Comment

Comment by M Izabel on November 14, 2010 at 1:14am

Okay... to really end my participation here... Lemkin who coined the word "genocide", included cultural destruction under vandalism as genocide.

Read the Lemkin Principle

http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:Mo_c9sZpdTkJ:www.geno...

Comment by M Izabel on November 14, 2010 at 12:43am

A quick google of "Bushmen and Genocide", this thing came out from BBC by Paul Kenyon...

"Many of the Bushmen forced out of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve now live in the resettlement town of New Xade.

Jumanda is worried about exposure to diseases such as Aids
There, we met Jumanda Gakelebone.

He is a Bushmen activist and supporter of Survival International. "It's a genocide. It's a murder by the government," he said.

Jumanda went on to explain that by forcing his people out of the game reserve and into resettlement towns like New Xade, the government is exposing them to diseases such as Aids.

He said those who have refused to leave the game reserve are facing starvation because vital supplies have been cut off by the government. This is his concept of genocide. "

As an anthropologist, you should not deny that there are Bushmen who think of their experience as genocide.

Comment by M Izabel on November 14, 2010 at 12:31am

You are being dismissive or, the worse, untruthful in your data-gathering about the Bushmen. Why don't you read the data collected by Survival International that has been with the Bushmen for decades? There were Bushmen who used "genocide" in relation to their experience. Don't be one-sided. Listen to those Bushmen too.

The issue of genocide is not a joke to me being a long-time member of amnesty international and a person belonging to a culture that has been fighting for ancestral domain and self-determination.

Your idea of genocide is really narrow-minded. You said that there is no cultural genocide because a culture does not cease to exist. Well, there are still jews, tutsis, marsh arabs, indian muslims, bosnian muslims, armenians. Are you saying then that these peoples have no history of being victims of genocide since their is no total extinction? Now you will say we are talking about culture not people. Okay, how about the material culture of German Jews such as books, paintings, religious paraphernalia that were burned and destroyed.

All cases of genocide accepted by united nations started as destruction of culture and marginalization of people. Hindu extremists burned christian churches in Orissa before raping nuns and killing priests and their christian devotees.

Regarding fieldwork, theorizing, interpretation, modeling, etc., I cannot talk about it. Some people here can tell you I had and did a lot of those when I started here to the point that I annoyed people.

Comment by Michael Francis on November 13, 2010 at 11:25pm

I actually work as an anthropologist with San or Bushmen in Southern Africa. I currently have three fieldsites active on of which had experienced a genocide. They are largely assimilated into the dominate Zulu speaking community and most scholars argue that they are an extinct group of people. They call themselves the Abatwa and I write against the grain so that they are not silenced in a process called archaeological colonization (first by Frans Prins). Another group the #Khomani of the Northern are a disparate group of people come together during a land claim and the last in Botswana is the !Xoo who until the 1980s relied on hunting and gathering as a main means of livelihood. The !Xoo experience racism, environmental degradation, discrimination and language loss in their home country. To call what they are experiencing as a genocide is to do symbolic violence to those who did experience genocide. So do not make baseless accusations about the silencing of voices. Perhaps when you do some fieldwork you will understand what it means to contextualise and theorise and understand how voices from the field articulate with texts you write.

Comment by M Izabel on November 13, 2010 at 10:06pm

I rest my case. Let readers judge your arguments and mine. I will stick to what victims express about genocide and their victimhood. I do not intend to become an anthropologist so I could silence the views and beliefs of the people I study, and contextualize it according to my notions and beliefs.

Comment by Michael Francis on November 13, 2010 at 10:00pm

@M Izabel - it seems that each case you cite actually involves a 'real' genocide or intended one - the systematic eradication of a people ("its physical destruction in whole or in part").

There is no such thing as cultural genocide as culture itself is a process so even as it changes due to nasty external forces it nonetheless remains unless there is a real genocide involved.

Your Hindu example has some conceptual problems. That case could have been considered the first step towards a genocide because of the context in which the mosque was burnt down. But every mosque burning is not the start of a genocide and clearly not an actual genocide. If we treat every mosque burning as genocide then things get silly quickly.

The case of the Akha is a shocking violation of human rights but not calling it a genocide does not mean that the women are not victims. It means they are victims of forced sterilization, racism and a whole other host of gendered based violence.

Concepts should not be widened beyond intelligibility and utility. Violence, even mass violence, can be understood as other things and other processes we do not need genocide to be a catch-all umbrella term for nasty things done to groups of people. We can actually just be direct and clear about what is happening without distorting an important concept.

You used culture in a particular way perhaps the next step in the debate should be about the meaning of the word culture and how can anthropologists just get on studying culture without worrying to much about the implications of such a concept.

Comment by M Izabel on November 13, 2010 at 9:30pm

I was not "coming around to your point of view." I did not reject culture as part of genocide. I illustrated how genocide as a process happened. It starts with the destruction of culture and environment. I also demonstrated how we should understand the nature of genocide using cases and through looking at their commonalities.

Comment by M Izabel on November 13, 2010 at 9:19pm

As I said genocide is a process. Cultural genocide is the first indication that the physical one, the mass killing, is coming or will follow. Semantics that exist for the sake of existing is what I'm against. If there is a case of semantics that exists for the sake of inclusivity or widening of a concept, then I'm for it. Genocide, whose definition, i believe, should be extended, is a good example of semantics that functions to include rather than exclude.

When the Hindus destroyed a mosque in Uttar Pradesh in India, only a few considered it to be genocide. When Hindus started killing Muslims in Gujarat en masse, then they started treating it as genocide. Had they considered the mosque incident as genocide, the Gujarat ethnic cleansing could have been avoided or preempted.

Displacement as genocide fits well in the experience of the Karen people of Burma. If we will not consider culture as part of genocide, the living situations of the karen people in forests and refugee camps will be meaningless. Remember they are not on tour or on vacation. Let's give credit to their experience and idea of genocide.

One of the definitions of genocide used by UN is:

3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.

Isn't that open to wide interpretations? What are conditions of life? Are they not related to culture, environment, identity, ethnicity, community?

Besides, there are cases of genocide that do not involved mass killing or even killing as we define it as infliction of death or extermination of life.

The best example of such genocide is the case of Akha women, whose sterilization was spearheaded by an American missionary with a PhD in anthropology. If we just define genocide as mass killing of a population, we will be toeing the line of this missionary-anthropologist that the women he sterilized are not victims.

http://www.akha.org/content/medicaldocuments/untimelycut.html

Comment by Michael Francis on November 13, 2010 at 9:02pm

@M Izebel - I also wanted to point out that your last post referred to 5 cases of genocide as used correctly. It seems you are coming around to my point of view.

Comment by Michael Francis on November 13, 2010 at 8:32pm

@M Izabel - You claim I do not "understand that culture, environment, and people go hand in hand as victims of genocide". Of course these need to be understood when studying victims of genocide. Anthropology brings to bear context and local understanding, but that is not where the disagreement is.

Yes victims of genocide have been displaced but that is not related in a direct sense as you imply. Displacing a people does not equal a genocide just because some people who suffered a genocide were displaced. There is a logical tautology built into your claims of displacement that does not exist.

Now saying this does not mean I am for the displacement of peoples, but displacement from one's environment needs to be understood in its own right. Now if that is part of the beginning process of genocide then surely it can be linked in a direct manner such as the Marsh Arab example you cite, but in most cases displacement is not genocide. To call every displacement a genocide is to create epistemic murk unnecessarily.

Genocide often includes the destruction of that peoples books, ideas, property, lands, language and so on. That I do understand. If one is studying genocide then studying the "culture, ethnicity, identity, environment" of those that experienced the genocide is important. Of course they are linked. The issue is one of representation and intellectual honesty. If there is no genocide occurring or about to occur then it is a misrepresentation and misuse of the concept.

It is not the linking of "culture, ethnicity, identity, environment" to genocide where appropriate but linking of genocide to other things such as language loss, environmental degradation, displacement, and cultural change.

Its about clarity of language and being direct. If every time we use the word genocide we have to justify and say what we mean because it has been so overused, abused and misused to mean anything nasty then we rob the word of meaning and utility. So lets use genocide to refer to genocide and use marginalization, language loss, abuse, racism, ethnocide, etc etc etc to mean what they mean without conflating them all in one. Lets get on with anthropology and embed our work in context and empirical detail and 'native points of view' so that we can truly understand "culture, ethnicity, identity, environment" as they relate to whatever situation we are studying, genocide or not.

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