ABSTRACT
Sociology and anthropology also shared a reluctance, until relatively recently, to confront issues of genocide and state terror. “Many sociologists,” stated Irving Louis Horowitz in the late 1980s, “exhibit a studied embarrassment about these issues, a feeling that intellectual issues posed in such a manner are melodramatic and unfit for scientific discourse.”2 Nancy Scheper-Hughes similarly described “the traditional role of the anthropologist as neutral, dispassionate, cool and rational, [an] objective observer of the human condition”; anthropologists traditionally maintained a “proud, even haughty distance from political engagement.”3
