The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

coming to our senses 369
ing the targeted victims without massive forms of civil disobedience or (as in Nazi
Germany and in Rwanda) can be recruited to participate in acts of genocidal violence.
But less well analyzed is the role of external or global “bystanders,” including
strong nation-states and international and nongovernmental agencies such as
the United Nations, whose delays or refusals to intervene can aid and abet genocides
at a time when the tide could still be reversed. In the case of Rwanda, for example,
U.N. peace-keepers were explicitly instructed to do nothing. Similarly, during
the Holocaust and during the worst phases of apartheid’s program of political
terror, a great many U.S. corporations continued to do business with the perpetrators
of mass violence. The origins and evolution of genocide are complex and
multifaceted, but they are not inscrutable or unpredictable.
PEACETIME CRIMES—THE GENOCIDE CONTINUUM
I have suggested a genocide continuum (see Scheper-Hughes 1997, 2001) made up
of a multitude of “small wars and invisible genocides” conducted in the normative
social spaces of public schools, clinics, emergency rooms, hospital wards, nursing
homes, court rooms, prisons, detention centers, and public morgues. The continuum
refers to the human capacity to reduce others to nonpersons, to monsters,
or to things that gives structure, meaning, and rationale to everyday practices of violence.
It is essential that we recognize in our species (and in ourselves) a genocidal
capacity and that we exercise a defensive hypervigilance, a hypersensitivity to the less
dramatic, permitted, everyday acts of violence that make participation (under other
conditions) in genocidal acts possible, perhaps more easy than we would like to
know. I would include all expressions of social exclusion, dehumanization, depersonalization,
pseudo-speciation, and reification that normalize atrocious behavior
and violence toward others. A constant self-mobilization for alarm, a state of constant
hyperarousal is a reasonable response to Benjamin’s view of late-modern history
as a chronic “state of emergency.”
I realize that in referring to a genocide continuum I am walking on thin ice. The
concept flies directly in the face of a tradition of genocide studies that argues for
the absolute uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust, for example, and for vigilance
with respect to a careful and restricted use of the term genocide itself (see Kuper
1885; Chaulk 1999; Fein 1990; Chorbajian 1999). But I share with Carole Nagengast
(this volume) the alternative view that we must make just such existential leaps
in drawing comparisons between violent acts in normal and in abnormal times. If
there is a moral risk in overextending the concept of “genocide” into spaces and
corners of everyday life where we might not ordinarily think to find it (and there
is), an even greater risk lies in failing to sensitize ourselves, in misrecognizing protogenocidal
practices and sentiments daily enacted as normative behavior by “ordinary”
good enough people.
Here Pierre Bourdieu’s partial and unfinished theory of violence is useful. By
including the normative, everyday forms of violence hidden in the minutia of “nor