Charred Lullabies
(Val Daniels)
In Charred Lullabies, the anthropologist, Valentine Daniel explores the effects that violence has on its victims. By looking at the history of violence in colonial Ceylon and the violent civil war of post-colonial Sri Lanka, Val Daniels presents a sensitive portrayal of how a society can be transformed into a culture of violence.Daniel?s first problem is to find a way to write about violence without
debasing it and making it either voyeuristic or banal. In order to achieve this, Daniel tacks back and forth between disturbingly visceral accounts of violence and more
abstract theoretical reflections. He reveals how the unfolding of violence is always diffuse, and multi-dimensional, blurring the
simple dichotomies and sharply drawn social boundaries that inform, what he
claims, mostly the ethnography of violence. Therefore Daniel calls his
approach an anthropography of violence by which he criticizes the modern
Western civilization and its reading of violence as a characteristic of
essentially a non-Western society. I think he is successful in his critique of
Western civilization by the analysis of Sri Lankan violence.
In order to do that he draws relations between culture, nation, and violence.
He shows us that culture totalizes and it is not power-neutral. He remarks upon how nationalism sweeps culture into a heady display of power and fear, this helpful in understanding the nationalist violence which is
generated by the desire to force reality to conform to the fantasy of
wholeness produced by an imagined past. For Daniel such a historical
consciousness originates from the Western world, and is dangerous since it can
lead to normalizing and stabilizing of identities. Daniel explains this
situation as the discordance between the epistemic and ontic discursive
practices, which produces the conditions for collective violence.
Daniel successfully reveals the paradox of culture that is; while culture
produces beauty, it also produces violence as a counterpoint to culture. In an
almost disturbingly manner, by juxtaposing Kantian aesthetics with violence in
Sri Lanka he indicates the uncanny similarity between the depictions of beauty
and pain.
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