Symbolism and Power

Susan Juster remarks in her essay, "What’s "Sacred" about Violence in Early America? Killing, and dying, in the name of God in the New World," that, "For the historian of colonial America, the question is not the ubiquity of religious violence but the apparent scarcity of it. The starkest and most brutal forms of persecution—the burning of heretics, wholesale destruction of sacred places and objects, the forced expulsion and enslavement of outsiders such as Jews and Huguenots—were noticeably absent from the British colonies. But the European periphery produced new and sometimes bizarre forms of sacred violence: the ritualized assaults by Puritans on witches and Indians, which some scholars consider a peculiar form of iconoclasm; the proliferation of martyr tales within the context of slavery and Indian captivity; and the emergence of a hyperbolic rhetoric of suffering and redemption that traveled easily from religious to secular genres. Colonial Americans seemed (in good Protestant fashion) particularly adept at vicarious forms of violence. Words and objects, not people, were their main targets."[1]


In other words, it seems to me that colonial Americans attacked symbols, with the intent to destroy those symbols instead of people. By attacking symbols, they asserted their hegemony over others. According to Laiten, hegemony is “the political forging—whether through coercion or elite bargaining—and institutionalization of a pattern of group activity in a state and the concurrent idealization of that schema into a dominant symbolic framework that reigns as common sense.”[2] The only way to assert their full dominance over others is to attack the symbols of the opposition. By destroying the symbols of others, and replacing them with their own, they impose their own version of reality--of common sense--over their enemies. There were fewer people in the colonies, so killing political or religious enemies wasn't as practical as instead destroying their symbols and reality, and dominating them by replacement of those symbols with their own.


[1] Susan Juster, “What’s 'Sacred' about Violence in Early America? Killing, and dying, in the name of God in the New World,”Common Place, October 2005., accessed August 28, 2013, http://www.common-place.org/vol-06/no-01/juster/.

[2] Quoted in Myron J. Aronoff and Han Kubik, Anthropology and Political Science: a Convergent Approach (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), 81.