Torture and Body Knowledge

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Katharina Inhetveen
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 397232855

The project studies the relationships between torture techniques and body knowledge. It argues that torture techniques (as enacted practices and as systematized blueprints for action) and body knowledge (as knowledge about the body and as incorporated knowledge) interact with each other: On the one hand, objectified stocks of knowledge about the human body form the basis for the development and application of torture techniques. On the other hand, experiences of torture by torturers, the tortured and third parties enter into the body-related knowledge of the field. Torture was, and is, a form of political violence that is institutionalized in many societies, but in different empirical manifestations. To enable a comparative study of interrelations between torture techniques and body knowledge, the project combines two methodological strategies. Firstly, it traces the changing forms and meanings of torture techniques in the course of their diffusion through different cultural contexts of application. To this end, the case of the torture techniques developed and systematized by the CIA during the Cold War is examined in their genesis and in their dispersion as mobile and adaptable patterns of action in different cultural contexts. This analysis is carried out with regard to the War on Terror, when US agencies used torture techniques in Afghanistan and Guantánamo, amongst other places, and with regard to torture regimes in Latin America in the second half of the 20th century, namely in Argentina and Chile. Secondly, torture techniques and the body knowledge associated with them are analyzed in a culturally contrasted context. Here, the empirical case will be the torture systematized and carried out by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. This case lends itself to the intended comparison as it offers extensive accessible material as well as a cultural contrast, being embedded in a cosmology different from the European-American context. The project aims to explore the culturally specific and transculturally observable interrelations between torture techniques and body knowledge. Thereby, it examines the tensions between, on the one hand, the differences between torture techniques and the associated body knowledge varying with cultural contexts and, on the other hand, the culture-independent and construction-resistant quality of the vulnerable human body, which limits the degree to which bodies are open to interpretation, use and handling. Thereby, the project facilitates innovative insights into the sociology of violence as well as body sociology. With the comparative study of torture techniques in their cultural contexts, conceptually based on the sociology of knowledge and sociological anthropology, the project aims to contribute to a better sociological understanding of torture, and of extreme violence more generally, as cultural bodily practice.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants