The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

justifying genocide 111
discussion of Japanese nationalism and archaeology, see Edwards 1991, 1999). If the
manipulation of the past, including the archaeological past, in the construction of
difference along racial lines is a sort of canary in a coal mine, a harbinger of genocidal
policies, then it seems imperative that anthropologists turn their attention to
the study of political systems in which such manifestations appear.
What does the future hold? Is the appropriation of the past as a justification for
authoritarian and occasionally genocidal regimes inevitable? That seems to depend
on a number of variables, but there are some new configurations developing to
counter the continuing parade of regimes intent on cannibalizing themselves in the
name of cultural difference. For example, the Celts are currently the “ethnic” group
that it is most expedient to claim as national patrimony in Germany, as well as a
number of other western European nations. One can apply Gellner’s observations
regarding the connection between emerging states and a resurgent interest in ethnicity
to this “Celtic renaissance.” Whereas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries the emphasis was on national differences, now, with the newly emergent
European Community, it is on “pan-European-ness.” The Celts are presented
as the ultimate pan-European “ethnic” group ( James 1999), stretching from Spain
to Galicia during the late Iron Age. In fact, this archaeologically “documented”
Celtic cultural uniformity is as much an “imagined community” as Tacitus’s or
Kossinna’s constructions, since it is based mainly on similarities in material culture.
As examples from ethnographic contexts such as New Guinea have shown (Terrell
1986), ethnicity need not map onto material culture, nor necessarily map onto language,
or religion, or race, or any combination of the above. The question of how
to define “cultures” in the material record of the past is in need of serious re-examination,
not least because of the potential for abuse by political systems. Archaeologists
can no longer afford to produce interpretations of the past on the sidelines
of history. Whether they are actively involved in the construction of cultural
difference or not, indirectly their research produces a potentially lethal weapon in
the symbolic arsenal available to political regimes, including those bent on genocide.
This places a tremendous responsibility on the producers of such knowledge,
a burden that will only continue to grow as the demands placed on scholars increase
in complexity in the coming decades. Archaeology as a discipline, which has tended
to be focused inward, will need to adjust its modus operandi accordingly. The recent
emergence of the concept of the archaeologist as “public intellectual” (Bonyhady
and Griffiths 1997) suggests the direction that the discipline will need to take
if it wants to adopt a proactive stance in the battle over the interpretation and exploitation
of the archaeological past. At the same time, anthropology as a whole
could benefit from acknowledging the actual and potential contributions of archaeological
research to the increasingly pressing problem of how to recognize and
take action against inter- and intragroup violence based on the cultural construction
of difference. I therefore want to thank Alex Hinton for the opportunity to
contribute an archaeological voice to the anthropological analysis of genocide—
this is an endeavor that can only benefit from interdisciplinary cooperation.