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How and why notion of "violence" are significant in a society. What aspect or aspects of power involved with violence universal and what can you say about the relationship of violence to history and culture?.
"Violence", if we go by dictionary meaning it seems to be one of the most misinterpreted words. Dictionary says violence is physical force exerted for the purpose of violating, damaging, or abusing and that is what society at large recognizes violence as. In a broader sense as kelkar (1991:1) has been quoted in "domestic violence" by malvika karlekar the word violence also includes the concept of discrimination, exploitation, upholding of unequal economic and social structure and creation of an atmosphere of terror. The violence consequences of these are not direct and so not as visible, that's why society as a whole fails to recognize violence as such. To sum up defination of violence.
"Violence is produced when an individual or group acts unilaterally, imposing its opinion without allowing space for negotiation; when the power of each side is not equal. This imposed action can affect the body, life, future, or plans of the other, whether an individual or group," (Aldea and Rosseau:no date).
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Violence in Society.
Society at larger tries to discriminate things, create boundaries, which is largely assisted by modern science. The crux of violence lies in this process of creating boundaries and separating thing to make them other. Why does society tends to divide and categorize things? It is been a human tendency to carve up the external world into named categories and then arranging the categories to suit our social convenience. We do this because our ability to alter the environment is very limited but we have a virtually unrestricted capacity for playing games with internalized version of the environment which we carry in our heads.
