Structural Violence and Everyday Resistance
Key concepts from Paul Farmer and James C. Scott on how social structures harm people and how the powerless push back.
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Questions Covered in This Set
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Structural violence
Harm built into the arrangement of a society — distribution of land, income, citizenship, clinics, water — so that some categories of people predictably die younger and suffer more, with no identifiable perpetrator.
Who coined 'structural violence,' and who made it central to medical anthropology?
Coined by peace researcher Johan Galtung; made central to medical anthropology by physician-anthropologist Paul Farmer.
Direct violence vs. structural violence
Direct violence has an actor (someone swings a fist, fires a gun); structural violence has no obvious villain — the harm comes from policies and economic structures.
'Resocializing' explanations of suffering
Farmer's methodological demand: instead of individualizing illness ('non-compliant patient,' 'risk behavior'), keep asking why until you reach structural causes.
How did Farmer explain a Haitian woman's death from AIDS?
Through a chain of structures: a hydroelectric dam flooding her family's farmland, displacement to a squatter settlement, economic dependence on an infected truck driver, and no access to antiretrovirals routine in Boston.
Farmer's critique of cultural relativism taken too far
Explaining high maternal mortality as 'their culture' converts an injustice into a custom and lets institutions like the World Bank off the hook — conflating structural violence with cultural difference.
'Immodest claims of causality'
Farmer's term for sloppy explanations that assign causes (culture, behavior, biology) without tracing the actual structural chain producing suffering.
Structural explanation of the Black–white infant mortality gap
Residential segregation from redlining, hospital closures in poor neighborhoods, employment-tied insurance, and physiological wear of chronic discrimination — causes policy created and policy could undo.
Weapons of the weak
Scott's term for low-risk, deniable, often anonymous acts of resistance needing no organization: foot-dragging, pilfering, feigned ignorance, sabotage, false compliance, slander, and gossip.
What did Scott find in the Malaysian rice village (Weapons of the Weak, 1985)?
During the green revolution, combine harvesters destroyed poor households' wage labor, yet there were almost no strikes or uprisings — instead everyday, deniable forms of resistance, the normal form of peasant class conflict.
