The culture of terror
Taussig, Michael. “Culture of Terror--Space of Death. Roger Casement's Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture”. Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 26, No. 3. (Jul., 1984), pp. 467-497.
In Michael Taussig's analysis of the Putumayo Report, the white employees of English owned rubber companies inflicted the most outrageous bodily punishments to the Indigenous population of the Huitotos in Colombia, including men, elder, women and children. And precisely, the discourse that legitimized this brutality was that the first represented civilization, while the latter where presented as savages and “cannibals”. Taussig argues that these practices of torture aimed at the establishment of a culture of terror and cannot be merely explained by the rational logic of capitalism (in which torture would be a way of obtaining free labour by disciplining a population).
“...to offer one or all of the standard rational explanations of the culture of terror is [similarly] pointless. For behind the search for profits, the need to control labor, the need to assuage frustration, and so on, lie intricately construed long-standing cultural logics of meaning-structures of feeling- whose basis lies in a symbolic world and not in one of rationalism.” (Taussig 471)
Beyond “market pressure”, the use of ritualized violence against the indigenous population relates then to the cultural construction of evil, and also can be viewed as a way of male bonding between businessmen. Using Taussig's framework, we can understand state violence as anchored in its civilizatory project (in opposition to the savagery of the jungle), in which capitalism is its core content. In fact, Taussig points out that the resistance of the Putumayo's indigenous people to engage in exchange was presented by the rubber company owners as evidence of their savagery. But modernity is a violent project driven not only by the rational of profit, as there is also an element of mystic fear, hatred and awe towards the “savages”. Torture and violence would then be a way not only to obtain labour, but is linked to a culture of terror based on the myth of the cannibal savage (which we could maybe connect later with the popular image of the “baby eating communists”?). In sum, the rubber company owners systematically sought to inspire terror because they were themselves terrified of the jungle, constructed in colonial imagination as a space of death.
“To an important extent all societies live by fictions taken as reality. What distinguishes cultures of terror is that the epistemological, ontological, and otherwise purely philosophical problem of reality-and-illusion, certainty-and-doubt, becomes infinitely more than a "merely" philosophical problem. It becomes a high-powered tool for domination and a principal medium of political practice. And in the Putumayo rubber boom this medium of epistemic and ontological murk was most keenly figured and objectified as the space of death.” (Taussig 492)
The use of violence and torture was an effective way to assert complex hierarchies of race and class (many of which persist today to some degree in Latin America). Torture as a systematic and ritualistic practice, in this context, became not only a mean, but a mode and aim of production of power and meaning. This is all helpful to understand how ritualistic violence is intrinsic (rather than opposed) to the bureaucratic rationality of the state.
In Michael Taussig's analysis of the Putumayo Report, the white employees of English owned rubber companies inflicted the most outrageous bodily punishments to the Indigenous population of the Huitotos in Colombia, including men, elder, women and children. And precisely, the discourse that legitimized this brutality was that the first represented civilization, while the latter where presented as savages and “cannibals”. Taussig argues that these practices of torture aimed at the establishment of a culture of terror and cannot be merely explained by the rational logic of capitalism (in which torture would be a way of obtaining free labour by disciplining a population).
“...to offer one or all of the standard rational explanations of the culture of terror is [similarly] pointless. For behind the search for profits, the need to control labor, the need to assuage frustration, and so on, lie intricately construed long-standing cultural logics of meaning-structures of feeling- whose basis lies in a symbolic world and not in one of rationalism.” (Taussig 471)
Beyond “market pressure”, the use of ritualized violence against the indigenous population relates then to the cultural construction of evil, and also can be viewed as a way of male bonding between businessmen. Using Taussig's framework, we can understand state violence as anchored in its civilizatory project (in opposition to the savagery of the jungle), in which capitalism is its core content. In fact, Taussig points out that the resistance of the Putumayo's indigenous people to engage in exchange was presented by the rubber company owners as evidence of their savagery. But modernity is a violent project driven not only by the rational of profit, as there is also an element of mystic fear, hatred and awe towards the “savages”. Torture and violence would then be a way not only to obtain labour, but is linked to a culture of terror based on the myth of the cannibal savage (which we could maybe connect later with the popular image of the “baby eating communists”?). In sum, the rubber company owners systematically sought to inspire terror because they were themselves terrified of the jungle, constructed in colonial imagination as a space of death.
“To an important extent all societies live by fictions taken as reality. What distinguishes cultures of terror is that the epistemological, ontological, and otherwise purely philosophical problem of reality-and-illusion, certainty-and-doubt, becomes infinitely more than a "merely" philosophical problem. It becomes a high-powered tool for domination and a principal medium of political practice. And in the Putumayo rubber boom this medium of epistemic and ontological murk was most keenly figured and objectified as the space of death.” (Taussig 492)
The use of violence and torture was an effective way to assert complex hierarchies of race and class (many of which persist today to some degree in Latin America). Torture as a systematic and ritualistic practice, in this context, became not only a mean, but a mode and aim of production of power and meaning. This is all helpful to understand how ritualistic violence is intrinsic (rather than opposed) to the bureaucratic rationality of the state.
I think I've mentioned this before, but there is a tension (is there not?) between analyses of terror that stress its bureaucratic rationality, the way in which as you say it is "intrinsic (rather than opposed) to the bureaucratic rationality of the state," and analyses that see it as excessive and irrational. I think that Taussig tries to resolve that tension with his discussion of the irrationality of reason and the like. But it does make things more complex.
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