“Whose Violence Is It?” is my response to Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers’s Violence’s Fabled Experiment (2018), originally published by the Society for Cultural Anthropology, Visual and New Media Review.
Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers’s Violence’s Fabled Experiment (2018) is a superb account of the relationship between images, violence, and history. It is also an anthropological engagement—an engagement with how certain currents of thought are posited imagistically—with three filmmakers: Werner Herzog, Joshua Oppenheimer, and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. The book moves through an in-between space where creative thought and the moving image meet, where cinematic experiments are forged. Baxstrom and Meyers dwell with and assess these experiments as they pull us into a quest for human origins, enfold us in historical reenactments, and turn us into receptors of planetary crisis.
Let’s begin with the title. Violence in the possessive form presumes that violence exists independently from humans. And yet, as a word, it is inadequate to account for the killing and maiming of the animal world or the dangerous scale of weather events. As a universal concept, it fails to account for the diversity of violent acts and events. If violence, by definition, belongs to humans (who have named it), then the question of our capacity for and proximity to violence is pretty much already answered. By fabled, the authors refer to the popularity of the films under discussion, which ostensibly “authorize” the question of violence and trauma; more typically, a fable would refer to a story that has been repeated over time and sunk in to a given storyteller or community …
