The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

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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 1980s) begun to focus their attention intensively on political violence
in complex state societies.
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