The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

386 critical reflections
killers, but that followed a cultural logic of blockage—putting up too many roadblocks,
impaling victims, cutting leg tendons rather than killing outright.
Taylor also highlights the rhetorical and psychological processes by which the
state reframed its own violence as “the anger of the people,” processes that included
incorporating “the people” into the cruelty, by forcing those who passed a roadblock
to hit a captured Tutsi with a hammer. “Prove that you’re one of us” is a logic
used by state agents in many similar situations—in Indonesia in 1965–66, for example,
when the army made as many people as possible tools of murder, in order
to more plausibly frame the events as a mass uprising, and thereafter to more effectively
silence the incorporated killers.
Taylor argues persuasively for attention to the cultural logics surrounding power
and hierarchy that shape violent actions, without attributing to those logics a causal
force in producing violence. Taylor’s argument does not take ethnicity as an explanatory
primitive, but acknowledges that it is a salient, and historically constructed,
set of representations. In similar fashion, Linke’s and Phim’s essays add
to our understanding of the ways in which a particular aesthetics of the body can
evoke or contribute to violence. Linke’s shocking article points to the continuity of
imagery of the naked male body and of pristine nature from the Nazi era to current
antifascist politics. Nazis, neo-Nazis, antifascists, Greens—all want to purge
Germany of pollution, participating in a “logic of expulsion.” Linke recounts how
many German academics have dismissed her study, by saying that political discourse
is “just words.” She also reminds us that images and discourse are the very
substance of the mechanisms by which “ordinary Germans” or anyone else can
be turned into a mass murderer. Representations can provide a cultural logic to
killing, even though that killing then requires an additional push—a panic, fear of
retaliation, incitement by leaders.
The study of national corporeality is also at the center of Phim’s account of how
Khmer Rouge soldiers harnessed dance and music to revolutionary ends. Khmer
Rouge theorists saw creating a new aesthetics as part of the process of instilling terror
and enforcing compliance. And yet, as she tells it, a nostalgia that lingered
among the guards and officials caused some of them to spare and even to favor
those artists who performed the old music and dance. Images, sounds, movements
leap across even the sharpest shifts in political ideology.
Here we begin to see the way that anthropological analyses of violence can draw
out the cultural logics that lead ordinary people to accept that others in their country
ought to be harassed or eliminated. Such violence may well not become genocidal;
indeed, as Nagengast suggests (this volume), we should take into account the
continuum of oppressive measures that are supported by popular opinion, which
can stretch from everyday harassment (such as that experienced by middle-class
blacks in many U.S. suburbs) to efforts at annihilation, or genocide in the strict sense.
The challenge, then, to an anthropology of violence is to keep in play both the
analysis of a cultural logic of action and the analysis of individuals’ motives, without
reducing the one to the other. Rwandans killing other Rwandans acted from