Anthropological Aspects of Genocide Research Paper

1. Problems Of Definition

The term genocide is a neologism, coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a legal scholar and Polish Jewish emigre to the USA. Lemkin took over ancient Greek roots for ‘tribe’ and ‘killing’ to create a word that would adequately convey the enormity of Nazi and Axis crimes in Central and Eastern Europe during World War II. This definition inspired a UN General Assembly resolution of 1946 but when, two years later, the same body established a binding Genocide Convention, the range of reference was narrowed in two important ways. First, cases where a culture is destroyed without the extermination of people—now commonly referred to as ethnocide—were excluded. Secondly, and much more critically, in order to accommodate concerns of the USSR, which might have faced indictment for mass killing of ‘class’ enemies (as in the deliberately created famine in the Ukraine in 1932–3, or the then still undiscovered ‘gulag’), the 1948 UN definition excluded the extermination of ‘political and other groups’ such as social classes.

These questions of legal definition are important because the Convention commits states which subscribe to it ‘to prevent and to punish’ the crime of genocide by pursuing perpetrators ‘whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.’ Moreover, since the Convention explicitly denies that genocide can be a ‘political’ crime, perpetrators are subject to the laws of extradition.

Perhaps precisely because of its ambitious promise, the Convention has been invoked remarkably little since 1948. Both the desire of member states to preserve inviolate their claims to sovereignty and of others not to have to commit resources to humanitarian interventions have played a role. Leaving aside UN silence during the slaughter of half a million Indonesian communists in 1965 and the death of 1.5 million Cambodians in 1975–9 (since it could be argued that the 1948 Convention excluded such cases) it is a matter of record that US officials at the UN were instructed in 1992 to avoid using the term ‘genocide’ with respect to Bosnia so as not to trigger obligations under the Convention. In fact, the only major development since 1948 has been the establishment, in 1994, of the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunals for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, though under the peace enforcement provisions of the UN Charter (Chapter VII), not the Genocide Convention, and refused permanent status due to Chinese objections.

While considerable academic energy has been expended in attempting to classify particular mass murders as genocide or otherwise (the destruction of the Albigensian Cathar heretics in France in the thirteenth century, the removal of up to 50 million persons from Africa during the slave trade, the slaughter of the Hereros of South West Africa by German forces in 1904–7, the massacres of the Armenians in 1915, the persecution of political enemies under Stalin in the USSR, the elimination of various indigenous peoples such as the Ache of Paraguay, to name but a few) perhaps the most broadly attended and resonant debates have concerned the uniqueness or otherwise of the Nazi genocide of the Jews. On the one hand, some scholars argue that the Jewish Holocaust is the only case in history of the attempted destruction of an entire people because they were that people. Other genocides were committed as a by-product of the course of war (Hereros) or political struggles (Democratic Kampuchea), or aimed to destroy a culture or way of life by eliminating some of its bearers (Gypsies in World War II ), or occurred indirectly as a consequence of actions not per se intended to destroy a people (the slave trade). The Nazi persecution of the Jews differed from all these in intent, extent and ‘success’ (Bauer 1984).

Other scholars, however, resist the implication of the ‘exceptionalist’ position that the Holocaust occurred in some sense ‘outside of normal history’ and thus had neither precedent in the past nor lessons for the future. Unsurprisingly, this debate leads on to conflict over the interpretative framework for under-standing the causes and the motivations of the Holocaust and its perpetrators. For their part, most anthropologists would favor retaining a comparative, sociological framework and resist the suggestion that any sociological phenomenon can be unique in the strong sense argued by exceptionalist scholars, or require recourse to abstract notions of ‘evil’ (Conte and Essner 1995, Clendinnnen 1999).

This debate has implications beyond German historiography. An anthropologist working in former Yugoslavia has recently argued that the public understanding of what constitutes genocide, which derives from images of the Nazi Holocaust, prevented observers from recognizing an actually existing genocide as it developed before the world’s eyes (Sorabji 1994). Indeed, one of the puzzles of the sociology of genocide is why outside observers tend in general to be so unwilling to face the facts until it is too late, and why even after the event such effort is put into obfuscation and evasion of the brute historical record.

2. The Sociology Of Genocidal Mass Murder

Though anthropologists aim to study the sources of human social and cultural variation, surprisingly little effort has been contributed by this discipline to the study of genocidal mass murder. This gap in the literature is all the more surprising in that many of the acknowledged genocides of the last century and a half have taken place in parts of the world where anthropologists work. Naturally, part of the explanation lies in the way anthropologists carry out their research. Participant observation in the life of a community is not a methodology that is easily adapted to the study of murderous gangs manning roadblocks or units of the local military on active service. Beyond methodological considerations, there may also be a sense, shared with those who work for Amnesty International, that to explain is in some sense to forgive, and that the task of observers is merely to record, lest we forget.

Recently, however, anthropological avoidance of this topic—an evasion that was characteristic of most social science, with some noteworthy exceptions like Leo Kuper (1982)—has been coming to an end. Inspired in part by a wave of ethnographic writing about political violence, especially in South Asia (Spencer 1990), a new generation of anthropologists have written on particular genocides (Bosnia, Rwanda, and Cambodia most notably, but also Nazi Germany). In this work, the anthropologists attempt, with more or less success, to bring to bear a sense that violence is rarely simply pragmatic and is often patterned in ways specific to a particular time and place and always interpreted in local, cultural terms.

As in the other social sciences and humanities which deal with cases of mass murder, anthropological analyses aim above all to answer the question, ‘how could this happen? Under what conditions did one group of humans attempt to wipe out another?’ Responses can be divided along a familiar line into two camps: those who stress cultural factors and those who stress social, political, and economic factors. Taking the former first, for authors in this school the goal is to provide a specifically ‘anthropological contribution,’ to prove that an ethnographer’s interest in ‘cultural variation’ adds an otherwise missing ingredient to analyses of genocide.

Much of this ‘culturalist’ work (notably writing on Rwanda and Cambodia) takes a cue, wittingly or not, from an essay by the historian Natalie Zemon Davis (1973) on differential patterns of violence in the religious wars in France in the seventeenth century. Davis showed that the forms of Protestant on Catholic violence were not the same as those perpetrated by Catholics on Protestants. Each religious tradition had its own construction of the nature of demonic power in the other and adherents of the two faiths acted to cleanse the world accordingly. Because of their interest in demonstrating a ‘cultural logic,’ the anthropological writing on Rwanda and Cambodia does not advance theoretically on Davis’s original insight (Taylor 1999, Hinton 1998). Evidence is presented that shows how in some instances cultural patterns seem to have given form to and shaped people’s violent behavior, but little or no attempt is made to explain how particular segments of the population or groups of individuals came to participate in the genocide at a particular time and place.

Curiously, this kind of explanation of ‘how it happened’ has several features in common with the approach adopted by Daniel Goldhagen (1996) in Hitler’s Willing Executioners, a book which enjoyed runaway popular success across the USA, Europe, and particularly Germany in the mid-1990s (while being almost universally condemned by the historians with period expertise). Goldhagen’s answer to the question ‘how could it happen’ was that it was Germans who killed Jews in World War II (it was not just they, in fact) and they did so because of the activation of a tradition which he dubbed ‘eliminationist antisemitism’ which had long characterized German culture (while in reality antisemitism had actually been a vote-loser for the Nazis prior to 1933).

For authors working in this tradition, genocide is derived or emerges out of a ‘cultural model.’ What tends to be missing from such explanations is any attempt to detail political manipulation by those who planned the genocides, to analyze the institutional apparatus which prepared and carried through the genocides, and to establish the sociological and even biographical profile of identified killers. In the case of Rwanda one has to turn away from the anthropologists, to the work of the political scientist Rene Lemarchand to discover, for instance, that the genocide was planned by a core of one extended family and advisors, promulgated through 300–500 middle level, rural cadres, set off by a presidential guard of around 6,000 persons who massacred all opponents of the genocide (Hutu and Tutsi alike) and finally continued by militias who may have made up 1–2 percent of the population, each member of which may have killed 200–300 people (Lemarchand 1997).

Work that searches for the cultural models which underpin and apparently feed directly in to genocide bears a close affinity with the first efforts by anthropologists to deal with issues of genocide during and shortly after World War II. Then adherents of the culture and personality school provided textbook manual type explanations of the personality of the enemy in an effort to explain the success of totalitarian regimes in Japan and Germany and as a prelude to reconstruction and democratization. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, with decades of detailed analysis of the paradigmatic Nazi case behind us, there really is little excuse for allowing this kind of cultural reductionism to pass for ‘anthropological explanation.’

An alternative approach within anthropology is to be found in work on Bosnia. Here the research was carried out by a British-trained social rather than US- trained cultural anthropologist (Sorabji 1994). This work owes much to the tradition of historical and sociological investigation of the Holocaust represented by such scholars as those around Herbert (2000), as well as the kind of political science of Bosnia pursued by Bougarel (1997). It puts stress less on ‘culture’ than ‘local knowledge,’ and tries to provide a fuller sense of ‘what happened’ before answering the more difficult question, ‘why?’. Anthropological expertise is combined with a journalist’s sense of political manipulation, a sociological interest in institutions, and a historian’s concern with events of the recent and remembered past. Not only is the Bosnian genocide not represented as being rooted in ‘cultural traditions,’ but it is shown how this very representation is part of the armory of the perpetrators, used, with great success in this case, to keep outsiders from interfering. As long as US Secretary of State Warren Christopher, or British Prime Minister John Major was advised that ‘ethnic cleansing’ was not ‘genocide’ and that deeprooted cultural patterns on all sides were to blame, they felt justified in evading calls for intervention. Indeed, the very ‘disorganized’ quality of the genocide (compared with the Nazi model case) came to be taken as evidence of its nonexistence. In reality, however, institutional patterns were at work: Violent criminals were being released from Belgrade jails and sent to join militias. These operated formally independently but under the cover of the official military. Intellectuals were among their first targets, often identified on pre-prepared lists; local schools and other sites of intercommunal, neighborly interaction were chosen as locales for internment and torture; neighbors were deliberately sent to kill neighbors. The ‘sites of memory’ of Bosnian social life were being systematically and consciously destroyed by the instigators of a genocidal violence that was presented as medieval but was, in reality, wholly modern.

This kind of work points to a need to think more broadly about the psychological and mental underpinnings of the violent behavior of individuals and collectivities and to relate these findings to work elsewhere within anthropology. It is striking that the language of genocide in Bosnia, as in some other cases, was one of sacrifice, an invitation, one might think, to introduce anthropological work on the relation between religious representations of transcendence and political violence (e.g., Bloch 1992).

3. The Sociology Of The Representation Of Genocide And Memorialization

It is possible to argue that much of what has recently passed for analysis of the cultural soil of genocide in anthropology is in reality merely the re-presentation of local, folk explanations of genocidal behavior. This data, which is often part of the discourse around the genocide and ought to be part of the material analyzed and explained by a sophisticated social science, is instead relied upon, more or less uncritically, as if descriptively neutral.

In analyzing perpetrator discourse anthropologists have pointed out how genocide, like political violence more generally, tends to be presented by the perpetrators as a just defense against others who are about to attack, or are already attacking, the perpetrators. But a less sceptical attitude has been adopted, for instance, over accounts which focus on the rural, resentful character of supposed killers (Hinton 1998). Going further into the psychological roots of genocidal violence, the fundamental challenge, as everyone knows who has ever investigated these issues, is that no one ever admits to having personally been a genocidal killer. No researcher has yet overcome this obstacle.

A more fruitful domain has been analysis of survivor testimony and of the reconstructions of generations who have come after (a field which overlaps with broader interests in memory, narrative, and representations of the past). Discussion of the relationship between trauma, personal memory, and reconstruction of the ‘self’ is still at an early stage in all the disciplines which touch on this area. One feature that is commonly pointed to in victim testimony is a flat, matter-of-fact tone adopted, a technique of distancing and dissociation. In innovative work in transcultural psychiatry, Laurence Kirmayer has developed a notion of landscapes of memory to characterize some of the differences in narratives of trauma between child abuse and holocaust victims: ‘while holocaust stories involve bearing witness to what is widely … recognized as a human catastrophe, personal stories of abuse are revelatory, shameful and damaging’ (Kirmayer 1996, p.188). In this context memorialization may be a key feature of legitimating the experience of suffering. Work is, however, only just beginning on situations where memorialization does not take place (as for instance with most Gypsies in Eastern Europe).

One important new area of investigation is the social and political understandings and implications of particular ways of representing genocides. Early work in material culture on the activity of memory in holocaust memorials has shown how the meanings of memorials are contingent on social and political realities (Young 1993). At a literary level, work by Inga Clendinnen (1999) has opened up one path for a generation who no longer have access to direct testimony from survivors; more challengingly, Peter Novick’s (1999) iconoclastic study of the Holocaust in US public life argues that some representations of genocide may act to inoculate a society against its own history and current world duties.

Apart from academic analysis, anthropologists have, at times, become centrally involved in acts of memorialization. In 1989, Polish Prime Minister Mazowiecki convened a commission to reconstruct the Auschwitz–Birkenau museum and monument for a post-communist world. At the behest of the Polish Ministry of Culture, Jonathon Webber, an anthropologist with field research in Poland, and head of Oxford University’s Centre for Hebrew Studies, invited an international body of experts to discuss ‘the future of Auschwitz.’ Alongside determining major issues of factual history—that 1.6 million had died there, and not four million as previously claimed, that 90 percent of those killed were Jews and not Polish and so on—the commission also addressed such tricky questions as to whether and how one should preserve the ruins: reconstruction of the gas chambers was out of the question, but what sort of renovation should be permitted?

4. Postgenocide Societies?

Work on the representation of genocide is intimately connected with an interest in the afterlife of such massive social trauma. Many have suggested an association between German and Japanese urban terror in the 1960s with the phenomena of the ‘second generation’ but the link has never been established systematically. Now, however, a body of clinical work on individual responses to massive trauma is emerging. Imaginative work here often comes at the interface of disciplines, as in Lynne Jones’s (2000) ethnographic psychological examinations of how subjective understandings and political context mediate the impact of political violence on adolescent mental health in Bosnia. Jones, who is based at Cambridge University’s Centre for Family Research, has, among other things, investigated children who had watched others being cleansed from their own town. In this case the ‘therapeutic remedy’ of ‘the search for meaning’ exposed children to uncomfortable truths about their community and appeared to lead to psychological discomfort, depression, and anxiety. Those children who avoided examining such events had better psychological health, but at the cost of leaving their elders’ discourse unchallenged for a second generation.

For many victims of direct attack, the search for meaning, to name the unnameable is unavoidable. Here too, it is to be hoped, ethnographic work will emerge examining the impact of the International Criminal Tribunals. The president of the Yugoslav tribunal has sought to bring as many witnesses as possible to the Hague, so they can see their stories heard and entered in the register. But what effect has this had, and how will the expanding work of the Tribunal change the ‘landscapes of memory’ in Bosnia? It has been argued that significant use was made in 1990–2 of representations of experiences of World War II in cultivating an environment in which violence came to be seen as a serious option (Hayden 1994). Investigation of how societies deal with these kind of events is thus not merely of academic interest.

At an even broader level of analysis, anthropology would have much to contribute to the study of the experience of societies like Israel—for long unwilling to incorporate the genocide into its collective memory and now, having made it central to the nation, finding it hard to create a unified identity with Arab Jews who did not suffer. In the case of the perpetrator states the issue is almost invariably one of the social consequences of denial. Racist attitudes to Gypsies in Eastern Europe are likely related to denial and ignorance of Gypsy persecution in 1940–5. In this regard the German case is unique—a perpetrator state that has accepted historic responsibility. German foreign policy will be constrained by the Nazi past for the foreseeable future and perhaps as long as there is a German political entity, but it is also clear that for the time being this is a society which cannot shrug off its past. Daniel Goldhagen’s work struck a profound chord in Germany perhaps because it offered a new generation a fresh chance to stare at an unadulterated image of the heart of some of their ancestors’ ‘darkness.’ At that very moment there was also anguish over the Berlin Holocaust memorial. One particularly radical proposal was to construct a bus station in central Berlin with timetabled buses taking visitors and pilgrims to and from the death and concentration camps—a reminder of just how close so many of these camps lay to the capital of the Reich and lie to the new capital of a reunified Germany. It was rejected for ‘lack of taste’ and necessary ‘monumentality.’ Such phenomena can provide sociologists and anthropologists with rich seams of cultural and social significance.

Bibliography:

1. Bauer Y 1984 The place of the Holocaust in contemporary history. In: Frankel J (ed.) Studies in Contemporary Jewry. Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, Vol. 1, pp. 201–24
2. Bloch M 1992 Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
3. Bougarel X 1997 Bosnia and Hercegovina: State and communitarianism. In: Dyker D, Vejvoda I (eds.) Yugoslavia and After: A Study in Fragmentation, Despair and Rebirth. AddisonWesley Longman, New York, pp. 87–112
4. Clendinnen I 1999 Reading the Holocaust. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
5. Conte E, Essner C 1995 La Quete de La Race: Une Anthropologie du Nazisme. Hachette, Paris
6. Davis N Z 1973 The rites of violence: Religious riots in sixteenth century France. Past and Present 59: 51–91
7. Fein H 1990 Genocide: A sociological perspective. Current Sociology 38(1): 1–126
8. Goldhagen D J 1996 Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Knopf, distributed by Random House, New York, London
9. Hayden R M 1994 Recounting the dead: The rediscovery and redefinition of war-time massacres in late and post-communist Yugoslavia. In: Watson R (ed.) Memory, History and Opposition under State Socialism. School of American Research Press, Sante Fe, NM, pp. 167–84
10. Herbert U (ed.) 2000 National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and ContrOversies. Berghahn, New York
11. Hinton A L 1998 A head for an eye: Revenge in the Cambodian genocide. American Ethnologist 25(3): 352–77
12. Jones L 2000 Adolescent understandings of political violence and their relationship to mental health: A qualitative study from Bosnia Herzegovina. http://www.waraffgc.ca/socscimedpaper-e.asp/
13. Kirmayer L J 1996 Landscapes of memory: Trauma, narrative and dissociation. In: Antze P, Lambek M (eds.) Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. Routledge, London, pp. 173–98
14. Kuper L 1982 Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT
15. Lemarchand R 1997 The Rwanda genocide. In: Totten S, Parsons W S, Charny I W (eds.) Century of Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views. Garland, New York, pp. 408–23
16. Novick P 1999 The Holocaust and Collective Memory: The American Experience. Bloomsbury, London
17. Sorabji C 1994 A very modern war. In: Watson H, Hinde R (eds.) War: A Cruel Necessity: The Bases of Institutionalised Violence. I.B. Tauris, London, pp. 80–95
18. Spencer J 1990 Collective violence and everyday practice in Sri Lanka. Modern Asian Studies 24(3): 602–23
19. Taylor C C 1999 Sacrifice as Terror: The Rwandan Genocide of 1994. Berg, Oxford, UK
20. Young J E 1993 The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT