The intimacy of persecution: gossip, stereotype, and violence

Abstract

Persecution and communal violence present methodological challenges for researchers of violence. One such challenge lies in connecting persecutor and victim, as well as macroand micro- factors. Part of the solution, we suggest may come from adapting approaches of linguistic anthropology to gossip and ‘everyday talk’. We propose that persecution has two poles: collective (in which the persecutors are generally not acquainted with their victims) and intimate (in which the persecutors are generally well acquainted through day-to-day or other meaningful contact with their victims). Analyzing intimate persecution of ‘sorcerers’ and ‘Chinese’ in Indonesia, we suggest that gossip and everyday talk enables stereotypes to be ‘pinned on’ certain acquaintances. The findings we suggest are exploratory, possibly contributing to a more nuanced method for understanding intimate persecution more generally