On the Attribution of Violence

This paper studies the folk understandings of "violence". While specialists have worked to refine the concept (e.g., Coady, Schinkel, Wolff), this analysis explores what people mean when they label something as “violent.”

In our everyday public life, the category “violence” is often applied broadly, from state actions like killing protestors to social behaviors like political apathy, catcalling, or even wearing fur. Despite its wide-ranging application, the paper argues that “violence” still holds a core meaning in contemporary societies, ingrained in collective consciousness and relatively resistant to academic refinement.

Using cultural sociology, the paper reconstructs the symbolic system surrounding “violence” by examining various instances where the term is invoked. I focus on cases that challenge the boundaries of what is or isn’t considered violence, provided that none involves physical force: feminists' claims that catcalling is violent, environmental activists’ assertions that nature's exploitation is violent, and academic concepts like Bourdieu’s “symbolic violence” and postcolonial “epistemic violence.”

Through these examples, the paper demonstrates that “violence” functions as a critical symbol in contemporary public discourse, embodying two key discursive features. First, it represents a claim of illegitimacy within a civil-democratic cultural framework. Second, it reflects a claim of social transcendence, signifying that violence poses a fundamental threat to the sacred values underlying society, rather than being a routine problem.