The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

388 critical reflections
erage American” have inevitably been of white, middle-class persons of median
height and build, and have immediately marginalized all other bodily types. Once
harnessed to policy ends, the use of a metric together with the notion of “normal”
can be shifted to accommodate any existing hierarchies, just as the original
Binet test was renormed on white Americans after its original French version
showed them to tend toward idiocy, but was not renormed after it showed immigrants
to the United States to be subnormal (Gould 1981).
The problem with constructing human types goes well beyond the use of a category
of “race.” In her essay in this volume, Bettina Arnold questions archaeology’s
assumption that material culture assemblages map onto peoples, ethnic
groups, or protonations. She shows how this assumption can be put to the service
of political projects, as occurred in the Germany of the 1930s and 1940s. Nazi-era
narratives about German historical identity depended on claims of ethnic-racial
continuity and autochthonousness. Of course, claims of long lineage are found in
many times and places, but their specific content changed when harnessed to the
project of legitimating exclusive nationalism. In Germany, ethnicity meant “race”
(as it does elsewhere in Europe), and Nazi ideological requirement of racial purity
did not allow a finding that Germans had migrated from somewhere else. Germans
had to be indigenous people, or as nearly so as archaeology could make them by
identifying a continuity of material assemblages over the territory then inhabited
by Germans. No longer did the ruler descend from Greece or Rome, but the people
arose from the forest itself—an idea of the nation-state that was particularly dependent
on anthropology for its scientific validation.
The ideology of the nation-state, regnant in international political discourse
during the interwar period, has been so frequently held responsible for atrocities
that the arguments need not be rehearsed here. And yet, plans to redraw boundaries
in, say, Bosnia, to conform to the distribution of “peoples” or “nations” follows
that same logic—“Once we get the borders right, we will have peace.” 7 Moreover,
the general way of thinking that tries to map “peoples” onto political units
transcends the nation-state. The possibility of thinking in terms of “Europe” makes
possible new ways of projecting an indigenous peoplehood. Bruno Mégret, leader
of the breakaway faction of the French National Front, now claims that “his”
France is that of the Gauls; Breton regionalists claim a Celtic identity that links
them to the British Isles (and perhaps even to the Basques!); Afro-Celt musicians
find a way to marry immigrant heritage to European antiquity.
The same cultural logic that equates peoples with material cultures can also be
used to deny historical continuity, when racialist politics require. It was just not
thinkable, for example, that the Mound Builders could have been native Americans.
To have acknowledged historical continuity between the builders of the giant
mounds and current natives would have required whites to recognize them as
culturally advanced and as thus in a position to make certain claims. The same
logic is at work: continuity on a territory grants certain rights.