Abstract
It is quite easy to summarize Lois Presser’s book Why We Harm, at least when it comes to its theory. Certain deep and collectively shared logics exist in our culture, Presser claims, typically taking the form of stories. These stories make doing harm possible because they ‘reduce’ the target of harm and construct people as both authorized to harm and, ironically, as powerless to avoid perpetrating it. Cultural logics promote harm, Presser argues, whatever their manifestation.
Reducing the target means casting him or her as less complex than oneself, and authorizing harm entails drawing on culturally shared arguments that seem to make harm ‘right’. At the same time, though, a harm-doer is portrayed – in and through the stories that Presser identifies – as compelled to act in a harmful way, as if governed by some force beyond his or her immediate control. The actor is given societal ‘licence’ to act, but he or she also seems stuck in a dead end without any other choices. ‘The cooperation of the license to harm and the logic of powerlessness is a power paradox’, Presser writes, ‘one of the instigators of harm discernible across cases’.
It is more difficult to summarize Presser’s fields and data. She is not studying violent crime alone but harm in general, as a ‘unitary social phenomenon’. Why We Harm covers not only genocide and intimate-partner violence but also meat consumption (harm done by killing and eating animals) and ‘penal harm’ (imprisoning sentenced criminals). While the first two categories are clearly distinguishable as fields of harm, the latter two – meat-eating and penal harm – are far more problematic.
There is no cultural consensus today that killing and eating non-human animals and putting criminals in prison are harmful acts (even though there certainly exist arguments and social movements sustaining these views) and Presser’s interviewees definitely do not subscribe to such views. Presser nurtures a markedly educational tone by including these fields in her study. Meat-eating and imprisonment should be seen as harm, she argues, no matter what people in general think – an argument that, unfortunately, simply underlines the author’s own agenda. (It is telling that Presser admits in the Preface that she eats fish.) Genocide and intimate-partner violence are more convincing as cases since they are socially grounded, whereas meat-eating and penal harm are more academic or philosophical cases and, it must be said, a bit utopian.
But Presser’s line of reasoning is nevertheless clear. The logic of reducing the target of harm is shown succinctly. Tutsis in the Rwanda genocide in 1994 were called ‘cockroaches’ and ‘dogs’, and Jews in Nazi Germany were called ‘rats’. Her very careful analysis of the power paradox will probably become her most long-lasting contribution. It is not completely original; she refers to Jack Katz’s observations of crime’s causes as constructed by the criminals themselves, but nevertheless experienced as ‘lures and pressures’, and she refers to David Matza’s observations of ‘the mood of fatalism’, which might put an individual into a state of drift. But Presser articulates the phenomenon so neatly. A harm-doer is squeezed between ‘I have the right to do it’ and ‘I have to do it’, between a cultural licence and situational powerlessness – two assertions that ‘form a unit’.
Presser’s analyses of intimate-partner violence are illuminating in this respect. She uses a range of previous studies in this area, including some of her own, to show that batterers are ‘supposed to rule their partner’, but still their power is thwarted by the victims, other actors or larger forces. They give themselves licence to strike out even as they feel cornered or trapped. They ‘signify themselves into this mood’, Presser writes, casting themselves ‘as protagonists of stories where especially manly heroes fight against that which ensnares them because it is right to do so’.
The logic of reducing the target is also clear when it comes to penal harm and eating meat. Interviewees characterize imprisoned criminals as involved with little else apart from crime; they are reduced to ‘their use-value’ (deterring others outside prison from committing criminal acts). Likewise, animals are reduced to ‘things’, ‘meat’, ‘steak’, ‘poultry’, and so on: ‘You don’t think of the cow itself’, the interviewees said; this means that they ‘failed to grasp the systematic nature of the abuse’, Presser declares indignantly. Descriptions of penal harm and meat consumption are quite normatively analysed in this book, and the phenomena appear in a relatively bleak light owing to the informants’ lack of worry, but in Presser’s defence, one cannot deny that the cultural logic of harm is nevertheless somehow present.
Presser’s habit of decontextualizing quotes taken from interviews is more troublesome, as is the small number of extended stories in her data. This book is an example of narrative criminology without much narrative analysis. Why not make use of the work of an authoritative scholar such as Catherine Kohler Riessman, who has presented a sophisticated menu of perspectives and techniques for identifying, scrutinizing and comparing narrative data? That speakers may ‘reject the need for storytelling’ (as in the case of meat-eating) is not an argument. The reader merely starts to wonder why the analyst then (a) calls the data ‘stories’ in the first place (and not, for instance, accounts, discourses, categorizations, interpretive practices or attitudes) and (b) does not search for stories in other settings.
Another troubling aspect of Presser’s study is the lack of theoretical and empirical interest in interactions between harm-doers and harm targets. Given Randall Collins’s and Jack Katz’s work on violence, there are surely more vivid and direct ways of analysing harmful situations, ways in which emotional states, violent techniques and interactive dynamics can be integrated into narrative structures. In Lois Presser’s view, harm is more or less a product of certain types of stories and their inherited cultural logic, whereas in more ethnographic works stories are part and parcel of institutions, relations and situations. My impression is that narrative criminology could become even more relevant if scholars took steps to explicitly situate their narratives at issue in terms of research interviews (including the interviewee’s social situation) and in terms of other settings in which storytelling occurs. Doing so would better demonstrate when and how such cultural logics as the ones Presser identifies emerge in social life.
That said, there is no doubt that this book will stimulate the fields of criminology and sociology in numerous ways. It is elegantly composed, pedagogically written and argumentatively precise, and it engages carefully and bravely with both urgent social issues and previous research. Once one starts thinking in Lois Presser’s terms, one can hardly stop finding more evidence for them, especially regarding genocide and intimate-partner violence. Her thesis of the power paradox – a culturally embedded licence to harm combined with ‘espousals of necessity’ – is itself reason to read the book.