The Sex in Your Violence

Patriarchy and Power in Anthropological World Building

and Everyday Life

Robin G. Nelson

In its broadest conceptualization, violence includes everything from physical assault to the creation and maintenance of institutional
structures that are discriminatory and exclusionary. However, violence as a topic of biological and archaeological anthropological
inquiry has often been limited to malevolent physical assault perpetrated by men against other men. This is due to an outsized focus
on the role that men played in the evolutionary history of our species. This conceptualization of violence obscures both the ways that
other forms of harm—other violence(s) also often committed by men—structure the daily lives of people who do not have significant
social or institutional power and how this harm becomes embodied. In this paper I explore how gendered knowledge production in
anthropology has influenced our acceptance of what counts as meaningful harm. I posit that the threat of physical violence and
encounters with other violence(s), specifically emotional and structural violence, shape the lives of people who are structurally
disadvantaged in ways that are missing from our analyses. When we forgo emphases on war and murder and choose to study other
violence(s) that are enacted in families and relationships, we become aware of the kinds of hidden assaults that are often meted out
in small doses, eventually accumulating and impacting individual mental and physical health and survivorship.

Although definitive explanations of violence are elusive, there
is broad cross-disciplinary interest in making sense of the
seemingly ubiquitous nature of this phenomenon. Within an-
thropology it has long been asserted that violence is a fun-
damental feature of human society. Violent behavior has been
a cornerstone of anthropological theory and thinking as re-
flected in many influential writings on topics ranging from the
earliest imperialist surveys of Indigenous kinship patterns in
America to foundational hypotheses about our hominin an-
cestors (Carneiro 1970; Chagnon 1977; LeBlanc and Register
2003; Morgan 1963 [1877]; Tiger and Fox 1997). In his 1957
piece Raymond Dart’s osteodontokeratic culture posited that
early members of the genus Australopithecus were predatory
and violent in nature. In his model, their survival was con-
tingent on the use of bones and horns to kill and butcher prey
(Dart 1957). For Dart, this very particular and creative use of
materials available in the natural world signaled a cognitive
leap marking the transition from apes to something more
humanlike. So clearly emerging as a functional application of
the survival of the fittest, this early imagining of the prehuman
past positions violence as an integral aspect of our evolution.
Although this model was critiqued extensively at the time it
was published (Wolberg 1970), it is an illustrative and resilient
example of the central role that our focus on physical violence
has played in theoretical world building in a field dominated
by White men (Keeley 1997; Lee and DeVore 2017; Morris
1967; Wrangham 1999a).
In practice, this focus on violence, and only particular forms
of physical violence such as murder and assault, reflected a
preoccupation in the role that men (the main perpetrators of
these acts) played in shaping our evolutionary trajectory as
humans and in structuring contemporary societies. Emerging
from studies of evolutionary biology, cognition, and behavior,
there was a shift in the literature at the end of the twentieth
century toward a focus on the idea that cooperation rather
than violent competition is a hallmark of our species and thus
must have been central in human evolution (Fuentes 2004;
Knauft et al. 1991). What develops from these analyses are
investigations of cultural adaptation, cooperation, and even
forced cooperation under threat of punishment, rather than
overt physical violence, as the most important organizing fea-
tures of human culture (Boyd et al. 2003; Boyd and Richerson
2009; Fehr, Fischbacher, and Gächter 2002; Fuentes 2004; Moll
and Tomasello 2007). Additionally, more than being a devia-
tion from a presumed default setting of violent behavior, in-
dividuals are even willing to punish noncooperators at cost to
themselves (Boehm 1984; Bowles and Gintis 2004). By some
estimates, third-party punishment, or punishment of an indi-
vidual who violated cooperative norms against someone else,
may be a particularly effective mechanism for enforcing co-
operation in larger communities (Marlowe et al. 2007). While,
mechanistically, kin selection predicates that underlying sus-
tained cooperation is dependent on presumed high levels of
relatedness between individuals in ancestral communities, this

Robin G. Nelson is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology of Santa Clara University (500 El Camino Real, Santa Clara
University, Santa Clara, California 95053, USA [rnelson@scu.edu]). This paper was submitted 13 XI 19, accepted 23 VIII 20, and elec-
tronically published 15 I 21.

Current Anthropology, volume 62, supplement 23, February 2021. q 2021 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.
0011-3204/2021/62S23-0009$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/711605
Nelson Patriarchy and Power in Anthropological World Building and Everyday Life
is not required for strong reciprocity (Bowles and Gintis 2011;
Nowak 2006). Humans are cooperative under many circum-
stances, and prosociality combined with group familiarity and
the means by which to adapt culturally to changing landscapes
are the default setting in our evolutionary past.
While scientifically more rigorous, this theoretical shift away
from emphases on a kind of physicality as a definitive human
characteristic to a focus on cooperation left an anthropological
gap in theory production regarding the persistence of violence
within human cultures and why certain members of the com-
munity are the ones most likely to commit violence. Removed
from our anthropological imagination of ancestral past, there
is still work to be done in understanding how physical vio-
lence and, perhaps more importantly, other violence(s) shape
the lives of contemporary humans. Violent acts are more
often committed by men strategically against individuals whom
they assess to be vulnerable across any number of traits related
to power and retribution. Harm, risk, and the accompanying
trauma are often experienced via structural and emotional vio-
lence as well as physical violence. With this piece, I suggest that
in expanding our definition of the violence(s) worthy of study,
we will be better able to identify the limits of an unacknowledged
hierarchal ranking of violence that has emphasized murder
above all other kinds of harm. Dismantling this hierarchy of bad
acts will enable us to understand the impacts of inequity in
power and risk experienced in the familial and interpersonal
relationships often experienced in daily life.
Defining Meaningful Violence
It is unclear whether it is sheer prurience, fear of our own vul-
nerability, or simply the accessibility to data that are codified
in body and bone that renders physical assault the most often
studied and well-accepted referent point for our understanding
of the nature and impacts of violence. Conceivably, there is
some unacknowledged link between the fact that men commit
most physically violent acts and the fact that the preponderance
of early anthropological research on violence was conducted
by men. Perhaps this is not surprising, as men outnumbered
women within the discipline until the latter twentieth century,
and they continue to outnumber women in research-based
tenure-track positions (Kulis, Sicotte, and Collins 2002; Turner
2002; Turner et al. 2018). In these appointments, primarily
European and White American scholars set funding and re-
search priorities, dictating for the field what was valuable and
noteworthy. Performances of a particular kind of physical prow-
ess associated with a masculinity that is easily recognizable due
to the resultant increased risk of injury and death set the
standard for the most consequential form of violence. This ex-
tends to research on nonhuman primate relatives (as discussed
by Fuentes [2021]), and it is perhaps this nonhuman primate
research that has confirmed our biases on the value of physical
violence in humans (Sussman and Garber 2007). In this way,
physical violence becomes the focus of many anthropological
S93
studies, locates emotional and structural violence at the bot-
tom of a hierarchy of danger, and leaves the individual impacts
of emotional and structural violence largely understudied in
this literature and underappreciated in their impact.
While some of the emphasis on physical violence can be
attributed to the theoretical and ideological orientation of the
researchers themselves or the allure of observations of these
behaviors in nonhuman primates, an argument might be made
that these data and how they are manifested in both bodies
and bones are seductive in their supposed clarity. The traces of
interpersonal violence can sometimes be found in the human
skeleton, and this evidence can be measured, quantified, and
contextualized (Ferguson 1997; Frayer and Martin 2014; Walker
2001). As subdisciplinary shifts in biological and archaeologi-
cal anthropology favored increased quantification, evidence of
physical violence came to serve as one form of appropriately
rigorous data. However, these data have always been open for
reinterpretation. “An individual’s injuries are often open to
multiple, sometimes even paradoxical interpretations (e.g., vio-
lent death and dismemberment vs. veneration of the deceased
through careful preparation of their cleansed bones for afterlife
adventures)” (Walker 2001:579). Greater contextualization of
individuals’ lived experiences becomes ever more important as
we recognize that various kinds of interactions with both living
and deceased individuals may produce these physical traces.
Thus, for some researchers, designating an act as “violent” is best
reserved for actions having an unkind origin or source.
Owing to these evidentiary limitations, it is wise to restrict use
of the term violent injury in bioarchaeology to skeletal inju-
ries for which there is strong circumstantial evidence of
malevolent intent (e.g., the presence of several arrow points
embedded in the skeleton of a man in a mass grave with other
injured young men whose skulls show cutmarks consistent
with scalping) and to reserve the term accidental injury for
cases lacking such clear evidence of malevolent intent. (Walker
2001:576)
While the requirement of malevolence may be appropriate for
some bioarchaeological analyses, other kinds of violence(s),
such as structural and emotional violence, can influence indi-
vidual well-being simply because an individual is enmeshed
within the broader cultural or societal system. Structural and
emotional violence often produces lifelong impacts absent any
negative intent from a single individual. Restricting the use of
the term “violence” in this manner may hinder our ability to
understand how differential access to resources and unequal
power relations in interpersonal relationships also inflict harm
and influence well-being and health outcomes.
Within biological and archaeological anthropology, inter-
personal and between-group physical violence in small-scale
foraging communities has historically been the focus of much
research, while structural violence has been the purview of
medical anthropologists for the last two decades (Benson
2008; Farmer et al. 2004). Because physical violence became
the default conceptualization of violence in the anthropological
 S94
canon, the lives of people, specifically women and children,
who lived with other forms of violence were left underinves-
tigated and undertheorized until women scholars began raising
the profile of these other aspects of, in the words of Nancy
Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois, “everyday violence”
(Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004). The concept of every-
day violence straddles structural violence and interpersonal,
physical, gendered violence. It clearly articulates the ways that
structural violence is enacted on individuals such that it ac-
cumulates, eventually becoming embodied.
Perhaps most poignantly explored in her classic text Death
without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil,
Scheper-Hughes describes a system in which impoverished
women experience the daily indignities of hundreds of years of
exploitation at the hands of colonialism and wealth inequity
year-by-year in the death of their sick and starving babies. The
everyday violence experienced in this community results in a
routinization of death (Scheper-Hughes 1993). It is an accu-
mulation of social, financial, institutional, and physical vio-
lence that inures individuals to the trauma experienced by
others. In this context, women are tasked with primary child-
care and also with the grieving that accompanies the loss of
children whose lives have been ravaged by poverty. “These
babies die, mothers say, à míngua, of slow and gradual neglect.
The term, a colloquialism, specifically indicates a death from
wasting” (Scheper-Hughes 1993:368). While reckoning with
the mothers’ psychological and logistical inability to fight for
children whose likelihood of survival is slim, Scheper-Hughes
always draws attention back to the everyday violence(s) that
created these durable and untenable conditions. “In a way, we
can consider the given-up, offered-up angel babies of Bom Jesus
as prototypical scapegoats, sacrificed in the face of terrible do-
mestic conflicts about scarcity and survival” (Scheper-Hughes
1993:394). What is often women’s work, to absorb the systemic
and institutional violence, has been excluded from many bio-
anthropological conversations about meaningful harm. In this
example, we see how longtime ethnographic engagement with
a community of women makes obvious the value in accounting
for the harm caused by other kinds of violence.
Just as we interrogate a singular idea of “masculinity” (see
work by Cheng [2021], Gutmann [2021], Maringira [2021],
Martin [2021], Padilla [2021], and Smith [2021] in this issue),
we need to make sense of the ways that violence(s) build on
themselves, culminating in harm that is as visible, accessible,
and measurable as physical violence. The etymological origins
of the word “violence” are in the word “violation.” In an in-
fluential treatise on the definitions of violence, Garver (1968)
posits that essential to the idea of violence is the notion that the
inalienable aspects of individual personhood are being vio-
lated. For Garver, this idea of violation is more integral to the
definition of the term than the idea of force. The right for in-
dividuals to make decisions regarding the experience of their
own body is central to his thesis. This conceptualization of
violence falls in line with classic philosophical thinking on
individual rights and freedoms. However, this definition of
Current Anthropology Volume 62, Supplement 23, February 2021
violence as a personal violation of one’s body worthy of note
and discussion almost never imagined women or racialized
peoples as human enough to deserve individual liberty (Sim-
mons 1983; Welchman 1995). In practice, those who proposed,
believed in, and were afforded inalienable individual rights
were (and remain) almost always White men.
In this paradigm, physical violence becomes a proxy for
conversations about all other kinds of violence. Rather than
one of many, all of which result in a kind of damage to one’s
integrity, physical violence becomes ranked as definitively the
worst in a hierarchy of oppression. If we accept this premise,
then we also have to acknowledge that our ability to think
about, discuss, and reckon with other kinds of violence is di-
minished. In this weakness, we are also unable or unwilling
to grapple with the layered nature of these different forms of
violence. That is, discussions of the interconnectedness of
physical, emotional, and structural violence are excluded from
conversations in biological and archaeological anthropology
and become the purview of research that integrates gender
studies, sociology, and public health.
Although the concept had permeated studies by peace and
violence scholars since its introduction by Johan Galtung in
1969, many anthropologists became familiar with structural
violence via the work of Paul Farmer and his analyses of the
intersections of poverty and health inequity in Haiti (Farmer
1996; Galtung 1969). For Farmer, people living in the Central
Highlands in Haiti experienced brutality in the form of hunger,
desperation, and increased risk of disease. This conceptuali-
zation of violence as situated in systems that exist above that of
any individual person enables us to broaden our understand-
ings of what constitutes harm and thus, what actual embodied
outcomes emerge from this inequity. It follows that structural
violence as a theoretical anchor has been particularly useful
in critical medical anthropology studies on experiences of ill-
ness and suffering in marginalized communities (Benson 2008;
Korbin 2003; Leatherman and Thomas 2009).
This redirection toward exploring how institutional hierar-
chies influence the lives of those with limited ability to escape
these systems signaled a movement away from what was a
searing focus on violence committed by men against other
men in foraging communities. It also serves as signpost of
shifting subdisciplinary foci within anthropology. As Dart
imagined our hominin ancestors using any matter of easily
sourced materials as weapons in battles for survival, violence in
foraging communities was studied as a referent point for our
evolutionarily ancient behaviors. Perhaps most infamously,
Chagnon’s research on club fighting among the Yanomami
held standing for decades as the preeminent example of a
proposed link between success in bouts of interpersonal vio-
lence and reproductive success (Chagnon 1968). However, this
theory was refuted by several studies via reanalyses of previous
research on the Yanomami, including Chagnon’s own data
(Ferguson 2015; Fry 1998). A parallel and separate examina-
tion of boundary patrolling in Pan troglodytes (chimpanzees)
was used as evidence for our primal violent state. Violence in
Nelson Patriarchy and Power in Anthropological World Building and Everyday Life
nonhuman primates was well documented, but as evidence
mounted that our closest living relatives patrolled the periph-
ery of their territories and engaged in lethal intergroup ag-
gression when confronted by out-group males, researchers
suggested that there was a relationship between this behavior
in nonhuman primates and similar behavior in young men
(Fawcett and Muhumuza 2000; Wilson and Wrangham 2003;
Wrangham and Wilson 2004).
The kinds of collective violence exhibited by youth gangs are
part of a common human pattern evident in societies lacking
effective central authority, manifested in ethnic riots, blood
feuds, lethal raiding, and warfare. Males cooperate to defend
group territories, resources, and status; they tend to avoid
mass confrontation; and they seek out opportunities to attack
members of rival groups at low cost to themselves. These
patterns strongly echo the system of collective violence ob-
served in chimpanzees. (Wrangham and Wilson 2004:251)
What emerges from cross-subdisciplinary research within an-
thropology is extensive support for the supposed naturalness
and deep conservation of what is imagined to be an adaptive
trait of warfare (Pitman 2011; Shaw and Wong 1989; Somit
1990; Wrangham 1999b; Wrangham and Peterson 1996). It has
been noted that the choice to draw all evolutionary analogies in
reference to Pan troglodytes (chimpanzees) rather than Pan
paniscus (bonobos) is reflective of the timing of publications on
these different species, our tendency to believe that humans are
physically violent in nature, and not phylogenetic precision
(Stanford 1998).
As physical violence becomes enshrined as part of our evo-
lutionary legacy, so do differences between the sexes that allow
for and encourage this supposed behavior in the name of a
natural hegemonic masculinity. From this, a thread that con-
nects interpersonal violence, our supposed human nature,
sexual dimorphism, and gender roles develops. In this creation
myth, the male body is adapted for violence, and success in
these physical endeavors results in everything from more ma-
terial goods to increased sexual and reproductive opportuni-
ties. The through line that connects our behavior to that of
chimpanzees has all the trappings of empiricism and parsi-
mony despite the fact that humans diverge from our closest
living relatives along several characteristics, including that we
exhibit less sexual dimorphism than any of the living great apes
(Fine et al. 2013; Larsen 2003). In attributing and normalizing
violence via evolutionary just-so stories, we silence discussions
of behavioral phenotypic flexibility and we canalize gender
roles (Fine et al. 2013; Liesen 2007). These rigid gender norms
are then used to justify abuses in the name of a behavioral core
that is guided by biological differences that must be true for
all men.
An investment in an essential maleness that is undergirded
by binary sexually dimorphic bodies accompanies a commit-
ment to physical violence as a core behavior. This model es-
sentially collapses the classic dualism of ascribed (sex) versus
achieved (gender) identities into one biologically determined
S95
personhood. As noted above, this is more a rhetorical argu-
ment than a position anchored in data from the evolutionary
record. This focus on physical violence obscures how domi-
nance hierarchies actually operated both in our evolutionary
past and, more specifically for the purposes of this discussion,
in contemporary human groups (see Fuentes 2021). In re-
sponse to essentialist analyses of sex differences in aggression,
dominance, and gender roles in fields such as evolutionary
psychology, theorists have argued for analyses that center the
role of social structures in creating, maintaining, and rein-
forcing gendered hierarchies. Eagly and Wood (1999) posit
that gendered differences develop from both underlying dif-
ferences in physiology and the influence of cultural practice,
economic markets, and social systems. Borrowing from West
and Zimmerman’s (1987) influential “Doing Gender,” I sug-
gest that understanding gender as an achievement that must be
performed, and for which proper performances are rewarded,
pushes us to expand our conceptualizations of violence beyond
this pointed focus on physical assault. The proper performance
of gender, and thus assured belonging to particular groups
rather than to rigid sex categories, manifests itself as engage-
ment with various kinds of violent acts. Social hierarchies
are often built on the scaffolding and specter of the threat of
physical violence. The absence of physical assault does not ne-
gate the threat but simply reveals the presence of other kinds
of violence, such as emotional and structural violence. In lim-
iting violence to physical assault, we miss how the reification
and exultation of supposed core physical differences allows for
the perpetuation of a wide variety of aggressions that are not
physical but are still damaging.
The Limits of Physical Violence
In the bioarchaeological record, an accumulation of injuries in
a specific group of people, or mass graves or burials in cases of
genocide or state-sponsored violence, can reveal a deliberate
and pointed show of force (Martin and Frayer 1997; Perez
2012; Walker 2001). Thus, in these empirical studies of power
and dominance, there are classic markers that serve as evidence
of lethal aggression. If we understand these markers of physical
violence as indicative of a particular kind of performance of
dominance, there is value in understanding how the threat of
physical violence serves a similar end of maintaining a domi-
nance hierarchy. (See Martin [2021] for an expanded treatment
of this topic.)
Just as bones and bodies demonstrate the end points of vi-
olence, hierarchal power and dominance in nonhuman pri-
mates have been used as referent points for operational defi-
nitions for the actualization of power in group settings. Watts
(2010) argues that dominance is one aspect of power that is
predicated on an individual having leverage over others in the
group. For nonhuman primates, this leverage comes in the
form of unequal access to a myriad of resources that facilitate
survival and reproduction (King et al. 2008; Kitchen and
 S96
Beehner 2007; Majolo et al. 2012; Wittig and Boesch 2003). In
many species, dominant primates have more offspring, more
access to food and reproductive and grooming opportunities,
and better overall health (Sapolsky 2005). Researchers have
long used the nonhuman primate literature as an analogical
template through which to imagine the role of dominance in
structuring contemporary human interactions when resource
acquisition is a consideration and the specter of violence acts
to assure compliance with cultural or institutional norms.
In nonhuman primate communities, dominance and in-
group and out-group membership is often established using
physical force but maintained by other means. Boehm (2009)
hypothesized and work by Wrangham, Wilson, and Muller
(2006) supported the idea that chimpanzees and humans use
lethal aggression at similar rates, but chimpanzees engage in
nonlethal aggression at rates several times higher than that of
humans. This kind of comparison attempts to draw a direct line
between nonhuman primate behavior and that in contempo-
rary human communities. However, these models actually
obscure the meaningful distinctions and variability in the vi-
olence(s) enacted by humans and nonhuman primates. If we
accept decreased use of nonlethal aggression and increased
employment of other means of behavioral regulation as a hall-
mark of human behavior, we can move beyond relying on
instances of physical violence to serve as the most informative
aspects of intergroup and interpersonal relations. The threat of
violence and social sanctioning constrains human behavior
around the world. Threat is particularly meaningful to those
who are positionally subordinate in institutional or social hi-
erarchies (Boyd and Richerson 2009; Okada and Bingham
2008; Richerson and Boyd 1998). The specter of interpersonal
physical violence, the historical production of gendered hier-
archies, and the maintenance of these hierarchies serve as
controlling mechanisms in contemporary human communities
of all sizes and cultural backgrounds.
Reduced reliance on physical violence and aggression as the
primary means by which we regulate social hierarchies does
not suggest that egalitarianism is the dominant organizational
standard by which humans arrange themselves. In the absence
of physical violence, other forms of control structure our in-
teractions, and these inequities in power and access become
embodied. We need not rely only on these nonhuman primate
analogical referents. There are endless examples of the ways
that complex hierarchal organizational structures act violently
in the lives of contemporary humans. The in-group power
dynamics that allow some individuals to accrue and maintain
power, engage in status building, and deny entry and inclusion
to others are acting daily in governance mechanisms for in-
stitutions ranging from schools to multinational organizations.
The same biases that shape in-group and out-group dynamics
outside of these institutions permeate every aspect of our
lives, resulting in individuals with less social and cultural status
being omitted from decision-making mechanisms and vital
resources (Badgett et al. 2007; Deitch et al. 2003; Duncan and
Loretto 2004; Harrison, Grant, and Herman 2012). In a study
Current Anthropology Volume 62, Supplement 23, February 2021
of race-based discrimination in the armed forces, Deitch et al.
(2003) noted that “everyday discrimination” in the workplace
resulted in differences in reported well-being for Blacks and
Whites (Deitch et al. 2003:1315). Racial hierarchies that exist
outside of the armed forces permeated this workplace, threat-
ening the livelihood of those with lower social and cultural
status. An awareness of other mechanisms that perpetrate
harm requires that we move beyond regarding physical assault
as the most damaging and consequential kind of violence and
recognize the damage achieved by emotional and structural
violence. These violence(s) that may not culminate in actual
physical assault nonetheless become embodied and impact
individual health.
A reorientation toward considering long-term impacts of
psychological and structural violence on individual livelihoods
and survival suggests that we must redefine what counts as
meaningful trauma, and thus, whose lives are included in these
analyses. The idea that the worst harm is physical violence that
is most often committed by men and most often acknowledged
when it is perpetrated on other men is an artifact of post-
Enlightenment knowledge production. In her analysis of racism
and sexism in academe, Patton (2004) argues that philosophies
from the Enlightenment provided cover for colonialist abuses
and that dualisms that started with this movement perpetuate
power dynamics that value some experiences and voices and
exclude others. Academia and, more specifically, anthropology
were born of this tradition (Vermeulen 2015; Vermeulen and
Roldán 1995). This is reflected in who has the ability to decide
which victims of violence matter and what kinds of violence
could be emphasized in our analyses. Ostensibly, anthropology
has been concerned with the voices of individuals in marginal-
ized communities. However, anthropologists have long been
comfortable deciding who fits this description and amplifying
voices only if the scholars are able to serve as the megaphone
(Spivak 1988; Trouillot 2003).
It is worth noting that the treatment of women in our
analyses shifted considerably as more women entered the field.
This is reflected in the new kinship studies, the integration
of queer studies into the discipline, gender studies in archae-
ology, and closer attention being paid to women’s roles in
foraging communities (Carsten 2000; Conkey and Spector
1984; Dahlberg 1981; Fedigan 1986; Gero 1991; Newton 1972;
Robertson 2008; Rubin 1975; Yanagisako and Collier 1987).
When knowledge production comes from intellectual move-
ments dominated by White men, value is placed on particular
kinds of assaults most often experienced by those same men or
by those who are deemed worthy victims. The everyday vio-
lence(s) perpetrated by these men and the manifestation of this
harm in institutional structures are often omitted from these
analyses.
Violence Experienced Is Violence Embodied
Embodiment provides one conceptual frame through which
we can understand the long-term impact of multiple forms of
Nelson Patriarchy and Power in Anthropological World Building and Everyday Life
everyday violence(s) on individual survival, reproduction, and
thriving. The body as a subject of culture rather than an object
as articulated by Csordas (1990) enables us to consider that
humans are always embedded within and thus impacted by
both interpersonal and structural situational contexts. Epide-
miologist and theorist Nancy Krieger (2005) posits that be-
cause humans are both social and biological organisms, our
lived experiences become incorporated into our bodies. The
everyday violence(s) are thus revealed by local biologies that
are situationally and contextually constructed, whether we are
permitted to acknowledge or give voice to them or not (Lock
and Kaufert 2001).
While bodies and bones can seemingly serve as an ideal
material through which to understand physical aggression and
harm, they cannot capture all variety of injury. As such, our
reliance on the body to reveal the violence wrought upon it
may present researchers with a critical evidentiary limitation.
Violence(s) that compromise mental health or access to re-
sources may become embodied and impact individual health
via less overtly transparent pathways such as the epigenome
(Geronimus 2013; Krieger 2005; Walters et al. 2011). There are
models, such as the Developmental Origins of Health and
Disease framework (DOHaD), that call specific attention to the
ways that early life experiences shape adult health outcomes
(Gluckman and Hanson 2006; Godfrey et al. 2007). These ex-
periences can in fact be violent in that they increase risk and
harm, as was the case during the Dutch Hunger Winter during
World War II, when maternal deprivation during pregnancy
led to increased risk in adulthood of cardiovascular disease and
other chronic diseases for those unborn children (Schulz 2010).
Our reliance on “bodies [to] tell stories that people cannot and
will not tell,” in the words of Nancy Krieger (2005:350), must be
coupled with appropriate contextualization and acknowledg-
ment of evidence of other kinds. The question of what evidence
is valued and by whom has been shaped by who has been in the
position to shape knowledge production within anthropology.
Embodiment provides a metaphorical bridge for our un-
derstanding of the relationship between structural, emotional,
coercive, and physical violence. In a discussion of the role that
clinicians can play in the fight against HIV, Farmer calls for an
acknowledgment of and active work to alleviate poverty, as it is
embodied and thus becomes a secondary cause of mortality for
patients visiting his Partners in Health clinics in Haiti (Farmer
et al. 2006). In many communities, people give name to the
embodied forms of these violence(s). Culture-bound syn-
dromes, as they were designated in medical anthropology lit-
erature, refer to illnesses that are known throughout a com-
munity to have clear symptomology and etiology. In many
instances, these illnesses were associated with shifts in mental
health (Kleinman 1987; Low 1985; Simons and Hughes 2012).
Debilidad is a chronic illness experienced by Andean women. It
has physical and psychological symptoms, and it develops due
to the additive effects of “reproductive and productive labor”
(Oths 1999). In an analysis of the transgenerational effects of
neoliberal policies, poverty, and intimate partner violence,
S97
Tapias understands that the emotional resonance of these
challenging experiences has corporeal manifestations that are
carried between generations (Tapias 2006). In these examples,
we see how communities make sense of the embodied aspects
of structural violence while understanding that this harm is a
manifestation of state violence against the most vulnerable in-
dividuals. While the connection between structural violence in
the form of transgenerational poverty and lack of access to basic
medical resources and physical illness may be overt, violence
that occurs in the context of interpersonal relationships is often
harder to document and understand.
Private Violence: Intimacy and Risk
When we turn our attention toward forms of everyday vio-
lence(s) that are experienced unequally across a community or
population, we are reminded that some of these violence(s),
such as emotional violence, are often perpetrated in intimate
relationships and beyond the public’s view. Researchers ex-
ploring the lives of women, particularly in the context of un-
equal power dynamics in intimate partner relationships, iden-
tify forms of harm that have detrimental health outcomes. Our
attention to the effects of only certain kinds of violence actu-
ally reflects differences in the scale of our analyses. That is, we
are choosing whether or not to investigate the effects of con-
flict between nation-states, structural inequity experienced by
marginalized individuals within a group, interpersonal vio-
lence between members of different communities, or the kinds
of daily assaults endured in the private spaces of homes. When
we choose to forgo emphases on war and murder for violence
that is enacted in families and relationships, we learn about the
kinds of hidden assaults that are often meted out in small doses.
These offenses eventually accumulate, impacting individual
mental and physical health, and are perpetuated by individuals
with social or institutional power precisely because they do not
always leave the obvious tell of overt physical violence.
Regarding matters of scale, intimate partner violence (IPV)
allows us to explore performances of dominance and power
that reflect culturally specific manifestations of hegemonic
masculinity and that are often anchored in particular ideas
about oneself in relation to larger communities and global
systems. IPV includes various forms of physical and sexual
violence and other forms of nonphysical violence, including
emotional and financial abuse perpetrated by current or former
romantic partners (Garcia-Moreno et al. 2006; Rennison and
Welchans 2000; Tjaden and Thoennes 2000). Unlike other
public health crises, IPV is experienced by victims across a
spectrum of identities. However, the risk of physical violence,
sexual abuse, and emotional abuse at the hands of a partner is
higher for women (Romans et al. 2007). It is also higher for
people who are living in poverty (Goodman et al. 2009; Vyas
and Watts 2009). Through IPV, we can revisit the question of
how dominance is enacted across human populations and what
state-level, structural, and ideological factors contribute to
women’s increased risk of experiencing this form of violence.
 S98
While the rates of IPV vary broadly both between and within
communities, it occurs across the world. In one multicountry
study, women who had ever been partnered experienced some
form of physical violence at rates ranging from “13% in Japan
to 61% in Peru” (Garcia-Moreno et al. 2006:xiii). Intimate part-
ner violence includes various forms of abuse, although emo-
tional abuse is operationalized differently, depending on the
disciplinary and geographic context of the study. Emotional or
psychological abuse includes but is not limited to verbal insults,
public humiliation, intimidation, direct threats, isolation from
friends or family, destruction of property, coercion via threats
of physical harm to the target or the target’s loved ones, and
expressions of jealousy (Garcia-Moreno et al. 2006; Mcnutt
et al. 2002). By one estimation, 20% to 75% of women had
experienced emotional abuse of some kind in the previous
12 months. It is perhaps not surprising that women are likely to
experience a co-occurrence of physical and emotional abuse
(Garcia-Moreno et al. 2006). That this kind of interpersonal
violation is pervasive and yet poorly operationalized across
sites and disciplines speaks to the challenge in investigating
violence(s) that are obscured from public view, variability in
what aspects of patriarchal dominance qualify as worthy of ex-
amination, and diversity in cross-cultural manifestations of
this issue.
Emotional abuse is pervasive, reflecting sometimes subtle
ways of exacting control. In a 2010 study from the United States,
women were more likely than men to have experienced stalking
by an intimate partner, and men and women were equally likely
to have reported psychological aggression in any form. How-
ever, women were more likely to report having been insulted,
threatened, or isolated from friends and family (Breiding,
Chen, and Black 2014; Carbone-López, Kruttschnitt, and Mac-
millan 2006). Similarly, research from Canada finds that women
are more likely than men to experience repeated emotional
abuse in the form of coercive or controlling behavior (Ansara
and Hindin 2010). It is important to note that there is evidence
that women engage in emotional abuse, particularly control-
ling behavior in the form of tracking a partner’s movements
(Breiding, Chen, and Black 2014). However, women are more
often the targets of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.
While it is recognized as an important issue by many gov-
ernments around the world, aid for victims of intimate partner
violence is inconsistent, as it is often considered a personal or
social problem rather than a health problem or a problem that
is amplified by policy decisions at the national level. In a survey
of European Union member states, rates of psychological or
emotional violence varied widely among respondents. This may
be due in large part to countries varying greatly on the seri-
ousness with which they take this form of IPV and thus how
frequently these data are captured (Gracia 2014). By one esti-
mate, 62% of violence experienced by South African women was
due to IPV. However, there was low recognition of the scale of
the problem, as health-care providers were hesitant to screen
patients for IPV and did not know how to treat the associated
psychological challenges in addition to the medical problems
Current Anthropology Volume 62, Supplement 23, February 2021
(Joyner and Mash 2012). Although it is ubiquitous, estimates of
IPV around the world vary greatly based on what is culturally
considered unacceptable or noteworthy kinds of violence to-
ward women and the status of women in these spaces (Boy and
Kulczycki 2008; Foran, Slep, and Heyman 2011).
If we posit that physical assault has dominated our dis-
cussions of violence because it confers some better under-
standing of the clear impacts of conflict, then we have to reckon
with data exploring the long-term health effects of IPV. In
Canada and the United States, women were more likely than
men to have experienced chronic physical and/or emotional
abuse by a current or former intimate partner. However, for
men and women, IPV was associated with diminished mental
health, substance use, injury, and chronic disease (Coker et al.
2002). In one study, women were more likely than men to report
long-term psychosocial effects of this trauma, including feel-
ings of fear, worry, and concern for themselves and their chil-
dren. This presented as increased experiences of depression,
anxiety, feelings of victimization, injury, and sleep disruption
(Ansara and Hindin 2011). In a separate study of US women,
psychological abuse was associated with a sequelae of symptoms
related to chronic pain, ranging from migraines to arthritis
(Coker et al. 2000). When one accounts for both the kinds and
the duration of IPV experienced by individuals, women had
greater odds of facing negative health outcomes related to IPV
than men (Carbone-López, Kruttschnitt, and Macmillan 2006).
Gender roles shape not only men’s risk of encountering IPV
but also their ability and willingness to speak about its impact
on their lives. In a Canadian study, men were more likely to
report that they experienced no long-term effects of IPV
(Ansara and Hindin 2011). It is worth exploring what is lost by
men if they express vulnerability and damage at the hands of a
current or former romantic partner. Research from the United
States finds a correlation between men who had experienced
IPV and self-reports of poor health, injury and disability, de-
pression, substance abuse, and recreational drug use (Carbone-
López, Kruttschnitt, and Macmillan 2006). Although they were
less likely to experience physical assault, older men in the
United States were more likely to have depressive episodes and
decreased mental health if they had also experienced non-
physical forms of IPV (Reid et al. 2008). In both of the above-
mentioned studies, the methodologies explored correlations
without explicitly asking respondents to connect their health
reports to their experiences with IPV.
Because intimate partner violence is understood to be a
public health crisis, the risk factors for both perpetuating and
being targeted for IPV dominate the literature. Along with
obvious risk factors including poverty, substance use, and ex-
periences of violence in the home during childhood, research-
ers have identified gender roles and “masculinity” as factors
that influence risk of experiencing or perpetrating IPV. Spe-
cifically, masculine gender socialization, adherence to mascu-
line gender role ideology (as defined by various survey instru-
ments), and discrepancy from masculine norms are associated
with increased risk of perpetration of IPV (Reidy et al. 2014). In
Nelson Patriarchy and Power in Anthropological World Building and Everyday Life
these models, masculinity is operationalized as a series of
qualities including (but not limited to) being assertive, dom-
inant, and self-reliant (Próspero 2008). These are traits that
seemingly occur in a binary opposite to more feminine char-
acteristics. In qualitative studies, men were asked to identify
their own narratives of masculinity and assess their ability to
adhere to these norms. In these models, masculinity, though
narrowly constructed via hegemonic ideas of maleness, is cor-
related with men’s experiences of IPV (Eckstein 2010).
Intimate personal violence serves as a case study through
which we can examine both the impact of empirical biases on
the collection of data and the challenge in gathering accurate
data and understanding the experiences of violence due to the
constraints created by cultures of masculinity. While physical
violence was a relatively easily understood and measured as-
pect of IPV, emotional or psychological violence was oper-
ationalized differently depending on the study, and sometimes
this was excluded from the analyses. There remains inconsis-
tency in assessments of emotional violence despite the clearly
documented long-term health impacts (Winstok and Sowan-
Basheer 2015). This research identifies the ways that experi-
ences of nonlethal and nonphysical violence become embod-
ied, shaping individual livelihoods much like overt and direct
physical assault.
By problematizing early emphases on the macro level within
and between group violence in foraging communities and
highlighting violence that is most frequently gendered and
occurs in the private sphere, it may appear that these domains
of violence have little influence on one another. However, there
is often a connection between conflict that is initiated and
sanctioned at the state or group level and intimate partner vi-
olence. The violent training required to create soldiers who will
fight for the state or community and the normalization of this
kind of interpersonal violence does not disappear in the home.
Women living in countries that have recently been engaged in
state-level violence or war are more likely to experience IPV
(Saile et al. 2013). Additionally, experiences of targeted vio-
lence continue long after wars end. The romantic partners of
individuals who are suffering from war-related PTSD may ex-
perience higher IPV rates than individuals who are not part-
nered with those experiencing the lasting effects of this trauma
(Vinck and Pham 2013; Zannettino 2012). Additionally, IPV
in these communities may occur after sexual violence had been
employed as a weapon of war (Danjibo and Akinkuotu 2019;
Villa 2019). In this way, there is an explicit link between the
creation and politicization of masculinity and the ways that
violence manifests itself at different institutional tiers and
within different and sometimes overlapping spheres (McWil-
liams and Ni Aolain 2013).
Conclusion
In this piece, I suggest that we must consider the conditions of
knowledge production in our discussions of masculinities and
violence. Our emphasis on interpersonal violence, and specif-
S99
ically physical assault and murder, even as we compare across
taxa, reflects questions that are narrowly focused on only one
scale of human violence and the manifestations of patriarchal
power. Equal attention toward other kinds of violence, spe-
cifically nonphysical violence, provides a more nuanced way
for us to engage with the ways that inequity impacts the lives
of individuals in contemporary human populations. The ap-
plication of a structural violence model within analyses of
gendered violence allows us to analytically bridge the gap be-
tween interpersonal dynamics that contribute to exploitations
of individual boundaries and systematic inequalities and in-
dignities that eventually contribute to reduced access to re-
sources and daily fear. By reifying physical violence, we miss
the everyday abuses experienced by individuals who are dis-
advantaged with regard to structural power. Intimate partner
violence provides one example through which we can under-
stand what is lost in our understanding of gender roles, mas-
culinity, and harm when we fail to make space for analyses of
nonphysical violence.
That patriarchal power structures have influenced our entire
academic endeavor is not particularly surprising, but yet we
still have to address and correct how it has shaped not just what
we value but also how we understand risk and survival. In
2011, Steven Pinker published The Better Angels of Our Nature.
His central thesis is that violent behavior has declined over the
last several hundred years due to shifts in various factors ranging
from humanitarianism to increases in civil rights (Pinker 2011).
Similarly, Richard Wrangham recently published The Good-
ness Paradox: The Strange Relationship between Virtue and
Violence in Human Evolution. In this book he argues that self-
domestication explains the decrease in violence over the course
of human evolution (Wrangham 2019). Both of these books,
which have received considerable public praise, are anchored
in patriarchal narratives that overemphasize the significance
of physical violence, while obscuring the other violence(s) that
impact those whose lives are lived on the margins of social and
institutional power. Until analyses of violence are functionally
diversified in order to engage with experiences at various scales
of human sociality and thus include other violence(s) like emo-
tional violence, we will fail at our goal of understanding the scope
of the human experience as it relates to vulnerability, risk, and
survival.
Acknowledgments
This paper emerged from a Wenner-Gren Foundation funded
symposium that I organized with Matthew Gutmann and
Agustín Fuentes. I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity
afforded by this gathering to think through these topics. Thank
you to the symposium participants for their feedback on early
drafts of this manuscript. I also appreciate the insightful
comments and suggestions from the reviewers. All errors or
omissions are my own.
 S100
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