The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

372 critical reflections
sacrificed and “martyred” children died purposefully and died well. This kind of
thinking is not exclusive to any particular class of people. Whenever humans attribute
some meaning—whether political or spiritual—to the useless suffering of
others we all behave, I have argued, a bit like public executioners.
Similarly, the existence of two childhoods in Brazil—“my” child (middle class,
beloved, a child of family and home) versus the hated “street child” (the child of
the other, unwanted and unwashed) has given rise in the late twentieth century to
police and death squad attacks that are genocidal in their social and political sentiments.
“Street children” are often described as “dirty vermin” so that unofficial
policies of “street cleaning,” “trash removal,” “fly swatting,” and “pest removal”
are invoked in garnering broad-based public support for their extermination.
The term street child reflects the preoccupations of one class and segment of Brazilian
society with the proper place of another. The term represents a kind of symbolic
apartheid as urban space has become increasingly “privatized.” As long as
poor, “dirty” street children are contained to the slum or the favela, where they “belong,”
they are not viewed as an urgent social problem about which something must
be done. The real issue is the preoccupation of one social class with the “proper
place” of another social class. Like dirt, which is “clean” when it is in the yard and
“dirty” when it is under the nails, “dirty” street children are simply children out of
place. In Brazil the street is an unbounded and dangerous realm, the space of the
“masses” (o povo), where one can be treated anonymously. Rights belong to the realm
of the “home.” Street children, barefoot, shirtless, and unattached to a home, represent
the extreme of social marginality. They occupy a particularly degraded social
position within the Brazilian hierarchy of place and power. As denizens of the
street, these semiautonomous kids are separated from all that can confer relationship
and propriety, without which rights and citizenship are impossible.
In the cohort of forty semiautonomous, mostly homeless street children in the
interior market town of Bom Jesus in Pernambuco that I have been studying since
1982, twenty-two of the original group are dead. Some were killed by police in
acts designated as “legitimate homicides”; others were killed by death squads and
hired guns, some of them by former street children themselves. Others are “disappeared”
and suspected dead. Among the survivors a third are in jail, or released
from jail, and some of these have already become killers, recruited by off-duty police
and by corrupt judges to help clear the streets of their own social class. And so
the cycle of violence turns, with children killing children, urged on by the so-called
forces of state law and order.
But we need go no further than our own medical clinics, emergency rooms, public
hospitals, and old age homes to encounter other classes of “rubbish people”
treated with as much indifference and malevolence as “street kids” in some parts
of South America. As ever increasing numbers of the aged are both sick and poor
because of the astronomical cost of late-life medical care, they are at risk of spending
their remaining time in public or less expensive private institutions for the aged,
where the care of residents is delegated to grossly underpaid and undertrained