The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

6
The Cultural Face of Terror in the
Rwandan Genocide of 1994
Christopher C. Taylor
INTRODUCTION
For the past fifteen years anthropology’s central concept, the concept of culture, has
come under withering attack. Some have criticized its use as overly reifying. Others
claim that no human group has ever been characterized by a single coherent set of
norms, beliefs, and attitudes. Still others view the notion of culture as excessively
rule-oriented and deterministic—too much of a “cookie-cutter” and as such insufficiently
sensitive to the expression of diverse human agencies. There are no such
things as rules, say the latter, only contested meanings and negotiated realities arrived
at, and only ephemerally, in the clash of conflicting interests and ideologies.
Yet those who claim that the anthropological notion of culture has been excessively
totalizing sometimes ignore the fact that the analysts they criticize are often not guilty
of the imputed charges (Sahlins 1999:404). Still the critique has not fallen on deaf ears.
It cannot be denied that in its wake, much anthropological analysis has returned to a
kind of methodological and ontological individualism. Eschewing homeostatic “social
structures” and the decoding of “deep structures,” many anthropologists have begun
to prefer analytic approaches that emphasize diverse subjectivities, multivocality,
and multiple interpretation (Clifford and Marcus 1986). These latter claim that anthropologists
of intellectualist bent ignore or diminish the subject, that they depict social
actors as mere bearers of their culture rather than its shapers. History as well, in
the hands of the intellectualists, loses its dynamism as all becomes reduced to the
recapitulation of the same or very similar structures of thought.
Yet among those who would fetishize difference, many appear bent upon abolishing
the concept of culture altogether. In earlier versions of methodological individualism,
as in transactionalism and rational choice theory, individuals everywhere
seemed to think and to act alike. Like Homo economicus, social actors exercised
their free will, maximizing utility, and choosing courses of action according to per-
137