Violence and Symbolism

In Susan Juster’s article, she remarks on the relationship between violence and iconoclasm: “Colonial Americans seemed (in good Protestant fashion) particularly adept at vicarious forms of violence.  Words and objects, not people, were their main targets.”  While Juster uses this distinction as a way of making a larger exceptionalist claim about why colonial America had less religious violence than might otherwise be expected, I found this distinction between violence and vicarious violence to be interesting but also a bit shaky.  Juster herself suggests that acts of violence against “heathens, infidels, apostates, or devil worshippers, Indians and Africans” held symbolic meaning for colonists.  Furthermore, the excerpt from Gutierrez highlights the overlap between “real” and “symbolic” violence.  Both sides engaged in direct violence as well as iconoclasm.  The Spaniards had gained power by destroying both people and their idols; in a similar fashion, the rebelling Pabloans drove out the Spaniards by killing the priests and desecrating their churches.

With this in mind, I remained unconvinced that it was a focus on “words and objects, not people” that made colonial America “exceptional.”  Perhaps the balance of violence against people and the iconoclasm directed against books and words was different in colonial America than in New Mexico, but all parties mixed violence and symbolism.  In fact, religious discourse seems to have imbued all sorts of violence with symbolism.  Thus, rather than focus on which group engaged in the most violence (for which a number of other factors could be responsible), it seems more interesting to ask how this discourse created a symbolism that justified and encouraged violent acts.  For example, was killing a way of making heathens pay for transgressions (as Bartolome de las Casas’ work suggests)?  Could it be a way of pleasing a god or gods and achieving a material reward, as the Puebloans believed?  By reconstructing these religious value systems, perhaps we can better understand how different groups interpreted the violence they engaged in.