The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

262 genocide’s wake
charges of implementing a program of language purism; and an advocacy for
American-style political correctness. How dare I tell Germans how to speak?
These angry objections to my findings sometimes took the form of outright denial.
A young woman at an international conference in 1994 responded as follows
to my presentation:
I worked with the Greens for several years, and among them were some of the kindest
and gentlest people I have ever met. How can you say these things about them? I
think you are wrong to say that the Greens have a problem with violence or pollution.
If that was true they would advocate the use of pesticides against insects or promote
the dumping of toxic wastes into the oceans. These are things which they oppose.
Such attitudes of denial and dissociation by German academics were on occasion
coupled with their plea for my silence. For example, at a meeting for area specialists
in April 1994, I was angrily reproached by a German legal scholar: “You just
can’t say these things about the left. The left has made headway, changed many
things with their initiatives, and if you say such things it leads to setbacks.”
My ethnographic documentation of exterminatory violence and its perpetual
contestation by members of my German audiences engender a paradox: genocide,
both as a practice and a discourse, is clearly linked to modernity, yet some German
scholars prefer to deny this. Their attitude toward violence is embedded in a
theoretical approach that promotes a basic assumption of progress. Modernity is
equated with the development of a civil society, in which outbursts of violence are
suppressed by the state’s pacification of daily life. From such a perspective Nazism,
genocide, and annihilatory racism are interpreted as anomalies, as regressive aberrations,
resulting from temporary social breakdown.
GENOCIDE, MODERNITY, AND CULTURAL MEMORY
What are we to make of these collective imaginings? Zygmunt Bauman, in Modernity
and the Holocaust (1989), argued that genocide in Germany must be understood
as a central event of modern history and not as an exceptional episode. The production
of mass death was facilitated by modern processes of rationalization. Exterminatory
racism was tied to conceptions of social engineering, to the idea of creating
an artificial order by changing the present one and by eliminating those
elements that could not be altered as desired. Genocide was based on the technological
and organizational achievements of an advanced industrial society. A political
program of complete extermination became possible under modernity because
of the collaboration of science, technology, and bureaucracy.
Such an interpretation of mass violence requires a critical reconsideration of
modernity as a civilizing process, as a progressive rationalization of social life (see,
for example, Elias 1939; Weber 1947). It requires rethinking genocide, not as an
exceptional episode, a state of anomie and a breakdown of the social, a suspension
of the normal order of things, a historical regression, or a return to primitive in-