioms of violence - one might ask, how could it be
otherwise?), but rather demonstrations of how, under historically specific
circumstances, certain idioms and not others enter into particular constructions
of legitimacy. I have sought to show that a specific set of imageries of destructive and evil forces; of the (sacred) Dominican national purity and order
(with mutually dependent racial, religious, and personal purity/order), and
of violent conquest, which were already present in a range of Dominican
popular and elite discourses on Hispaniola's two peoples and territories,
served to justify and exacerbate the outcome of the 1937 Haitian massacre
- the grotesque slaughter carried out by the Trujilloist state. I have also
attempted to indicate that an idiom of conquest is reproduced daily as part
ofDominican men's (heavily hegemonic) constructions of good or ideal male
conduct, and that this idiom of violence - or the 'sacred' image of the guapo
or the valiente- has been, and is, used to attempt to make sense of, and justify,
ETHNOS VOL. 62:3-4, 1997
71
aspects of the state's terror, repression and fraud before, during, and after
Trujillo. The production of this kind of legitimation in turn strengthens and
reproduces the conquest idiom - the image of the guapo or the valiente- itself.
The production reproduces this particular symbolic potential for the legitimation of the illegitimate, for the justified construction of relationships of
domination and subordination - and the state - through the use of real
violence.
Notes
* I thank the anonymous readers and the Editors of Ethnos for their help with this
article.
1. There is a whole range of types of ideas (reproduced through practices) which
have been called 'cosmology' by anthropologists. It would be beyond the bounds
of this essay to try to classify them strictly; in this essay I am merely using the word
loosely. Indeed, a basic point that I shall stress in the discussion which follows is
that analysis should operate with a broad and open concept of cosmology. Such
a comprehensive concept ought to cover the most fundamental assumptions reproduced in everyday life about the cosmos, man's place in nature and society,
and social relationships (Douglas [1966] 1989, 1982), and what is included in the
following definition given by Tambiah: 'Cosmologies ... are the classifications of
the most encompassing scope. They are frameworks of concepts and relations
which treat the universe or cosmos as an ordered system, describing it in terms
of space, time, matter, and motion, and peopling it with gods, humans, animals,
spirits, demons, and the like' (Tambiah 1985a:3).
2. A useful Annual Review of Anthropology essay - which covers a great part of the
most directly relevant literature published until 1994 - is Carole Nagengast's
'Violence, Terror, and the Crisis of the State' (1994). Stanley Tambiah ([1977]
1985b) and Clifford Geertz (1980) presented relatively early anthropological work
on so-called cosmic states. Tambiah has also written on political violence in Sri
Lanka (Tambiah 1986, 1988). For a brief critique of Geertz's (1980) work Negara,
see Thomas (1990:168-169). For more references to relevant anthropological
work on links between culture/cosmology, state power, and violence, see below.
3. For a relevant but controversial essay on culture and power (including its grim
faces), and on state and violence, written by a historian and published in Public
Culture, see Achille Mbembe's The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Postcolony' (1992a); see also a set of comments by anthropologists,
historians, and others which this essay provoked and which were published in the
same journal (Olaniyan 1992; Cohen 1992; Mudimbe 1992; Taussig 1992b; Butler
1992; Trouillot 1992; Pemberton 1992; Coronil 1992; Borges 1992; Richman 1992;
and Mbembe 1992b). During the last two decades Foucault's work has, to a considerable extent, inspired the anthropology of violence and terror (see, for example, Foucault 1979, 1980). None the less, there is an important difficulty in
Foucault's thinking related to violence and state power, which Fernando Coronil
and Julie Skurski have outlined as follows (and which, as we will see, should be
viewed by the anthropologist, among other things, as an encouragement to work
72
systematically in order to understand modern and other ethnographic complexity):

'A myth central to modernity, whose paternity can be traced to Hegel and Foucault (1979), contends that as heirs to the Enlightenment, modern states establish
their authority by embodying not divine will or force but reason. The modern
state, it asserts, having domesticated the bloody theater of violence of the ancien
rgime [see also Giddens 1981:177], replaces publicly inflicted punishment with
a myriad of disciplinary procedures that permeate the body politic and engender
the modern soul. From this perspective, state violence as a reason of state marks
thepremoderndomain, in which the state writes its texts on the bodies of its citizens, presumably because premodern souls grasp its reasons concretely.' Coronil
and Skurski write - and I agree - that we should question 'a viewpoint that divides
history into neat ascending stages and is blind to the violence through which
modern states secure their hegemony' (Coronil & Skurski 1991:332).
4. High uncertainty exists with regard to the number of Haitians killed in the massacre. This is just one of many indications of how relatively little investigation has
been undertaken in relation to the whole event One scholar, Thomas Fiehrer, has
asserted that 'the [1937] event has never been explained satisfactorily by either
participants or succeeding investigators;' his own number for those who died in
the massacre is 'some 9,000 to 12,000 Haitian peasants' (Fiehrer 1990:1, 12). Some
have claimed the number to have been as high as 25,000 (Garca 1983:15).
5. The slave revolution led by Toussaint Louverture between 1791 and 1804 not
only created Haiti and thereby the second independent republic in the Western
hemisphere, but also came to influence nearly all political life in Hispaniola thereafter. It was a singular event, capable (if only in passing) of shaking the very conceptual framework of the slave-owning planters and the rest of the nationalist
pioneers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in America. It is
therefore not surprising that the freedom achieved by the Haitian revolutionaries
had to be militarily defended for a long period of time thereafter. Most of the
Haitian military actions can only be understood in the light of the fact that the
slave revolution and the first independent black state in the Western hemisphere
was isolated and opposed from all sides - by colonial powers, the Vatican, and the
United States (Trouillot 1990:50-58). The Haitians' notions of their lack of security in a world of imperialism made them, in turn, invade their neighbours' land (in
order to attempt to protect the revolution by controlling the whole island and
thereby impeding European attacks from the easily conquered [because thinly
populated and little productive] Spanish sector), and tragically shape the Dominicans' fear of them. (For an illuminating discussion of the West's failure to
acknowledge the Haitian Revolution, the most successful slave revolution in
history, see Trouillot (1995:31-107).)
6. This circumstance was connected with the development of a large-scale production
of sugar for export in the Dominican Republic from the 1870s (Hoetink 1982:118, 64-93; del Castillo 1985; Bryan 1985; Baud 1987).
7. A number of the images connected with the civilization-savagery opposition
which has been appropriated in Hispaniola have a long history in the West
(McGrane 1989; Mason 1990; Foucault [1967] 1991; Trouillot 1991; Baretta &
Markoff 1978; Taussig 1987; Coronil & Skurski 1991; Sommer 1991).
8. Joaqun Balaguer has dominated the post-Trujillo era and was Dominican presiETHNOS VOL. 62:3-4, I997
73
dent from 1966 to 1978 and from 1986 to 1996. Balaguer was among the Trujilloist
state's leading producers of justifications of the 1937 events and the Dominicanization in the 1940s and 1950s.
9. For a comprehensive survey of the Dominican literature about Dominican-Haitian relationships, see Moya Pons (1992).
10. In popular Dominican parlance, a 'Haitian' (haitiano) is called a 'black' (negro), and
a 'black' a 'Haitian'; popular Dominican discourse conflates race and nation (raza
and nacin) so that Hispaniola's national boundary is shaped as a racial one (or
one between relatively 'light-skinned Dominicans' and 'black Haitians') (KrohnHansen n.d).
11. As Graziano (1992:140) has said in his chilling account of the Argentine 'dirty
war' from 1976 to 1982, Divine Violence (a study which reveals the in-built 'logic'
of a military-junta mythology and how the Argentine junta 'emptied' the 'dirty
war' of its true contents as it mythologized it), when the 'others', in this case the
desaparecidosorthe 'disappeared', are constructed as 'dirty', one's own / the state's
violence can be cleaned and restored as production of 'order'.
12. Much the same can be said for the internationally condemned exploitation of
Haitians in the Dominican sugar industry, where the least humane labour conditions are those provided on the state's plantations (Chardon 1984; Moya Pons
1986b; Plant 1987; Murphy 1991). To put it another way, having first produced
representations of people from 'the other side' as belonging to 'a land which does
not know civilized life', it is then possible to treat them as if they were savages.
13. For a general elaboration of ideas which state that 'conceptual violation' can be
a source of meaning for actors involved in (the remembering of) violence, see
Corbin (1977).
14. For an illuminating elaboration of the thmatique of the politics of 'naming', see
the section entitled The symbolic order and the power of naming' in Bourdieu
(1992:239-243).
15. For a rich collection of examples which show how nations' imageries of their own
past design and reproduce specific events of 'challenge', 'defeat', 'revenge', 'final
victory', and 'triumphant conquest', see Marc Ferro's book about how the past is
taught and popularly consumed across the world, The Use and Abuse ofHistory
(1984).
16. An instructive example can be found in Nicholas Thomas's essay 'Sanitation and
Seeing: The Creation of State Power in Early Colonial Fiji' (1990). Thomas reveals how particular notions of 'visibility' and 'hygiene' can significantly help to
shape state power.
17. A more detailed discussion of the politics of masculinity among Dominicans may
be found in Krohn-Hansen (1996).
18. For more information on the relevance of patronage and clientage to the shaping
of Dominican political life, see Hoetink (1982) and Kearney (1986).
19. For some tentative answers to the question about what in Hispaniola's history
may account for the great relevance of daily-life notions of masculinity as a sort
of shared 'language' for constructions of power and legitimacy among Dominicans,
see the introduction to Krohn-Hansen (1996). None-t e-le ls, as we have seen,
masculinity represents only one of the dominant discourses in Dominican politics.Just as central to the definitions of 'the politically thinkable' among Dominicans
74
has been the broad, national problematic focused on the Dominican fatherland
as a nation born to share an island with another nation, that of Haiti.
20. A villager once emphasized that a leader has to be the kind of man who acts as
a seducer: 'If you arrive at a place where there are five or six girls and have a drink,
soon you flirt with all of them. But if you don't drink and dance, you cannot do
that. Nothing. Nor do they as much as look at you. A man has to be a drinker and
a dancer; if he isn't, he isn't valiente [no tiene valenta]. The man must be a spender,
a drinker, and clean; he cannot be dirty.' Such a use of the word valenta directly
links the hombre valiente or the hombre guapo (or the image of man as courageous
fighter) to notions of male use of seduction and ideas about male beauty.
21. Balaguer stepped down from power in 1996. The 1996 election was won by the
candidate of the Party for Dominican Liberation, current president Leonel Fernandez.
22. The concept serio/a is used with different connotations according to gender: The
classification of a woman as either seria or sinvergenza (serious or shameless)
typically focuses on the issue of her sexual/marital fidelity.
23. According to the local accounts, Alcntara distinguished himself during the 1937
Haitian massacre and was thereafter one of a small group of exceptionally feared
officers used by Trujillo in the different regions of the country.
24. Given both the terror and the other remembered dimensions of the Trujillo regime, there is little wonder that today's Dominicans' discourses on this regime
and the man who personalized it, appear notoriously ambiguous and even selfcontradictory. Any specific discourse on Trujillismo should be understood as contextually situated. San Antonio people express shifting ideas about the power
constructed by Trujillo according to the memory's detailed context (which may
be one of drawing attention to 'ear,' 'order' or 'progress').
25. For discussions of the use of the concept of violence as necessarily contested use,
see Riches (1986) and Krohn-Hansen (1994).
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The Construction of Dominican State Power and Symbolisms of Violence

tique of anthropology's traditional ignorance of violence #/*</Bloch's own

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The Construction of Dominican State Power and Symbolisms of Violence

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The Construction of Dominican State Power and Symbolisms of Violence

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resulted in the reproduction of a set of Dominican (hi)stories of fear of the

The Construction of Dominican State Power and Symbolisms of Violence

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These Trujilloist discourses, with which Dominicans were bombarded for

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The Construction of Dominican State Power and Symbolisms of Violence

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The Construction of Dominican State Power and Symbolisms of Violence

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The Construction of Dominican State Power and Symbolisms of Violence

A central image of masculinity is that of the hombre valiente, the spirited,

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The Construction of Dominican State Power and Symbolisms of Violence

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The Construction of Dominican State Power and Symbolisms of Violence

military force. Given certain circumstances, the daily cultivation of what

ETHNOS VOL. 62:3-4, 1997

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Conclusion: Power, Cosmology, and Idioms of Violence

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membered extreme violence and atrocity perpetrated by 'the Tutsi' - or what

The Construction of Dominican State Power and Symbolisms of Violence

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systematically in order to understand modern and other ethnographic complexity):

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The Construction of Dominican State Power and Symbolisms of Violence

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Anderson, B. [1983] 1991. Imagined Communities, revised edition. London: Verso.

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The Construction of Dominican State Power and Symbolisms of Violence

. 1992. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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