Deadline : crime, journalism, and fearful citizenship in Caracas, Venezuela
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation traces the constitutive relationship between the press and populism in Venezuela through an account of crime journalism. Based on more than two years of research alongside journalists on the Caracas crime beat, it analyzes how demands for security mobilized disparate sectors of society around a common cause. The vital link between the politics of security and populist mobilization is something that scholars have only recently begun to recognize (Bottoms 1995; Garland 2002; Pratt 2007; Wacquant 2009). Although my analysis focuses specifically on Venezuela, I believe that it has implications for studies of crime and for studies of populism more generally. This dissertation sets out three interrelated findings. First, crime news creates victims. I mean this in a discursive sense: crime news reproduces the figure of the innocent, wholesome victim. A glance at the morning papers or the midday news confirms as much. Crime journalism is replete with images of grieving relatives and stories about good kids, hard-working men, and beloved mothers who were murdered for no reason at all. Anthropologists studying mass media representations of crime have looked almost exclusively at the figure of the criminal. We know where the category of the criminal leads—to the body of the young, poor, dangerous, black male. What can we learn by following the category of the victim? Second, in Venezuela victimhood becomes legible through the discursive practice of denunciation. We tend to think of victims as silent, passive objects; yet in Venezuela victimhood is anything but silent. To the contrary, the victim is an active performer, someone who voices sentiments of rage, grief, tragedy, and fear. To denounce is to assert one's victimhood publicly, usually through the medium of the press. Third and finally, denunciations made in the name of victims are the building blocks that form populist movements. In Culture & Truth, anthropologist Renato Rosaldo talks about how finding the rage in grief helped him understand the impetus for Illongot headhunting (Rosaldo 1993). I argue that by seeing the rage in victimhood, we begin to understand the impetus behind populist mobilizations against violent crime. The discursive practices of denunciation on the part of victims, journalists, pundits, and media moguls allow us to analyze this process. Rather than reducing the phenomenon to a moral panic or a mob mentality, an analysis of denunciation actually shows us the mechanisms and the micro-politics through which the populist movements take shape.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2012 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Samet, Robert Nathan |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Anthropology. |
| Primary advisor | Yanagisako, Sylvia Junko, 1945- |
| Thesis advisor | Yanagisako, Sylvia Junko, 1945- |
| Thesis advisor | Ebron, Paulla A, 1953- |
| Thesis advisor | Ferguson, James |
| Thesis advisor | Karl, Terry Lynn, 1947- |
| Thesis advisor | Turner, Fred |
| Advisor | Ebron, Paulla A, 1953- |
| Advisor | Ferguson, James |
| Advisor | Karl, Terry Lynn, 1947- |
| Advisor | Turner, Fred |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Robert Nathan Samet. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Anthropology. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2012. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2012 by Robert Nathan Samet
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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