Dy­lan Ker­ri­g­an

In po­lit­i­cal an­thro­pol­o­gy, the hunger strike is seen as a front-of-stage so­cial dra­ma. It is a cul­tur­al per­for­mance for a broad au­di­ence. It is not just the hunger strik­er who is on stage. The au­thor­i­ties, politi­cians, me­dia and gen­er­al pub­lic all be­come per­form­ers in the dra­ma too. Their be­hav­iour and re­spons­es to the hunger strik­er are there for all to see. In this sense, a hunger strike is a "com­mu­nica­tive act," one clear­ly in­tend­ed by the in­di­vid­ual un­der­tak­ing it.

Yet gen­er­al­ly and some­what pe­cu­liar­ly, the hunger strik­er him- or her­self tends not to be held re­spon­si­ble for the in­tend­ed con­se­quences of their ac­tion. That is, the strik­er as­cribes in­ten­tions to their ac­tion but it is the Gov­ern­ment that should and would be held re­spon­si­ble for the con­se­quences of let­ting a hunger strik­er die.

A long his­to­ry and tra­di­tion of hunger strikes around the world il­lus­trates this. Most gen­er­al­ly, re­searchers have come to de­scribe such strikes as a tool of the po­lit­i­cal­ly dis­en­fran­chised. They are a means of em­pow­er­ing the pow­er­less by us­ing the weight of pub­lic opin­ion against the pow­er­ful. A jiu-jit­su eth­ic, if you will, to get a much stronger po­lit­i­cal op­po­nent to grant par­tic­u­lar de­mands that they don't agree with and would not for the most part con­sid­er grant­i­ng.

As the Irish Re­pub­li­can Ter­ence Mac­Swiney, who died af­ter be­ing on a hunger strike for 74 days in 1920, sug­gest­ed: "It is not those who can in­flict the most, but those that can suf­fer the most who will con­quer." A fa­mous ex­am­ple of this in­cludes mem­bers of the Suf­fragettes' Move­ment from ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry Britain who, when im­pris­oned, re­fused to eat.

The prison au­thor­i­ties were wor­ried the pub­lic would hold them re­spon­si­ble if a hunger strik­er died in cus­tody and this of­ten led to ear­ly re­lease or force-feed­ing. The lat­ter- a vi­o­lent ex­pe­ri­ence-was of great sym­bol­ic val­ue and the Suf­fragettes recog­nised this ear­ly on, suc­cess­ful­ly us­ing the strat­e­gy of pub­lic out­rage to force the Gov­ern­ment in­to changes.

In pop­u­lar con­scious­ness, the most fa­mous hunger strik­er is Gand­hi. Tech­ni­cal­ly, how­ev­er, Gand­hi wasn't ac­tu­al­ly a hunger strik­er, but de­vel­op­ing and prac­tis­ing his ver­sion of the phi­los­o­phy Satya­gra­ha- a fast and form of non-vi­o­lent re­sis­tance de­signed to con­vert those in pow­er rather than co­erce them.

One rea­son sug­gest­ed for why hunger strik­ers are cred­it­ed with the in­ten­tion to strike but ab­solved of the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for its ef­fects on them­selves is the ab­sence of choice. As the strik­er has no po­lit­i­cal chan­nel left open to him or her, the per­son­al be­comes po­lit­i­cal. There is noth­ing else they can do to get po­lit­i­cal pow­er to lis­ten, hence they can­not be held re­spon­si­ble for the con­se­quences of their ac­tions.

An­oth­er rea­son is that un­like oth­er forms of life-threat­en­ing com­mu­nica­tive acts like self-im­mo­la­tion (set­ting one­self on fire) or stand­ing in front of a tank, there is a rel­a­tive­ly long time pe­ri­od be­tween the be­gin­ning of the hunger strike and its end. Re­searchers sug­gest this in­ter­val al­lows the hunger strik­er to dis­place the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for his/her po­lit­i­cal act on­to the pow­er­ful in a way that oth­er ex­treme po­lit­i­cal acts don't.

Any analy­sis of the hunger strike as cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non should not be tak­en to mean that a per­son em­bark­ing on a hunger strike is not "dead­ly" se­ri­ous. Nor should we imag­ine that hunger strikes are a reg­u­lar event and oc­cur­rence. While it is hard to pro­vide a true ac­count of the fre­quen­cy of hunger strikes around the world, some re­searchers have tried to com­pile a fig­ure. That num­ber is far less than one might imag­ine.

Be­tween 1906 and 2004 the es­ti­mate is 1,441 re­port­ed hunger strikes across 127 dif­fer­ent coun­tries, with the me­di­an strike du­ra­tion be­ing 12 days. Of course the da­ta might be shaky, but a low in­ci­dence would sug­gest the hunger strike is a fi­nal and last re­sort of the po­lit­i­cal­ly dis­en­fran­chised.

And that is a key point re­vealed in the lit­er­a­ture. One of the clear things about hunger strikes is that they gen­er­al­ly emerge when there is lit­tle hope or op­por­tu­ni­ty for change with­in the ex­ist­ing po­lit­i­cal sys­tem. As such, their ex­is­tence is said to be symp­to­matic of a dam­aged po­lit­i­cal cul­ture.

In that sense, whether one agrees with Dr Kublals­ingh's hunger strike or not isn't the on­ly dra­ma in front of us. Rather, the spec­ta­cle that his sym­bol­ic and life-threat­en­ing protest puts on stage for every­one to see clear­ly is just how dam­aged our post-In­de­pen­dent, neo-colo­nial, class-based so­ci­ety and po­lit­i­cal cul­ture re­al­ly is.

• Dr Dy­lan Ker­ri­g­an is an an­thro­pol­o­gist at UWI,

St Au­gus­tine