The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

390 critical reflections
For most of us today, the term genocide prototypically refers to the Nazi efforts to
annihilate the Jews. It also has an unquestionably appropriate and unproblematic
(psychologically, morally, and legally) application to the efforts by European conquerors
to wipe out certain peoples of the New World—and elsewhere, as David
Maybury-Lewis reminds us in his discussion of the sad history of Tasmania.
The legal definition of genocide comes from the 1948 U.N. convention, which
stipulates that those accused have intended to destroy a “national, ethnical, racial,
or religious group” (Article 2). As Paul Magnarella points out (this volume), the convention
has been interpreted to refer to “stable and permanent groups” that are in
some sense objective—that is, which exist prior to the efforts to wipe them out. This
interpretation makes sense in terms of the prototypical referents of the concept.
However, this idea of ethnic (or racial, or national) identity is one that anthropologists
increasingly understand to be problematic, for reasons that soon were perceived
by the international tribunals. Ethnic identification is itself a social process,
subject to both gradual social changes and abrupt political manipulation, in Europe
and North America as much as elsewhere. Much of modern European history
has consisted of attempts to regiment self-identifications along nation-state
lines, with some success, especially in the mid-twentieth century (fewer Bretons,
more French). The violent dismembering of Yugoslavia in the 1990s was accompanied
by the withdrawal from “Yugoslavs” of the right to claim that identity, and
the substitution of ethnically specific alternatives.
As Magnarella points out, this point was not lost on the judges serving on the U.N.
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda who sought to apply the 1948 genocide
convention to Rwanda. What many had assumed to be a physically obvious distinction
between Hutus and Tutsis in fact was the artifact of (a) initial distinctions that
were relatively fluid, and (b) a subsequent hardening of those categories by colonial
and postcolonial regimes. The judges realized that these ethnic labels did not designate
what an outside observer would see as objective groups, making the designation
of the massacres as “genocidal” legally, if not politically, problematic. And yet
the actions of Rwandans presupposed the existence of such categories. The justices
concluded that self-identifications as “Hutu” or “Tutsi,” classifications by the Rwandan
government of people into these two categories, and the fact that slaughtering
mothers and infants was intended to prevent the birth of new “Tutsi,” defined in
terms of patrilineal descent, made the Tutsi a “stable and permanent group” for purposes
of finding that genocide had occurred. In other words, sufficient violent behavior
was organized around the psychologically real categories of “Hutu” and
“Tutsi” that they could be taken to designate socially real groups. Ethnic groups come
into existence legally, then, when someone is trying to wipe them out.
Here we see an instance where international categories have responded to a
gathering of new evidence and perspectives about social and cultural processes. International
law will doubtless continue to refine its categories as the International
Criminal Court takes form and begins to set out its codes and procedures. Alongside
of genocide, as defined by the United Nations, such tribunals may likely rec-