Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide

14. Coming to our Senses: Anthropology and Genocide

  Coming to Our Senses Anthropology and Genocide Nancy Scheper-Hughes Modern anthropology was built up in the face of colonial genocides, ethnocides, mass killings, population die-outs, and other forms of mass destruction visited on the marginalized peoples whose lives, suffering, and deaths have provided us with a livelihood. Yet, despite this history—and the privileged position of the anthropologist -ethnographer as eyewitness to some of these events—anthropology has been, until quite recently, relatively mute on the subject. To this day most “early warning signals” concerning genocidal sentiments, gestures, and acts still come from political journalists rather than from ethnographers in the field. And most theories concerning the causes, meanings, and consequences of genocide come from other disciplinary quarters—history, psychology and psychiatry, theology, comparative law, human rights, and political science. In all, anthropology is a late arrival to the field, and this volume, published in , represents, as it were, anthropology ’s opening gambit. Why is this so? As Alex Hinton and several contributors to this volume have noted, violence is hardly a natural subject for anthropologists. Everything in our disciplinary training predisposes us not to see the blatant and manifest forms of violence that so often ravage the lives of our subjects. Although the term genocide and its modern conception were first coined by Raphael Lemkin () following and in response to the Holocaust, genocides and other forms of mass killing clearly existed prior to late modernity and in societies relatively untouched by Western “civilization.” Indeed , the avoidance of this topic by anthropologists was surely dictated by a desire to avoid further stigmatizing indigenous societies and cultures that were so often judged negatively and in terms of Eurocentric values and aims. A basic premise guiding twentieth-century ethnographic research was, quite simply , to see, hear, and report no evil (and very little violence) in reporting back from the field. Classical cultural anthropology and its particular moral sensibility orients us like so many inverse bloodhounds on the trail and on the scent of the good and the righteous in the societies that we study. Some have even suggested that evil is not a proper subject for the anthropologist.1 Consequently, as Elliot Leyton (a) has pointed out, the contributions of anthropology to understanding all levels of violence—from sexual abuse and homicide to state-sponsored political terrorism and “dirty wars” to genocide—is extremely modest. Those who deviated from the golden rule of moral relativism were forever saddled with accusations of victimblaming . But the moral blinders that we wore in the one instance spilled over into a kind of hermeneutic generosity in other instances—toward Western colonizers, modern police states, and other political and military institutions of mass destruction . Although genocides predate the spread of Western “civilization,” the savage colonization of Africa, Asia, and the New World incited some of the worst genocides of the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. The failure of anthropologists to deal directly with these primal scenes of mass destruction as they were being played out in various “ethnographic niches” is the subject of this epilogue or postscript to the story of anthropology and genocide. Although averting their gaze from the scenes of genocide and other forms of graphic and brutal physical violence, anthropologists have always been astute observers of violence-once-removed. We are quite good at analyzing the symbolic (see Bourdieu and Waquant ), the psychological (see Devereux ; Goffman ; Edgerton ; Scheper-Hughes b), and the structural (see Farmer ; Bourgois ) forms of everyday violence that underlie so many social institutions and interactions—a contribution that may provide a missing link in contemporary genocide studies. In my own case, it took me more than two decades to confront the question of overt political violence, which, given my choice of early field sites—Ireland in the mid-s and Brazil during the military dictatorship years—must have required a massive dose of denial. While studying the madness of everyday life in the mid- s in a small, quiet peasant community in western Ireland, I was largely concerned with interior spaces, with the small, dark psychodramas of scapegoating and labeling within traditional farm households that were driving so many young bachelors to drink and bouts of depression and schizophrenia. I paid scant attention then to the mundane political activities of Matty Dowd, from whom we rented our cottage in the mountain hamlet of Ballynalacken, and who used our attic to store a small arsenal of guns and explosives that he and a few of his Sinn Fein...