Feldman

cortita y buena

Feldman, Allen 1991 Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Chapter 2: Spatial Formations of Violence (pp. 17-45).
Feldman examines the common explanations for violence in Ireland that explain it as a result of various causes, from economic inequalities, to social or economic contradictions. This is as a result of structural problems, which reach moments of intensity and are explode in the “abnormal violent behavior”. Contrarily he proposes to consider it as a generative force, which opens a new arena of social conditions. In this violence as a condition for its own reproduction generates a particular spatiality. For Catholic Irish in Belfast the house is made into a “safe place” in tension with the streets as sites of danger, need of constant movement and hiding. The making of the house as safe is created in a set of practices, to get inside a kind of “purification” of the body takes place in the changing clothes and burning the ones used in fights, The violence as a ritualized practice is manifested in the making of sanctuaries that evoke the events of particular struggles and commemorate specific deaths. The sanctuary is seen as a safe place but only as long as it has military surveillance, which acts as a counter-surveillance to British force. Sanctuaries are then claimed as significant spaces even when they are outside “safe” locations, thus religious marching are turned into acts of political transposing of boundaries, as moments of collective remembering violence and of actualizing its tensions spatially. It is in the memory of violence that specific locations in the city constitute and zones of interface and “neutrality” are shaped.