Scholars have long argued that dehumanization causes violence. However, others have recently argued that those who harm do so because they feel pressured or view violence as justified. Examining the ...Rwandan genocide, this article contends that contradictory theories of dehumanization can be reconciled through consideration of cultural and moral sociology. Research on culture and action demonstrates that when people strive to implement new practices, they often explicitly work through them cognitively and emotionally. With time, however, these conscious processes diminish until actions that were once new proceed with ease. In another vein, morality research suggests our affective responses to actions indicate their moral significance; when we do not react emotionally to actions, they are morally irrelevant. Herein, I combine these ideas with a temporal analysis of Hutus’ recollections of killing Tutsi and find cognitive, emotional, and relational transformations rendered killing mundane over time. Dehumanization was a consequence of violence, not a cause.
In contrast to the portrayal of archives as neutral sites that contain evidence of times past, this paper examines the construction of three archives during and after the Holocaust to highlight the ...challenges involved in gathering, preserving, and sharing documents produced by victimized populations. Specifically, I analyze the construction of, and conflicts among, the archives of the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine in Paris, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, and the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Each archive purports to contain the history of Jews in France during the Holocaust and strived in its aftermath not only to gather the remnants of European Jewish history but to reconstitute it, leading to contestations over what it meant to be Jewish in turn. Through analysis of the conflicts among these three archives, I show how debates over the possession of documents after genocide became symbolic debates about Jewish history and identity that would shape each of these archives for generations to come. I generalize from the example to discuss the practical implications of working with conflicting archives and examine the broader lessons for social scientists who wish to give “voice to the voiceless” by working with documents produced by victimized populations.
Dual-process theories of morality are approaches to moral cognition that stress the varying significance of emotion and deliberation in shaping judgments of action. Sociological research that builds ...on these ideas considers how cross-cultural variation alters judgments, with important consequences for what is and is not considered moral behavior. Yet lacking from these approaches is the notion that, depending on the situation and relationship, the same behavior by the same person can be considered more or less moral. The author reviews recent trends in sociological theorizing about morality and calls attention to the neglect of situational variations and social perceptions as mediating influences on judgment. She then analyzes the moral machine experiment to demonstrate how situations and relationships inform moral cognition. Finally, the author suggests that we can extend contemporary trends in the sociology of morality by connecting culture in thinking about action to culture in thinking about people.
"Our institutions will save us." This phrase, repeated time and again as reassurance in the face of mounting uncertainty following the 2016 presidential election, is not without merit. America has ...long prided itself on the stability of its institutions-on the stability of its democracy and the assumption that its institutions function to undergird, serve, and protect it. However, when the question of social death emerges, we must ask ourselves: whom have our institutions historically served, whom have our institutions historically excluded, and how, given the clear and unflinching evidence that some groups are more desirable to the new administration in Washington than others, can we learn from the past to confront the present and shore up our institutions so that they are truly representative of all who live in America in the future? Here, Luft will answer these questions while making historical comparisons with social death mechanisms in the US.
Humanizing dehumanization research Leader Maynard, Jonathan; Luft, Aliza
Current research in ecological and social psychology,
2023, 2023-00-00, 2023-01-01, Letnik:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
•Cultural understandings of the human and dehumanized influence how dehumanizing ideologies shape violence.•Social relationships and dynamics influence how dehumanization functions in real-world ...conflicts.•The institutional organization of violence influences dehumanization's relevance and effects.•Interdisciplinary research on dehumanization will provide the best path forward for understanding the linkages between dehumanization and violence.
This essay contends that contemporary research should pay greater attention to three fundamentally human characteristics of dehumanization. First, we argue that scholars need to better consider and analyze the ideological context of dehumanization, specifically the multiple meanings that diverse cultural conceptions of the human and the dehumanized impart to dehumanizing concepts or attitudes. Second, we urge a greater emphasis on how social relationships influence dehumanization, recognizing that people are entangled in complex and intersecting social identities, relationships, and histories that affect how they respond to the dehumanizing intentions of others. Third, we argue that the institutional context of dehumanization must be investigated and theorized, as dehumanization’s effects are rarely the result of atomized individuals reacting to diffuse dehumanizing rhetoric but rather the result of collective action within more or less formal organizations. These tasks can be accomplished through increased interdisciplinarity, thereby enhancing the insights and applicability of dehumanization research to the numerous forms of conflict, brutality, and extremism that are so frequently associated with dehumanization.
Display omitted
This article is about behavioral variation in genocide. Research frequently suggests that violent behaviors can be explained by or treated as synonymous with ethnic categories. This literature also ...tends to pre-group actors as perpetrators, victims, or bystanders for research purposes. However, evidence that individuals cross boundaries from killing to desistance and saving throughout genocide indicates that the relationship between behaviors and categories is often in flux. I thus introduce the concept of behavioral boundary crossing to examine when and how Hutu in 1994 Rwanda aligned with the killing behaviors expected of them and when and how they did not. I analyze interviews with 31 Hutu, revealing that transactional, relational, social-psychological, and cognitive mechanisms informed individuals' behaviors during the genocide. The result is a dynamic theory of action that explains participation without homogenizing individual experience due to presumptions about behavioral and categorical alignment.
Research on authoritarian legitimation suggests that rulers seek support through ideological, personalistic, performance-based, and procedural strategies. Typically, however, this work only considers ...the dynamics of legitimation between rulers and civilians. In contrast, this paper suggests that meso-level actors play a critical role in shaping legitimation from both above and below. Through an historical analysis of the French episcopate’s support for the Vichy regime from 1940 to 1942, I identify four practices that bolstered Vichy’s attempts to accrue legitimacy and simultaneously identify the consequences of these practices for the Church’s relationship with Jews. Public endorsements by the religious authorities for Marshal Pétain, their cooperation with the Vichy administration, the expression of shared values, and common rhetoric all contributed to the regime’s legitimation process while leading to a concomitant decline in the hierarchy’s ties to the rabbinate. These results suggest that attention to meso-level actors brings into relief important dynamics about how legitimation processes unfold in authoritarian settings while simultaneously contributing to research on the Holocaust in France.
PDF
