The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

326 critical reflections
then genocide are not primordial but rather are constructed along linguistic,
“racial,” or ethnic lines with class often disguised as “race” or ethnicity (Bowen
1996; Appadurai 1998). In this formulation, difference equals inequality.
One of the most frightening aspects of genocide is the dual recognition that first,
those who commit atrocities against categorical others (however constructed) are
not very different from ourselves, and second, that all of us through a range of societal
circumstances including “disaster fatigue”—the failure to be moved by human
suffering if it is sufficiently removed from our own lives—are indirectly responsible
for its continuation (Lifton and Markusen 1990; Falk 2000:163). Robert
Jay Lifton suggests that the roots of genocide can be found in a combination of
the human personality and the economic-social hierarchy of society. Therefore a
“moralistic denunciation on its own is an empty gesture that obscures the pervasive
and continuing potential for genocide to erupt almost anywhere in the social
landscape of humanity” (Falk 2000:165). 1 Genocide is always a possibility, and none
of us can be complacent.
If prediction is the first step in preventing ethnic violence and genocide, we need
to ascertain what the first steps in an escalation of violence that culminates in genocide
might look like. Drawing on my fieldwork in the U.S.-Mexican border region,
I will examine the informal and formal, the institutional and cultural constructions
of difference through which Latinos in the United States are separated and labeled
and made victims of mostly symbolic but sometimes physical violence. These
processes constitute potential first steps toward what might, in other times and
places and in the absence of political controls, become widespread ethnic violence
that could culminate in genocide. Although there is always the possibility of “devaluing
an important concept by allowing it to become a catch phrase for the dispossessed”
(Harff 1992:28), I think the heuristic of using domestic examples to illustrate
what is to most Americans inconceivable justifies the risk.
SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE LEADS TO PHYSICAL VIOLENCE
I suggested above that Latinos along the border are subjected to symbolic violence.
By symbolic violence I mean what Bourdieu (1977:191) calls the “censored but euphemized”
violence that is part of daily hegemonic practice, but in “disguised and
transfigured” form. These are the multitude of everyday violences that can be found
in the workplace, in schoolyards, in jails, and in the media (see Scheper-Hughes,
this volume) and that often precede and always accompany physical violence.
Bowen’s (1996) discussion of colonial Rwanda and Burundi illustrates both the
process through which various forms of violence succeed each other and the ways
in which economic inequality can be recast as ethnicity. He argues that ethnic violence
is likely to occur in postcolonial situations in which the colonial powers and
later independent states promoted and elaborated differences among groups as a
way of amassing and consolidating power (ibid.:6). German and Belgian colonial
powers admired the minority Tutsis, who were tall and handsome. They therefore