The Dynamic Relationship Between 'Identity And Violence'

Essay on Memories and Emotion with refrences to the titled essays and other*

Renato Resaldo~Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage
Dean Barnlund~Communication in a Global Village

Emotions are a loaded topic. From love and hate to grief, fear and envy, emotions are increasingly understood as driving forces in social life. They are affected or aroused by many factors such as: memories of all kinds, complex situations and fights. Charismatic leaders rely heavily on the dynamic relationship between memory and emotion in order to act upon their audience. A charismatic leader can attracts the audience and capture their attention. He or she has the power to make the audience listen and act. The method usually used is manipulating the power of peoples emotion linked memories. Which means, guiding the negative emotions people carry because of past events and bad memories, and put them in focus. That serves the leader’s goal of leadership and gaining more power. In my school in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; Teachers act in a similar way to charismatic leaders. They demonize the western culture. They remind us of things that happened ages ago, like the Crusades and they would say to us: the people of the west are evil
and we must hate them. It’s ironic but their definition of ‘the west’ is non-existent. It is as Barnlund calls it: an ‘assumptive world’. I would say I consider my school to be a cultural force of emotions. Because, of the way they guide our emotions to serve their goals, to make us hate the ‘western people’ as they call them. In the book titled “Identity and Violence” by Amartya Sen.
He talks about the Hindu-Muslims riots in the chapter called: Freedom to think. I think the one of the reasons why the riots and killings continued, is because the way each sides leader forces certain emotions and way of thinking against the other side. Sen says that each individual has many identities. For example, I am a female, a daughter, a student an Arab and a Saudi… Violence as he stated, is created when a person or a bunch of people are reduced to one identity. That I think is what’s happening in Saudi Arabia. There, teachers would tell the students: we are Muslims, everyone else is our enemy. They would basically divide all people in this world to Muslims and Kuffar
(non-Muslims). The Ilongot tribe in the Philippines used to have a ritual of killing a victim when a loved one died. Although the Ilongot no longer practice this ritual, Rosaldo researched the custom during his fieldwork in the tribe. He asked older Ilongot men why they cut off human heads when they mourned the death of their loved ones. Their answer was simple: their rage, which was born of grief, impelled them to kill other people. Rosaldo had a hard time understanding this head-hunting ritual. At first, he tried to explain the tradition by using an exchange theory, a classic anthropological model of population control. However, his explanation was absolutely unintelligible to the Ilongot’s point of view. Only after his wife’s accidental death in the field, did Renato finally understood why the Ilngot men took heads for their loved ones. His unbearable sorrow led him to see what drove the Ilongot. At the same time, he realized why he previously misunderstands the Ilongot head-hunting custom: he attempted to apply a Western scientific model to the tribe, even though they did not share the same concepts.

I think rituals rely on emotions. When judging a ritual one must judge it on emotions and reason. A ritual may not be logic; but a believer in a certain religion or ritual would believe because of strong emotions of spirituality not because it’s reasonable to. The Ilongot headhunting ritual I would say; is not a logic ritual. It is an example of an assumptive world. Rituals and assumptive worlds are not related to logic. They both address people’s emotions. When I described an assumptive world in a previous essay, I used a Subway commercial as an example. And this ritual is quite similar to that commercial since that it is said when a loved one dies, you can sooth the grief and rage by killing another person. It is as stupid as saying you can ensure keeping a boyfriend if you eat this food. There is no linkage between what you eat and keeping you loved ones as there is no linkage between the emotions you feel witnessing a death and killing another person.

To be emotional, to experience different kinds of emotions we need communication. That’s what I thought when I talked about the character Chuck Noland in Cast Away in a previous essay I said, that he felt isolated because of the lack of communication. Nowadays I am reconsidering, after reading what a fellow classmate wrote about communication channels emotions. She says “Emotion is an idiosyncratic behavior because we learn from our family how to deal with and show emotions.” If Chuck was born on that island, if he never lived the life he lived before he ended up on that island; he may not have shown all the emotions he did. By communicating with his family as a child, then with the people around him he learned how to deal with and show his emotions, because people show emotions too that could be relative. When he got stuck on the island after being around people his entire life, suddenly completely alone, he felt the need of communication, he needed people, needed to talk, and to express his emotions. He considered suicide at some point. He had no one to talk to as if he’s dead. And I say dead because, when one dies, one looses contact with contacts with family, friends and people. Chuck also considers suicide because he was desperate, and he felt helpless. Death brings out powerful emotions. And to him it brought out the emotions of the last resort, the only way for salvation. Death is the ultimate trauma. It is the ultimate challenge to reason and intellect. Humans do not have a logical answer to death, never had it, and never will. All people fear death. They fear the unknown, and life after death is undefined. They fear it because they know they are helpless about it. In some places like the place Rosaldo went to study the Ilongot, have no medical care so people die young. In Rosaldo’s essay, one of the cases where death seems to bring more rage and anger than sorrow is when the death is of someone who was of a really young age. Tragedy seems to have a stronger relationship with rage and bereavement when associated with younger people. “This insight informed my account, partially described earlier, of an Ilongot man’s reaction to the death of his seventh child. At the same time, my bereavement was so much less than that of my parents that I could not then imagine the overwhelming force of rage possible in such grief.”(Rosaldo 476) I have heard a parent once say, no man should bury his child, and a child should outlive his parents, not the other way around. I think that all kinds of emotions exists in a human, the person may not experience or show all but it depends on the type of situations that person gets into and what memories one has of certain situations. Emotionally charged situations tend to be the most clearly remembered. When it comes to memories, we do not have the power of choice, the choice of forgetting or remembering. But there are powers that be: powers like media, politicians, teachers and priests. These kinds of powers can make us remember or forget as they choose. Saddam Hussein is an example. My teachers back in Saudi Arabia speak of Saddam Hussein nowadays as a freedom fighter. Ever since he’s been executed they’ve been telling us that he did not deserve to die, that his execution was cruel. That man occupied Kuwait, caused the death of hundreds of people and bombed Saudi Arabia as well. My dad says: people just chose to forget all the bad things and now are directing different emotions towards him. Memories involve the possibility of forgetting, but forgetting is also a part of remembering. I thought we had the choice of either remembering a memory or forgetting it. But when I really started thinking about it. I realized that will power has nothing to do with it. I thought that we can choose what to remember and what we forget, but the truth is we can’t. Even if we try to forget, it may haunt us in the years to come. Will power doesn’t matter because, memories are linked to emotions. Anything associated with a powerful emotion can be memorable and the force could be positive or negative. It could be positive in a way that you learn from your mistakes if the memory is of a situation where you said or did something wrong, you learn not to repeat that mistake. My theory is that in a human’s world there are two main opposite sides: the emotional and rational sides. In order for a person to be a well rounded being, one must find balance between them sides. One side must not overcome the other. The mind must not suppress emotions, and emotions must not dominate reason.