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  The Dark Side of Modernity 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.”1 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”2 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 Mayans, 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 the 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.3 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 s) 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 deessentializing of the concept of culture; the growing awareness that anthropology must deal conceptually with globalization, history, and the nation-state; 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.4 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  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” (:). 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).5 This book represents an attempt to focus anthropological...

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