The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

coming to our senses 365
tional Party government with reductionist theories of culture, community, and basic
personality structure that were used to justify the apartheid policy of “parallel” cultural
development. American Indian reservations were often cited by apartheid planners
as a model for the creation of the hated Bantustands.
Still, it was something of a shock during a visit to the Afrikaner University of
the Orange Free State in 1994 to see large photographs of the founding fathers and
mothers of American anthropology gracing the walls of the Department of Anthropology
there. I wondered what the great antiracist Franz Boas, and the Berkeley
ethnographer of the Plains Indians, Robert Lowie, and Alfred Kroeber, the
founder of the Berkeley department, and even that irascible mother of us all, Margaret
Mead, would have thought about their images being displayed at an institution
that had more or less faithfully served the apartheid state in South Africa. The
explanation given for their presence was genealogical: both American cultural anthropology
and Afrikaner anthropology emerged from the same nineteenth-century
tradition of German idealism dedicated to discovering the specific “genius”
of each cultural group, a genius that needed to be carefully cultivated and developed
according to its own intrinsic values and in its own cultural (and geographical)
space. This ideal was the original goal of apartheid as imagined by “the great
South African anthropologist” H. F. Verwoerd. In the context of this vexed history
I wondered (Scheper-Hughes 1996:344–46) what, if any, role a reinvented and
deracinated cultural anthropology might play in the building of a new South Africa.
While one could supply other instances of the misuse of anthropological ideas
and practices in fostering structural and political violence, one can also cite far more
numerous examples of anthropological ideas and methods used as a tool of human
liberation and as a defiant wedge in opposition to state projects of mass killing and
genocide. The oppositional and Marxist tradition of social anthropology as it was
practiced by some anthropologists at Witswatersrand, the University of Cape Town,
and at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa during the apartheid
years is one case in point.
The courageous political work of forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow, in collaboration
with Mary Clare King, is another example of politically committed anthropology
in the face of genocide. Snow helped to organize and train the vital Equipo Argentino
de Antropologia Forense of Buenos Aires, one of the first groups to use the
technology of DNA to identify the remains of the politically disappeared exhumed
from mass graves. More recently, these methods have been used to locate and identify
the adult children and grandchildren of some of those politically “disappeared” who
were adopted by military families during the Argentine “dirty war” (1975–83). Similar
work is going on today in Salvador, Guatemala, and Bosnia with the help of applied
forensic anthropologists. This new field of politically engaged forensic anthropology
has emerged in the past two decades as a potent political and scientific practice
in defense of human rights during and after genocides and other mass killings.
If some key anthropological concepts—from Lowie’s notion of culture, to Boas’s
notion of race, to Ruth Benedict’s “configurationalism,” to Mead’s notions of na