The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

coming to our senses 351
truck routes or loitering in urban villages looking like slums carved out of a gutted
wilderness. The Nambiquara and their Amerindian neighbors have been decimated
by wage labor, gold prospecting, prostitution, and the diseases of cultural
contact: smallpox, TB, AIDS, and syphilis.
But the old master’s confession goes further. These early photos capturing simple,
naked Indians sleeping on the ground under romantic shelters of palm leaves
have nothing to do with a state of pristine humanity that has since been lost. The
photos taken in the 1930s already show the effects of a savage European colonization
on the once-populous civilizations of Central Brazil and the Amazon. Following
contact, these indigenous civilizations were destroyed, leaving behind only
sad remnants of themselves—a people not so much “primitive,” he cautions, as
“stranded,” stripped of their material and symbolic wealth. Levi-Strauss’s camera
had captured images of a particularly virulent kind of human strip mining, an invisible
genocide, the magnitude of which the anthropologist was at the time perhaps
naively unaware.
Earlier, Levi-Strauss had recognized that a good deal more was required of the
anthropologist than dedication to a purely scholarly pursuit (see also Sontag 1964
on anthropology as a spiritual vocation). He wrote (1966:126): “Anthropology is not
a dispassionate science like astronomy, which springs from the contemplation of
things at a distance. It is the outcome of a historical process which has made the
larger part of mankind subservient to the other, and during which millions of innocent
human beings have had their resources plundered and their institutions and
beliefs destroyed whilst they themselves were ruthlessly killed, thrown into bondage,
and contaminated by diseases they were unable to resist. Anthropology is the daughter
to this era of violence: its capacity to assess more objectively the facts pertaining
to the human condition reflects, on the epistemological level, a state of affairs
in which one part of mankind treated the other as an object.” Sadly, however, more
often than not, anthropologists have served as passive bystanders, as silent rather
than engaged witnesses to the genocides, ethnocides, and die-outs they have so often
encountered in the course of pursuing their “vocation.”
Late-in-life professional examinations of conscience by anthropologists with
regard to their “recovered memories” of the scenes of violence and ethnocide go
back to the days of Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942). Malinowski began his anthropological
career under considerable duress as an “enemy-alien,” a Polish-born
Austrian citizen detained in Australia while en route to his first fieldwork expedition
during the outbreak of World War 1. Granted libera custodia by the Australian
government, Malinowski was permitted to conduct his ethnographic research in
New Guinea as long as the war continued, which artificially expanded his intended
term of fieldwork.
Malinowski’s field diary, covering the period from 1914 to 1918 and published
posthumously by his widow in 1967, records the anthropologist’s conflicting emotions
and identities as a European gentleman, a child of Western imperialism, and
a natural scientist trying to reinvent himself and carve out a new science and method