The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

18 the dark side of modernity
thought. Schafft responds by noting that anthropologists throughout the world were
using many of the same conceptual categories as Nazi anthropologists, including
notions of race, eugenics, and social engineering.
Ultimately, I suspect that the Holocaust is difficult for us to look at because it illustrates
how our most fundamental enterprise—examining and characterizing human
similarity and difference—may serve as the basis for horrendous deeds, including
genocide. Genocidal regimes thrive on the very types of social categories
that anthropologists analyze and deploy—peoples, cultures, ethnic groups, nations,
religious groups. Anthropology is, in large part, a product of modernity and its essentializing
tendencies. However, our discipline has another side, tolerance, which
also has its roots in Enlightenment thought and was forcefully expressed by some
of the founding figures of anthropology, such as Johann Herder and Franz Boas.
Following this other disciplinary tradition, anthropologists have fought against
racism and hate, defending the rights of indigenous peoples, demonstrating that
categories like race are social constructs situated in particular historical and social
contexts, and advocating a general respect for difference. These insights can certainly
be extended to combat discourses of genocide. Nevertheless, an understanding
of Nazi anthropology may help us to acknowledge and remain aware of
our discipline’s reductive propensities and the ways in which the forms of knowledge
we produce can have powerful effects when put into practice.
ANNIHILATING DIFFERENCE:
LOCAL DIMENSIONS OF GENOCIDE
Although I have frequently referred to modernity in the singular, I want to emphasize
that modernity is not a “thing.” The term refers to a number of interrelated
processes that give rise to distinct local formations, or “modernities.” If genocide
has frequently been motivated by and legitimated in terms of metanarratives of
modernity, genocide, like modernity itself, is always a local process and cannot be
fully comprehended without an experience-near understanding. Thus, modernity
and genocide both involve the essentialization of difference, but the ways in which
such differences are constructed, manufactured, and viewed may vary considerably
across time and place. Moreover, the form and experience of genocidal violence
is variably mediated by local knowledge.
These two key dimensions of genocide, modernity and the local, are exemplified
by the many “ideological genocides” that have plagued the twentieth century (Smith
1987). In Nazi Germany and Cambodia, for example, genocide was structured by
metanarratives of modernity—social engineering, progress, rationality, the elimination
of the impure—and related sets of binary oppositions, including:
us/them
good/evil
progress/degeneration