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Genocide: Truth, Memory, and Representation

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 Kevin Lewis O’Neill and Alexander Laban Hinton

Genocide, Truth,

Memory, and Representation

An Introduction

Tomorrow
you will walk toward other evenings
and all your questions
will flow like the last river of the world.
—Herberto Padilla, “History”

Genocide staggers the imagination. It staggers us with numbers.

In the 20th century alone, 65,000 Hereros, 1 million Armenians,
6 million Ukranians, 6 million Jews, 3 million Bangladeshis, up
to 1 million Indonesians, 100,000 Hutus, 2 million Cambodians,
200,000 East Timorese, 200,000 Guatemalans, 800,000 Tutsis
and moderate Hutus, and countless numbers of indigenous peo­
ples have been annihilated.1 And this is a partial list. It staggers
us with images: Armenian death marches into the desert, Nazi
crematoriums and concentration camps, Cambodian killing
fields, Interahamwe roadblocks and rape pens in Rwanda, Su­
danese refugee camps, Sarajevo besieged, and Kurdish villag­
ers in Iraq gassed to death. Some of these images have become
iconic of genocide: emaciated prisoners staring from behind the
wires of a concentration camp, mass graves packed with corpses,
and the fleeing or suffering refugee. With the power of these
numbers and images genocide also staggers us with questions:
How can such events happen? What motivates people to commit

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 these heinous crimes against humanity? What is it like to endure horrors
of this type? How do survivors cope? Can they ever? Why could the vio­
lence not be stopped? And why does genocide happen time after time?
Questions such as these motivated the Polish jurist Raphaël Lemkin
to seek the creation of new international law that would punish the per­
petrators of mass murder. Writing in the shadow of the Holocaust, Lem­
kin coined the term genocide—a hybrid word taken from the Greek genos
(race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing)—to denote a crime that involved
“a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essen­
tial foundations of life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the
groups themselves” (1944:79). Just two years after Lemkin published this
definition, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 96-I,
which states: “Genocide is a denial of the right of existence of entire human
groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human
beings. . . . Many instances of such crimes of genocide have occurred, when
racial, religious, political and other groups have been destroyed, entirely or
in part” (Kuper 1981:23).
In 1948 Resolution 96-I became international law, with genocide refer­
ring to “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a na­
tional, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” These acts include both
outright “killing” and “causing serious bodily or mental harm” or creating
“conditions of life” intended to physically destroy the members of a group.
The definition of genocide in Resolution 96-I also encompasses attempts
to eliminate a group’s survival by “preventing births” or “forcibly transfer­
ring [their] children” to another group. Yet it is clear that some key ele­
ments of Lemkin’s original conceptualization of genocide were left out of
Resolution 96-I.
Why? The contours of the legal definition of genocide shifted as United
Nations (UN) delegates debated the wording of the convention for two
years (Kuper 1981). Certain types of groups (national, ethnical, racial, or
religious) were included. Others, such as economic and political groups,
were eventually excluded for a variety of reasons ranging from the con­
ceptual (e.g., some argued that political and economic groups were not
enduring) to the pragmatic (e.g., many states feared interference in their
internal political affairs and some, such as the Soviet Union, feared accusa­
tions they had committed genocide against such groups).

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 Similarly, in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Lemkin, reflecting on Nazi
atrocities, argued that there were political, social, cultural, economic, bio­
logical, physical, religious, and moral “techniques of genocide” (1944:82).
While physical, biological, and cultural acts appeared in the initial draft of
the convention, the broader sense of “cultural genocide” was eliminated
from the final text (Kuper 1981). Cultural genocide, for example, includes
curtailing or banning a language, traditional socialization practices, artis­
tic endeavors, ritual practices, social institutions, and so forth. The framers
of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime
of Genocide erased these aspects from the text for conceptual and legal
reasons (some argued that cultural genocide was already prohibited in in­
ternational law) and practical reasons (colonial powers, for example, likely
feared accusations of cultural genocide). There were similar debates over
issues of motivation and intent, the scale of destruction, and punishment
and enforcement.
The very conception and legal definition of genocide was forged in a
highly politicized atmosphere, one that resulted in inclusions and exclu­
sions and a moral gradation of atrocity. The destruction of political groups,
while abhorrent, was written out of the convention and became something
else, an implicitly lesser crime; cultural genocide similarly dropped from
sight, eventually reemerging in popular discourse as “ethnocide.”
It is precisely these sorts of processes of inclusion and exclusion that are
at the core of this book. Moreover, this book addresses acts of discursive
privileging and moments of silencing that complicate and constitute is­
sues of truth and falsity. While some of the essays in this volume grapple
with the genocide convention directly (e.g., Pamela Ballinger’s essay), most
carry these themes far and wide to consider how genocide is itself repre­
sented and remembered in a variety of contexts.
Along these lines, while this book examines several cases commonly
regarded as genocide, it includes other cases in which the application of
the term remains contested such as the North-South conflict in Sudan and
Guatemala, where debate continues over whether civil conflict reached
genocidal proportions. The Guatemalan case also illustrates how such views
change over time, as many more people came to view the violence against
the indigenous Maya as genocide following the findings of the Commission
for Historical Clarification (Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico,

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 CEH) in 1999. Such moments and these more contested cases are revealing
about the ways in which horrific violence is represented, remembered, and
linked to truth claims about genocide. Accordingly, the essays in this vol­
ume do not just explore the relationship of genocide to truth, memory,
and representation; they are also concerned with how discourses about
genocide, truth, memory, and representation are interlinked. This issue
emerges perhaps most clearly in Conerly Casey’s essay on Nigeria. While
some scholars suggest that Nigeria has been the site of genocide or geno­
cidal massacres (see Kuper 1981; Chalk and Jonassohn 1990),2 others would
argue that genocide has not taken place there. Casey’s essay explores the
ways in which discourses about genocide in Nigeria are bound up with is­
sues of representation, memory, and truth claims, particularly with regard
to the media.
At the same time, several of the essays in this volume are directly con­
cerned with issues of truth, memory, and representation in the aftermath
of what most people would agree is genocide. These chapters ask: What
happens to people and the societies in which they live after genocide? How
are the devastating events remembered on the individual and collective
levels, and how do these memories intersect and diverge as governments in
postgenocidal states attempt to produce a more monolithic “truth” about
the past? How are representations of a violent past structured by one’s po­
sitioning as a survivor, perpetrator, witness, government official, scholar,
activist, legal professional, journalist, or ethnographer? And, what are the
epistemological, ethical, and empirical entanglements in which research­
ers find themselves enmeshed in postgenocidal contexts?
Central to the book is the notion that socially and historically located
cultural practices construct postgenocidal contexts and that these practices
are best observed through experience-near qualitative research methods.
Indeed, one of the major ways in which anthropology can contribute to
the field of genocide studies is through this experience-near, ethnographic
method of data collection. Extended face-to-face engagements with com­
munities yield textured, thick descriptions that macro-analyses of geno­
cide overlook. To this end and through these means, this book asks, what
do cultural practices and lived experiences look like in postgenocidal con­
texts—spaces in which trauma, grief, and fear, as well as power and state
control, frame and at times define the contours of everyday life for survi­
vors and perpetrators alike?

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 The “truth” of genocide, for example, often becomes a power-laden
tool over which politicians, activists, and the international community
wrestle by asserting and contesting representations cobbled together from
the often fragmented and clashing memories of survivors, perpetrators,
witnesses, and bystanders. While scholars can make distinctions between
truth, memory, and representation for the sake of analytical clarity, these
divisions frequently become problematic on the ground. This conceptual
unsteadiness can prove troubling for those who want to definitively ex­
plain how, why, and when mass murder takes place.
The stakes are high here as various individuals, groups, governments,
and institutions vie to map out a narrative of the past that legitimates their
agendas or desire for justice, assert or reject the right to legal redress for
and moral outrage about “the crime of all crimes,” and acknowledge or dis­
avow memories, experiences, suffering, and losses linked to mass murder.
These often fiery debates rage around us in the world today, ranging from
the Turkish government’s continuing denials of the Armenian genocide to
the debate over whether or not a genocide has taken place in Darfur.
Such issues have also arisen in the two countries in which the co-authors
of this introduction have conducted ethnographic fieldwork, Guatemala
(O’Neill) and Cambodia (Hinton). The politics of memory have been par­
ticularly contested in Cambodia, where, during Democratic Kampuchea
(DK), Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge enacted policies resulting in the death or ex­
ecution of 1.7 of Cambodia’s 8 million inhabitants—almost a quarter of the
population—from 1975 to 1979 (Hinton 2005).
After a Vietnamese-backed army overthrew the Khmer Rouge in Janu­
ary 1979, the sands of memory began to shift (see Hinton 2008). In Cam­
bodia, the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) (ironically, many of the
top officials in the PRK were former Khmer Rouge who had been purged by
the DK regime) lambasted the genocidal policies of the Khmer Rouge, es­
tablished the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes, wrote school texts
detailing the atrocities, held public events to commemorate the genocide,
and even put on a weeklong tribunal (August 15–19, 1979) that convicted
Pol Pot and his deputy, Ieng Sary, of genocide in absentia. Over the ensu­
ing decade the PRK repeatedly called for a UN-sponsored trial of the “Pol
Pot–Ieng Sary–Khieu Samphan clique.”
Due to geopolitics the international community would have none of
it (see Fawthrop and Jarvis 2004). Not only did China and a coalition of

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 Western powers led by the U.S. refuse to hold such a tribunal, but they al­
lowed the DK regime to hold onto Cambodia’s seat at the UN while rearm­
ing and supporting the Khmer Rouge in the fight against the PRK, which
was portrayed as a puppet of Vietnam. Meanwhile, former DK leaders
made speeches in which they asserted that PRK genocide memorials were
fabrications and, even more strikingly, that the Vietnamese were perpe­
trating a genocide in Cambodia. With a handful of exceptions, the interna­
tional community remained largely mute on the topic while providing the
Khmer Rouge with a forum to continue their denials. Even after a peace
accord was reached and UN-backed elections were held in 1993, many offi­
cials continued to refer to the genocide using the phrase “the unacceptable
practices of the recent past.”
Ironically, after the 1993 election the U.S. and other governments began
to openly use genocide to describe the actions of the murderous group that
they had directly and indirectly supported since 1979. In fact, in 1994 the
United States passed the Cambodian Genocide Justice Act, which prohib­
ited further cooperation with the Khmer Rouge and provided funds for
the collection of evidence for a possible tribunal. Only recently, in 2006,
was a UN-sponsored tribunal finally set up to bring the surviving leaders
of the Khmer Rouge to justice and to pass judgment on whether or not
evidence exists to convict former Khmer Rouge leaders of genocide (in
the legal sense of the Genocide Convention). Even as these state-level and
international-level contestations over the genocide unfolded, individual
Cambodians found their own memories and suffering framed first in terms
of the genocidal policies of the “Pol Pot–Ieng Sary–Khieu Samphan clique”
(during the PRK), then in terms of a public need for forgetting and recon­
ciliation ( just after the UN-sponsored election in 1993), and most recently
in terms of the need for “truth” that will be revealed by the UN-sponsored
tribunal (Hinton 2008).
Guatemala provides another vantage on such shifts in the politics of
truth, memory, representation, and genocide, one in which truth commis­
sions have played a prominent role. As we see in the present essays by
Victoria Sanford and Debra Rodman, the country’s 36-year civil war began
after the failure of a nationalist uprising by military officers in 1960. It for­
mally ended on December 29, 1996, with the signing of a peace agreement
between the military and counterinsurgent forces in Guatemala City. The
roots of the war, however, took hold in 1954 with a U.S.-backed coup of

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 the then democratically elected government. President Jacobo Arbenz’s
practice of land redistribution—accentuated by a Cold War fear of com­
munism—threatened the United Fruit Company, a U.S.-based corporation
and Guatemala’s biggest landowner. Following the coup, Guatemala’s gov­
ernment became increasingly militarized, while other Ladinos (Guatema­
lans of “mixed” descent) formed counterinsurgent guerrilla forces.
The struggle between the government and the guerrillas was at first ar­
ticulated through the language of class conflict. In the 1960s, however, La­
dinos incorporated Maya communities, historically excluded by Ladinos,
through an ethnic analysis of Guatemala’s struggle over freedom of orga­
nization, land rights, and democracy. The government’s response to these
demands throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s was absolutely brutal,
especially between 1978 and 1982. Large-scale massacres, scorched-earth
tactics, and massive acts of disappearances and displacements aimed at
annihilating Guatemala’s Maya population riddled the country with what
would later be understood as acts of genocide.
Global awareness of such systematic, large-scale human rights viola­
tions forced the Guatemalan government by the mid-1980s to adjust its
tactics to continue receiving international aid. Under the protective um­
brella of general amnesty and impunity, civilian rule slowly began to shape
the agenda alongside the military, while human rights abuses increased
and went unpunished. Guatemala’s peace process, however, slowly began
in 1986, amid political unrest, with a series of talks and accords that ulti­
mately led to a UN-mediated peace process (1994–96) and to the writing of
two truth commission reports.
The Oslo Accord, signed in 1994 as part of the UN peace process, initi­
ated the CEH, a project created to investigate human rights violations and
to make recommendations on how to promote peace in postwar Guate­
mala. The Roman Catholic Church’s Archbishop’s Office for Human Rights
(ODHA), motivated by the CEH, initiated its own Recovery of the Historical
Memory Project (REMHI), a faith-based truth commission that sought to
establish the history of Guatemala’s civil conflict and to serve as a basis for
justice and national reconciliation.
While they were two distinct projects, both the CEH and the REMHI came
to strikingly similar conclusions. According to the CEH, more than two
hundred thousand people died or disappeared as a result of the armed con­
flict, of which more than 80 percent were Maya; the report also establishes

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 that 93 percent of these human rights violations can be connected to the
state. In light of the Genocide Convention both projects establish that the
Guatemalan state committed acts of genocide against Maya people.
The conclusion that periods of Guatemala’s civil war are best under­
stood as genocidal is not an uncontested argument (Nelson 2003). What
this book aims to appreciate, however, is not whether Guatemala’s civil con­
flict was or was not genocidal, but how both reports represent genocide.
It is certain that both reports functioned as machines of documentation.
The commissions collected, analyzed, edited, and published extraordinary
amounts of data that form seemingly comprehensive histories of human
rights abuses. A close textual analysis, for example, demonstrates that
Christian frameworks motivate both representations of genocide (O’Neill
2005). The CEH’s ostensibly secular report employs a Christian imagination
through its reliance on a conspicuously Protestant image: the testifying in­
dividual who works toward reconciliation by giving truthful witness. This
central figure condemns genocide as a kind of fallen event. The REMHI’s
Roman Catholic report, on the other hand, represents Guatemala’s geno­
cide analogically as a sacramental moment between Guatemala’s commu­
nal body and the suffering body of Jesus Christ. While not a celebration
of Guatemala’s genocide by any stretch of the imagination, the report links
the passion narratives to Guatemala’s genocidal histories, cultivating reli­
gious meaning amid horrific moments: “Despite the profound sorrow with
which we have heard these testimonies of human suffering, the memory
and image of Christ crucified anew, we can do no less than hope that by
renouncing this dark past of horror, and with our determination to rebuild
our country, a new climate of hope will emerge with fraternity, solidarity,
and understanding” (REMHI 1998:1:xi). Guatemala, then, becomes a case
where we see how Christian imaginations inflect not just explicitly Chris­
tian truth commission reports but also secular, humanistic, democratic,
and Western institutional attempts at remembering genocide.
While acknowledging that such tribunals and truth commissions are
often very important to people who have been the victims of mass atrocity,
this book nevertheless demonstrates that there are inevitably gray zones
(see Sanford this volume; Levi 1989) and silences that are elided from these
official accounts. The essays in this volume linger on the disorderliness
of genocide, as well as on the inevitable incompleteness of any attempt to
remember and represent the truth of mass killings, systematic torture, and

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 deliberate attempts to annihilate a single group of people from the face of
the earth.
Through the tools of experience-near, ethnographic methods, then, this
volume demonstrates the enmeshments of truth, memory, and representa­
tion in genocidal and postgenocidal contexts. To emphasize this point, we
have articulated these as a single block: truth/memory/representation. By
doing so, we note that each essay, like the cases discussed above, speaks to
questions of truth, memory, and representation, albeit in different ways and
to different extents. Accordingly, for the sake of analytical clarity, we have
compartmentalized each article in terms of emphasis, highlighting one di­
mension of each to create a coherent, stylized conversation that makes a
significant contribution to the anthropology of genocide, genocide studies,
and the history of anthropological thought. We do this through the use
of boldface, darkening the analytical thread we want to emphasize while
also allowing the other two themes to remain present: truth/memory/rep­
resentation, truth/memory/representation, and truth/memory/represen-
tation.3 The aim for this book’s critical reader, then, will be to follow our
organizational strategy—noticing the themes that we have selected—but
also to read across these editorial decisions to see how each essay can be
read in and through each subtitle.
This book also fulfills a research imperative. While scholars in fields
such as history, sociology, and literature have increasingly struggled with
questions of genocide, truth, memory, and representation, particularly in
the context of the Holocaust (e.g., Diner 2000; Friedlander 1992; Hartman
1994; LaCapra 1998; Levi and Rothberg 2003; Postone and Santner 2003;
Young 1993), anthropologists have only more recently begun to grapple
with such issues, about which they have a great deal to say because of their
engaged, experience-near perspective. The burgeoning anthropological in­
terest in genocide has a number of roots, including a growing interest in
both modernity and globalization, as well as in violence and terror, a shift
from small village studies to those that examine the state-level dynamics
in situations of upheaval, flux, and violence, and a greater commitment to
reflexivity, historicity, and engaged anthropology. Our aim here is to ad­
vance this emerging research trajectory while also giving the conversation
shape and structure. In this sense it is important to note the dearth of lit­
erature available to date on the anthropology of genocide as a research
imperative.

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 As part of this growing engagement with political violence, a number of
anthropologists began writing about genocide, particularly after the geno­
cides of the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. However, to date
the nascent anthropological literature on genocide has been published in
diffuse forums—articles, book chapters, a handful of ethnographies, and
two edited volumes by Alexander Laban Hinton (2002a, 2002b). No book
in anthropology has yet directly grappled with the complex yet crucial re­
lationship of genocide, truth, memory, and representation from a com­
parative perspective. In doing so, this book fills an important gap while
building on and contributing to a growing body of work that explores
issues of truth, memory, and representation in relationship to political
violence and terror (e.g, Besteman 2002; Das et al. 2000; Das et al. 2001;
Feldman 1991; Ferguson 2003; Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997; Malkki 1995;
Nagengast 1994; Nordstrom and Robben 1995; Sanford 2003; Scheper-
Hughes and Bourgois 2004; Sluka 2000; Taussig 1984, 1987; Whitehead
2004, Zulaika and Douglass 1996).
Pamela Stewart and Andrew Strathern (2002:3–14) have helped bring
back into current anthropological discussion David Riches’s earlier (1986)
argument that violence is characterized by a structure (it involves a triad
of actors: “performer, victim and witness”), competitive stakes (“contested
legitimacy”), an aesthetics (it is “highly visible” and performative), and a
semantics (as opposed to being “senseless,” violence has crucial “expres­
sive” properties and involves shared understandings). Expanding on and
introducing some critical points regarding Riches’s model, they further ex­
plore violence in terms of history, narrative, and performance, a move also
influenced by Michael Taussig’s (1984, 1987) concurrent work that fore­
grounded issues of representation, “epistemic murk,” and the symbolic and
mimetic properties of violence. Such notions were amplified by a number
of subsequent ethnographies that focused more directly on political vio­
lence, such as Allen Feldman’s (1991) analysis of the performative, embod­
ied, and narrative aspects of violence in Northern Ireland, Liisa Malkki’s
(1995) discussion of “mythico-histories” in the aftermath of the 1972 Bu­
rundi genocide, Joseba Zualaika and William Douglass’s (1996) work on
narratives of terrorism, and E. Valentine Daniel’s (1996) discussion of the
silences, gaps of meaning, and limits of representation involved in the Sri
Lankan conflict—though of course each of these scholars was influenced
by other literatures as well.

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 More recently, several works have reframed such ideas in terms of the
imagination, a notion that resonates with Riches’s (1986) emphasis on the
communicative dimensions of violence, Cornelius Castoriadis’s (1987) con­
cept of “the social imaginary,” recent studies of globalization, modernity,
and the effects of mass mediation (see Appadurai 1996; Anderson 1991;
Goankar 2002), and the aftermath of 9/11 (Strathern, Stewart, and White­
head 2006). What such diverse sources share is a view of the imagination
as a creative force that both interprets events in terms of a set of existing
cultural codes and generates new constellations of meaning in moments of
transformation, chaos, and even radical change. With regard to violence,
the imagination involves narratives, performances, embodiments, and
symbols that infuse spaces of violence with meaning and communicative
value but are creatively reworked through time (e.g., Aijmer and Abbink
2000; Hinton 2005; Schmidt and Schröder 2001; Strathern, Stewart, and
Whitehead 2006).
All of this work, both new and old, has relevance for the articles in this
volume, which explore how the genocidal past is represented and reimag­
ined, asserted or elided through narratives and counternarratives, remem­
bered or forgotten, avenged or unavenged, and coped with or silenced
and ignored in different contexts and historical moments. With regard to
Riches in particular, the two cases we discussed earlier and the essays in
this book foreground how truth and legitimacy are asserted in postgeno­
cidal contexts, how victims, perpetrators, witnesses, and outside observers
may all imagine the past in very different ways, and how these contesta­
tions remain highly visible, particularly given the proliferation and rapid­
ity of electronic media. Power remains central to this politics of memory,
as some groups have the means—often through the control of govern­
ment and media—to assert their genocidal imaginary and suppress that
of others, even as this genocidal imaginary may be contested and resisted
through local protests, ritual, personal remembrance, a lingering sense of
wounding, and even silences that refuse to instantiate official narratives.
As this discussion suggests, the stakes involved and the issues dis­
cussed in this book are not just intellectual but also political. On the one
hand, within anthropology, we intend this volume to fill a crucial gap in
the anthropology of genocide by bringing together anthropologists who
are conducting cutting-edge research on genocide, truth, memory, and
representation in a variety of different contexts including Bali, Germany,

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 Guatemala, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sudan, East Timor, and the former Yugo­
slavia. On the other hand, this book intends to be a politically engaged
contribution to work on and in postgenocidal contexts, ranging from that
of scholars in the field of genocide studies and human rights to that of staff
workers at nongovernmental organizations, of aid workers, and of devel­
opment officers. Outside anthropology there is an urgent need for a book
of this kind. Moreover, because of anthropologists’ on-the-ground field
experience and attunement to local understandings, they have a great deal
to offer interdisciplinary discussions about genocide that have taken place
in a variety of cultural contexts. This is to say that while scholars in other
fields have conducted excellent analyses of the macrolevel factors facilitat­
ing genocide, fewer have been able to approach genocide from this type of
local perspective. By filling this important niche, this volume is meant to
appeal to a wide audience, ranging from scholars and teachers in a variety
of fields to activists, legal professionals, and interested lay readers.
What can anthropology contribute to efforts at rebuilding, reconcilia­
tion, and relief ? A great deal, we argue. The essays in this book attest to this
argument, examining such topics as the friction between state discourses
and personal experience; how people cope with, respond to, and remem­
ber genocide when the state foments a regime of silence or of forgetting
about the events; how the state attempts to strengthen political identity
(thereby increasing its popular support) by creating “emotive institu­
tions” (White 2005) and discourses of remembering that link its follow­
ers through a shared suffering and outrage; how individual strategies of
coping with trauma are affected and ruptured by such state initiatives or
silences; how the very act of writing about or representing genocide both
clarifies and occludes memories and understandings of the genocidal past;
and how local frames for comprehending genocidal acts articulate with
and diverge from global discourses.

Part 1: TRUTH/MEMORY/REPRESENTATION

There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths.

—Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues

It is difficult but important to approach the issue of truth in relationship

to genocide. It is difficult because so many people were killed, suffered

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 enormously, or remain enraged about the violence to which they were
subjected. To avoid misinterpretation, we want to be clear that we fully
recognize the reality of such mass violence, a reality that both of the au­
thors have confronted directly in their fieldwork. Did the Holocaust really
happen? Of course. Were indigenous peoples throughout the Americas
victims of genocide? Yes.
Nevertheless, it is important that we remain open to exploring the ways
in which discourses about truth have been deployed—including the man­
ner in which dominant state discourses may silence or even deny the ex­
periences and memories of victims. To this end, this volume risks for the
sake of analytical sophistication a more nuanced understanding of truth
within genocide and postgenocidal spaces. That is, this volume wants to
sidestep “black-and-white” conversations to explore how the idea and felt-
reality of truth within postgenocidal contexts come to be lived by survi­
vors and per­petrators alike. As Whitehead suggests in the above epigraph,
issues of truth and falsity are never simply black and white but involve
shades of gray. Genocidal and postgenocidal spaces provide haunting ex­
amples of this.
Victoria Sanford’s essay, “What Is an Anthropology of Genocide? Re­
flections on Field Research with Maya Survivors in Guatemala,” turns
this tension between truth and falsity into an ethnographic problematic
through the work of Dominick LaCapra and Primo Levi. Drawing on over
ten years of fieldwork with Maya survivors in postgenocidal Guatemala,
Sanford addresses the question of truth along with questions of memory
and representation. She asks: What do questions of truth and truthfulness
mean for ethnographers whose very research depends on the collected
stories and testimonies of survivors and perpetrators? Borrowing the con­
cept from Levi, Sanford explores what she calls the “grey zone” of research,
arguing that the memory of survivors and perpetrators in postgenocidal
contexts will undoubtedly reveal ruptures and contradictions in commu­
nities of survivors.
Rather than as a methodological crisis, Sanford reads this predicament
as a theoretical opportunity to “push and redefine the limits of anthro­
pological research on genocide.” Striking at the nature of testimony itself,
Sanford argues that the truth of narrative—as well as the truth of mem­
ory and of representation—lies in its ability to unsettle more “authentic”

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 accounts of genocide. The excavation of testimonies in postgenocidal con­
texts, for example, contributes to the reconstruction of political subjec­
tivities. Sanford makes this point by drawing on her own research on the
evacuation of clandestine gravesites in Guatemala. For Sanford and her
informants the exhumation of remains contributes to the making of col­
lective memories, as well as to the political will to resist more official and
often state-sponsored truths. The grey zone of research is thus the answer
to Sanford’s own question, what is an anthropology of genocide? By her
account, an anthropology of genocide involves the excavation of marginal­
ized voices in postgenocidal contexts to contribute to the construction of
political subjectivities and of unofficial, but no less true, political spaces of
resistance.
In her essay, “Perilous Outcomes: International Monitoring and the
Perpetuation of Violence in Sudan,” Sharon E. Hutchinson undoes seem­
ingly truthful assumptions about international human rights monitoring
groups and the implied neutrality that these groups, as well as the truths
they deliver, carry. Hutchinson’s article points to gray half-truths. Based on
fieldwork as an official monitor in the Sudan, Hutchinson’s work provides
a case study that writes against the assumption that international moni­
toring teams are essentially benign. In reality, these teams—and truths
themselves—are never neutral, and well-intentioned efforts can have coun­
terproductive outcomes. Monitoring teams may actually yield, as Hutchin­
son’s title suggests, perilous outcomes.
Hutchinson enumerates many generalizable problems in her case study,
providing points of reference for scholars in other postgenocidal contexts.
For example, the international human rights monitoring team in Sudan did
not address the issue of proportionality lying at the heart of international
humanitarian law, failed to contextualize allegations of military violence,
did not explain the criteria by which some incidents were selected for in­
vestigation rather than others, projected the “illusion of neutrality,” did
not document the military shifts of power and territory under the group’s
watch, and (implicitly) condoned the forward movement of government
military troops despite the existence of several internationally brokered
military stand-down agreements explicitly prohibiting such movement.
The human rights field operation, Hutchinson argues, ultimately did more
to excuse and condone military violence against southern Sudanese civil­
ians than to restrain or rectify military violence. Hutchinson’s essay, in all,

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 raises the problem of international monitoring operations, including those
in postgenocidal contexts. While the supposed truths of international
human rights monitoring operations will always be incomplete, Hutchin­
son points to concrete investigative strategies and reporting priorities that
could reduce the possibility that such missions will inadvertently reinforce
an atmosphere of military impunity.
In her essay, “Whose Genocide? Whose Truth? Representations of
Victim and Perpetrator in Rwanda,” Jennie E. Burnet continues where
Hutchinson ends, arguing that the Rwandan government’s articulation
of national unity through the commemoration of genocide has actually
polarized survivors and stunted their ability to mourn. The polarization
occurred during the discursive construction of victim and perpetrator in
postgenocidal Rwanda. At the center of Burnet’s ethnographic account is
an annual day of remembrance that takes the form of a national mourning
ceremony. The ceremony functions as a space where national discourses
are made on and about the Rwandan genocide. In this space, there is an
emphasis on a seemingly naturalized difference between victim and per­
petrator—between Tutsi and Hutu.
Burnet argues that this representation of the Rwandan genocide fails to
capture the complexity of the varied subject positions within postgenocide
Rwanda and that this national discourse, in turn, marginalizes many of
those who were victims of the genocide but who nonetheless do not fit
within these two distinct categories. Moreover, Burnet shows how these
national discourses structure the social reality that survivors must now
negotiate in their daily lives. Hutu widows of the genocide, for example,
find it difficult to get sufficient financial assistance from international relief
organizations, noting that the government uses their plight to marshal aid
but then fails to deliver that aid to them. Burnet makes the point that rep­
resentations of the truth of genocide, especially state-sponsored attempts
at mourning, have concrete effects on those who carry on in postgenocidal
contexts.

P a r t 2 : TR U T H / M E M O R Y / R E P R E S E N T A T I O N

Memory may almost become the art of continually varying

and misrepresenting the past, according to one’s interests in the
present.
—George Santayana, Persons and Places I

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 Just as the production of truth in postgenocidal contexts is often cast in
shades of gray, so, too, are memories in these traumatic spaces selective.
Take, for example, truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs), which now
produce an established genre of human rights literature, the TRC report
(Hayner 1994, 2002). Functioning as machines of documentation, these
commissions collect, analyze, edit, and publish extraordinary amounts of
data that form seemingly comprehensive histories of genocide. They do
so with standard techniques of memory making: first-person testimonies,
statistical analysis, charts, graphs, case studies, photographs, and historical
periodization (O’Neill 2005). Anthropological theory, however, tells us that
these acts of remembering yield “systems from chaos” (Taussig 1987:xiv)
through objectivity (Rosaldo 1989), generalizations (Abu Lughod 1991),
interview-based research (Dwyer 1982), notions of truth (Tyler 1986), and
colonial relationships (Asad 1973).4 The politics of memory, as Santayana
explains, involves continually reworking the past “according to one’s inter­
ests in the present.”
Drawing on the experiences of Balinese in the aftermath of 1965–66,
Leslie Dwyer’s essay, “A Politics of Silences: Violence, Memory, and Treach­
erous Speech in Post-1965 Bali,” explores the dynamics of presence and
absence in this politics of memory. Although Bali is a well-worn anthropo­
logical space, most scholars who worked in Indonesia after 1965–66 rarely
mentioned the country’s history of genocide, concluding that Balinese no
longer wished or perhaps were unable to speak about this troubled time.
The national history textbooks also fail to reference a genocidal violence in
which some 80,000–100,000 people were killed. Dwyer asks, placing the
question of memory at the fore: Why had 1965–66 seemed to have disap­
peared not only from the popular imagination and from expert attention
but from the lives of Balinese themselves? Dwyer’s haunting insights sug­
gest that acts of forgetting genocide must form a part of any study on and
about remembering genocide. Dwyer advocates listening to the marginal
stories that anthropologists are best able to engage through the practice of
ethnography. There, in the margins of mass violence, anthropologists are
able to begin to read silences and moments of forgetting.
Uli Linke’s essay, “The Limits of Empathy: Emotional Anesthesia and
the Museum of Corpses in Post-Holocaust Germany,” also explores the
dark side of memory: forgetting. She places at the center of her piece a

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 tension between the unprecedented successes of “Body Worlds,” an art ex­
hibition comprised of stylized corpses, and memories of the Holocaust in
postgenocidal Germany. What allows the display of dead bodies to be so
successful in a space where dead bodies had long been painful referents to
an even more painful past? Linke argues that a kind of coldness, a kind of
forgetting, has allowed “Body Worlds” to become the most visited exhibit
in Germany’s history. Part of this forgetting, Linke continues, involves the
sexualization of the bodies on display. Enlarged genitalia, distinctly gen­
dered poses, and the housing of the exhibit in Germany’s Erotic Art Mu­
seum exist as strategies to negate the humanity of the bodies on display. As
Linke argues, objectified bodies have no history and, in turn, are not the
subject of empathy. This process of dehumanization facilitated the success
of “Body Worlds” in post-Holocaust Germany and raises questions about
the limits of empathy and about strategies employed to cope and to forget
in other postgenocidal contexts. How, her essay asks us, do sites of memori­
alization, like museums, serve as places of forgetting, where self-reflexivity
and the engagements of feelings are numbed?
In her essay, “Forgotten Guatemala: Genocide, Truth, and Denial in
Guatemala’s Oriente,” Debra Rodman explores areas largely unaffected
by Guatemala’s genocide, detailing how national and international media
construct the memories of genocide for indigenous and nonindigenous
(Ladino) persons alike in postwar Guatemala. Rodman pays particular at­
tention to the oral histories that stand in stark contrast to how anthropolo­
gists and international observers remember Guatemala’s genocidal history.
Based on fieldwork in Guatemala’s interior, Rodman focuses on the theme
of denial, noting how a culture of fear and violence paradoxically allowed
both Ladinos and Maya to deny the war and genocidal dimensions. For ex­
ample, many Ladinos do not accept the concept of a civil war, choosing to
believe instead that the army invented the guerrillas to maintain control of
the indigenous population and to eliminate the Maya population. Rodman
found that many in the region tend to accept the state-sponsored belief
that the violence is not political but a result of delinquency. Rodman also
provides examples of people attributing the civil war and the massacres
that accompanied it to family feuds. In the end, Rodman lists several more
ways in which Guatemala’s genocidal civil war is denied or made neutral
and then forgotten by many.

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 P a r t 3 : TR U T H / M E M O R Y / R E P R E S E N T A T I O N

Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.

—Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Representation, like truth, is a gray area and, like memory, is selective and
constituted in part by the act of forgetting. As Miller suggests, representa­
tions of genocide are written against a backdrop of enormous upheaval,
suffering, and chaos. This tension between (inevitably narrowed) asser­
tions of reality and the enormity of genocide is evident in the attempts of
scholars, government officials, survivors, and perpetrators—to name but
a few—to represent what are otherwise ineffable crimes against humanity.
The politics and poetics of writing about genocide thus produce situated
knowledges that force us to ask how the act of representing genocide may
make genocide itself into the cultural category we have come to know.
Elizabeth F. Drexler’s essay, “Addressing the Legacies of Mass Violence
and Genocide in Indonesia and East Timor,” addresses this question, mak­
ing clear that memories are never unmediated and that with issues of vio­
lence and genocide, the truth never simply awaits discovery. Drawing on
her fieldwork in postgenocidal East Timor, Drexler explores the dense
interconnections between institutions and representations, focusing most
squarely on the inability of postindependence institutional responses to
violence to curb genocidal state violence. Drexler writes, “The transitional
institutions have failed not only to demonstrate how conditions of civil
war could develop but also to hold the Indonesian military accountable for
the violence it perpetrated.”
Drexler’s essay aims to reposition and, in some instances, refashion
advocacy in postgenocidal contexts based on a greater awareness of how
violence and genocide are represented. Drexler’s ethnographic focus on
transitional governments emphasizes the ad hoc, theatrical nature of
representation within genocidal contexts and how tribunals and special
panels, for example, create dubious histories of causation, conspiracy, and
complicity. In the article Drexler also raises problems with the practice of
transcription and translation—the very tools through which genocide is
represented. In the case of East Timor these technical problems questioned
the legitimacy and the promise of postgenocidal reconciliation. Through
the lens of anthropological field methods, Drexler found that betrayal and
collaboration, rather than reconciliation, colored the representation of of­

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 ficial accounts of violence in East Timor. Drexler’s argument recognizes
the importance of representing violence in international forums, but it is
also critical of representations of mass violence, suggesting that the very
conditions that enabled mass violence to occur actually structure the rep­
resentation of mass violence as well.
Conerly Casey’s essay, “Mediated Hostility: Media, Affective Citizen­
ship, and Genocide in Northern Nigeria,” focuses on how national and
transnational media contribute to the formation of new modes of citizen­
ship—feelings of belonging with the state—in Nigeria against the backdrop
of violent conflict. In Nigeria local media represent the political sentiments
of majority ethnic groups (Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo) and religions (Islam
and Christianity) that are embedded in historical memories of communal
violence and genocidal massacres. Focusing on instances of such violence
and on perpetrators, Casey emphasizes that the construction of killers
(subjects) and victims (objects) involves media as a mode of power.
Central to Casey’s argument is the idea that media disrupts the tem­
porality of history, creating entangled representations of social reality. In
media-saturated places such as northern Nigeria, Casey argues, youths’
uncertain experiences of local conflicts become placed next to regional
and global media images of political unrest. The result is an affective citi­
zenship constituted by “historical ruptures of identity, memory, emotion,
and agency, processes that become sediment within the body and enacted
by the body.” The intent here is to make clear that media representations
play an especially important role in the construction of political belong­
ing among Nigerian youths who are (or who may become) perpetrators in
genocidal massacres.
In her essay, “Cleansed of Experience? Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, and
the Challenges of Anthropological Representation,” Pamela Ballinger asks
the important question: What does the analytical category “ethnic cleans­
ing” allow scholars of violence to see (and not see) as compared to the
category of “genocide”? Engaging her fieldwork in the former Yugoslavia,
Ballinger questions the very tools that scholars use to represent genocidal
activities. The major concern here is with experience, particularly the
kinds of experience the phrase ethnic cleansing brings into focus and the
kinds of experience thus removed from critical analyses. Following a gene­
alogical review of the term ethnic cleansing, Ballinger turns to a case study
of what some scholars call Yugoslavia’s first instance of ethnic cleansing:

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 Istria. This case study provides a number of details that strain the catego­
ries of both genocide and ethnic cleansing, demonstrating that scholars
must be careful when representing mass violence. On the one hand, the
Istrian case involves hundreds of thousands of refugees. Yet while genocide
and ethnic cleansing suggest the production of complete victims, forced
migration out of Istria happened over the course of several years and for
multiple reasons. Genocide or ethnic cleansing did not happen all at once,
nor did mass violence crash down on the population of Istria like a wave.
The events were much more diffuse, much grayer. This case study chal­
lenges the implied structure and essence of common representations of
genocide and ethnic cleansing. On the other hand, the term ethnic cleans-
ing does refocus attention on the ethnic dimensions of violence in and be­
yond the Istria case. Ballinger’s argument problematizes the classifications
and analytical categories that scholars use, noting that scholarly represen­
tations of genocide have an effect as well.

C onclusion : TR U T H / M E M O R Y / R E P R E S E N T A T I O N
an d I ma g ina t ion

Some distortion is inherent in every attempt to achieve

stability or closure, as history changes into memory and its
institutionalization.
—Geoffrey Hartman, “Darkness Visible”

Genocide staggers the imagination. On the one hand, victims, if not all of
us, struggle to comprehend the enormity of genocide. On the other hand,
genocide’s very enormity provides potent fodder for imaginings (and the
parallel silencings and forgettings that ensue) of the genocidal past—what
we earlier referred to as the “genocidal imaginary.” Truth, memory, and
representation mix together in a given space and moment of time to con­
struct a reality that, while partial and incomplete, nevertheless may have
powerful effects on those interpellated into or subjugated by such a discur­
sive regime.
Antonius C. G. M. Robben’s epilogue, “The Imagination of Genocide,”
concludes this book by drawing out two key themes that cut through the
essays: imagination and incomprehension. While anthropologists and
other scholars pursue their research on and in postgenocidal spaces, most
have never directly experienced genocide or lived through the chaos that

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 they are trying to capture. Most scholars thus rely on their imaginations.
The imagination, Robben makes clear, only takes us so far, as genocide
itself is impossible to directly and fully know, comprehend, and represent.
Genocide’s ineffable qualities and the distances that exist between the an­
thropologist and genocidal events are thus poignant and powerful notions
with which both to begin and to end this book.
Rather than seeking straightforward truths, memories, and representa­
tions, the reader is encouraged to follow the book’s guiding problematics
and questions, which focus not on veracity or realism but on the cultural
work that practices of truth, memory, and representation do in postgeno­
cidal contexts and on how that work differs from one social and historical
space to another. Anthropologists, as this book in general and Robben’s
epilogue in particular demonstrate, rely on their imaginations to under­
stand the incomprehensible, but in a way that uncovers how and why
truth, memory, and representation exist as entangled efforts in spaces of
such traumatic and horrific acts of mass violence.

N o t es

1. These numbers are taken from Charny 1999; Kuper 1981; and Totten, Parsons, and
Charny 1997. It is notoriously difficult to determine the exact number of dead in
genocide, a reality that has led to many controversies. As several of the essays in this
volume demonstrate, such debates are often closely bound up with the politics of
memory and representation.
2. Article 2 of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention defines genocide as follows: “In the
present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with in­
tent 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 chil­
dren of the group to another group.” In an effort to address the problem of numbers
(i.e., how many people must be killed before mass murder may be considered geno­
cide), Leo Kuper proposed that smaller-scale “genocidal massacres” are “expressed
characteristically in the annihilation of a section of a group—men, women, and
children, as for example in the wiping out of whole villages. This is in part because
the genocidal massacre has some of the elements of genocide” (1981:10). Like many
other scholars of genocide, the co-editors prefer a broad definition of genocide that
encompasses a variety of collectivities, including political and economic groups as
well as other sorts of groupings found in different cultural traditions. Along these

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 lines Helen Fein (1990) has proposed defining genocide as “sustained purposeful
action by a perpetrator to physically destroy a collectivity directly or indirectly,
through interdiction of the biological and social reproduction of group mem­
bers, sustained regardless of the surrender or lack of threat offered by the victim”
(1990:24; see also Chalk and Jonassohn 1990:23; Hinton 2002b).
3. See Dirks, Eley, and Ortner (1994) on this organizational strategy.
4. This particular constellation of critiques of anthropology comes from an article by
Roy D’Andrade (1995).

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26  O’Neill and Hinton

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