The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

338 critical reflections
subset of political violence is “the criminal intent to destroy or permanently cripple
a human group, whether that group is political, religious, social, or ethnic” (Andreopoulos
1994:1). 16 As is the case in other forms of political violence, the state is
the major perpetrator. If the police or military are not the major actors, they may
stand by while civilians act with impunity, unrestrained by the institutions of the
state. Civilian paramilitaries may even act with the implicit collusion of the state,
as they did in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Cambodia, among other places (see
contributors to this volume; Totten, Parsons and Charney 1997). State officials also
may find reasons to not enforce the law, or perpetrators of genocide might be civilians
who learn who and what to despise and go on rampages when the state is weakened
or collapses. 17
It cannot be emphasized too strongly that official institutions of the state, such
as the military and the police, are directly or indirectly responsible for genocide
against groups of people. Scholars and politicians who insist on analyzing the accounts
of ethnic violence or the shootings described above as inexplicable tribal violence,
primordial evil, or individual happenings with individual and unconnected
actors fatally obscure the overall historical, economic, social, and cultural processes
and the semantic space in which the events are embedded. Just as in Rwanda, unfolding
social relations in the U.S.-Mexican border region and the cultural practices
with which its inhabitants “construct and represent themselves and others, and
hence their societies and histories” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992:27) illuminate
the processes of domination, representation, and, to some degree, resistance that
underpin political violence.
Part of peoples’ everyday construction of their world—whether they are politicians,
news reporters, or others—entails the process through which popular consensus
is built around the idea that the state ought to control certain others, usually
minorities, 18 by jailing them, depriving them of basic services and civil rights, deporting
them, or even killing them. The result of these processes are analogous to
Hinton’s primers, in the sense that political violence is activated by injecting just a
little bit of ethnic conflict into daily fare in order to “get it going,” just as a water
pump is primed by pouring a little fluid into it. It is, of course, largely underclass status
that makes certain people susceptible to violence, whether it is manifest symbolically
or physically. It is their ambiguity as both sub- and superhuman that allows
dominant groups to crystallize the myths about the evils that subordinates represent,
whether they are citizens, residents and holders of green cards, or undocumented.
This justifies first symbolic and then all too often physical violence against them.
And that requires the implicit agreement and cooperation of ordinary nice people
who have been inoculated with evil, who learn to take myths at face value, and who
do not question the projects of the state in defense of a social order that requires
hierarchy. Only when general consensus has been created can “ordinary people”
(read the dominant group) actively participate in human rights abuses, explicitly support
them, or turn their faces and pretend not to know even when confronted with
incontrovertible evidence of them. My hypothesis is that similar processes of pump