The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

108 essentializing difference
tory once held by ancient Europe. The Moundbuilder myth was not just the result of
a harmless prank or a confusing hoax. It was part of an attempt to justify the destruction
of American Indian societies. (1996:135)
In this particular case archaeology initially underwrote but later challenged the ideology
justifying the extermination of Native Americans on the basis of their supposed
cultural inferiority and recent arrival in the Americas—but the acknowledgment
of native achievement did not come until the living descendants of the
populations to which the moundbuilding cultures were attributed had effectively
been disenfranchised and no longer posed a legitimate threat to the colonial regime.
Significant parallels to the Moundbuilder myth can be found in the history of the
archaeological investigation of the ruins known as Great Zimbabwe in what was
formerly the British colony of Rhodesia (Garlake 1983; Hall 1984; Kuklick 1991).
Seeking to legitimate their rule, British settlers and African nationalists subscribed to
very different accounts of the building of the ruins, placing their construction alternately
in ancient times and the relatively recent past, and identifying the builders—
or, at least the architects—either as representatives of some non-African civilization
or dismissed the possibility that the Shona in the area could have built Great Zimbabwe.
(Kuklick 1991: 139–40)
The list of supposed non-African “builders or architects” proposed by white researchers,
settlers, and politicians includes some of the same peripatetic types cited
by the Moundbuilder fantabulists (minus Vikings and Welshmen): Phoenicians,
Egyptians, the Lost Tribes of Israel, and so forth. As in the North American case,
the local population was categorized as intellectually too degenerate to have been
able to produce such sophisticated structures; later, when an African origin for the
site became the accepted interpretation, the construction techniques were described
as primitive, giving with one hand and taking away with the other, while maintaining
the trope of the inherent inferiority of the local African peoples. A similar
reversal can be found in North American archaeology post-Cyrus Thomas, where
the emphasis for many years was on the cultural immutability, even stasis, of Native
American peoples (Trigger 1980b). To some extent this notion is still with us
today in the form of New Age interpretations of Native culture as “closer to Nature”
because less evolved. This may currently be intended to be complimentary
but is nevertheless part of the same legacy of denigration of the colonized by the
colonizers that we already see in Tacitus, whose Germania has been described by
Schama as a “backhanded compliment from Barbarism to Civilization” (1995:76). 4
In this sense archaeology historically has been in the business of what Alex Hinton
calls “manufacturing difference” (1998:14), which is the first step toward, and
necessary precondition of, “social speciation” and, under certain conditions, genocide.
As Barry Sautman has pointed out, “[M]yths of descent deployed as an instrument
in the service of a modernizing, authoritarian state to artificially reconstruct
the idea of a people are politically perilous....The experiences of the former