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Genocide: Anthropological Aspects
Genocide is a crime in international law. It was
established as such by the United Nations Genocide
Convention of December 9, 1948 which committed
‘contracting’ states to ‘prevent and to punish … acts
committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in
part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.’
This legal definition was reached following political
compromises between the major powers at the UN,
and a more precise, academic definition is adopted
here, according to which genocide is ‘a series of
purposeful actions by a perpetrator(s) to destroy a
collectivity through mass or selective murders of group
members and suppressing the biological and social
reproduction of the collectivity’ (Fein 1990, pp. 28–9).
After many years of academic avoidance of the topic,
there has been a recent surge of interest across
disciplines from psychology through political science
to anthropology, the best of which work has been in-
terdisciplinary in perspective. Sociological and anthro-
pological investigation of genocide covers four main
areas: the definition of genocide and the charact-
erization of particular instances of mass slaughter; the
sociology of genocides themselves; the sociology of
representations of genocide (from ‘survivor testimony’
through memorialization and forms of material cult-
ure such as architecture to studies of war crimes
tribunals): and the sociology of the after effects of
genocide. These will be treated in turn.
1. Problems of Definition
The term genocide is a neologism, coined in 1944 by
Raphael Lemkin, a legal scholar and Polish Jewish

e! migre! to the USA. Lemkin took over ancient Greek
roots for ‘tribe’ and ‘killing’ to create a word that
would adequately convey the enormity of Nazi and
Axis crimes in Central and Eastern Europe during
World War II. This definition inspired a UN General
Assembly resolution of 1946 but when, two years later,
the same body established a binding Genocide Con-
vention, the range of reference was narrowed in two
important ways. First, cases where a culture is de-
stroyed without the extermination of people—now
commonly referred to as ethnocide—were excluded.
Secondly, and much more critically, in order to
accommodate concerns of the USSR, which might
have faced indictment for mass killing of ‘class’
enemies (as in the deliberately created famine in the
Ukraine in 1932–3, or the then still undiscovered
‘gulag’), the 1948 UN definition excluded the ex-
termination of ‘political and other groups’ such as
social classes.
These questions of legal definition are important
because the Convention commits states which sub-
scribe to it ‘to prevent and to punish’ the crime of
genocide by pursuing perpetrators ‘whether they are
constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or
private individuals.’ Moreover, since the Convention
explicitly denies that genocide can be a ‘political’
crime, perpetrators are subject to the laws of
extradition.
Perhaps precisely because of its ambitious promise,
the Convention has been invoked remarkably little
since 1948. Both the desire of member states to
preserve inviolate their claims to sovereignty and of
others not to have to commit resources to humani-
tarian interventions have played a role. Leaving aside
UN silence during the slaughter of half a million
Indonesian communists in 1965 and the death of 1.5
million Cambodians in 1975–9 (since it could be
argued that the 1948 Convention excluded such cases)
it is a matter of record that US officials at the UN were
instructed in 1992 to avoid using the term ‘genocide’
with respect to Bosnia so as not to trigger obligations
under the Convention. In fact, the only major de-
velopment since 1948 has been the establishment, in
1994, of the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunals
for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, though under the
peace enforcement provisions of the UN Charter
(Chapter VII), not the Genocide Convention, and
refused permanent status due to Chinese objections.
While considerable academic energy has been ex-
pended in attempting to classify particular mass
murders as genocide or otherwise (the destruction of
the Albigensian Cathar heretics in France in the
thirteenth century, the removal of up to 50 million
persons from Africa during the slave trade, the
slaughter of the Hereros of South West Africa by
German forces in 1904–7, the massacres of the
Armenians in 1915, the persecution of political en-
emies under Stalin in the USSR, the elimination of
various indigenous peoples such as the Ache of
Genocide: Anthropological Aspects
Paraguay, to name but a few) perhaps the most
broadly attended and resonant debates have con-
cerned the uniqueness or otherwise of the Nazi
genocide of the Jews. On the one hand, some scholars
argue that the Jewish Holocaust is the only case in
history of the attempted destruction of an entire people
because they were that people. Other genocides were
committed as a by-product of the course of war
(Hereros) or political struggles (Democratic
Kampuchea), or aimed to destroy a culture or way of
life by eliminating some of its bearers (Gypsies in
World War II ), or occurred indirectly as a conse-
quence of actions not per se intended to destroy a
people (the slave trade). The Nazi persecution of the
Jews differed from all these in intent, extent and
‘success’ (Bauer 1984).
Other scholars, however, resist the implication of
the ‘exceptionalist’ position that the Holocaust oc-
curred in some sense ‘outside of normal history’ and
thus had neither precedent in the past nor lessons for
the future. Unsurprisingly, this debate leads on to
conflict over the interpretative framework for under-
standing the causes and the motivations of the
Holocaust and its perpetrators. For their part, most
anthropologists would favor retaining a comparative,
sociological framework and resist the suggestion that
any sociological phenomenon can be unique in the
strong sense argued by exceptionalist scholars, or
require recourse to abstract notions of ‘evil’ (Conte
and Essner 1995, Clendinnnen 1999).
This debate has implications beyond German his-
toriography. An anthropologist working in former
Yugoslavia has recently argued that the public under-
standing of what constitutes genocide, which derives
from images of the Nazi Holocaust, prevented obser-
vers from recognizing an actually existing genocide as
it developed before the world’s eyes (Sorabji 1994).
Indeed, one of the puzzles of the sociology of genocide
is why outside observers tend in general to be so
unwilling to face the facts until it is too late, and why
even after the event such effort is put into obfuscation
and evasion of the brute historical record.
2. The Sociology of Genocidal Mass Murder
Though anthropologists aim to study the sources of
human social and cultural variation, surprisingly little
effort has been contributed by this discipline to
the study of genocidal mass murder. This gap in the
literature is all the more surprising in that many of the
acknowledged genocides of the last century and a half
have taken place in parts of the world where anthro-
pologists work. Naturally, part of the explanation lies
in the way anthropologists carry out their research.
Participant observation in the life of a community is
not a methodology that is easily adapted to the study
of murderous gangs manning roadblocks or units of
6149
Genocide: Anthropological Aspects
the local military on active service. Beyond methodo-
logical considerations, there may also be a sense,
shared with those who work for Amnesty Inter-
national, that to explain is in some sense to forgive,
and that the task of observers is merely to record, lest
we forget.
Recently, however, anthropological avoidance of
this topic—an evasion that was characteristic of most
social science, with some noteworthy exceptions like
Leo Kuper (1982)—has been coming to an end.
Inspired in part by a wave of ethnographic writing
about political violence, especially in South Asia
(Spencer 1990), a new generation of anthropologists
have written on particular genocides (Bosnia,
Rwanda, and Cambodia most notably, but also Nazi
Germany). In this work, the anthropologists attempt,
with more or less success, to bring to bear a sense that
violence is rarely simply pragmatic and is often
patterned in ways specific to a particular time and
place and always interpreted in local, cultural terms.
As in the other social sciences and humanities which
deal with cases of mass murder, anthropological
analyses aim above all to answer the question, ‘how
could this happen? Under what conditions did one
group of humans attempt to wipe out another?’
Responses can be divided along a familiar line into
two camps: those who stress cultural factors and those
who stress social, political, and economic factors.
Taking the former first, for authors in this school the
goal is to provide a specifically ‘anthropological
contribution,’ to prove that an ethnographer’s interest
in ‘cultural variation’ adds an otherwise missing
ingredient to analyses of genocide.
Much of this ‘culturalist’ work (notably writing on
Rwanda and Cambodia) takes a cue, wittingly or not,
from an essay by the historian Natalie Zemon Davis
(1973) on differential patterns of violence in the
religious wars in France in the seventeenth century.
Davis showed that the forms of Protestant on Catholic
violence were not the same as those perpetrated by
Catholics on Protestants. Each religious tradition had
its own construction of the nature of demonic power in
the other and adherents of the two faiths acted to
cleanse the world accordingly. Because of their interest
in demonstrating a ‘cultural logic,’ the anthropological
writing on Rwanda and Cambodia does not advance
theoretically on Davis’s original insight (Taylor 1999,
Hinton 1998). Evidence is presented that shows how in
some instances cultural patterns seem to have given
form to and shaped people’s violent behavior, but
little or no attempt is made to explain how particular
segments of the population or groups of individuals
came to participate in the genocide at a particular time
and place.
Curiously, this kind of explanation of ‘how it
happened’ has several features in common with the
approach adopted by Daniel Goldhagen (1996) in
Hitler’s Willing Executioners, a book which enjoyed
runaway popular success across the USA, Europe,
6150
and particularly Germany in the mid-1990s (while
being almost universally condemned by the historians
with period expertise). Goldhagen’s answer to the
question ‘how could it happen’ was that it was
Germans who killed Jews in World War II (it was not
just they, in fact) and they did so because of the
activation of a tradition which he dubbed ‘elimina-
tionist antisemitism’ which had long characterized
German culture (while in reality antisemitism had
actually been a vote-loser for the Nazis prior to 1933).
For authors working in this tradition, genocide is
derived or emerges out of a ‘cultural model.’ What
tends to be missing from such explanations is any
attempt to detail political manipulation by those who
planned the genocides, to analyze the institutional
apparatus which prepared and carried through the
genocides, and to establish the sociological and even
biographical profile of identified killers. In the case of
Rwanda one has to turn away from the anthropolo-
gists, to the work of the political scientist Rene
Lemarchand to discover, for instance, that the geno-
cide was planned by a core of one extended family and
advisors, promulgated through 300–500 middle level,
rural cadres, set off by a presidential guard of around
6,000 persons who massacred all opponents of the
genocide (Hutu and Tutsi alike) and finally continued
by militias who may have made up 1–2 percent of the
population, each member of which may have killed
200–300 people (Lemarchand 1997).
Work that searches for the cultural models which
underpin and apparently feed directly in to genocide
bears a close affinity with the first efforts by anthro-
pologists to deal with issues of genocide during and
shortly after World War II. Then adherents of the
culture and personality school provided textbook\
manual type explanations of the personality of the
enemy in an effort to explain the success of totalitarian
regimes in Japan and Germany and as a prelude to
reconstruction and democratization. At the beginning
of the twenty-first century, with decades of detailed
analysis of the paradigmatic Nazi case behind us, there
really is little excuse for allowing this kind of cult-
ural reductionism to pass for ‘anthropological
explanation.’
An alternative approach within anthropology is to
be found in work on Bosnia. Here the research was
carried out by a British-trained social rather than US-
trained cultural anthropologist (Sorabji 1994). This
work owes much to the tradition of historical and
sociological investigation of the Holocaust represen-
ted by such scholars as those around Herbert (2000), as
well as the kind of political science of Bosnia pursued
by Bougarel (1997). It puts stress less on ‘culture’ than
‘local knowledge,’ and tries to provide a fuller sense of
‘what happened’ before answering the more difficult
question, ‘why?’. Anthropological expertise is com-
bined with a journalist’s sense of political manipu-
lation, a sociological interest in institutions, and a
historian’s concern with events of the recent and

remembered past. Not only is the Bosnian genocide
not represented as being rooted in ‘cultural traditions,’
but it is shown how this very representation is part of
the armory of the perpetrators, used, with great success
in this case, to keep outsiders from interfering. As long
as US Secretary of State Warren Christopher, or
British Prime Minister John Major was advised that
‘ethnic cleansing’ was not ‘genocide’ and that deep-
rooted cultural patterns on all sides were to blame,
they felt justified in evading calls for intervention.
Indeed, the very ‘disorganized’ quality of the genocide
(compared with the Nazi model case) came to be taken
as evidence of its nonexistence. In reality, however,
institutional patterns were at work: Violent criminals
were being released from Belgrade jails and sent to join
militias. These operated formally independently but
under the cover of the official military. Intellectuals
were among their first targets, often identified on
pre-prepared lists; local schools and other sites of
intercommunal, neighborly interaction were chosen as
locales for internment and torture; neighbors were
deliberately sent to kill neighbors. The ‘sites of
memory’ of Bosnian social life were being system-
atically and consciously destroyed by the instigators of
a genocidal violence that was presented as medieval
but was, in reality, wholly modern.
This kind of work points to a need to think more
broadly about the psychological and mental under-
pinnings of the violent behavior of individuals and
collectivities and to relate these findings to work
elsewhere within anthropology. It is striking that the
language of genocide in Bosnia, as in some other cases,
was one of sacrifice, an invitation, one might think, to
introduce anthropological work on the relation be-
tween religious representations of transcendence and
political violence (e.g., Bloch 1992).
3. The Sociology of the Representation of
Genocide and Memorialization
It is possible to argue that much of what has recently
passed for analysis of the cultural soil of genocide in
anthropology is in reality merely the re-presentation
of local, folk explanations of genocidal behavior. This
data, which is often part of the discourse around the
genocide and ought to be part of the material analyzed
and explained by a sophisticated social science, is
instead relied upon, more or less uncritically, as if
descriptively neutral.
In analyzing perpetrator discourse anthropologists
have pointed out how genocide, like political violence
more generally, tends to be presented by the perpetra-
tors as a just defense against others who are about to
attack, or are already attacking, the perpetrators. But
a less sceptical attitude has been adopted, for instance,
over accounts which focus on the rural, resentful
character of supposed killers (Hinton 1998). Going
Genocide: Anthropological Aspects
further into the psychological roots of genocidal
violence, the fundamental challenge, as everyone
knows who has ever investigated these issues, is that
no one ever admits to having personally been a
genocidal killer. No researcher has yet overcome this
obstacle.
A more fruitful domain has been analysis of survivor
testimony and of the reconstructions of generations
who have come after (a field which overlaps with
broader interests in memory, narrative, and represen-
tations of the past). Discussion of the relationship
between trauma, personal memory, and reconstruc-
tion of the ‘self’ is still at an early stage in all the
disciplines which touch on this area. One feature that
is commonly pointed to in victim testimony is a flat,
matter-of-fact tone adopted, a technique of distancing
and dissociation. In innovative work in transcultural
psychiatry, Laurence Kirmayer has developed a no-
tion of landscapes of memory to characterize some of
the differences in narratives of trauma between child
abuse and holocaust victims: ‘while holocaust stories
involve bearing witness to what is widely … recog-
nized as a human catastrophe, personal stories of
abuse are revelatory, shameful and damaging’
(Kirmayer 1996, p.188). In this context memorializa-
tion may be a key feature of legitimating the experience
of suffering. Work is, however, only just beginning on
situations where memorialization does not take place
(as for instance with most Gypsies in Eastern Europe).
One important new area of investigation is the
social and political understandings and implications
of particular ways of representing genocides. Early
work in material culture on the activity of memory in
holocaust memorials has shown how the meanings of
memorials are contingent on social and political
realities (Young 1993). At a literary level, work by
Inga Clendinnen (1999) has opened up one path for a
generation who no longer have access to direct
testimony from survivors; more challengingly, Peter
Novick’s (1999) iconoclastic study of the Holocaust in
US public life argues that some representations of geno-
cide may act to inoculate a society against its own
history and current world duties.
Apart from academic analysis, anthropologists
have, at times, become centrally involved in acts of
memorialization. In 1989, Polish Prime Minister
Mazowiecki convened a commission to reconstruct
the Auschwitz–Birkenau museum and monument for a
postcommunist world. At the behest of the Polish
Ministry of Culture, Jonathon Webber, an anthro-
pologist with field research in Poland, and head of
Oxford University’s Centre for Hebrew Studies, in-
vited an international body of experts to discuss ‘the
future of Auschwitz.’ Alongside determining major
issues of factual history—that 1.6 million had died
there, and not four million as previously claimed, that
90 percent of those killed were Jews and not Polish and
so on—the commission also addressed such tricky
questions as to whether and how one should preserve
6151
Genocide: Anthropological Aspects
the ruins: reconstruction of the gas chambers was out
of the question, but what sort of renovation should be
permitted?
4. Postgenocide Societies?
Work on the representation of genocide is intimately
connected with an interest in the afterlife of such
massive social trauma. Many have suggested an
association between German and Japanese urban
terror in the 1960s with the phenomena of the ‘second
generation’ but the link has never been established
systematically. Now, however, a body of clinical work
on individual responses to massive trauma is emerging.
Imaginative work here often comes at the interface of
disciplines, as in Lynne Jones’s (2000) ethnographic-
psychological examinations of how subjective under-
standings and political context mediate the impact of
political violence on adolescent mental health in
Bosnia. Jones, who is based at Cambridge University’s
Centre for Family Research, has, among other things,
investigated children who had watched others being
cleansed from their own town. In this case the
‘therapeutic remedy’ of ‘the search for meaning’
exposed children to uncomfortable truths about their
community and appeared to lead to psychological
discomfort, depression, and anxiety. Those children
who avoided examining such events had better psycho-
logical health, but at the cost of leaving their elders’
discourse unchallenged for a second generation.
For many victims of direct attack, the search for
meaning, to name the unnameable is unavoidable.
Here too, it is to be hoped, ethnographic work will
emerge examining the impact of the International
Criminal Tribunals. The president of the Yugoslav
tribunal has sought to bring as many witnesses as
possible to the Hague, so they can see their stories
heard and entered in the register. But what effect has
this had, and how will the expanding work of the
Tribunal change the ‘landscapes of memory’ in
Bosnia? It has been argued that significant use was
made in 1990–2 of representations of experiences of
World War II in cultivating an environment in which
violence came to be seen as a serious option (Hayden
1994). Investigation of how societies deal with these
kind of events is thus not merely of academic interest.
At an even broader level of analysis, anthropology
would have much to contribute to the study of the
experience of societies like Israel—for long unwilling
to incorporate the genocide into its collective memory
and now, having made it central to the nation, finding
it hard to create a unified identity with Arab Jews who
did not suffer. In the case of the perpetrator states the
issue is almost invariably one of the social conse-
quences of denial. Racist attitudes to Gypsies in
Eastern Europe are likely related to denial and
ignorance of Gypsy persecution in 1940–5. In this
regard the German case is unique—a perpetrator state
6152
that has accepted historic responsibility. German
foreign policy will be constrained by the Nazi past for
the foreseeable future and perhaps as long as there is a
German political entity, but it is also clear that for the
time being this is a society which cannot shrug off its
past. Daniel Goldhagen’s work struck a profound
chord in Germany perhaps because it offered a new
generation a fresh chance to stare at an unadulterated
image of the heart of some of their ancestors’ ‘dark-
ness.’ At that very moment there was also anguish over
the Berlin Holocaust memorial. One particularly
radical proposal was to construct a bus station in
central Berlin with timetabled buses taking visitors
and pilgrims to and from the death and concentration
camps—a reminder of just how close so many of these
camps lay to the capital of the Reich and lie to the new
capital of a reunified Germany. It was rejected for
‘lack of taste’ and necessary ‘monumentality.’ Such
phenomena can provide sociologists and anthropolo-
gists with rich seams of cultural and social significance.
See also: Anti-Semitism; Collective Memory, Anth-
ropology of; Ethnic Cleansing, History of; Ethnic
Conflicts; Ethnocentrism; Ethnonationalism: Cultural
Concerns; Genocide: Historical Aspects; Holocaust,
The; National Socialism and Fascism; Public Com-
memoration;Racism,Historyof;Racism,Sociology of;
Social Trauma; Xenophobia
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All rights reserved.
Genocide: Historical Aspects
Genocide is any intentional act to physically eliminate
a non-combatant group in whole or in part by direct
assault, or by inflicting deadly life conditions including
measures to prevent biological, economic and cultural
reproduction.
This article will outline the development of genocide
research as well as the tasks of this young academic
discipline (Sect. 1). It will, in Sect. 2, deal with the
problem of applying the twentieth-century term
genocide to a wide variety of mega-killings which have
happened throughout history. The term genocide has
generated a tendency not only to rewrite, but also to
morally judge anew, historical events to settle recent
political accounts. Groups whose ancestors have
suffered massacres at a period in which neither they
themselves nor their victorious opponents had drawn
up or adhered to international legal standards out-
lawing such atrocities may yet label their past fate as
genocide to attract attention to contemporary plights.
The entry will try to circumvent this extra-scholarly or
ideological use of the term genocide by implicitly or
explicitly using a caveat of the sort that an event called
genocide ‘today’ was not seen as such then. It has to be
stressed that all figures used in this entry are estimates.
There is no such thing as an undisputed figure for even
the best researched genocides.
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
Genocide: Historical Aspects
1. The Term Genocide and the De
elopment of
Genocide Research
Genocide is not only a historical concept but also an
international crime defined by the 1948 United
Nations Con
ention on the Pre
ention and Punishment
of the Crime of Genocide. In its Article II
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: (a) killing members of the
group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members
of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions
of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in
whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent
births within the group; (e) forcibly transferring children of
the group to another group.
The crimes mentioned in paragraphs (a) to (e) of
Article II of the Convention are generalizations of
practices employed by Nazi Germany after September
1, 1939 (beginning of World War II) against Slavs
and\or Jews, and gypsies. The UN Convention was
mostly written by a Polish lawyer and Holocaust
refugee, Raphael Lemkin (1900–59), who had first in
1933 proposed a similar measure to the ‘League of
Nations.’ In 1943, he had termed the crime in Polish as
ludoboT jstwo (lud l people; zaboT jstwo l murder). A
year later, he translated it into English as genocide
(from Greek genos l people, and Latin caedere l kill,
see Lemkin 1944, p. 79).
Since the UN Convention—today signed by some
140 nations—excluded ‘politicide’—the murder of any
person or people because of their politics or for
political purposes—as well as ‘ideological geno-
cide’—the murder of any person or people because of
their ideology, theory or knowledge—scholars have
broadened the concept. Rudy Rummel’s term
‘democide’ may be considered as the most compre-
hensive one. It is the murder of any person or people
including genocide in the international legal sense,
politicide as well as ideological mass murder (Rummel
1996, p. 39).
Besides the narrower term genocide and the more
inclusive term democide the term ‘crimes against
humanity’ is still in wide use. It was coined on May 24,
1915 by France, Great Britain, Russia, and the USA
on behalf of the slaughtered Ottoman Armenians as
‘new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civili-
zation.’ The term ‘crimes against mankind’ created,
on October 12, 1942, in London (Declaration of
St. James) to denounce the Nazi Holocaust of Euro-
pean Jewry is also still in use. Less known though quite
appropriate is Gracchus Babeuf’s French term ‘popu-
licide,’ a shorthand for his ‘syste' me de de! population’
executed—during the French Revolution—in the
Vende! e (1793\94) by killing its entire royalist peas-
antry of some 120,000 (Babeuf 1795).
The discipline of comparative genocide research
draws on the entire corpus of historical research of the
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