Trauma and Lived Religion

Transcending the Ordinary

R. Ruard Ganzevoort,Srdjan Sremac

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319918723
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia delle religioni

This book focuses on the power of the 'ordinary', 'everydayness' and 'embodiment' as keys to exploring the intersection of trauma and the everyday reality of religion. It critically investigates traumatic experiences from a perspective of lived religion, and therefore, examines how trauma is articulated and lived in the foreground of people's concrete, material actualities.

Trauma and Lived Religion seeks to demonstrate the vital relevance between the concept of lived religion and the study of trauma, and the reciprocal relationship between the two. A central question in this volume therefore focuses on the key dimensions of body, language, memory, testimony, and ritual. It will be of interest to academics in the fields of sociology, psychology, and religious studies with a focus on lived religion and trauma studies, across various religions and cultural contexts.

Part IBody

© The Author(s) 2019

R. Ruard Ganzevoort and Srdjan Sremac (eds.)Trauma and Lived Religion Palgrave Studies in Lived Religion and Societal Challengeshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91872-3_2

Begin Abstract

Torture and Lived Religion: Practices of Resistance

Kathryn House¹

(1)

School of Theology, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

Kathryn House

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Introduction: Witnessing

In December 2014, the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) released the much-anticipated review of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program (SSCI 2014). The full document, over 6700 pages, remains classified, but the almost 525 pages made available offered indisputable proof of the clandestine interrogations, renditions, and detentions of individuals thought to have knowledge of terrorist activities after the attacks on the USA in 11 September 2001. Jared Del Rosso pointedly summarizes the slippages and recalibrations of authority and truth in the documents: “the CIA employed unauthorized interrogation techniques and used authorized techniques in unauthorized ways and that those techniques did not yield valuable information” (2015, p. xi). Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein confirmed that in her estimation, the evidence is now clear “that, under any common meaning of the term, the CIA detainees were tortured…the conditions of confinement and the use of authorized and unauthorized interrogation and conditioning techniques were cruel, inhuman, and degrading” (2014, p. 4). Indeed, one key insight of the report was that “the interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and the American public” (SSCI, “Findings and Conclusions,” 2014, p. 3). The SSCI report also included confirmation that officials at the highest levels implemented and condoned the following enhanced interrogation techniques: exposure to extreme temperatures, sleep deprivation, confinement, rectal feeding and rehydration, threats of death to prisoners and prisoners’ families, stress positions, sexual humiliation, waterboarding, and walling (“Findings and Conclusions,” 2014, pp. 3 and 4). Since 2014, not only have these techniques been named in the Committee’s 2014 study, but also they were recalled in testimony from Guantánamo detainees obtained in declassified transcripts of military hearings (Savage 2016). Ariel Dorfman’s lament in “Hope/Esperanza,” a poem recounting a parent’s unending horror of not having information about a child disappeared under General Pinochet’s brutal regime in Chile, resounds in the wake of these American affirmations: “Somebody tell me frankly/what times are these/what kind of world/what country?” (2002, pp. 10 and 11).

It is possible to view the Program as one misguided step of a country otherwise devoted to human rights, even in the most tenuous and trying circumstances. President Obama’s statement at an August 2014 press conference, as some report revelations were beginning to surface, demonstrates this view: “…In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 we did some things that were wrong. We did a whole lot of things that were right, but we tortured some folks. We did some things that were contrary to our values…And when we engaged in some of these enhanced interrogation techniques, techniques that I believe and I think any fair-minded person would believe were torture , we crossed a line…And we have to, as a country, take responsibility for that so that, hopefully, we don’t do it again in the future” (Obama 2014).

But such sound bites do not account for the complexity and history of torture within the USA. If Dorfman’s question is a call about the reality of torture as a matter of national policy, here related to the admissions of torture in the CIA’s program, then Nafis White’s installation piece “Can I Get a Witness?” is a response from the related context of police brutality in the United States. In the piece, a neon sign hangs on an unadorned wall (White 2014a, b). It beckons: “Can I Get A Witness?” in neon white matchsticks, sharp, blazing, just barely touching at tenuous angles. The letters are crooks and curves, stretching and bending. A typed list, running vertically down the page, is posted to the left of the sign. This is a list of the names of men and women who have been killed by police forces in the USA. The list begins with “2104: Mike Brown (Ferguson, MO)” and ends (begins?) with “2009: Victor Steen, (Pensacola, FL).” In the artist’s description, White notes that the piece grew out of seeing Mike Brown’s body lying in the street for four hours, bereft of concern from those who were sworn to protect him. White explains: “This terrible event, along with the many before and after are part of my landscape, part of my DNA, and the call to action, to work together as a community to challenge these violent events is being illuminated and shouted out for all to bear witness to. Our collective witnessing is what is shifting our landscape and our consciousness” (2014b).

The intrinsic connection between the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program and White’s statement is highlighted here to emphasize that the violence perpetuated under the auspices of the CIA’s program is arguably not the exception but the norm in US-American policing strategies (Alexander 2012, p. 13; Gordon 2014, pp. 107 and 133; Zimmerman 2013, p. 183). Note that the Executive Summary was released in Washington, DC, on 9 December 2014, and gained traction during waves of protest in the USA over police brutality. One such sparking event was that on 3 December, a grand jury did not indict New York Police Department Officer Daniel Pantaleo for placing Eric Garner in a chokehold that ended his life (New York Times Editorial Board 2014). Contrary to the way records of torture abroad were destroyed, the evidence from Ramsey Orta’s video forced a visual and auditory reckoning with Garner’s repeated cries of “I can’t breathe” and the seven minutes of silence as he laid motionless (Guardian.com 2014). Thus, the simultaneity of the report’s release and the grand jury decision might be accidental, but the timing is not inconsequential.

I intentionally begin by forging a connection between the torture of non-US-American enemy combatants and insurgents and police brutality against US-American citizens, predominantly black and brown US-American citizens, to reiterate the ubiquity of such violence within the context of the USA. As legal scholar Dorothy E. Roberts explains, the logic of torture is well acquainted with “racialized hierarchies” and the “marking” of brown and black bodies, bodies deemed in/subhuman. Roberts articulates the operationalizing of these hierarchies in this way: “Torture’s maintenance and production of racialized hierarchies links the current treatment of detainees in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantánamo to the status of African Americans in the United States. Torture functions similarly in both cases to mark the bodies of brown-skinned victims as savage objects undeserving of civilized legal protection and to violently impose their subjugated status” (Roberts 2008, p. 230). Theologian Kelly Brown Douglas argues that such an understanding functions within the American myth of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism, America’s “original sin” of white supremacy, evident as far back in US-American history as in the forced removals of against Native Americans and enslaved African Americans in the history of the founding of the USA (2015, p. 15). Torture, then, must be understood within a history of racialized violence in the USA, even as it is contextualized within the US-American reality of mass incarceration and police brutality, as movements like #BlackLivesMatter have brought to the forefront of American consciousness (Douglas 2015; Alexander 2012; #BlackLivesMatter 2016). To say “never again” is to deny history past and history unfolding; to frame the CIA Program as a reasonable but unfortunate response in a time of extreme fear masks the way in which institutionalized violence against persons of color is the precedent and norm rather than the exception in the USA.

Positing torture within this broader context of racialized violence has implications for trauma and lived religion. It not only takes seriously torture’s impact on individual persons, but also attends to the perspectives of scholars such as Maria Root and Stef Caps, who broaden definitions and diagnoses of trauma by attending to the “long-term, cumulative trauma suffered by victims of racism or other forms of structural oppression” (Craps 2013, p. 20; Root 1992). Such a context also presses the power of the ordinary and the “everyday” as a significant lens by which to analyze the intersection of torture, trauma, and lived religion. Rebecca Gordon has persuasively argued that instances of torture seem like aberrations. Torturers seem to be betraying orders, stepping out of line and taking things too far. On the contrary, Gordon contends, torture’s power is in the fact that it is highly normalized; it is ingrained in and protected in institutions rather than singular or rare occurrences. It is this imagined rarity that lends the reality of torture an air of mystique or responses of shocked condemnation rather than sustained resistance or acceptance of its ubiquity (2014, p. 107).

Analysis through a framework of lived religion offers a similar methodological move by refusing to prioritize the abstract, special or set apart as the subject of study and as the most insightful location or source of meaning-making. Whereas the study of religion often assumes a dichotomy between the sacred and the profane, focusing predominantly on religion as unembodied beliefs in stable and fixed institutions, Robert Orsi argues that engaging religion from this more materialist and empiricist perspective embraces the ways that unique individuals at particular times and places in specific spaces practice religion. According to Orsi, this expands the definition of what it means for humans to make meaning and just where such meaning-making might take place (1997, p. 7). Religious practice is not confined to pews or pulpits, but encompasses all of the places where humans narrate and interpret their worlds. Such intersections and spaces —offices, subways, the streets—are religious, he contends, because they “are the places where humans make something of the worlds they have found themselves thrown into, and, in turn, it is through these subtle, intimate, quotidian actions on the world that meanings are made, known, and verified” (1997, p. 7). Torture , which has the horrific capacity for creating worlds and is grounded in be...