Accessing stigmatized knowledges: a crucial peace-making skill
This essay is part of Ways of working for more peaceful futures: A global health humanities roundtable, an effort through the Future of Peace program to bring perspectives from global health humanities into conversation with questions of peace. Read Michelle E. Anderson’s introduction to the series, or explore the full roundtable paper bringing all six contributions together.
We often think of peace as an absence of violence or conflict. But defining peace as an absence, rather than an active practice of “making,” leaves little guidance for working toward peace in a polarized world. Peace, like the human rights meant to support it, centers the human. The UDHR is paradoxically both assertive (all humans are to have rights) and aspirational (all humans should have them). Hannah Arendt, writing after the mass statelessness of World War II, observed that only citizens hold enforceable rights, yet the stateless are the ones who most need them. This problem has only grown with rising numbers of refugees and stateless people, not to mention citizens who find themselves at odds with states that don’t accord them the rights they do have in law. For these reasons, human rights frameworks often exclude the very people who most need them. Further, the UDHR’s “human” is rooted in the Western notion of “Man” — what Sylvia Wynter calls an idea of the human that overrepresents itself as all humans. That man is also anthropocentric: rights center the human so completely that they fail to serve human interests well. Humans are deeply interdependent with non-human animals and the natural and built environments. For example, access to clean water and breathable air are necessities for many beings, not just humans.
So where do we go from here?
First, we need to abandon the idea that peace and material or political goods are things the privileged “give” to those who lack them. I spent decades working to mainstream gender-based violence prevention into HIV/AIDS prevention efforts in southern African communities facing endemic poverty and HIV prevalence rates between 33% and 38%, both before and after highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) became available through churches and then the state. This work reshaped my understanding of peacemaking — both its methodology and the community-based knowledge it depends on. The two are inseparable.
Violence — whether structural, like racism, gender-based violence, or entrenched ethnic conflict, or interpersonal, like partner abuse — is heavily stigmatized. We lack everyday language for discussing it, and when we do speak of it, we tend to abstract it away from the body, even though it is our bodies and minds that bear its harm. For this reason, our community engagement approaches drew on embodied strategies from dramatists, body-mappers, and educators using “cellphilm” methods to capture young girls’ experiences. By embodied methods, I mean ones that engage not just the mind but the entire body of community members — and often facilitators too. These activities include drawing maps of one’s own body in relation to others’ in a cohort; drama techniques using the body to communicate with a cohort; and using cell phones to film oneself in daily contexts, record voice-over reflections, and play these back to one’s cohort and facilitators.
These approaches let community members convey knowledge to each other and to outsiders without relying on spoken or written narrative. Working through posture, gesture, and the traced histories of participants’ bodies accomplishes three things: it allows stigmatized issues to be addressed without being spoken aloud, sparing the communication from self-censorship; it refuses the mind-body split that makes violence against others easier to commit; and it surfaces knowledge participants may not have known they held — knowledge essential to right-making. This includes understandings of the interrelation between the natural world and humans (unborn, living, and ancestral), and the primacy, in some cultures, of relationship over individual identity. In Ubuntu, for instance, one has no identity apart from one’s relations to human and non-human beings.
These methods are slow and effortful, resistant to economies of scale. But they build trust and understanding. Peacemaking cannot be reduced to time-rationing or large-scale intervention into other people’s worlds — two modes of “efficiency” that can themselves produce violence. For example, the introduction of Western medicine, dependent on the mind/body split Western science manifests, imposes that split onto cultures that never suffered it in the first place — itself a kind of violence demanding acute attention and remediation in cross-cultural medical work. Consider the thousands of Westerners trying to bridge that split through practices like yoga. Or the other side of the coin: the foreignness, to some, of a Western-trained doctor’s instructions: take HAART with food. But how do you explain — itself a point of stigma — that you have no food, and so skip the medicine because it makes you vomit? A rural traditional healer would not demand that explanation; they would foresee the possibility, because they create an environment that does not stigmatize that degree of poverty.
Embodied engagement is a way of listening to knowledge we haven’t been attuned to — which suggests real listening is itself an act of peacemaking. It is not passive; it means attending to what we don’t already know and cannot simply recognize.
Finally: peacemaking is not all-or-nothing, as the conflict-versus-peace binary implies. Differences can exist without becoming violent. Moreover, harm reduction in this violent world is not an attack on excellence — it is progress toward peace, not despair at the distance between where we are and where we strive to be.
