we are only concerned with me-me-me is nonsense’

1. The Knife

Suddenly there was the violence, in all its hideousness. In the guise of a mugger, who cut her off as she walked to her front door down a quiet street and put a knife to her stomach.

With a shock, Marie Rosenkrantz Lindegaard realized what that meant. The man would rob her, rape her, maybe kill her. After all, she was an attractive young anthropology student doing fieldwork abroad. And this was Cape Town. One of the most violent cities in the world.

Lindegaard began to give her possessions, while, terrified, she repeated that she was only a student. Her wallet. Her rings, just inherited from her grandmother. †outside‘ the robber ordered. No doubt he would force her to a quiet place and rape her, she realized. She used her last trump card. Her phone, which she’d kept hidden in her purse. The robber snatched it from her hand and dashed off. Just like that.

‘For me, that event was a really big turning point’, says Lindegaard, twenty years older now. As a student she always saw crime as an academic issue, an abstract concept that is mainly in the minds of white South Africans. And then it happened to her.

‘How can anyone harm me so much? For three weeks I didn’t dare go outside,’ she says. ‘And I really reacted the way you read from women who have been raped. Three times a day I took a shower, changed clothes. All unconscious huh?’

Yet there was also that other nagging question. Why didn’t it end worse? “I felt like I had negotiated my way out. That I could have avoided being raped. Because of something I said, all kinds of micro-actions that happened in that one moment. Somehow I was… powerful been. But what actually happened? What kept this man from stabbing me, from raping me?’

From now on Lindegaard would no longer see violence as an act associated with a perpetrator: robber robs woman, quarrel-seeker beats passer-by. ‘What happens is determined by the interaction. Half of the victims of a violent crime say afterwards: I tried to negotiate. I want to understand: how does something like this work?’

2. A beautiful fight

It always works the same way, Lindegaard has seen it hundreds of times. Somewhere in the street an argument arises, often about something small. And then the dance starts. According to fixed patterns.

“People do this,” she says, waving her finger like a symbolic bat. ‘They will move more in their place. They make themselves wide. And they get closer together. Then you know: something is going on.’

Usually it goes well. One comes forward, the other recoils and shrinks – that’s how the dance often goes. ‘That’s the rhythm, you can see it almost every day,’ says Lindegaard. ‘Between children and parents. between traffic participants. That’s the lowest level of aggression you’ll see.’

But sometimes it does escalate. ‘When men fight with men, you often see them take off their sweater or jacket. Very funny to watch. There really is some sort of agreement: OK, now we’re going to fight, this is reality now. It takes a while before people realize that they have to take on a different role.’

That’s how it always goes, on the images from security cameras that she is allowed to use for her research. Whichever city you visit, the ritual looks the same everywhere. A sign for anthropologists that something universally human is here, bubbling up from the monkey instinct that we still carry around somewhere.

And the reaction of the bystanders, that is actually it. They immediately stop. They’re going to look. Come closer. Lay a hand on the arm of the quarrels, softly, as if to say: we are there too. Try to distract the brawlers. Or, if the fight escalates: call the police, try to pull the victim away.

Very different from what sociologists have long thought: that passers-by do nothing, an idea that has come to be called the ‘bystander effect’. Lindegaard talks in scents and colors about what she considers her favorite fight at a supermarket in Amsterdam. A late customer was no longer allowed in by the security guard – after which the customer and the security guard got into a fight.

‘A wonderful fight’, Lindegaard says delightedly. ‘You can see that the bystanders really have to do everything they can to separate the two. It takes forever, there are many actions, the bystanders try everything. I think that’s wonderful! It’s amazing to see what an enormous effort those passers-by are making to calm the fight.’

Why is that important to know? Easy. “There is such an idea that public order is something that needs to be monitored. More blue on the streets, more money for the police and guards, that’s the only way to keep safety’, she says. ‘You can keep saying that politically, but we see that it just isn’t the case. The vast majority of conflicts are resolved by people themselves.’

Suddenly: ‘The whole idea of: individualism, we are only concerned with me-me-me and if you let people do their thing, they are only concerned with themselves, that’s just bullshit. That’s not how people work.’

3. Big Brother

All the more wry that Lindegaard recently became the target of corona protests. She’d be spying on citizens, violating the constitution. ‘People have been closely monitored and their behavior has been analyzed in detail by officials’, as it is called, op one of the booming protest websites that arose around corona.

All because Lindegaard conducted some studies during corona into how people behave with a mouth cap on. The OMT, led by Jaap van Dissel, suspected that people would no longer keep their distance once they had on a face mask. That turned out to be by no means the case, Lindegaard saw on the security cameras.

Oh well, she also understands that something like this just pisses some people off. Our covid research was of course also bad pro state‘, she says. “The concern of these critics is that the state is given too much room to interfere in civil affairs. The funny thing is, we have the same kind of goal in that. We want to see evidence before politicians make decisions.’

There is in any case no question of shadowy or even illegal spying. She lists everything that is involved before she can see the images from the security cameras: this is only allowed after permission from the Public Prosecution Service, in a completely blinded room, and under the express condition that what she sees is strictly anonymized. .

‘As a scientist you have some privileges. Of course, that applies to more research,’ she says. ‘If we want to have knowledge about human behavior or, for example, about certain diseases, you simply need this kind of data.’

4. Smaller Brother

Ukraine. She sometimes fantasizes about it: what would happen there? Wouldn’t she be able to work with that too, somehow? “This is the war of which we have the most video documentation. And NGOs are now collecting them. An enormous source of observations.’

Because what would happen behind the great shooting and bombing, in the capillaries of the conflict? Would violence also crumble there into a fairly manageable series of human interactions, as once happened between her and the robber? And what determines the outcome, which is often so horrific in Ukraine?

‘You see a number of places where it has gotten out of hand, and a number of places where it hasn’t. Why are all those civilians shot in Butsha and not elsewhere? What exactly happened there?’, she wonders. ‘You could call it strategy, but I’m almost sure there are a lot of coincidences involved. We like to think: violence happens to us. But even in a war there are interactions. Something is happening there.’

A few days after the conversation, she emails, full of cheerfulness and smileys. She thought again about a question to which she did not immediately have the answer. What gives her the confidence that all that research into camera images does not gradually derail into a big brother society where the state is uncomfortably close to its citizens?

“The reason for my optimism is that Smaller Brother, namely the citizens, also uses videos to watch Big Brother and document the injustices of social life that we want to change,” she writes. ‘Just think of police brutality in the US. The reason it’s being taken seriously now is because it’s captured on video cameras these days.”

For example, her group conducts research into police brutality, prisons and ethnic profiling – projects she does not want to say too much about yet. ‘The reality is that there are cameras everywhere. So you better use them for social change :-)’, she emails.