Anthropology, Cultural

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Anthropology, Cultural

Anthropology, the study of human beings through time and across place, is characterized by the concept of culture, a particular set of methods (ranging from anatomical analysis to ethnographic fieldwork), and a holistic perspective. Most anthropologists also adhere to the principle of relativism, which holds that one must at least temporarily suspend judgment and comprehend behavior from the perspective of the people studied to combat human tendencies toward ethnocentrism and naive realism—the view that, at root, everyone views the world in a similar manner. Although a relativist stance might seem problematic in the face of genocidal horrors, few anthropologists adhere to a fanatical relativism, which argues that "anything goes." Relativism is nevertheless essential to the ethnographer's attempt, as one of the founding figures in anthropology put it, "to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world" (Malinowski, 1984, p. 25). This anthropological perspective is of enormous importance to human attempts to understand genocide, which occurs in a variety of cultural contexts.

Given the broad scope of the discipline, it is not surprising that, particularly in recent years, anthropologists have engaged in a wide range of projects related to genocide, such as defending indigenous peoples, leading forensic investigations, consulting United Nations (UN) tribunals, assisting refugees, helping victims cope with trauma, promoting conflict resolution, participating in the reconstruction, and arguing against so-called primordialist explanations.

One key area in which anthropologists have contributed to human understanding of genocide is in helping to explain why people participate in mass murder. Perpetrator regimes—particularly those involved in "ideological genocides" (Fein, 1984, p. 1)—often rise to power as "revitalization movements" (Wallace, 1956, p. 1) that gain support in situations of rampant social, political, or environmental change which undermine local structures of meaning. Such upheaval provides a foundation for the emergence of radical ideologies and charismatic leaders whose blueprints for renewal require the elimination of those labeled as undesirable in the population.

To facilitate this project, genocidal regimes are centrally concerned with "manufacturing difference" (Hinton, 2004). As they reconstruct and crystallize boundaries of difference, for example, genocidal regimes set perpetrators and victims apart, marking the latter in dehumanizing discourses that facilitate their annihilation. Thus, Germans are split off from Jews, who are depicted as a disease that threatens to contaminate and even destroy the Aryan race. In a similar manner, Hutus have been divided from Tutsis, Bosnian Serbs from Muslims and Croats, Turks from Armenians, colonizers from indigenous peoples, and so forth.

Such genocidal ideologies are not constructed in a vacuum: They are located in particular places at a given moment in time. To motivate their minions to kill, genocidal ideologues forge their messages of hate out of a blend of the new and the old, thereby enabling them to tap into local knowledge that has deep ontological resonance for the actors. Examples range from the Hamitic hypothesis in Rwanda to the Khmer Rouge manipulation of local understandings of disproportionate revenge and Nazi invocations of anti-Semitism and the German Volk.

Besides revealing much about such boundary construction and ideology, anthropologists have also shown how violence is culturally patterned. In Rwanda, for instance, Hutu acts of violence, ranging from stuffing Tutsis into latrines to bodily mutilation, resonated with local understandings linking bodily health to proper blockage and flow. This "bodily inscription of violence" (Hinton, 2004) can be seen in a wide range of cases, from the torture chambers of the Khmer Rouge to the murder of so-called savage Putumayo in Colombia at the turn of the twentieth century.

Such violence always occurs in a social context. Anthropologists have examined a number of crucial group dynamics, such as kinship relations, liminality and rites of passage, socialization into microcultures of violence, ritual process, and local understandings of status, honor, face, and shame. Confronted with Putumayo who had been manufactured into beings classified as savage, ignorant, and wild, rubber traders engaged in ritualized murder, sometimes burning or crucifying the alleged infidels in a liminal locale where a microculture of brutal violence had emerged. Anthropology, of course, does not explain everything, but it provides a crucial level of analysis that may be fruitfully combined with insights garnered from other disciplines.