The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

culture, genocide, and a public anthropology 391
ognize a broader category of state violence used to intimidate or oppress political
as well as ethnic groups, and also government efforts, violent or nonviolent, to compel
or induce members of a group to move from one region to another, whether
as “ethnic cleansing” or as policies intended to keep certain types of individuals
out of certain areas—such as targeting by police or immigration officials of certain
“profiles,” or Israeli settlement policies. Such state policies are hardly “genocide”
but are similarly aimed at categories of individuals. Different again are efforts
to wipe out a language, or religion, or various culturally specific patterns of behavior,
including forced assimilation, such as of U.S. Native Americans in reservation
schools, or of Bretons in French schools.
A concern for “cultural survival” against these types of violence has supported
anthropological attention to the plight of “indigenous peoples”—who often also are
targets of genocide. David Maybury-Lewis (this volume) reminds us that in the New
World, and in some other places colonized by Europeans, true genocide did take
place, as colonists, either initially or in the process of establishing their domination,
sought to wipe out the peoples who pre-existed them. In these situations the contrast
between inhabitants of long standing and genocidal European colonizers is
clear. Indeed, precisely because the New World cases are so clear, they have come
to be the prototypes for how we think about indigenous peoples, who have come to
be associated as a category with tribal knowledge and medicine, a special relationship
to the earth, and prior claims on land. This particular conceptual package has
been very effective in allowing a public anthropology to work for tribal rights over
property, for example, including intellectual property.
But can we easily export the concept of “indigenous peoples” around the world?
The question may seem anachronistic, because we clearly have done so. The 1994
U.N. Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples enunciates the rights
of “indigenous peoples” everywhere, guaranteeing them rights of self-determination,
remaining on their territory, and even the right (Article 32) “to determine their
citizenship in accordance with their customs and traditions.” The declaration does
not define what is meant by “indigenous peoples,” but an influential definition was
proposed by J.R. Martinez-Cobo, the author of a study that preceded and in some
sense led to the declaration. Indigenous peoples, “having a historical continuity
with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider
themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing in those
territories....They form at present non-dominant sectors of society and are determined
to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral
territories, and their ethnic identity, as the basis of their continued existence as peoples,
in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions, and legal
systems.” 8 To be an indigenous people, then, presupposes a demonstrable continuous
relationship to ancestral territories and a sense of ethnic distinctiveness visà-vis
other “peoples” in the state who are not indigenous.
Although New World tribal groups easily fit this definition, extending it across
the world, as international law requires, encounters difficulties. Samuel Totten,