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Genocide: An Anthropological Reader. Alexander Laban Hinton, ed. Blackwell Readers in Anthropology. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002. 382 pp.
Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide. Alexander Laban Hinton, ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 405 pp.
Alexander Laban Hinton has done anthropology a tremendous service. He is giving a major impetus to the anthropological study of genocide by gathering its most important contributions in the two edited volumes Genocide: An Anthropological Reader (hereafter: G) and Annihilating Difference: the Anthropology of Genocide (hereafter: AD). These excellent collections demonstrate that anthropology has come of age by entering the major debates on genocide that historians, psychologists, and political scientists have largely dominated. Instead of reviewing the books one by one or summarizing all 30 essays and the two lucid introductions, I shall focus on those contributions that speak most directly to the conceptualizations, causes, consequences, and complicities of genocide in order to delineate the principal anthropological ideas on this complex topic.
CONCEPTUALIZATIONS
The Polish jurist Raphaël Lemkin (G) coined the term genocide in 1944. Much impressed by the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany and the Germanization of the occupied territories, he regarded genocide as a war practice consisting of two phases: the destruction of oppressed groups and their culture and the imposition of the oppressor's culture and sociopolitical organization. The 1948 UN Genocide Convention (G) and most scholarly work focus exclusively on the first phase of genocide. In a groundbreaking historiography, Leo Kuper (G) describes how diplomatic machinations curtailed the legal definition of genocide. The Soviet bloc succeeded in excluding political groups from the final text, while Western Europe prevented the inclusion of cultural genocide. Thus, genocide became restricted to "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."
Very much like Kuper, Helen Fein (G) regrets the exclusion of political groups and cultural genocide and proposes a sociological definition that revolves around the purposeful destruction of social collectivities through the interdiction of their social and biological reproduction. Samuel Totten, William Parsons, and Robert Hitchcock (AD) follow in her footsteps by developing a typology of indigenous genocide: political genocide of indigenous peoples resisting the state; retributive genocide by states to enforce political compliance; developmental genocide to stimulate...