Preamble Narratives and Social Memory - Universidade do Minho

Criminal violence in Brazilian moving images in 2010Juliana Cunha Costa4. An Attempting in Defining Violence & Criminal ViolenceThe concept of violence changed over time, and nowadays what is considered a violentact, most probably was not seen as violent many years ago. In order to understand this premiseElias & Dunning (2008), proposed an association on sport and violence through humanrelations in “Question for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilising Process”. In thiswork, the transition of the game, as a pastime, for the emergence of a modern sport in preindustrialBritain was based on the level of violence socially permissible (Mezzadri, 2002).Elias and Dunning argue that some acts of violence were not perceived as violent orcriminal but as pastime, for example, “[…] cock-fighting, bull- and bear baiting, burning catsalive in baskets, prize-fighting, watching public executions – which appears ‘uncivilized’ interms of present-day values” (Elias & Dunning, 2008, p. 227). In addition, in many Europeancountries the earlier forms of hunting were a customary practice of sport. “People enjoyed thepleasures of hunting and killing animals in whatever way they could […] The excitement ofhunting and killing animals had always been to some extent the peacetime equivalent of theexcitement connected with killing humans in times of war” (Elias & Dunning, 2008, p. 164).Furthermore, Pinker (2011) published his theory regarding the decline of violence.His publication is partially based on his reading of Elias, originally published in 1939: “TheCivilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations”. Pinker’s book (2011) isdivided into six transition processes in which humans being retreated from violence: thePacification Process, the Civilizing Process, the Humanitarian Revolution, the Long Peace,the New Peace, and the last process Rights Revolution was “[…] symbolic inaugurated by theUniversal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948” (Pinker, 2011 p. xxv).Pinker (2011) also argues that, at the end of the 1970s, the Civil Rights continued tobe a major challenge, since Civil Rights discriminate any form of violence against minoritiesof all kinds. To reinforce this statement is possible to fall back on Arendt’s work “OnViolence” published in 1970; in her book she had indicated that “in the last edition of theEncyclopedia of the Social Science ‘violence’ does not even rate an entry” (Arendt, 1970, p.8). She is referring to the phenomenon that in her time a large volume of literature treatedviolence as only dealing with war and warfare not with violence as such.However, “if we turn to discussions of the phenomenon of power, we soon find thatthere exists a consensus among political theorists from Left to Right to the effect thatviolence is nothing more than the most flagrant manifestation of power” (Arendt, 1970,p. 35), which plays an important role with the objective of maintaining the societal order,especially in poor slums communities of Rio de Janeiro (Fonseca, 2004). As Guggisberg andWeir (2007, p. x) remark “violence perpetrated against individuals, communities, and theenvironment is all too often condoned and reinforced by individuals in positions of poweralong with power structures, either implicitly or explicitly” . Finally, based on previous authorstatements, it is possible to assure that violence plays an important role in determinesfigures of power; those actors of the visual narratives are portrayed by police officers versuscriminal suspects.The first group, the law enforcement agency, is formed by agents representing thepowerful structure of the State. “The state monopoly exerts such an effect directly because itNarratives and social memory: theoretical and methodological approaches208