Genocides by the Oppressed: Subaltern Genocide in Theory and Practice

9 “WHEN THE RABBIT’S GOT THE GUN” Subaltern Genocide and the Genocidal Continuum

185 “When the Rabbit’s Got the Gun” Subaltern Genocide and the Genocidal Continuum ADAM JONES I n seminal essays published in 2002 for collections edited by Jeanette Mageo and Alexander Hinton, the anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes described her provocative concept of a “genocidal continuum.” Derived from her longstanding anthropological research—“a concern with popular consent to everyday violence”—Scheper-Hughes described “a multitude of ‘small wars and invisible genocides’” occurring in various “normative social spaces.” Institutional settings (jails, old-age homes, and the like) were especially prone to violent acts and relationships that contained at least a kernel of genocide, in the sense that they exhibited in a smaller-scale or more localized form some of the same ideological and symbolic frameworks, similar patterns of demonization and scapegoating, and exclusions from the sphere of social obligation as fully fledged genocidal outbreaks. They also pointed to the way that a genocidal potential was latent and pervasive in societies, available for activation in mass-killing campaigns. These “less dramatic, permitted, everyday” acts and atrocities were tied to the human capacity for “social exclusion, dehumanization, depersonalization, pseudo-speciation , and reification that normalize atrocious behavior and violence toward others.” Given the presence of these ideological and institutional features of our environment, Scheper-Hughes argued that we must “exercise a defensive hypervigilance , a hypersensitivity” to the “genocidal capacity” of human beings; and recognize how strategies of marginalization, anathematization, and exclusion “make participation (under other conditions) in genocidal acts possible, perhaps more easy than we would like to know.” Some of the more directly or destructively violent manifestations of Scheper-Hughes’s “genocidal continuum” approach or even cross the threshold of genocide as it is broadly understood. For example, she explores the “social cleansings” of thousands of street children, prostitutes, and transgendered people in urban areas of Latin America and elsewhere—cleansings carried out by selective murder on a substantial scale. Her framework also seems highly useful in exploring structural and institutional forms of violence, including genocidal and “gendercidal” violence.1 In this chapter, I seek to apply the notion of a “genocidal continuum” to subaltern genocide—looking at latent, symbolic, and 9 186 Table 9.1 The Continuum of Subaltern Genocide localized expressions as well as overt, systematic, and massively destructive ones (see Table 9.1). Many subaltern motifs at points (1) and (2) on the continuum take the form of what the Yale political scientist James Scott called “acts of everyday resistance” deploying “weapons of the weak.”2 Often there is an added element of ritualized play or performance, symbolized, for example, by the radical symbolic inversions of the world’s “carnival” traditions. Many of these originated as managed forms of libidinal release through fiesta—a “safety valve” for a manifestly unjust social order. To the extent that such performances are politically coherent, they serve a cathartic or wish-fulfillment function—somewhat similar to the minor “androcidal ” strain of feminist science fiction touched on below in this chapter. Accordingly, I do not wish to overstress the “proto-genocidal” character of certain ritual forms and expressions. However, it would be equally unwise to dismiss this dimension as merely marginal or purely symbolic. At particular times, and in particular contexts where the dominant-subaltern relationship is destabilized or inverted, the consequences may be explosively violent and destructive. At points (3), (4), and (5) on the continuum as sketched in Table 9.1, real-world and physical consequences increase notably. The scale of atrocity may be substantial: riots and pogroms3 inflicted on “middleman” groups and other privileged minorContext (1) Subaltern popular culture (2) Subaltern interaction with dominant culture (3) Niches of subaltern dominance (4) Local and/ or temporary unrest (5) Generalized and/or protracted conflict Content Songs, writings (incl. slogans, graffiti, pamphlets ), jokes, gossip, rumors, curses/ vulgarities, children’s stories “Everyday forms of resistance” (Scott); inversion rituals (carnivals, bacchanalias , etc.); individual hate crimes and hateinfluenced crimes Patterned and pervasive acts of physical and sexual assault; torture , murder ; local (micro) regimes and rituals of domination , degradation , humiliation , dehumanization Riots, pogroms, witch-hunts, vigilante campaigns, genocidal massacres Systematic campaigns of genocide and crimes against humanity; generalized (macro) regimes of genocide and mass atrocity with a subalterninflected “foundation myth” Adam Jones Symbolic/ Performative Individual/ Local Mass atrocity Aggression Atrocity 187 ities the world over; acts of terrorism and suicide-bombing against western civilians by humiliated, vengeful subaltern actors of the Global South; the rape and gang-rape...