Annihilating Difference

Genocide is one of the most pressing issues that confronts us today. Its death toll is staggering: over one hundred million dead. Because of their intimate experience in the communities where genocide takes place, anthropologists are uniquely positioned to explain how and why this mass annihilation occurs and the types of devastation genocide causes. This ground breaking book, the first collection of original essays on genocide to be published in anthropology, explores a wide range of cases, including Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Guatemala, Rwanda, and Bosnia.

Genocide is one of the most pressing issues that confronts us today. Its death toll is staggering: over one hundred million dead. Because of their intimate experience in the communities where genocide takes place, anthropologists are uniquely positioned to explain how and why this mass annihilation occurs and the types of devastation genocide causes. This ground breaking book, the first collection of original essays on genocide to be published in anthropology, explores a wide range of cases, including Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Guatemala, Rwanda, and Bosnia.

List of Figures and Tables
Acknowledgments

1. The Dark Side of Modernity:
Toward an Anthropology of Genocide
Alexander Laban Hinton

I. Modernity’s 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. Genocide’s 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