Genocide and anthropology

Genocide: Conceptual Foundations

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

• Killing members of the group;
• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
• Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
• Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
• Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
• Article II, 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention 

Fein defines genocide as a:
``sustained purposeful action by a perpetrator to physically destroy a collectivity directly or indirectly, through interdiction of the biological and social reproduction of group members, sustained regardless of the surrender or lack of threat offered by the victim.'' 

From an anthropological perspective:

the UN Convention definition is highly problematic because it: 

• privileges certain social categories ± race, ethnicity, religion, and nationality over others. While the marking of social difference is a human universal, the categories into which we parse the world are culturally constructed. 

Is genocide a product of modernity?

The Holocaust constituted a tragic coalescence of several aspects of modernity.

• With the emergence of Enlightenment ideals of equality and the uniform citizen, race became a new way of differentiating human beings. also PROGRESS
• Science was enlisted in the effort to create a new hierarchy of the human and not fully human, on top of which the Aryan race stood predominant.
• Bauman distinguishes such racism (the thoroughly modern construction of a racial social order that may be modified and ``improved'' through social engineering) from two types of prejudice: 

• ``heteropho- bia'' (general fear and anxiety about the unfamiliar) and 
• ``contestant enmity'' (more specific group hostility toward threatening ``others''). 

Several other dimensions of modernity facilitated the Nazis' racist ambitions. 

• With the rise of the nation-state, power and the means of force are increasingly centralized under state control. Science and technology make this power all the more lethal. 
• To optimize``efficiency,''work tasks are increasingly specialized and divided, culminating in impersonal bureaucracies that substitute technical proficiency for moral responsibility. 
• As the division of labor is specialized, each bureaucrat becomes another step removed from the task that is ultimately performed. 
• This distance, in turn, facilitates dehumanization, as the human beings whose lives are affected by the task lose their distinctiveness, becoming objects often referred to in euphemistic language. 
• In Nazi Germany, the result was a bureaucrat like Eichmann, who efficiently carried out his tasks, unconcerned about the dehumanized individuals he thereby helped annihilate. 
• While bureaucracy is not inherently genocidal, Bauman argues, it has the potential to facilitate lethal projects of social engineering, particularly when other moral safeguards break down. 
• This is precisely what happened in Nazi Germany, as religious leaders, politicians, and intellectuals stood by ± or even applauded or helped out ± while Hitler's government annihilated Jews and other ``contaminating''groups. 
• Bauman recognizes that many Nazis were brutal anti- Semites.Anti-Semitism alone,however,cannot account for the modern character of the Holocaust. 

ETIC versus EMIC categories to identify targeted groups

• anthropologists have a problem with the UN convention because it privileges etic explanations like ethneic group, race, religion and not internal classifications (Hutu, Tutsi)