The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

coming to our senses 349
the righteous in the societies that we study. Some have even suggested that evil is
not a proper subject for the anthropologist. 1 Consequently, as Elliot Leyton (1998a)
has pointed out, the contributions of anthropology to understanding all levels of
violence—from sexual abuse and homicide to state-sponsored political terrorism
and “dirty wars” to genocide—is extremely modest. Those who deviated from the
golden rule of moral relativism were forever saddled with accusations of victimblaming.
But the moral blinders that we wore in the one instance spilled over into
a kind of hermeneutic generosity in other instances—toward Western colonizers,
modern police states, and other political and military institutions of mass destruction.
Although genocides predate the spread of Western “civilization,” the savage
colonization of Africa, Asia, and the New World incited some of the worst genocides
of the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. The failure of anthropologists
to deal directly with these primal scenes of mass destruction as they were being
played out in various “ethnographic niches” is the subject of this epilogue or postscript
to the story of anthropology and genocide.
Although averting their gaze from the scenes of genocide and other forms of
graphic and brutal physical violence, anthropologists have always been astute observers
of violence-once-removed. We are quite good at analyzing the symbolic (see
Bourdieu and Waquant 1992), the psychological (see Devereux 1961; Goffman 1961;
Edgerton 1992; Scheper-Hughes 2000b), and the structural (see Farmer 1996; Bourgois
1995) forms of everyday violence that underlie so many social institutions and
interactions—a contribution that may provide a missing link in contemporary genocide
studies.
In my own case, it took me more than two decades to confront the question of
overt political violence, which, given my choice of early field sites—Ireland in the
mid-1970s and Brazil during the military dictatorship years—must have required
a massive dose of denial. While studying the madness of everyday life in the mid-
1970s in a small, quiet peasant community in western Ireland, I was largely concerned
with interior spaces, with the small, dark psychodramas of scapegoating and
labeling within traditional farm households that were driving so many young bachelors
to drink and bouts of depression and schizophrenia. I paid scant attention
then to the mundane political activities of Matty Dowd, from whom we rented our
cottage in the mountain hamlet of Ballynalacken, and who used our attic to store
a small arsenal of guns and explosives that he and a few of his Sinn Fein buddies
were running to Northern Ireland. Consequently, I left unexamined until very recently
(Scheper-Hughes 2000b) the possible links between the political violence in
Northern Ireland and the tortured family dramas in West Kerry that I so carefully
documented, and which certainly had a violence of their own.
Since then I have continued to study other forms of “everyday” violence: the
abuses of medicine practiced in bad faith against the weak, the mad, and the hungry,
including the bodies of socially disadvantaged and largely invisible organ
donors in transplant transactions (see Scheper-Hughes 2000a); and the social indifference
to child death in Northeast Brazil that allowed political leaders, priests,