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The intimacy of persecution: gossip, stereotype, and violence

Persecution and communal violence present methodological challenges for researchers 
of violence. One such challenge lies in connecting persecutor and victim, as well as macroand micro- factors. Part of the solution, we suggest may come from adapting approaches of 
linguistic anthropology to gossip and ‘everyday talk’. We propose that persecution has two 
poles: collective (in which the persecutors are generally not acquainted with their victims) 
and intimate (in which the persecutors are generally well acquainted through day-to-day or 
other meaningful contact with their victims). Analyzing intimate persecution of ‘sorcerers’ 
and ‘Chinese’ in Indonesia, we suggest that gossip and everyday talk enables stereotypes to 
be ‘pinned on’ certain acquaintances. The findings we suggest are exploratory, possibly 
contributing to a more nuanced method for understanding intimate persecution more 
generally.