The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

364 critical reflections
1988 [1969]; Thomas 2000) rooted in a history of genocide requires, as Vizanor
noted, a great deal more than an apology or a scholarly conference. But the return
of Ishi’s brain from the Smithsonian Institution to representatives of the Pit
River tribe on August 8, 2000, closed one sad chapter in the history of anthropology-Indian
relations. Perhaps it has also opened the way for more constructive
and meaningful engagements between anthropologists and the survivors of U.S.
genocides and ethnocides.
Compared with the role that anthropology played in providing a “scientific” rationale
and conceptual “tool kit” for the Jewish Holocaust (as described in the unflinching
chapters by Arnold and Schafft, this volume), the “little history” of anthropology’s
complicity in the erasure of the history of the genocides in California or in
the reification of Ishi as an object of anthropological analysis might seem minor. But
within the conceptual framework that I am proposing here—the genocidal continuum—it
is essential not to lose sight of the ease with which the abnormal is normalized
and the deaths of our “anthropological subjects” rendered inevitable or routine.
ANTHROPOLOGY AND APARTHEID
Another, and more extreme, instance of the application of anthropological ideas, methods,
and concepts to an officially genocidal public policy—one not treated in this volume—is
the ideological and applied role that the German-Dutch tradition of cultural
anthropology (known in South Africa as volkekunde) played in the rationale and design
of grand apartheid in South Africa. The idea that people were naturally divided into
discrete cultural groups and “populations” based on recognizable differences in physical
type, in social organization, in language, and in cultural institutions, along with the
key concepts of race, tribe, ethnic group, community, and ethos, were readily drafted
into the service of implementing the South African Bantu “homelands,” the Group Areas
Act (1950), and various other institutions of cultural and racial segregation. These
policies were defended by the architects of apartheid as fostering the unique cultural
heritage of different “peoples” (see Boonzaier and Sharp 1988). This perverse application
of anthropological discourses was a fairly transparent ploy for a ruthless form of
white domination and suppression of the black majority, a system that was supported
in some Afrikaner universities and departments of anthropology.
Volkekunde provided the blueprint and scientific rationale for apartheid. It was a
tradition of anthropology that was inspired both by late-nineteenth-century German
ethnology and folklore, and by twentieth-century American anthropology, especially
that of the Boasian/Kroeberian “school,” which integrated biological, linguistic, and
cultural anthropology, as well as by the romantic cultural configurationalist “school”
of Ruth Benedict. Indeed, Benedict’s Patterns of Culture was read in some South African
circles during the 1970s and 1980s as a romantic Magna Carta for grand apartheid—
an argument for the need to preserve highly reified notions of cultural patterns and
social distinctions. Afrikaner cultural anthropology, drawing on the tradition of American
“culture and personality” studies of the 1950s and early 1960s, provided the Na-