‘We all suffer, but to be a victim is a choice.’ – Author unknown

THE category of victimhood as it operates in both the discourse of common sense as well as in conventional social sciences, has at times led to a confusion of the nuances and the politics the category entails as a complex idea and as a body of experiences. The basic meaning of victimhood as ‘the state of being a victim’¹ is a sensibility that encompasses most understandings of what victimhood means. It is this commonsense that Montville refers to as ‘a state of individual and collective ethnic mind that occurs when the traditional structures that provide an individual sense of security and self-worth through membership in a group are shattered by aggressive, violent political outsiders’.² As Montville further notes, victimhood tends to be characterized by ‘either an extreme or persistent sense of mortal vulnerability’.³

Victimhood at the most fundamental level, as in these senses, has to do with deprivations that exist or are perceived to exist in specific temporal moments or historical contexts. One can take such understandings of being victimized, evident in most renderings of what victimhood means for granted, as a point of departure.

However, such understandings – precisely due to their generality – also diminish the inherent complexities of the discourses of victimhood, which go beyond the mere act of being victimized. Victimhood is almost always understood overwhelmingly within an idiom of negativity. But is this always the case? Being victimized can also entail more nuanced possibilities of being. At one end of the spectrum, victimhood could lead to the construction of the essential foundation of one’s personal and collective identity. At the other end of the spectrum, victimhood might serve as the deciding factor in the allocation of financial benefits one may receive as reparations, compensations and so on in situations of violence and marginalization. All of these extensions of victimhood, which can generally be seen as ‘assets’, will however be ruptured, if the tag of victimhood is removed from consideration. Seen in this sense, the experience of victimhood can be understood in a more nuanced manner if it is situated within a paradigm of identity formation and economic well-being in very specific situations.

 

This essay will focus on this aspect of victimhood looking at it as a social and political asset and as a means to profit within a very specific ethnographic and political context located in the political violence in Sri Lanka in the late 1980s. Such a focus would take this brief reading beyond the better known and taken for granted understandings of the category.

With regard to issues of economic and financial benefits of victimhood, laws on victimhood in situations of conflict and post-conflict often take being a victim and the ability to ascertain victimhood in legal and political terms as the basic foundation for reparations and benefits of aid programmes. It is in such a context that Counter has noted, ‘the manner in which the Victims’ Law designates who counts as a victim, as well as the inability of the law’s reparations to consistently materialize, has paradoxically cast the Victims’ Law as a piece of legislation with its own victimizing potential.’⁴ That is, who is a recipient of aid and who is not, within a group of perceivably aggrieved and victimized people, tends to create a dichotomy between recipients and non-recipients, leading to a sense of additional victimizing among non-recipients as noted by Counter.

 

Between 1997 and 1998, I was a co-team leader in a project focused on empowering Non Government Organizations and providing incentives for the development of entrepreneurial skills and knowledge transfer to people affected by political violence that would enable them to initiate forms of sustainable self-employment in the Monaragala and Hambantota districts of Sri Lanka. The project was coordinated by the University of Colombo with funds from the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, Japan. The two districts selected were severely affected by the extreme wave of political violence in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the context of the anti-state insurrection launched by the political group, the Janata Vimukti Peramuna (JVP, People’s Liberation Front) and the state’s response to it. To put it simply, this was a conventional applied sociological development programme situated in the backdrop of the socio-political upheavals brought about by the insurrection.

The kinds of villages we were working in were marked by excessive poverty over a long period of time, and this was one reason why the insurrection found more sympathy in such areas. Effectively, this meant that a generalized sense of victimhood rooted in the lack of access to economic resources and political power, along with a sense of geographic marginalization of the region itself, was part of the core narrative most people we met often narrated. It was a self-description of their being and was also at times articulated in terms of karma, which made sense within Buddhist sensibilities that most people in the region shared. These conditionalities also meant, in the aftermath of the violence, that many families were scarred by deaths, torture and destruction of property at the hands of both the state and the JVP. This further entrenched their prevailing sense of victimhood irrespective of political affiliations.

 

But our methodology required that we work with people whose families were impacted by violent deaths and who did not receive compensation from the state. It did not cover other victims of broader social and economic calamities who were nevertheless as poor as the former. This meant the people we worked with were likely to be families sympathetic to the JVP or perceived to be as such, and were specifically targeted by state actors. Fieldwork at the time had also indicated that such families were less likely to receive compensation despite their legal eligibility because of the state perceiving them as ‘culprits’. As a result, in the immediate post-violence period and up to a decade later, the sense of vulnerability and victimhood of these people was far more pronounced than what was generally felt and articulated in the region.

In retrospect, my sense is that our project, though short term, also led to the further enhancement of this feeling, not merely as a means to articulate the sense of belonging to a wronged moral community of pain, but more specifically, as a group that needed financial help and had to establish their sense of victimhood in order to receive this aid. Their conversations were invariably meant to make two inter-connected points: (a) their state of being continuously victimized; and (b) their pre-qualification for aid/ compensation precisely due to that state of victimhood. At the time, it was clear that the removal of the tag of victimhood was not something they aspired for, given the loss of economic and financial benefits that would necessarily follow.

 

A more specific example was the case of a police officer in Monaragala who was shot in his right hand in a JVP ambush, which had affected the use of that hand to some extent. I showed some sympathy towards his plight in my conversations with him, mostly because his injury was evident. But what he said in return was quite revealing. For him, it was a matter of ‘good fortune’ to get shot as he did, and survive. This is because the experience offered him immediate compensation from the state, and more importantly, a promotion to the rank of sub-inspector and an increase in salary. The promotion and the additional financial benefits would not have been possible without that injury in the line of duty.

In this context, being targeted by the JVP in the hope of turning him into a victim, worked instead to empower him in socio-political terms as a ‘hero’ in the state discourse, which also had considerable public acceptance in southern Sri Lanka and in enhancing his overall economic and financial state. In both Sri Lankan cases presented here, what is generally thought of as victimhood is seen as an asset in economic and financial terms even though there is no denying the fact that people in these situations have indeed been victimized.

But what Greenwood refers to in the context of Asháninka in Peru is very different to this situation. Unlike in these Sri Lankan narratives, in the initial stages post-violence, the Asháninka used ‘a culturally distinct language ideology that did not involve testimonies of past suffering’ when referring to violent events of the past.⁵ They opted instead in a self-conscious manner not to be known as victims, and preferred to be known for their intention to ‘move forward’.⁶

In this context, mostly for external consumption, they constructed a discourse to project an image of a ‘strong and proud people’ who wanted not to be known as victims specifically, and instead be thought of as ‘equals’.⁷ But that sense of public erasure emerged from an actual situation of victimization. Later however, they began to engage with the national discourse on the past, which had a very clear reference to the experience of suffering.⁸ Greenwood notes this latter engagement indicates how a national discourse on suffering can play a role in ‘constructing the localised identity of the Asháninka and the problems that arise out of this process’, which also has reference to victimhood in the larger scheme of things.⁹

 

When it comes to issues of identity, we are constantly reminded of the crucial implication of identity in Foucault’s idea of biopolitics. In so far as biopolitics is concerned, it is not merely a reference to fostering the life of specific populations as a matter of power. The meanings of identity that determine what kind of groups will be fostered and what groups of people might be exposed to violence and other forces of disruption, and are therefore victimized, are crucial to biopolitical analyses.¹⁰ In these situations, the social and political identities of such people are framed, mediated and created via a number of approaches, which includes among other things, the moral legitimacy accrued through the body that has essentially suffered in biophysical terms.¹¹ Without reference to that sense of suffering or victimhood, the power and legitimacy such identities would have in discursive terms, will be lost.

 

As we know, in most situations when victimhood becomes a core foundation of identity formation, it is often with reference to marginalized ethnic, religious or regional groups. What Glucksam describes in the context of violence and notions of justice in Liberia are manifestations of identity prerogatives on the basis of victimhood. As she notes, insecure groups often end up ‘auto-othering’ in order to construct narratives of ‘righteousness and innocence’ for themselves.¹² Nevertheless, this kind of discourse can emerge only in a situation of victimhood where one’s collective sense of ‘righteousness’ and ‘innocence’ can only be articulated when juxtaposed with ‘guilt’ and ‘culpability’ of clearly identified perpetrators/others.

However, instead of these kinds of groups prone to victim-based identity formation, my interest in this section is to briefly explore the issues of victimhood that have been exploited self-consciously by a group of artists as a primary marker of their professional and political identity. These were mostly Sinhala artists from the southern part of Sri Lanka who had become targets of political violence unleashed by the state or the JVP. It was not their Sinhala ethnic identity or southern Sri Lankan regional identity that formed the foundation of their collective identity as a group of artists. Instead, their identity was focussed on their shared experience in political violence as witnesses, as members of society when violence was the main modus operandi of the state and the JVP, and as personal victims who suffered torture, imprisonment, illegal detention, targeted family victimization and so on. Their work, which is collectively known as the ‘Art of the 1990s’ can be understood as a genre of political art. This art specifically reflected and addressed the phase of political violence in Sri Lanka in the late 1980s, and their own location in this violence.¹³

 

With reference to this kind of art in the broader Asia region, Caroline Turner notes that political and social changes in the region have been ‘mirrored and reflected’ in the region’s art.¹⁴ As Weerasinghe notes, one way in which this body of Sri Lankan art can be understood is to view them as works that explore the self and individuals’ sense of being that has been victimized and had become frustrated as victims organized violence.¹⁵ As he further notes, these artists were a ‘group of people living with memories of violence, dispossession and despair’.¹⁶ The other way to see this art was to perceive them as ‘works that investigate the allure as well as the frustrations of the city as an artistic expression.’¹⁷ This is because many of these artists felt they were ‘casualties of the alluringly strange beauty and evasive nature of urban culture.’¹⁸ In both senses, most of the artists who represented the ‘Art of the 1990s’ considered themselves to be victims of prevailing political conditions including political violence as well as forces of rapid urbanization and globalization.

 

This sense of victimization was the core of the collective identity of these artists as is also clearly reflected in their work. It is work that was formulated within this sensibility that also helped them make their mark as professional artists in the country and beyond. This identity and the work based on the specific experience of violence and victimhood this identity affords, created the foundation that made these artists successful commercially, particularly overseas. As a result, their professional existence without reference to this sense of victimization was not tenantable as the loss of that identity also meant the loss of a particular legitimacy to a specific genre of art. But locally, much of their work, due to their somewhat gloomy subject matter was considered culturally inauspicious, and therefore was not always commercially viable.¹⁹

Because of these socio-political and economic imperatives, these artists practiced their art on victimization for a considerable period of time even after the main phases of political violence in southern and north-eastern Sri Lanka had ended. Though in a very different context and conditions, this is not dissimilar to what Glucksam describes as ‘a proliferation of victimhood’ by ‘victim-witnesses.’²⁰

In the Sri Lankan case, this proliferation of victimhood occurred not so much to entrench a sense of being perpetual victims, but to construct a professional identity that took as its point of departure, a collective experience marked by political violence and victimization due to the fallouts of urban culture and low-intensity warfare. This art was also a matter of constructing and placing in public domains what might be called ‘narratives of righteousness and innocence’ that would help generate a sense of ‘identity stability’²¹ in the long term in the post-violence context.

 

What I have tried to do in this essay is to extend an invitation to explore the idea and experience of victimhood beyond the more taken for granted meanings generally assigned to it. If done so, victimhood can be unpacked to expose a more complex idea through which dynamics of identity formation and economic and financial relations – among many others – might be given additional meaning, and explored in a more nuanced fashion. This would offer newer and more creative possibilities of formulating a better informed sociology of victimhood.

 

Footnotes:

1. https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/victimhood (accessed 15 October 2019).

2. Quoted in Rhoda, Reddock, ‘Competing Victimhoods: A Framework for the Analysis of Post-colonial Multi-Ethnic Societies’, Social Identities 25(6), 2019, p. 812.

3. Ibid., 812.

4. M. Counter, ‘Producing Victimhood: Landmines, Reparations, and Law in Colombia’, Antipode 50(1), 2018, pp. 136-137.

5. Ashley Greenwood, ‘Authority, Discourse and the Construction of Victimhood’, Social Identities 25(6), 2019, p. 747.

6. Ibid., p. 747.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. M.J. Casper, L.J. Moore and T. Lemke, Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction. NYU Press, New York, 2011; J. Reid, ‘Life Struggles: War, Discipline, and Biopolitics in the Thought of Michel Foucault’, in S. Morton and S. Bygrave (eds.), Foucault in an Age of Terror: Essays of Biopolitics and the Defence of Society. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2008, pp. 14-42.

11. D. Fassin, ‘Another Politics of Life is Possible’, Theory, Culture and Society 26(5), 2009, pp. 44-60; M. Ticktin, Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2011.

12. Noga Glucksam, ‘I Fear, Therefore I Am: Victimhood and the Struggle for Ontological Security in the Liberia Truth Commission’, Civil Wars 20(1), 2018, p. 93.

13. S. Perera, Artists Remember; Artists Narrate: Memory and Representation in Contemporary Sri Lankan Visual Arts. Colombo Institute for the Advanced Study of Society and Culture, Colombo, 2011.

14. Caroline Turner (ed.), Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific. Pandanus Books, Canberra, 2005, p. 1.

15. Jagath Weerasinghe, ‘90 Pravanathawasaha Samakaleena Drushya Kala Bhavithaya’, Art Lab 1, 2004, pp. 5-43.

16. Jagath Weerasinghe. ‘Contemporary Art in Sri Lanka’, in Caroline Turner (ed.), Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific. Pandanus Books, Canberra, 2005.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. S. Perera, 2011, op. cit.

20. Noga Glucksam, 2018, op. cit., p. 92.

21. Ibid., p. 93.