The Causes, Meanings and Aftermath of Violence in Contemporary America

Review of Howard Stein, Beneath the Crust of Culture: Psychoanalytic Anthropology and the Cultural Unconscious in American Life. New York: Rodopi, 2004, paperback. ISBN 90-420-0818-0, ix-xv + 137 pp., $44.00.

In the wake of the September 11^th attacks, the possibility of widespread violence in the United States is more palpable than ever before. As I commute from my home in New York City to Ramapo College in New Jersey, I occasionally find myself wondering whether the George Washington Bridge will be the target of an attack, and whether this might happen as I transverse it. Many people in the New York metropolitan area share such anxieties, which are fueled by the government’s periodic security alerts. This makes the book Beneath the Crust of Culture particularly timely. It aims to help us understand the causes and meanings of some of the key crises in American history during the past decade: the attacks of 9/11, the Columbine high school massacre, the execution of Timothy McVeigh, hypernationalism, and corporate downsizing. Even more significantly, the book addresses the issue of how we confront and cope with disasters and loss.

As a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I was not introduced to psychoanalytic anthropology which remains a less common approach in the field. Most anthropologists would agree with the fundamental premise of the book: that the most visible and tangible aspects of culture cannot be taken at face value, and that the deeper meanings of culture must be uncovered through research. Howard Stein employs psychoanalysis as a way of revealing these inner meanings. As he argues on page 121, “psychodynamic processes are often the underpinnings (the ‘core’) of what we observe on the surface as the ‘whole’ culture (the ‘crust’”). Demonstrating the utility of this theory for analyzing culture is one of his main motives for writing this book. While Stein offers many interesting insights into these crises and problems, many anthropologists will remain skeptical of the utility of this approach.

One fundamental problem with Stein’s book is that he seeks to analyze American culture as if it were a united and homogenous entity. In this vast country, marked by class, race, regional and other differences, the concept of an American culture is probably best understood as an ideological prototype. People gain the sense that they share a culture through representations, particularly those in the media, as Benedict Anderson argued in his landmark study, Imagined Communities. For example, it is primarily through the media that people throughout the country were able to experience and to know the events of September 11, and thus were able to reaffirm the sense that they belong to a wider national community.

It is not surprising then that in his effort to analyze “American culture,” Stein focuses on many events that have been the focus of major mass media attention. Even while he cautions against assuming that there is one meaning of a disaster or other event, he makes broad generalizations about what these events meant to people in America. I believe that this shortcoming stems from the fact that, unlike most anthropologists, he infrequently uses data that is based upon ethnographic fieldwork. Much of the data that Stein draws upon come from these media representations. I believe that Stein could convince many anthropologists to see the merits of the psychodynamic approach if his arguments were more grounded in the experiences of

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particular communities and individuals in the United States.

The first chapter focuses on the meanings and causes of the attacks of September 11, 2001, as well as the responses to the attacks. He argues that people bring meaning to disasters and shows how the interpretation of these events drew upon shared unconscious fantasies, fantasies that are sustained in films, videogames and other media. These fantasies were not the direct cause of the attacks; rather they were linked to the attacks through what Stein identifies as a “tacit cultural suggestibility” (p. 6). In another section, he uses Freudian theory to analyze the symbols of the attacks and to comprehend the motivations of the attackers. He makes the important critical point that the terrorists were not just responding to U.S. policies and actions, but also to what the United States represents (p. 16).

Chapter two investigates the Columbine high school massacre. His central argument here is that the massacre was, in part, a reaction to the feelings of “disposability” generated by corporate downsizing. This is a satisfying theory in that it seeks to historicize this tragic event by relating it to the larger economic context. While Stein’s fascinating analysis of the symbolic violence manifested by massive corporate layoffs is convincing, he does not adequately demonstrate whether and how this phenomenon was experienced in the community in Littleton, Colorado. He merely shows that there are parallels between the forms of symbolic violence enacted by corporations and the types of violence carried out by the youths who carried out the massacre. Here, ethnographic fieldwork in this community would provide data to bolster his argument, as would some supporting data regarding the economic context in that particular place. Stein devotes a fair amount of time to analyzing the two youths who carried out these acts, examining their thirst for revenge against high school peers and the meanings of the symbols that were employed in the massacre. Yet he also attempts to link the motivations of these youths to forces in wider society. For example, he shows how social dynamics in high school mirror those in the corporate world. Despite his allegiance to psychoanalysis, Stein eschews the use of narrowly bounded individual psychology as a means of understanding acts like these massacres (p. 27). His key point in this chapter is that adolescents who commit such heinous acts are not aberrant monsters but are in some way produced by processes within our society. This is a provocative and important argument that goes against many popular assumptions. Only by taking responsibility for people who commit acts of violence will society be able to address the root causes of such problems.

Chapter three is a brief, five-page interpretation of the execution of Timothy McVeigh. Here, Stein continues the theme that society disavows any connection with those who commit acts of large-scale violence. Most of the chapter reviews McVeigh’s life and examines the meaning of the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma for him.

Chapter four addresses hypernationalism and xenophobia, as manifested in corporate America. Here his main agenda is to highlight the parallels between the psychodynamic processes of group formation that function in ethnic and nationalist movements and those that operate in corporations. This is one of the few chapters that draws on ethnographic data, and his vignettes from workplaces illuminate how groups are created by identifying enemies. Stein is on less solid ground when he moves from showing the similarity between dynamics of ethnic and nationalist movements and the corporate workplace to arguing that they are equivalent. His suggestion that the style in which corporations carry out mass firings “illustrates the presence of hypernationalist, xenophobic thinking in ordinary workplaces” seems to overstate the case (p. 65).

The focus of chapter five is on how we make sense of disasters. At the end of the chapter, Stein summarizes his important recommendations for dealing with disasters. Disasters do not mean the same things to everyone, he asserts: people employ multiple, competing frameworks for making sense of any disaster. This is an excellent point but it could have been demonstrated with more concrete examples. Furthermore, this point could be brought to bear on his interpretation of the events of 9/11 in chapter one.

In chapter six, “Mourning and Society,” Professor Stein shows how mourning is a far more prevalent practice than usually assumed. He argues that “the idea of mourning and of defenses against it

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help to account for a wide array of otherwise mystifying phenomena” (p. 115). Humans engage in mourning not just following the loss of a loved one or after some other tragic event; rather, mourning is part of ordinary social life. Shifts in scientific theories, for example, are accompanied by mourning, since people must adjust to leaving an old view of the world behind. Wars and ethnic conflict can be explained partially as defenses against mourning, he argues. This is an intriguing argument and can help us to understand the emotional dimension of the experience of social change.

Many of Stein’s insights could also be applied to other contexts beyond America. As I read the book, I thought of how a psychodynamic approach might help us to analyze the current Maoist conflict in Nepal, my main research site, where an estimated 10,000 people have been killed since 1996. While it is clear that both the government’s army and police forces, as well as the army of the Maoists are to blame for these deaths, the government in Nepal has been quick to label the Maoists “terrorists” and to demonize them. How is the violence, both by Maoists and the government, made possible by other forces in Nepali society? What are the psychological effects of the various forms of symbolic and real violence for people in Nepal? What are the multiple frameworks that people are using to make sense of the trauma of the death or “disappearance” of kin and neighbors, and of the loss of homes, as people flee their homes to escape the violence? How does unresolved mourning perpetuate, rather than resolve, the violence in Nepal? Addressing these questions, inspired by Stein’s analysis, would lead to a deeper understanding of the conflict that would supplement the prevalent political and economic analyses.

Although earlier versions of the essays comprising this book have been published elsewhere, collected as a group, these essays provide the reader with a solid sense of the variety of Stein’s applications of group psychoanalysis/psychohistory. In sum, this is a compelling and challenging book that will raise many questions for both academics and non-specialists about the deeper meanings behind major crises in American society.

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