From the Publisher

Genocide is one of the most pressing issues that confronts us today. Its death toll is staggering: over one hundred million dead. Because of their intimate experience in the communities where genocide takes place, anthropologists are uniquely positioned to explain how and why this mass annihilation occurs and the types of devastation genocide causes. This ground breaking book, the first collection of original essays on genocide to be published in anthropology, explores a wide range of cases, including Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Guatemala, Rwanda, and Bosnia.

Howard Zinn

This volume ranges far and wide across centuries and cultures to present fascinating perspectives on the phenomenon of genocide. It is a new venture for anthropologists, whose insights will be useful to us all and who connect their scholarship to profound moral concerns.

Kenneth Roth

This volume-a collection of writings on genocide from the perspective of anthropology-seeks a deeper understanding of our era's most heinous crime. It asks not only what happened but why it happened. It seeks not simply to describe but to explain. And in offering an explanation of this horrendous social malady, it points the direction for a possible cure.

Richard Pierre Claude

Fresh, useful, and engaging. This timely book reflects new research and important critical perspectives on the role of social science and the response of anthropology to human suffering.

Rigoberta Menchu Tum

Many peoples of the world, including the Mayans in Guatemala, have been devastated and destroyed by genocide. Over many years these horrors remained only in the hearts and memory of the victims. The testimonies of the survivors who had the courage to denounce these crimes are making a contribution to scientific research. In Annihilating Difference, anthropologists grapple with an urgent public issue, taking new points of view that could help understand the magnitude of past atrocities and develop strategies to prevent future massacres in the heart of humanity.

Donald L. Horowitz

Annihilating Difference is an anthropological collection that warrants the attention of non-anthropologists. It simultaneously adds to the growing body of knowledge about genocide and provides a revealing glimpse into what anthropologists are studying and how they are studying it.

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Annihilating Difference

University of California

Chapter One

Toward an Anthropology of Genocide

Alexander Laban Hinton

As we stand on the edge of the millennium, looking back at modernity's wake, genocide looms as the Janus face of Western metanarratives of "civilization" and "progress." With the rise of the nation-state and its imperialist and modernizing ambitions, tens of millions of "backward" or "savage" indigenous peoples perished from disease, starvation, slave labor, and outright murder. Sixty million others were also annihilated in the twentieth century, often after nation-states embarked upon lethal projects of social engineering intent upon eliminating certain undesirable and "contaminating" elements of the population. The list of victim groups during this "Century of Genocide" is long. Some are well known to the public-Jews, Cambodians, Bosnians, and Rwandan Tutsis. Others have been annihilated in greater obscurity-Hereros, Armenians, Ukrainian peasants, Gypsies, Bengalis, Burundi Hutus, the Aché of Paraguay, Guatemalan Indians, and the Ogoni of Nigeria.

Clearly, this devastation poses a critical challenge to scholars: Why does one group of human beings set out to eradicate another group from the face of earth? What are the origins and processes involved in such mass murder? How do we respond to the bodily, material, and psychological devastation it causes? How might we go about predicting or preventing it in the twenty-first century? Because of their experience-near understandings of the communities in which such violence takes place, anthropologists are uniquely positioned to address these questions. Unfortunately, with few exceptions anthropologists have remained remarkably silent on the topic of genocide, as illustrated by the fact that they have written so little on what is often considered the twentieth-century's paradigmatic genocide, the Holocaust. Although anthropologists have long been at the forefront of advocating for the rights of indigenous peoples and have conducted rich analyses of violence, conflict, and warfare in substate and prestate societies, they have only recently (since the 1980s) begun to focus their attention intensively on political violence in complex state societies.

Some of the factors fueling this shift in focus include the broadening and de-essentializing of the concept of culture; the growing awareness that anthropology must deal conceptually with globalization, history, and the nation-states; a theoretical and ethnographic move away from studying small, relatively stable communities toward looking at those under siege, in flux, and victimized by state violence or insurgency movements; and the dramatic rise in ethnonationalist conflict and state terror in the wake of colonialism and the fall of the Berlin Wall. In addition, anthropologists may have felt uncomfortable engaging with this topic insofar as anthropologists themselves and anthropological conceptions (such as race, ethnicity, and "culture") have contributed to the genocidal process (see Arnold, Bowen, Schafft, and Scheper-Hughes, this volume). Moreover, anthropologists who did engage in such large-scale sociopolitical analyses during World War II and the Vietnam War often found themselves mired in moral quandaries and controversies. Still other anthropologists may have felt their analytical frameworks and insights were somehow insufficient to deal with the horrors of genocide.

Finally, cultural relativism has likely played a key role in inhibiting anthropologists from studying genocide. As introductory textbooks in anthropology highlight, one of the fundamental features of anthropology is the view that cultural values are historical products and, therefore, that one should not ethnocentrically assume that the values of one's own society are more legitimate, superior, or universal than those of other peoples. This perspective informed the American Anthropological Association's official response to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the organization critiqued for being a "statement of rights conceived only in terms of the values prevalent in the countries of Western Europe and America" (1947:539). Although legitimately fighting against cultural imperialism, this type of relativistic perspective has great difficulty responding to, let alone condemning, the atrocities committed during genocides and other forms of political violence. For, if one assumes that the values of other societies are as legitimate as one's own, how can one condemn horrendous acts that are perpetrated in terms of those alternative sets of morals, since the judgment that something is "horrendous" may be ethnocentric and culturally relative? (Not surprisingly, many ruthless governments have invoked cultural relativism to defend atrocities committed under their rule.) I suspect that the difficulty of dealing with such questions has contributed greatly to the anthropological reticence on genocide (see also Scheper-Hughes, this volume).

This book represents an attempt to focus anthropological attention directly on the issue of genocide and to envision what an "anthropology of genocide" might look like. To broaden the scope of the volume, the essays examine a variety of cases (ranging from indigenous peoples to the Holocaust) and have been written from a variety of subdisciplinary backgrounds (ranging from archaeology to law). Moreover, the final chapters reflect on the book as a whole and suggest ways in which anthropologists might make a greater contribution to the study of genocide. In the introductory discussion that follows, I frame the essays along two axes. On the one hand, I suggest that genocide is intimately linked to modernity, a concept I define in more detail below. On the other hand, genocide is always a local process and therefore may be analyzed and understood in important ways through the ethnohistorical lens of anthropology. The introduction concludes by suggesting some key issues with which an anthropology of genocide might be concerned.

Genocide: What Is It?

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. -Article II, 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention

Prior to the twentieth century, the concept of genocide did not exist. The term was coined by the Polish jurist Raphäel Lemkin, who combined the Greek word genos (race, tribe) with the Latin root cide (killing of). Lemkin lobbied incessantly to get genocide recognized as a crime, attending numerous meetings and writing hundreds of letters in a variety of languages. His efforts ultimately helped lead the United Nations to pass a preliminary resolution (96-I) in 1946, stating that genocide occurs "when racial, religious, political and other groups have been destroyed, entirely or in part." It is crucial to note that this preliminary resolution included the destruction of "political and other groups" in its definition. Much of the subsequent U.N. debate over the legislation on genocide revolved around the question of whether political and social groups should be covered by the convention (Kuper 1981). A number of countries-particularly the Soviet Union, which, because of the atrocities it perpetrated against the kulaks and other "enemies of the people," feared accusations of genocide-argued that political groups should be excluded from the convention since they did not fit the etymology of genocide, were mutable categories, and lacked the distinguishing characteristics necessary for definition. In the end, the clause on "political and other groups" was dropped from the final version of the 1948 Genocide Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, which dealt only with "national, ethnical, racial or religious groups."

This omission has generated a great deal of debate. As currently defined, the U.N. convention definition has difficulty accounting for such events as the Soviet liquidation of its "enemies" or the Nazi annihilation of tens of thousands of "lives not worth living" (that is, mentally challenged or mentally ill individuals), homosexuals, social "deviants," and communists. Regardless, some genocide scholars prefer to adhere to the strict, legal definition of the Genocide Convention while attempting to account for violence against political and social groups under such alternative rubrics as "related atrocities" (Kuper 1981) or "politicides" (Harff and Gurr 1988). Many other scholars have proposed more moderate definitions of genocide that cover political and social groups but exclude most deaths resulting from military warfare (e.g., Chalk and Jonassohn 1990; Fein 1990). Thus Helen Fein states: "Genocide is sustained purposeful action by a perpetrator to physically destroy a collectivity directly or indirectly, through interdiction of the biological and social reproduction of group members, sustained regardless of the surrender or lack of threat offered by the victim" (Fein 1990:24). Finally, a few scholars use a very broad definition of genocide that covers more types of military warfare (e.g., Charny 1994; Kuper 1994).

From an anthropological perspective, the U.N. definition is problematic in several respects. In particular, it gives primacy to an overly restricted set of social categories. While the marking of difference occurs in every society, the social groupings that are constructed vary dramatically. Race, ethnicity, nation, and religion are favored categories in modern discourse. However, as anthropologists and other scholars have demonstrated, many other social classifications exist, including totemistic groups, clans, phratries, lineages, castes, classes, tribes, and categories based on sexual orientation, mental or physical disability, urban or rural origin, and, of course, economic and political groups. Surely, if a government launched a campaign to obliterate the "Untouchables," everyone would characterize its actions as genocide. Likewise, there is no a priori reason why the intentional destruction of a political group or the handicapped should not be characterized as genocidal. The criterion that distinguishes genocide as a conceptual category is the intentional attempt to annihilate a social group that has been marked as different.

Some scholars might challenge this assertion by arguing that many of the social categories I have mentioned are too malleable. Such an argument could be refuted in its own terms-it is often extremely difficult to stop being an Untouchable or to stop having a disability. One may much more easily convert to a different religion. Accordingly, I believe it is crucial to note that even categories such as race, ethnicity, and nationality, which are frequently given a primordial tinge, are historically constructed groupings that have shifting edges and fuzzy boundaries.

This point is illustrated in Paul Magnarella's essay "Recent Developments in the International Law of Genocide: An Anthropological Perspective on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda." Magnarella provides a detailed overview of the original provisions of the 1948 U.N. Genocide Convention and recent steps toward implementation. Since its inception, the convention has been plagued by the problem of enforcement. Although the convention provides for recourse on the state and international level, crimes of genocide have occurred without intervention or prosecution, since the state itself is usually the perpetrator and will not acknowledge the atrocities taking place within its borders. During the 1990s, the U.N. Security Council used its authority to establish tribunals in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. (An anthropologist and a lawyer, Magnarella served as a consultant and researcher for these tribunals.) Moreover, in July 1998, delegates at a U.N. conference in Rome approved a statute calling for the creation of a permanent International Criminal Court, despite the protests of the United States and a handful of other countries, including Iran, Iraq, China, Lybia, Algeria, and Sudan. President Clinton finally signed the treaty in January 2001, days before leaving office. Senate confirmation remains in doubt.

After tracing these developments, Magnarella describes the process by which the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) conducted the first trial for the crime of genocide ever held before an international court. In September 1998, fifty years after the adoption of the U.N. convention, former Rwandan mayor and educator Jean-Paul Akayesu was convicted of various acts of genocide, as well as crimes against humanity. Magnarella recounts the testimony of one woman who, despite seeking Akayesu's protection, was repeatedly raped in public; Akayesu reportedly encouraged one of the rapists, saying: "Don't tell me that you won't have tasted a Tutsi woman. Take advantage of it, because they'll be killed tomorrow." Akayesu, in turn, claimed that he was a minor official who was unable to control the atrocities that took place in his municipality.

Because of its unprecedented work, the ICTR faced many difficulties in achieving the conviction of Akayesu. One of the foremost problems was the U.N. convention's lack of a definition of a "national, ethnical, racial or religious group." Background research revealed that the drafters of the convention restricted the definition of the term genocide to "stable, permanent groups, whose membership is determined by birth." Based on that conceptual distinction, the ICTR came up with provisional definitions of the aforementioned groups. However, the more fluid Hutu/Tutsi/Twa distinction did not clearly fit any of the proposed definitions. Noting that Rwandans readily identified themselves in these terms and that the labels were used in official Rwandan documents, the ICTR nevertheless concluded that such emic distinctions could serve as a basis for prosecution.

Magnarella points out that the ICTR effectively expanded the coverage of the convention by adding any "stable and permanent group, whose membership is largely determined by birth" to the pre-existing national, ethnic, racial, and religious categories. Thus, atrocities committed against those of different castes, sexual orientations, or disabilities might qualify as genocidal.

(Continues...)

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