The Violence of Moral Binaries

I agree with so many of the analytical and empirical points in Leigh Binford’s response to my article on violence in El Salvador that at first I was not sure why he framed it as a critique rather than as a complement and extension. The mediating concepts that he introduces are compatible with – sometimes redundant to – my analysis. To sum up, we concur that: (1) the peace agreement in El Salvador preserved the unequal and unjust structures that spawned the conflict in the first place; (2) ‘some forms of everyday violence decline[d] in incidence’ in territories controlled by the guerrilla of the FLMN (Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front); (3) structural violence is central to the operation of power relations under the reign of neoliberalism; and (4) political-economic analyses of violence must not be reductionist or mechanical. Binford and I are cultural anthropologists trained in the US who have worked on similar topics in Central America. We are both heavily influenced by a flexible version of Marxism.1 We both blame much of the suffering in the social worlds that we observe on the workings of structural forces that disproportionately benefit the powerful and harm the dominated even as we pay considerable attention to the ways in which historical and cultural processes shape structures of power. Finally, perhaps most importantly, we both think that anthropology, or ethnographically informed scholarship more generally, should exercise a ‘preferential option for the poor’ (Binford, 1996: 192). I emphasize our substantive points of theoretical, political, and personal agreement because I esteem Binford’s work on revolutionary peasants. I am also wary of entering a spirited debate that is located so far out on the left-leaning sector of US academe that it renders the political stakes of our disagreement minor compared to our convergences. graphy