BEARING WITNESS

by Fiona C. Ross

People who witness acts of terror and violence are often called after the event to bear witness to what they saw. In cases where this violence is inflicted by the state upon its own people, the process of bearing witness is both politically complex and traumatic for the individual involved. Independent trials and commissions have become important mechanisms through which the truth of past violence is sought in democratising states, but to date there has been little close attention to the processes and complexity of the work of such institutions.Fiona Ross's fascinating study of the process of bearing witness is the first book to examine the gendered dimensions of this topic from an anthropological and ethnographic viewpoint. Taking as a key example the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, Ross explores women's relationships to testimony, particularly the extent to which women avoid talking about or are silent about certain forms of violence and suffering. Offering a wealth of first-hand examples, Ross approaches a more subtle understanding of the achievements and the limitations of testimony as a measure of suffering and recovery generally. Is it, she asks, the panacea it is usually seen as? Or do conventional discourses on human rights, suffering and reconciliation oversimplify an altogether more complex and problematic process?

Genres: Anthropology

216 pages, Paperback

First published December 20, 2002

Reviews

[Nathan Albright · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is an example of what happens when someone whose only knowledge about the world comes from the worthless field of women's studies and writes a book that only demonstrates her complete inability to understand what it is that she pretends to be an expert about.  To the extent that this book has any value, and it does not have much even then, it is a demonstration of the way that the author's perspective blinds her to insight about history and political affairs.  The fact that the author cannot recognize that a state has an inherent right of self-defense against those who would wish it harm means that she simply cannot appreciate why it is that Mandela's government sought a truth & reconciliation commission in the first place, and the author's gender obsession similarly blinds her to the characteristic way in which black women in apartheid times were valuable for the men they were related to, which explains why it is that most of them understandably focused on the men that they were related to when appealing to the commissions, even if the author seems unable to grasp such simple matters.

This book is about 175 pages or so and it is divided into seven chapters and other supplementary material.  The author begins with a list of tables and acknowledgments before an introduction where she lays out her approach to the subject at hand.  The author discusses the making of the subject of the truth & reconciliation commission, contrasting matters based on gender (1).  After that the author discusses the testimonial practices of men and women (2) as well as the discussion of the threat to which imprisonment for political activism did to the self of the women, something that perhaps should have discouraged political activism (3).  This leads to a discussion of narrative threads on account of those who reported on the truth & reconciliation commission (4) as well as a look at what was considered harm--most notably rape and other sexual offenses in the case of women (5).  After that the author discusses the pursuit of the ordinary when it comes to women and their lives and choices (6), after which there is an epilogue (7), and two appendices that deal with South African security laws (i) and detention data (ii), as well as a glossary, notes, references, and an index.

It is particularly telling that the author shows little knowledge of political legitimacy on the part of the state and is laser focused on her support of leftist activists and her frustration at the asymmetries that exist between men and women.  Is it unjust that women face tensions between their obligations to their families and their political activism?  No, that's just the way that life goes.  Would it be more worthwhile to seek to understand the motivations behind Mandela's desire for a truth & reconciliation commission that sought to lower tensions than to complain about it when it was structurally biased in favor of those making accusations and unjust but not in the way that the author claims?  Absolutely, but asking the author to have something approaching sense would be asking for far too much in this particular case, which makes this a deeply frustrating book if one is seeking to understand something about the aftermath of apartheid from someone whose only interest is furthering a feminist agenda.  And, in case it is not obvious, that is not an agenda I am particularly interested in supporting especially when one is dealing with an author whose insight is so limited as is the case here.