Scott Atran on Unconditional Commitment draws Reflections from Thuppahi Roberts

  ONE: Scott Atran: “The Devoted Actor Unconditional Commitment and Intractable Conflict across Cultures,” ... as introduced to Thuppahi by The Library of Social Science,in New York,with this abstract at journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/685495

Uncompromising wars, revolution, rights movements, and today’s global terrorism are in part driven by “devoted actors” who adhere to sacred, transcendent values that generate actions dissociated from rationally expected risks and rewards. Studies in real-world conflicts show ways that devoted actors, who are unconditionally committed to sacred causes and whose personal identities are fused within a unique collective identity, willingly make costly sacrifices. This enables low-power groups to endure and often prevail against materially stronger foes. Explaining how devoted actors come to sacrifice for cause and comrades not only is a scientific goal but a practical imperative to address intergroup disputes that can spiral out of control in a rapidly interconnecting world of collapsing and conflicting cultural traditions. From the recent massive media-driven global political awakening, horizontal peer-to-peer transcultural niches, geographically disconnected, are emerging to replace vertical generation-to-generation territorial traditions. Devoted actors of the global jihadi archipelago militate within such a novel transcultural niche, which is socially tight, ideationally narrow, and globe spanning. Nevertheless, its evolutionary maintenance depends on costly commitments to transcendental values, rituals and sacrifices, and parochial altruism, which may have deep roots even in the earliest and most traditional human societies. Fieldwork results from the Kurdish battlefront with the Islamic State are highlighted.

Scott Atran Richard Koenigsberg

TWO: Michael Roberts: “About Scott Atran and ‘Sacrificial Devotion’,”

In addressing the phenomenon of suicide atstacks deployed by the Palestinians and the Tamil Tigers from the mid-1990s, I coined the concept of “sacrificial devotion”. This concept was at the heart of numerous essays which I presented in refereed journals in the first decade of the 21st cenury –articles which also embraced the kamikaze oprations of the Japanese war machine in the 1940s and world-wide acts of self-immolation in political protest. This line of work brought me into fruitful interaction with Richard Koenigsberg and his Library of Social Science –where Atran is a regular contributor (visit https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/exhibits/).

This line of research also encouraged me to organise a conference in Adelaide on that focused on “Sacrificial Devotion.” The particpants included Riaz Hassan, Daya Somasundaram, Clive Williams, Shyam Tekwani, Peter Mayer, Rohan Bastin and a number of postgraduates (for eg Daniel Nourri, Harshan Kumarakulasingham, Sophie Corfield). One outcome for the web site : sacrificialdevotionnetwork.wordpress.com …. which lasted for a couple of years and is non-operational now, but still acessible on internet.

Scenes from BBC documentary of 1991 entitled “Suicide Killers” –with the passing out parade of female Tigresses (involving the garlanding with a cyanide capsule) as the fnal act serving as one moment in the tale

Tileepan fasting unot death on behalf of the Tamil cause 1987

 A Tiger figheter in camp with the kuppi around his neck–Pix by Shyam Tekwani of India whi was embedded among the Tigers 

A PARTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bloom, Mia 2005. Dying to kill: The allure of suicide terror. New York: Columbia University Press.

Elster, Jon 2005. Motivations and beliefs in suicide missions. In: Gambetta, D. (ed.). Making sense of suicide missions, pp. 233-259. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gambetta, Diego (ed.) 2005. Making sense of suicide missions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.— 2005. Can we make sense of suicide missions? In: Gambetta, D. (ed.). Making sense of suicide missions, pp. 259-299. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hellman-Rajanayagam, Dagmar 2005. ‘And heroes die’: Poetry of the Tamil liberation movement in northern Sri Lanka. South Asia 28: 112-153.

Holmes, Stephen 2005. Al-Qaeda, September 11, 2001. In: Gambetta, D. (ed.). Making sense of suicide missions, pp. 131-172. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jeyaraj, D.B.S. 2006. ‘No public speech ceremony for LTTE chief this year?’ http://transcurrents.com/tamiana/archives/234, 26 November.

Mines, Diane 2005. Fierce gods: Inequality, ritual and the politics of dignity in a South Indian village. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Mosse, David 1994. Catholic saints and the Hindu village pantheon in rural Tamilnadu, India. Man 29: 301-332.

Nabokov, Isabelle 2000 Religion against the self. An ethnography of Tamil rituals, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Natali, Christiana 2005. ‘Building cemeteries, constructing identities: Funerary practices and nationalist discourse among the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka’. Paper presented at the Conference of the British Association of Asian Studies.

Noorani, A.G. 2007. Roots of suicide terrorism. Frontline 24(7), 7-20 April. http://www.frontlineonnet.com/stories/20070420000507800.htm.

Pape, Robert A. 2005. Dying to win: The strategic logic of suicide terrorism. New York: Random House.

Rajam, K. 2000. South Indian memorial stones. Thanjavur: Manoo Pathikam.

Reuter, Christoph 2002. My life is a weapon: A modern history of suicide bombing. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Roberts, Michael 1996. Filial devotion and the Tiger cult of suicide. Contributions to Indian Sociology 30: 245-272.

Roberts, Michael 2005a. Tamil Tiger ‘martyrs’: Regenerating divine potency? Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 28: 493-514.

Roberts, Michael 2005b. Saivite symbolism, sacrifice and Tamil Tiger rites. Social Analysis 49: 67-93.

Roberts, Michael 2006. Pragmatic action and enchanted worlds: A Black Tiger rite of commemoration. Social Analysis 50: 73-102.

Roberts, Michael 2007a. Suicide missions as witnessing: Expansions, contrasts. Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 30: 857-888.Roberts, MichaeL 2007b. ‘Blunders in Tigerland: Pape’s muddles on “suicide bombers” in Sri Lanka’. Heidelberg Papers in South Asian and Comparative Politics. Available at http://hpsacp.uni-hd.de/

Sangarasivam, Yamuna 2000. ‘The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the cultural production of nationalism and violence’. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Syracuse University.

Sax, William Bo 1992. Pilgrimage unto death. In: Veitch, James (ed.) To strive and not to yield: Essays in honour of Colin Brown, pp. 200-212. Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington.

Settar, S. and Sontheimer G.D. (eds) 1982. Memorial stones. Dharwad: Institute of Indian Art History.

Shulman, David 1980. Tamil temple myths: Sacrifice and divine marriage in the South Indian Saiva tradition, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Trawick, Margaret 1999. Reasons for violence: A preliminary ethnographic account of the LTTE. In Gamage, Siri and Watson, I.B. (eds) Conflict and community in contemporary Sri Lanka, pp. 139-163. London: Sage.

Verdery, Katherine 1999. The political lives of dead bodies. New York: Columbia University Press.

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