The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

coming to our senses 367
small groups of bounty hunters, gold prospectors, and white or mixed-race settlers
seem far removed from the kinds of “modernity” referred to in Bauman’s thesis.
Indeed, mass killing, genocides, and provoked die-outs of scapegoated populations
have occurred in prestate societies, and in ancient as well as modern states.
Uli Linke (this volume), writing in the Weberian tradition, sees the Holocaust,
as do Hannah Arendt (1963) and Daniel Goldhagen (1997), as a kind of mad triumph
of rational efficiency, a distorted end product of the increasing rationalization
of social life. Recently, Agamben (1999) identified the modern concentration
camp as the prototype of late-modern biopolitics in its creation of a population of
“living dead” people, those whose bodies and lives can be taken by the state at will
or at whim, neither for (religious) sacrifice nor for crimes committed (capital punishment),
but merely because of their “availability” for execution.
Hence the Holocaust is something of a misnomer. It is not about religion or
about bodies that have been “sacrificed” as burnt offerings to placate the gods.
Rather, if Agambem is correct, modern forms of genocide are about actualizing
the capacity and availability of certain vulnerable populations for mass killings, a
dangerous theory that is reminiscent of Arendt’s condemnation of the collaboration
of Jewish leaders with the Nazis. Despite this, as Agamben and Foucault recognize,
the body is at the heart of modern biopolitics, as it is, of course, to the racist
rationales for genocide, as it was in Germany (see Linke, this volume) and in
Rwanda (see Taylor, this volume).
With the shocking reappearance of genocides and other mass killings in the late
twentieth century—in Africa (Malkki 1995), South Asia (Das 1996; Daniel 1997), and
Eastern Europe (Olujic 1998), in Central and South America (Green 1999; Suarez-
Oroxco 1987; Robben 2000)—anthropologists have been witness to the recurrence
of what moderns once thought, following the Holocaust, could not happen again.
In Central and South America during “dirty wars” and military-sponsored “social
hygiene,” the eliminations of despised populations were enacted through techniques
and practices of torture that could hardly be described as “modern.”
The apartheid government’s security forces reinvented “primitive” witch burnings,
and they discarded their political enemies by slowly burning them—sometimes
while still alive—over barbecue pits (see Scheper-Hughes 1998). And the
Brazilian and Argentinean military’s “parrot’s perch” torture resembled nothing
so much as a technique of the Inquisition. True, the Argentine military did use
modern planes to dispose of, by air drops into the sea, the dead bodies produced
by their medieval tortures, and Rwandan “genocidaires” relied heavily on the mass
media, radio in particular, to mobilize the Hutu killers in “barbarous” acts of cruelty
(see Gourvitch 1998). Meanwhile, the presumably modern invention of political
“disappearances” is spoken about by the terrorized populations subject to these
roundups for mass slaying in the premodern idiom of “body snatching,” “blood
and organ stealing,” and ritual killings.
What kinds of modernity do the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Burundi
represent? Characteristic of all of them is the “corporeal imaginary” that Linke