The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

350 critical reflections
coffin makers, and shantytown mothers to dispatch a multitude of hungry “angelbabies”
to the afterlife. In Brazil I did not begin to study state and political violence
until, in the late 1980s, the half-grown sons of some of my friends and neighbors
in the shantytown of Alto do Cruzeiro began to “disappear”—their mutilated bodies
turning up later, the handiwork of police-infiltrated local death squads.
TRISTES ANTROPOLOGIQUES
In his professional memoir, After the Fact, Clifford Geertz (1995) notes somewhat
wryly that he always had the uncomfortable feeling of arriving too early or too
late to observe the really large and significant political events and the violent upheavals
that descended on his respective field sites in Morocco and Java. But, in
fact, he writes that he (understandably) consciously avoided the conflicts, moving
back and forth between his respective field sites during periods of relative calm,
always managing to “miss the revolution” (Starn 1992), as it were.
Consequently there was nothing in Geertz’s ethnographic writings hinting at
the “killing fields” that were beginning to engulf Indonesia soon after he had departed
from the field, a massacre of suspected communists by Islamic fundamentalists
in 1965 that rivaled more recent events in Rwanda. It was an extraordinary
bloodbath—a political massacre of some sixty thousand Balinese following an unsuccessful
Marxist-inspired coup in 1965. Perhaps one could interpret Geertz’s celebrated
analysis of the Balinese cock fight as a coded expression of the fierce aggression
lying just beneath the surface of a people whom the anthropologist
otherwise described as among the most poised, controlled, and decorous in the
world.
Today, the world, the objects of our study, and the uses of anthropology have
changed considerably. Those privileged to observe human events close up and over
time and who are thereby privy to local, community, and even state secrets that
are generally hidden from view until much later—after the collective graves have
been discovered and the body counts made—are beginning to recognize another
ethical position: to name and to identify the sources, structures, and institutions of
mass violence. This new mood of political and ethical engagement (see Scheper-
Hughes 1995a) has resulted in considerable soul-searching, even if long “after the
fact.”
Claude Levi-Strauss (1995), for example, fast approaching the end of his long
and distinguished career, opened his recently published photographic memoir,
Saudades do Brasil [Homesickness for Brazil], with a sobering caveat. He warned the
reader that the lyrically beautiful images of “pristine” rain forest Brazilian Indians
about to be presented—photos taken by him between 1935 and 1939 in the interior
of Brazil—should not be trusted. The images were illusory, he cautioned. The
world they portray no longer exists. The starkly beautiful, seemingly timeless Nambikwara,
Caduveo, and Bororo Indians captured in his photos bear no resemblance
to the reduced populations one might find today camped out by the sides of busy