Talk:Structural violence
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[edit] I am editing the following
in the structural violence page the following is written.
"The violence in structural violence is attributed to multiple things, including disempowerment, oppressive passive social policy, and active marginalizing policy. Generally it is believed to come from a lack of access to power to protect oneself from the detrimental effects of the economic, social, and political order."
Do all agree that violence is the result of the victims actions? This seems to depart in a relatively huge way from what this page defines as violence, hence I shall change it.
If violence is allowing oneself to be victimized we need to change the definition in the main page.
If my edit is reverted with no arguments or explanations this is what I will be forced to do in order to make the pages agree.
Additionally I have completely removed the Farmer citation as it is irrelevant where the topic "structural violence" is concerned. A medical anthropologists opinion on the matter, regardless of publishing record is irrelevant where his work has never had any relation to observing, analyzing, or predicting such violence. I would additionally argue that farmer's POV provides no insight into the popular understanding of structural violence and instead is a departure from the norm.
"In explaining how structural violence affects the health of subaltern or marginalized people Paul Farmer writes, "Their sickness is a result of structural violence: neither culture nor pure individual will is at fault; rather, historically given (and often economically driven) processes and forces conspire to constrain individual agency. Structural violence is visited upon all those whose social status denies them access to the fruits of scientific and social progress."[1]"
Finally, if this edit is reversed, you may want to consider removing structural violence from the page of violence, altering the article "violence" to conform to victim responsibility, or perhaps just writing a better and more relevant entry.
I get the point you are trying to get across, however, it is easily mistaken to be an ascription of responsibility to the 'hapless' who have violence visited upon them. The word for that is "victimized".
[edit] objection
I put Farmer's quote back because his work forcuses exclusively on documenting and explaining structural violence. In academia, structural violence is primarily cited with his name.
[edit] explicates
It should be nice to note that much like Gould and biology this particular anthropologist is coming from outside his field of study and imposing views found not within research but rather opinion and personal bias.
While medical anthropology is concerned with developing models of health care and a diverse array of other things, it has never been associated with explicating theories which have been explicated elsewhere beyond the scope of the field of medical anthropology. In this way Farmers quotation seems somewhat irrelevant to me, it is merely an opinion and not a research conclusion about structural violence in and of itself.
