The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

order/chaos
belonging/alien
purity/contamination
toward an anthropology of genocide 19
Nevertheless, the meaning of such conceptual categories took on distinct local
forms. Both the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge sought to expunge the impure, but
they constructed the impure in different ways. Thus, even as the Nazis justified their
destruction of the Jews and other sources of “contamination” in terms of “scientific”
knowledge about race and genes, their ideology of hate also drew heavily on
German notions of blood, soil, bodily aesthetics, contagion, genealogy, community,
and anti-Semitism (Linke 1999, and this volume).
The Khmer Rouge, in turn, legitimated their utopian project of social engineering
in terms of Marxist-Leninist “science,” which supposedly enabled the “correct
and clear-sighted leadership” to construct a new society free of “contaminating”
elements (Hinton, forthcoming). In Khmer Rouge ideology, however, the “impure”
was often conceptualized in terms of agrarian metaphors and Buddhist notions of
(pure) order and (impure) fragmentation. Further, to increase the attractiveness of
their message and to motivate their minions to annihilate their “enemies,” the Khmer
Rouge frequently incorporated pre-existing, emotionally salient forms of Cambodian
cultural knowledge into their ideology (Hinton 1998, forthcoming). The essays
described in this section of the introduction illustrate the importance of taking into
account such local dimensions of genocide.
As suggested by its title, “The Cultural Face of Terror in the Rwandan Genocide
of 1994,” Christopher Taylor’s chapter argues that, while historical, political,
and socioeconomic factors played a crucial role in the Rwandan genocide, they
remain unable to explain why the violence was perpetrated in certain ways—for
example, the severing of Achilles tendons, genital mutilation, breast oblation, the
construction of roadblocks that served as execution sites, bodies being stuffed into
latrines. This violence, he contends, was deeply symbolic and embodied a cultural
patterning. Accordingly, it is imperative for scholars to take cultural factors into account
when explaining the genocidal process. Contrasting his position to the cultural
determinism of Daniel Goldhagen’s (1996) controversial analysis of German
political culture, Taylor emphasizes that Rwandan cultural knowledge did not
“cause” the genocide and that it is variably internalized by Rwandans. These preexisting
“generative schemes” only came to structure mass violence within a particular
ethnohistorical context, one in which other tendencies and metanarratives
of modernity—race, essentializing difference, biological determinism, national belonging—were
also present.
Drawing on his ethnographic fieldwork in Rwanda, Taylor points out that
Rwandan conceptions of the body are frequently structured in terms of a root
metaphor of (orderly) flow and (disorderly) blockage. Health and well-being depend
upon proper bodily flow. Thus, the bodies of newborn infants are carefully
examined to ensure that they are free of “obstructions,” such as anal malforma