The Debt Attached to the Vineyard: Paleoviolence as Concept, by David Olali, Comparative Heritage Project/CHERIT

Every object in a museum has a number. Not a label, which is written for you, but a number, which is written for the institution. It usually encodes a year and a sequence, sometimes a donor, sometimes an expedition. It is written in a hand that assumes no reader. And it is the most consequential thing in the room.

I have spent most of my working life on scriptures: on what happens to a body of material when a society decides to set it apart, fix it, guard its copies, and appoint people to say what it means. That is the trade I was trained in, at Ibadan and then at Claremont, and it took me an embarrassing number of years to notice that I had been walking past the purest example of it every time I went into a museum. The accession register is a scripture. It has all the marks. It is canonical, it is guarded, it is cited as authority in disputes, it is corrected only through ritual, and its entries convert a contested past into a settled present without ever arguing for anything. What a register does is not describe. Describing would be a label’s job. A register titles. That distinction is the whole of this essay, more or less, and I want to take a long way round to it.

The facts about Benin are not in dispute and have not been for some time. In February 1897 a British punitive expedition took Benin City. Thousands of brass plaques, ivories and cast heads were removed. A portion were sold, in part to defray the cost of the expedition that had seized them. Dan Hicks has laid out the material afterlife of that seizure in detail, and I will not try to improve on his account.

What interests me is the paperwork that followed, because the paperwork is where the act stopped being an act. Objects entered collections. Each was written down. A number, a date, a source, a short description. Nothing in that process is violent in any sense a court would recognize, and nothing in it was performed by anyone who had been at Benin. Most of the men who did the writing had probably never given the expedition a second thought. Clerks rarely do.

And yet by the end of it something existed that had not existed before, which was a good title, held by an institution, in an object taken by force. No document in the chain records the conversion. The register does not say “this is now ours.” It says “1898, 152.” The claim is not asserted. It is presupposed, which is a far stronger position, because a presupposition cannot be rebutted without first being noticed.

I said I would take the long way round. There is one area of practice where we still speak about inheritance without any sentimentality at all, and it is the law of estates. When someone dies, the estate passes whole. The house comes with the mortgage on the house. The business comes with the judgment against the business. An heir can take the estate or renounce it. What an heir cannot do is accept the vineyard and disclaim the debt attached to the vineyard. In probate that is not a moral failing. It is simply not a thing you can do, in the way that you cannot buy the front half of a horse.

Now consider how we talk about cultural inheritance. Our heritage, our patrimony, our legacy, our traditions. In every case we mean the vineyard. We mean the collection, the cathedral, the manuscript, the recipe, the mausoleum, the song. I have never once heard a national broadcaster or a minister of culture use the word heritage to mean a liability, and I have listened for it.

This is the intuition behind the framework I have been building for about two decades, which I call Comparativity Complex Theory. Its first premise sounds abstract and is not: heritage is not a collection of objects. Heritage is the deep infrastructure of power and privilege. I mean infrastructure the way an engineer means it. Buried. Load-bearing. Maintained by people nobody thanks. Visible only when it fails.

Objects are what surfaces. What runs underneath is an arrangement, and arrangements do not need anyone to believe in them in order to keep working. Dig down through that arrangement far enough, past the nineteenth century pageants that Hobsbawm and Ranger taught us to date and distrust, past the charters and the codes and the founding statutes, and you eventually reach a layer that is not made of custom at all. It is made of killing performed to hold the world together. I have been calling it paleoviolence, and I should say what I mean before someone helpfully decides for me.

Paleoviolence is archaic violence that came before law and before morality, performed under cosmological warrant rather than for advantage, which modern institutions inherited, transformed, and go on operating without any idea where it came from. Paleo is not doing romantic work there. It does not mean primitive and it does not mean long ago. It means deep in the deposit, in the sense a paleontologist would use. Bone that stopped being alive a very long time ago is still present, still load-bearing, still legible. That is the condition I am pointing at. Not a memory of killing but a technique for killing that has been fossilized into procedure.

Four things distinguish it, and I offer them as tests rather than as description, since a concept that cannot rule anything out is not doing any work. The first is that it comes before the rule. We are trained to ask whether an act was lawful, proportionate, justified, and each of those questions needs a standard already standing. Paleoviolence is what was going on before there was a standard, and, more awkwardly, it is some of what the standard was cut from.

The second is that it is done for order rather than for gain. A raider who takes cattle wants cattle. An officiant opening a throat wants the sky to stay where it is. This one has a consequence that took me a while to see and that now seems to me the crux of the whole thing. An act performed under cosmological warrant produces no guilt in its own terms, because guilt requires the suspicion that you might have done otherwise, and inside the warrant there is no otherwise. Any institution that inherits this inherits something very valuable: a way of doing terrible things that does not register internally as doing anything wrong at all. Not repressed. Not rationalized. Simply not felt as a question. The third is that it manufactures a category rather than choosing a person. Here I part from René Girard, whose scapegoat is selected out of a community in crisis and killed so the crisis can be discharged. Selection leaves a victim behind. Manufacture leaves a vacancy, and a vacancy outlasts everyone who fills it. Orlando Patterson saw this at the level of definition when he described slavery in terms of natal alienation and dishonor rather than cruelty. The cruelty varies by master. The status does not.

The fourth is the one that makes any of this worth publishing. Paleoviolence survives the death of its own theology. The gods go. The priesthood scatters. The rite becomes folklore, then becomes embarrassing, then becomes a line on a museum label. And the technique walks out of the building intact, because what transmits is not the belief. What transmits is the warrant, detached from whatever cosmology first issued it, available for reissue under any authority that turns up next. Which is why the usual tools miss it. Ideology critique goes looking for a belief doing hidden work. There is no belief left to find. There is a procedure, and we do not experience procedures as beliefs. We experience them as competence.

No curator anywhere thinks of himself as an officiant. He thinks of himself as a person exercising due care over an object in his custody, and he is right, and that is exactly the problem.  The obvious objection is that we have words for all this. Structural violence, most of all.

I want to be careful here, because Johan Galtung’s 1969 essay is the foundation of everything written since on invisible harm, my own work included, and I have no interest in scoring points off it. But there is a floor in that model, and he put it there deliberately.

His measure is avoidability, indexed to what is possible now. He says so without hedging. A life expectancy of thirty years in the neolithic was not an expression of violence; the same figure today would be. The deep past is exempt by definition, and for his purposes that was the correct call. He was building an instrument for negotiators. An instrument that indicts the Pleistocene is no use at a negotiating table.

Then, a few pages later, he does something I did not expect the first time I read it properly. He raises the question of whether violence always has a prehistory of violence behind it. He calls that a breeding theory. He rejects it. And he asks, in a phrase I have not stopped thinking about, whether all violence is handed down through some kind of apostolic succession.

He named it in order to put it down. So the difference between us is not one of emphasis. Galtung reads a situation as of now and asks what could be otherwise. I read a situation as a deposit and ask what is still running in it. His violence has no author because no author can be found. Mine has an author who cannot be summoned, which is not the same condition. The perpetrator is an ancestor. He is not absent from the room.

Rob Nixon’s slow violence gets confused with this fairly often and is a different animal, though they meet. Nixon is describing tempo: harm that arrives gradually, dispersed, attritional, not read as violence at all. I am describing descent. His object moves forward from an act into a future of delayed injury. Mine reaches back from a present arrangement into an act nobody remembers performing. Slow violence explains why an injury is hard to see. It does not explain why nobody feels responsible for it. In 2016 the International Criminal Court convicted a man for destroying ten sites in Timbuktu, nine mausoleums and a mosque door, all but one of them on the World Heritage list. Nine years. The first conviction of its kind, and rightly treated as a landmark.

I have read the judgment more than once and keep arriving at the same place, which I have not seen said anywhere in the commentary. Two inheritances met in that courtroom. Only one was on trial. The men with the hammers were not looting; there is nothing to steal in a tomb. They were performing a public correction of a world they held to have gone crooked, in daylight, with instruction, so that people would understand what was being put right. And the apparatus that answered them has a descent of its own that we examine much less often. A World Heritage list is a canon. Assembled by credentialed experts, policed for authenticity, defended in the language of the irreplaceable, and now enforceable by a court.

I am not saying that inscribing a shrine and demolishing one are the same act. They are not, and the difference matters more than almost anything else in this essay. I am saying that both parties were drawing on entitlements neither had issued, and only one of them could get a court to honor his.

Oil has been produced commercially in the Niger Delta since the late 1950s. The region has supplied the Nigerian state with the overwhelming share of its revenue and has received, by any measure its residents would recognize, very little of it back. Gas has been flared for decades. Creeks that fed people no longer do. Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others were executed in November 1995, after a trial the world condemned and then, within a year or so, largely stopped raising. Nixon fits the environmental half of that precisely. What he does not reach, and what I am trying to reach, is the impunity: not why the harm is invisible but why the arrangement is beyond reproach.

The reading I am testing goes like this. The older cosmologies of the Delta treated the waters as agents with standing, capable of demanding and of withholding, and the relations they governed were obligations rather than holdings. A concession agreement converts an obligation-bearing world into a resource-bearing one. It performs a piece of sacral arithmetic that no one involved would recognize as such: certain lives and certain waters are written into the ledger as expendable so that a larger order, now called an economy, can hold.

That is cosmological warrant in a fiscal vocabulary. The flare is a perpetual offering, tended around the clock, whose smoke nobody reads as smoke.

I put that forward as a hypothesis under test, not a finding. The evidence is thinner than for Benin, any composite account of Delta cosmologies flattens real differences between communities, and the study it comes from is unfinished. It may not survive contact with the archive. I include it because a concept tested only where it is comfortable has not been tested.

If the warrant travels through procedures rather than beliefs, then apology will not reach it. An institution can apologize with complete sincerity, rewrite its mission, revise its labels, change who it hires, and go on operating the entitlement without losing a day, because the entitlement does not live where the institution’s beliefs live. It lives in the register, the enabling statute, the loan agreement, the valuation for insurance. Which suggests the audit has to be procedural, and gives it a question: which of our procedures presuppose a licence that no living body ever issued?

You can ask that of an accession register. Of a concession. Of a nomination dossier, a founding charter, a curriculum, a canon. The answers will not be uniform and some will be reassuring. What the exercise cannot be is delegated to a statement of values, because values are precisely the layer where the thing is not. There is one more thing, which I hold with more conviction than evidence and will state as the speculation it is. Every serious account of violence I know needs an outside somewhere in its machinery. Girard needs a victim. Galtung needs someone on top. Mbembe’s necropower needs an enemy whose death is what makes the survivor feel singular. If that is right, then a heritage practice worth having would be one that can hold inherited sacred material without manufacturing an enemy to keep it warm.

I do not know whether that is possible. I know we have not tried it seriously, and I notice that we keep making offerings while insisting we have outgrown the altar. Meanwhile the numbers are still there on the objects. Small, in a clerk’s hand, written for no reader.

Further reading

• Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969): 167-191.
• René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).
• Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (London: Pluto Press, 2020).
• Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11-40.
• Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
• Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
• Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (London: Routledge, 2006).
• Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).
• Vincent L. Wimbush, White Men’s Magic: Scripturalization as Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

This essay is a condensed version of my longer scholarly treatment titled “Comparativity Complex Theory and the Concept of Paleoviolence.” 

by David Olali, Founding Director, Comparative Heritage Project/CHERIT