The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

justifying genocide 97
Part of the problem is the mutability of the term “ethnicity” itself, which is used
expediently in modern discourse. It can be equated with religious belief, race, language,
or cultural continuity within a specific location (Arnold 1998/99, 1999). Another
term that needs to be defined is “nation.” I am using the term in its most general
sense: a group of people who feel themselves to be a community bound by
ties of history, culture, and common ancestry. Is “nationalism” possible without notions
of “ethnicity”? Is nationalism the inevitable result of the creation of ethnic
identity in the postindustrial state? How do nationalist agendas affect archaeological
interpretation, and how does archaeological evidence affect nationalist agendas,
and in some cases, the genocidal expression of those agendas?
ARCHAEOLOGY AND GERMAN NATIONAL SOCIALISM
A particularly egregious, and therefore informative, example of the manipulation
of the “deep” archaeological past for political, and ultimately genocidal, purposes
is prehistoric German archaeology under the National Socialists. I have been doing
research for some time now on the role played by archaeology in the creation
of nationalist and ethnic identity in the German nation-state (Arnold 1990, 1992,
1998/99, 1999; Arnold and Hassmann 1995), and I will further develop some of
those ideas in this chapter.
Michael Ignatieff (1994) has described nationalism as an emotional mix of
“blood and belonging,” and certainly it was blood, or race, that determined belonging
in the German nation-state in the nineteenth century and particularly after
1933. 2 Language was a secondary, though important, defining characteristic
(Kellas 1991:31), but the idea that race was what distinguished Germans from all
other human groups had several ramifications. Unlike other defining ethnic characteristics,
race was assumed by nationalists to be unaffected by cultural changes
over time, which meant that “Germans” in 1933 could be considered part of an
ethnic continuum in northern Europe going back as far as the Upper Paleolithic
(that is, the first appearance of anatomically modern humans in the European archaeological
record). Race as defined by German National Socialism was what
qualified one to be a member of the Germanic community. It was more important
than religion, language, or place of birth. It was, in fact, the basis for the “imagined
community” that was the “German Reich.” In the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, Germany was wherever Germans were or could be shown to have
been. Germans established territory by occupying it and leaving a distinctive material
record of their presence. Once occupied, the territory could be reclaimed,
which was why the identification of “Germanic” material culture in the archaeological
record of eastern and northern Europe came to have such political significance
for German territorial expansion under the National Socialists. Ernest Renan’s
prophetic 1882 essay decried this conflation of race and nation by German
nationalists: