Reclaiming the Social Body Through Self-Directed Violence

Linos, Natalia. (2010). Reclaiming the social body through self-Directed violence:

Seeking anthropological understanding of suicide attacks. Anthropology Today, 26 (5).

According to Natalia Linos' 2010 article "Reclaiming the social body through self-directed violence: Seeking anthropological understanding of suicide attacks" from Anthropology Today, it is necessary to use a more rational, cooler academic lens to bring light as well as heat to the debate over the phenomenon of terrorist suicide attacks. While the emotionalism surrounding the issue is understandable, for Linos it often obscures the meaning and reasoning behind these suicidal gestures, and ultimately emotionalism impedes rather than enhances our ability to understand suicide bombing. Linos applies a Foucaultian analysis to the use of suicide bombing in the specific context of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The body has traditionally been a vehicle of articulation for the powerless. In Israel 'biopower,' or power over the physical bodies of the Palestinians, is manifested through the greater physical might of the Israeli army, checkpoints, and the presence of the military in the territories. For some radical groups, the use of their own biopower in the form of suicide bombers is the only way to strike back at the Israeli show of force. It becomes a paradoxical form of reclaiming one's own body through self-induced violence (Linos 2010:2). Linos suggests that self-directed violence becomes a source of positive self-definition within the symbolic vocabulary of the oppressed, as it has for women in other cultural contexts.

Violence against the self becomes regenerative in the community context of the Palestinians, even if it is personally destructive to the self. Linos also draws upon Durkheim's analysis of indigenous societies: on a communitarian level self-directed violent acts are rational, even if on an individualistic level they are not (Linos 2010:3). An individual suicide is not the same thing as a suicide undertaken for political reasons, and a suicidal bomber cannot be reduced to an individual's 'madness' any more than a hunger strike for a political reason can be reduced to an individual person refusing food (Linos 2010: 3). This inability to honor the collective dimension of individual experience is one reason why Westerners are particularly horrified by suicide bombing, more so than by other attacks (Linos 2010:4).

However, Linos admits that even in Islam there are prohibitions against suicide, as it is seen as a way of taking away the power of God to give and take away life. The notion that Westerners are uniquely disgusted by suicide bombing is also belied by the fact that it has existed within a Western context, such as in the 'Troubles' of Northern Ireland. There is also, she concedes, an element of pollution and co-mingling of the aggressor and the victim on the final death that creates revulsion innately, perhaps cross-culturally (Linos 2010:5).