Alexander Laban Hinton

Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide

List of Figures and Tables Acknowledgments 1. The Dark Side of Modernity: Toward an Anthropology of Genocide Alexander Laban Hinton I. Modernitys Edges: Genocide and Indigenous Peoples 2. Genocide against Indigenous Peoples David Maybury-Lewis 3. Confronting Genocide and Ethnocide of Indigenous Peoples: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Definition, Intervention, Prevention, and Advocacy Samuel Totten, William S. Parsons, and Robert K. Hitchcock II. Essentializing Difference: Anthropologists in the Holocaust 4. Justifying Genocide: Archaeology and the Construction of Difference Bettina Arnold 5. Scientific Racism in Service of the Reich: German Anthropologists in the Nazi Era Gretchen E. Schafft III. Annihilating Difference: Local Dimensions of Genocide 6. The Cultural Face of Terror in the Rwandan Genocide of 1994 Christopher C. Taylor 7. Dance, Music, and the Nature of Terror in Democratic Kampuchea Toni Shapiro-Phim 8. Averted Gaze: Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina 1992--1995 Tone Bringa IV. Genocides Wake: Trauma, Memory, Coping, and Renewal 9. Archives of Violence: The Holocaust and the German Politics of Memory Uli Linke 10. Aftermaths of Genocide: Cambodian Villagers May Ebihara and Judy Ledgerwood 11. Terror, Grief, and Recovery: Genocidal Trauma in a Mayan Village in Guatemala Beatriz Manz 12. Recent Developments in the International Law of Genocide: An Anthropological Perspective on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda Paul J. Magnarella V. Critical Reflections: Anthropology and the Study of Genocide 13. Inoculations of Evil in the U.S.-Mexican Border Region: Reflections on the Genocidal Potential of Symbolic Violence Carole Nagengast 14. Coming to our Senses: Anthropology and Genocide Nancy Scheper-Hughes 15. Culture, Genocide, and a Public Anthropology John R. Bowen List of Contributors Index

Critical Genocide Studies

Over the last two decades, the interdisciplinary field of genocide studies has dramatically expanded and matured. No longer in the shadow of Holocaust studies, it is now the primary subject of journals, textbooks, encyclopedias, readers, handbooks, special journal issues, bibliographies, workshops, seminars, conference, Web sites, research centers, government agencies, non-governmental organizations, international organizations, and a unit at the United Nations. If not yet fully theorized, the discipline is characterized by a number of debates and approaches. As the outlines of the field emerge more clearly, the time is right to engage in critical reflections about the state of the field, or what might be called critical genocide studies. The goal is not to be critical in a negative sense but to consider, even as a canon becomes ensconced, what is said and unsaid, who has voice and who is silenced, and how such questions may be linked to issues of power and knowledge. It is, in other words, a call for critical thinking about the field of genocide studies itself, exploring our presuppositions, decentering our biases, and throwing light on blind spots in the hope of further enriching this dynamic field.

Postscript—Man or Monster?*

postscript, a thing appended … an additional or conclusory action … an afterthoughtfrom Latin postscribere, write after 1Man or Monster? is a book without an end. I tried to finish it, even using t...

Genocide and Mass Violence: An Anthropology of the Effects of Genocide and Mass Violence

What are the wounds of mass violence on various experiential levels and how might recovery occur? Despite the emergence of an international human rights movement in the period after the Holocaust and World War II, mass violence has not ended. The late twentieth-century genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda were followed by early twenty-first-century genocides in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Civil war remains a central part of many of these conflicts, as illustrated by the atrocities perpetrated in Aceh, Colombia, East Timor, Guatemala, Liberia, Kosovo, Nepal, Peru, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Syria, and Uganda. The United States has recently entered zones of mass violence in a post-9/11 world, and with its allies has waged war in Afghanistan and Iraq while confronting terrorism at home. There is the postconflict legacy of such violence: economies and infrastructures destroyed, families and communities fractured, interpersonal mistrust, grieving, trauma, symptoms, unwanted memories, and many other forms of social suffering. This volume explores lingering aftermaths of mass violence and the reaction to it. What are the legacies of mass violence for individuals and the social worlds in which they live and how do they seek to recover? Former zones of violence often become sites of humanitarian aid, peace-building efforts, and transitional justice, but scholars and practitioners have paid too little attention to the ways in which individuals and cultural groups react to mass violence through microdynamics of memory, social practice, ritual, coping, understanding, symptoms, and healing. Psychological anthropology should have much to say about these issues given its emphasis on taking into account various levels of human ontology such as social experience, collective representations, and sociopolitical process; brain function and psychology; the phenomenology of lived experience; and the nexus of self, memory, and emotion. But psychological anthropology has only just begun to grapple with the legacies of mass violence (see, e.g., Fassin & Pandolfi, 2010; Kirmayer, Lemelson, & Barad, 2007; Kleinman, Das, & Lock, 1997; Robben & Suarez-Orozco, 2000).