The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

376 critical reflections
NOTES
1. During a lively debate at the American Anthropological Association meetings several
years ago, the late Paul Riesman concluded that when anthropologists try to intervene in critical
situations (of life and death) in the field they betray their discipline, and they/we: “leave
anthropology behind...because we abandon what I [Paul Riesman] believe to be a fundamental
axiom of the creed we [anthropologists] all share, namely that all humans are equal
in the sight of anthropology....Once we identify an evil, I think we give up trying to understand
the situation as a human reality. Instead we see it as in some sense inhuman, and all we
try to understand is how best to combat it. At this point we leave anthropology behind and
enter the political process.” This point of view is contested. One contrary example is provided
by the several anthropologists who contributed to the volume Sanctions for Evil (Nevitt
Sanford and Craig Comstack, eds., 1971), a project sponsored by the Wright Institute at Berkeley,
largely in response to the My Lai massacre during the American-Vietnam War.
2. In a letter to the commissioner of Indian Affairs, a government agent, Adam Johnson
(cited by Castillo 1978:107) reported the following with respect to the “Indian wars” in
California: “The majority of the tribes are kept in constant fear on account of the indiscriminate
and inhuman massacre of their people for real or supposed injuries. They have
become alarmed about the increased flood of [settlers]....[It] was just incomprehensible
to them....I have seldom heard of a single difficulty between the whites and the Indians in
which the original cause could not be traced to some rash or reckless act of the former.”
3. At a regular faculty meeting on March 29, 1999, the Department of Anthropology
voted to issue the following statement on Ishi’s brain:
The recent recovery of a famous California Indian’s brain from a Smithsonian warehouse has led
the Department of Anthropology at the University of California Berkeley to revisit and reflect on
a troubling chapter of our history. Ishi, whose family and cultural group, the Yahi Indians, were
murdered as part of the genocide that characterized the influx of western settlers to California,
lived out his last years at the original museum of anthropology at the University of California.
He served as an informant to one of our department’s founding members, Alfred Kroeber, as
well as to other local and visiting anthropologists. The nature of the relationships between Ishi and
the anthropologists and linguists who worked with him for some five years at the museum were
complex and contradictory. Despite Kroeber’s lifelong devotion to California Indians and his
friendship with Ishi, he failed in his efforts to honor Ishi’s wishes not to be autopsied and he inexplicably
arranged for Ishi’s brain to be shipped to and to be curated at the Smithsonian. We acknowledge
our department’s role in what happened to Ishi, a man who had already lost all that
was dear to him. We strongly urge that the process of returning Ishi’s brain to appropriate Native
American representatives be speedily accomplished. We are considering various ways to pay honor
and respect to Ishi’s memory. We regard public participation as a necessary component of these
discussions and in particular we invite the peoples of Native California to instruct us in how we
may better serve the needs of their communities through our research related activities. Perhaps,
working together, we can ensure that the next millennium will represent a new era in the relationship
between indigenous peoples, anthropologists, and the public.
REFERENCES CITED
Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. Remnants of Auschwitz. New York: Zone Books.
Arendt, Hannah. 1963. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking
Press.