The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

374 critical reflections
humane care to vulnerable and stigmatized social groups seen as social parasites
(“nursing home elderly,” “welfare queens,” “illegal aliens,” “Gomers,” etc.); the militarization
of everyday life (for example, the growth of prisons, the acceptance of capital
punishment, heightened technologies of personal security, such as the house
gun and gated communities); social polarization and fear (that is, the perceptions of the
poor, outcast, underclass, or certain racial or ethnic groups as dangerous public enemies);
reversed feelings of victimization as dominant social groups and classes demand
violent policing to put offending groups in their place.
GETTING OVER
Remorse, reconciliation, and reparation have emerged as master narratives of the
late twentieth century/early twenty-first century as individuals and entire nations
struggle to overcome the legacies of suffering ranging from rape and domestic violence
to collective atrocities of state-sponsored dirty wars, genocides, and ethnic
cleansings. Several chapters in this volume (but especially those by Linke, Ebihara
and Ledgerwood, Manz, and Magnarella) discuss individual and collective attempts
at reconciliation and healing, the repair of fractured bodies, broken lives, and destroyed
societies after the facts of genocide.
Linke presents us with a terrifying proposition—the irreversibility, the impossibility
of undoing so massive a wound as the Jewish Holocaust for new generations
of German youth, the children and grandchildren of perpetrators, bystanders, and,
one can hope, a few just men and women. There seems to be no exit, no escape,
from that spoiled history that continues to return, like the repressed, to haunt German
youth trying to reinvent themselves and to free themselves from inherited, generational
guilt and complicity. They seem altogether trapped by that history, when
youth culture embraces nudity as transparency and as innocence but which also
bears striking resemblances to the Nazi youth cults of the forest, the natural, the
German heroic. And the childlike display of unfettered nudity is seen by Linke as a
cruel, though surely unintended, parody of “naked life” in the concentration camps.
In marked contrast, Ebihara and Ledgerwood present an almost uncomplicated
picture of community recovery in rural Cambodia in the mere two decades following
the Pol Pot regime. That which was destroyed—from Buddhism to subsistence-based
peasant farming—appears to have returned relatively unscathed, while
extreme demographic imbalances—the virtual absence of men in rural villages—
is being corrected. Perhaps it is too soon in the history of the Khmer Rouge to assess
the real damages that may, as in the German instance, return to haunt subsequent
generations. It is for this reason that many recovering nations and wounded
populations—from post–military dictatorship Chile to postapartheid South Africa
to postgenocide Rwanda (see Magnarella, this volume)—have put their faith in international
tribunals or in independent truth commissions to deal with burying
the ghosts of the past. At times this has meant uncovering mass graves and re-