Martyrdom, example setting, suffering and non-violence are all images associated with hunger strikes. Violence and moral blackmail are as well. Extracting ‘the’ meaning of this action would be a vain enterprise, given its myriad uses and causes. Without succumbing to the easy solution of culturalist explanations, we can still identify strong symbolic regularities in these practices.

The limits of the culturalist hypothesis

The idea that certain social groups resort more easily to this form of protest than others because of their culture, is appealing initially because we spontaneously think both of the IRA and Gandhi when we think of hunger strikes. If we return to the creditor's fast, both in Ireland and in ancient India, we can see that the efficiency of Gandhi's fasts can be connected to the validation of fasting in Hinduism, and that the martyrs of the IRA evoke a mythology of sacrifice that runs throughout Irish history. However, although the ‘cultural’ traits of these protest groups are undeniably favourable to the use of one or other form of protest, they are not sufficient explanations in themselves. We could go onto explain the more frequent use of hunger strikes by Turkish and North African immigrants by their practice of the long Ramadan fast. But the fact is that throughout the world, this form of action is often that of foreigners, in detention or not, requesting a right to residency, whatever their religion or ‘culture’ may be: Chinese, Zairian, or Haitian held in the refugee camps in the American South.

Moreover, the forms of action elaborated in specific historical and cultural contexts are often imported, re-appropriated, transformed and reinterpreted, sometimes in complete disconnection from their initial meaning. The generalisation of means of communication allows us to observe protest techniques used successfully ‘elsewhere’ and to adapt them to new contexts. Finally, the memory of forms of action used in the context of certain struggles does not necessarily exist as such. During the movement of the sans papiers in 1991-1992, we observed with surprise that many of those involved were unaware of the similar movements that had taken place in the early 1970s.