Theoretical Paper: Anthropology and Genocide

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 Introduction

Writing on anthropology and genocide, or possibly on the anthropology of genocides, is to me the unforeseen outcome of thirty years dedicated to the study of Rwanda. That what I, as a Belgian social anthropologist, write on genocide happens to be informed by the long observation of an African country and its rural people is, as far as I am concerned, simply one of the unexpected turns a professional career can take. It is, however, my choice to stress that the genocide that happened in Rwanda in 1994 is testimony to the banality of Africa, to its belonging to our world, and not testimony to the resurgence of exotic primitiveness and tribal feuding. This needs to be stressed because the very word “Africa” has become the bearer of popular Western fantasy to such a degree that it erases all the particularities we are prone to acknowledge of our own, Western countries. Yet in each of the many countries that form the African continent, people strive to improve their lives or make sense of their despair, and they do so according to their own contemporary and more or less cosmopolitan world view. If, then, I became acquainted with the specifically organized form of violence that is genocide through the Rwandan case, it seems necessary to disentangle what is common to genocides from what is particular to the local forms genocidal mobilization can take, and from the local world view that can give violent deeds their inherent meaning. This is part of the anthropologist’s job as I see it.

In this article, I shall first provide an overview of the emergence of social anthropology. In the process, I shall draw some hypotheses as to why violence remained very much at the periphery of the discipline. As stigmatization under essentialized categories is the common denominator of genocides, I shall then discuss the so-called colonial creation of ethnicity and examine the links between ethnicity, identity, and popular mobilization. Identity, indeed, appears as both instrumental and ideological as it mobilizes social groups and individuals and, at the same time, prevents any analysis of complex facts. Agency must be taken into account and contextualized if genocide is to be understood and prevention, effective. In the specific case of genocide, the State—or fractions of it with access to the State apparatus—leads organized crime. They do so under particular circumstances and through specific means that social and political scientists should identify. I shall go into more detail on this. When prevention has not succeeded, anthropologists can still be present as analysts of socially detrimental economic and political realities that can quite rapidly re-entrench themselves under a new guise. They could also analyze the work and instrumentalization of “imaginaires” (collective mental representations) that revolve around social reconstruction and are embedded in brokerage processes between a country and the outside world.

 From anthropology and violence to anthropology of violence

Today, social anthropology may be broadly described as a scientific discipline dedicated to the study, based on empirical observation in contexts of interculturality, of human societies as they relate to their resources. Interculturality, originally resulting from the pre-colonial and colonial context from which the discipline emerged, has become one of its methodological tools. As is the case with all sciences, social anthropology and its manifold antecedents are embedded in the more general historical context of their production. Social anthropology evolved within social circles where violence was considered anti-social, and talking about it bad taste. As a consequence, the successive trends of social anthropology—evolutionism, functionalism, diffusionism and structuralism—did not provide the researcher with either the theoretical framework or the methodological tools to make violent practices an object of study in the Durkheimian sense of “seeing social facts as things.”

Only after the dynamics of social change had come to the fore in anthropological studies—largely thanks to the impulsion of the Manchester School of Anthropology and its leader of the time, Max Gluckman, a legal anthropologist—did conflict become subject to them. Statist studies were progressively abandoned—an unfinished process—while empirical data became more comprehensive and its analysis began to reflect the ambition of writing “from the people’s point of view,” as Geertz put it. These new approaches were bound to make social anthropologists more open to borrowing methodological tools from other disciplines and adjusting them to their professional field. Political science, economics and history, among other subjects, provided researchers with new insights, while the perception and description of violence remained problematic. In order to understand this attitude, we now have to take a look at other aspects of history.

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