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Reviews
Beaten Down: A History of Interpersonal Violence in the West
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By David Peterson del Mar
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University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2002. Notes, bibliography, index. 312 pages. $50.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.
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Reviewed by Jacqueline K. Dirks
Reed College, Portland, Oregon
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| In this thoughtful and engaging narrative history, David Peterson del Mar takes as his subject "interpersonal violence," which he defines as physical conflicts "within families and schools, between relatives, friends and acquaintances" (p. 8). He argues that such acts are "micropolitical" — that is, that such violence "is inextricably bound up in larger cultural processes and moral problems" and must be studied within "social relations of power" (p. 8). The book covers the geographic area of the north Pacific slope, "from pre-contact Native societies to the present," and is organized chronologically to treat themes such as colonization and violence, conflicts among settlers, and the effects of modernity on violent behavior (p. 9). The study's scope proves both its strength and its weakness. It is immensely useful to reflect upon how the meanings of violence have been transformed over almost two hundred years. Yet the evidence and argument are spread thin at times, as Peterson del Mar strives to show that public violence between men was increasingly censured and regulated by the early twentieth century, while family violence committed by husbands and fathers increased. |
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This study owes methodological debts to a number of fields. The author takes warfare between Natives and colonizers as his starting point. Here Peterson del Mar relies on historians who have studied organized, collective violence such as war or riots. Much of the rest of the book looks mainly at violent interpersonal acts and is indebted to historians of women and the family, including Peterson del Mar's own earlier work, and to new analyses of manhood and masculinity. The final chapter details specific violence against and within communities of African and Japanese Americans. |
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Peterson del Mar states that conquered people lose their freedom to fight and then chronicles guerrilla acts against occupiers, wife abuse across racial lines, and white missionaries' and teachers' corporal punishment of Native children. "Natives' violence served to defend their sovereignty and autonomy. White violence served to deny it" (p. 30). Natives also hurt one another, and Del Mar offers scant but tantalizing evidence that nineteenth-century Indians saw themselves as superior to blacks and Asians: "... immigrants from China were the most common target of aboriginal violence" (p. 33). The changing context — decreasing Native populations, land appropriation, confinement to reservations — rather than the amount of aggression is his focus here. "Colonization may not have changed the overall level of Native violence. But it transformed its character, context, and purpose" (p. 44). |
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Violence also occurred among settlers. Peterson del Mar marshals evidence from newspapers, trial transcripts, memoirs, and novels to argue that by 1900 "the legal and popular cultures" of the now-settled Pacific slope "were more critical of men's interpersonal violence than they had been a century before" (p. 74). Coroners' registers seem to confirm a drop in recorded homicides. Settlement seems to have given members of some groups — white wives and children, for example — access to new defenses against violence by husbands and teachers. Still, according to Peterson del Mar, these new pacifist ideals co-existed with, rather than transformed, older violent practices. |
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As he enters the twentieth century, Peterson del Mar argues that, despite popular beliefs to the contrary, "Violence between male peers in fact continued to decline in the 1920s and became more, not less, regulated" (p. 112). "Acts of unregulated violence" committed by men within families, on the other hand, seem to have increased. Modernity's critics worried about many things, especially men's loss of arenas in which they might physically prove themselves. |
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Though valuable and thought-provoking, the narrative still has several unresolved problems. Peterson del Mar rightly cautions readers against simple trust in publicly documented acts of violence; he notes that many unrecorded instances of physical conflict occurred in private. Yet he necessarily relies heavily on public records and should remind general readers that he is doing so. The author recognizes that people with less power were frequently victims of violence, and he rightly eschews the reduction of physical aggression to the "pathological." Instead, his book shows the instrumental and functional uses of physical violence for those at the top and the bottom. Peterson del Mar purports to trace an emerging denigration and legal restriction of public violence among men and a simultaneous increase in private violence against women and children. Given this focus on changing ideas about violence, his argument would be stronger had he given more space to describing the anti-violence ideologies of various experts who increasingly have equated violence with pathology. These critics include sociologists, criminologists, and psychologists. Peterson del Mar might also say more about feminist theorists who have analyzed how physical aggression often reinforces male dominance. |
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In the end, Peterson del Mar makes a plea for the big picture: "Larger stories and patterns of dominance and abuse are easily overlooked when violence becomes the solitary or primary lens through which social problems are assessed" (p. 173). The same might be said of this interesting yet partial history. |
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