The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

15
Culture, Genocide,
and a Public Anthropology
John R. Bowen
What is, or should be, the distinctive anthropological contribution to the study of
genocide? The essays in this book point toward what we might call the cultural
analysis of group violence, a mode of analysis that focuses on both individual acts
of violence and public representations of group differences, and that searches for
connections between the two. 1 Ultimately we wish to know whether some ways of
representing differences contribute to tolerance, intolerance, or violence. 2 Such
causal links might be direct, as when hate speech leads to hate crimes, or indirect,
as when social scientific representations of difference lead to policies that in turn
either exacerbate or lessen conflict. We need to include as an object of study the
public policy consequences of our own anthropological ways of speaking. After
years of self-criticism over past uses of “race,” we ought to consider the policy implications
of other ways of representing human variation and human conflict. To
the extent that anthropologists wish to play a more prominent public role in shaping
international political affairs, the variable resonances of our own professional
categories will need to be given greater scrutiny than ever before.
FRAMING CONFLICT
It is surely one of anthropology’s key contributions to the study of social life to point
out that categories—labels, names, ways of classifying things—shape our perceptions
and actions. This insight can be brought to bear on the task of analyzing
how public discourse shapes political policies toward violent conflicts. The labels
used to characterize groups involved in conflict index specific theories about group
cohesion, the genesis of conflict, and the motivations of those involved, and these
theory-saturated labels in turn shape subsequent policy decisions.
Take, for example, two sets of labels that might be used to build alternative descriptions
of the same set of events. The first set includes the phrase “ethnic con-
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