On the Attribution of Violence

Nicolas Rudas Neyra, Yale University

This paper departs from academic efforts that define “violence” as an analytical category and opts instead to explore the everyday understandings of the concept. Using the tools of cultural sociology, it reconstructs the symbolic system underlying “violence” by examining its broad and flexible application in contemporary societies. It focuses on instances where the term is invoked in non-conventional contexts: feminist claims that “piropo” (catcalling) is violent, environmentalist critiques of nature's exploitation, and the academic notions of “symbolic violence” (Bourdieu) and “epistemic violence” (postcolonial theory). The paper argues that "violence" is a potent symbol within the public imagination, with two key discursive features: anti-civility and transcendence. Anti-civility signifies illegitimacy within a democratic cultural framework and transcendence signals a fundamental threat to sacred social values. This symbolic core makes “attributions of violence” an important social fact on its own that sociologist should pay attention too.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 174. Interpretation and Social Order