The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

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Coming to Our Senses
Anthropology and Genocide
Nancy Scheper-Hughes
Modern anthropology was built up in the face of colonial genocides, ethnocides,
mass killings, population die-outs, and other forms of mass destruction visited on
the marginalized peoples whose lives, suffering, and deaths have provided us with
a livelihood. Yet, despite this history—and the privileged position of the anthropologist-ethnographer
as eyewitness to some of these events—anthropology has
been, until quite recently, relatively mute on the subject. To this day most “early
warning signals” concerning genocidal sentiments, gestures, and acts still come
from political journalists rather than from ethnographers in the field. And most
theories concerning the causes, meanings, and consequences of genocide come
from other disciplinary quarters—history, psychology and psychiatry, theology,
comparative law, human rights, and political science. In all, anthropology is a late
arrival to the field, and this volume, published in 2001, represents, as it were, anthropology’s
opening gambit. Why is this so?
As Alex Hinton and several contributors to this volume have noted, violence is
hardly a natural subject for anthropologists. Everything in our disciplinary training
predisposes us not to see the blatant and manifest forms of violence that so often
ravage the lives of our subjects. Although the term genocide and its modern conception
were first coined by Raphael Lemkin (1944) following and in response to
the Holocaust, genocides and other forms of mass killing clearly existed prior to
late modernity and in societies relatively untouched by Western “civilization.” Indeed,
the avoidance of this topic by anthropologists was surely dictated by a desire
to avoid further stigmatizing indigenous societies and cultures that were so often
judged negatively and in terms of Eurocentric values and aims.
A basic premise guiding twentieth-century ethnographic research was, quite simply,
to see, hear, and report no evil (and very little violence) in reporting back from
the field. Classical cultural anthropology and its particular moral sensibility orients
us like so many inverse bloodhounds on the trail and on the scent of the good and
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