ABSTRACT
In seminal essays published in 2002 for collections edited by Jeanette Mageo and Alexander Hinton, the anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes described her provocative concept of a “genocidal continuum.” Derived from her long-standing anthropological research – “a concern with popular consent to everyday violence” – Scheper-Hughes outlined “a multitude of ‘small wars and invisible genocides’” occurring in various “normative social spaces.” Institutional settings (jails, oldage homes, and the like) were especially prone to violent acts and relationships that contained at least a kernel of genocide, in the sense that they exhibited in a smaller-scale or more localized form some of the same ideological and symbolic frameworks, similar patterns of demonization and scapegoating, and exclusions from the sphere of social obligation as fully fledged genocidal outbreaks. They also pointed to the way that a genocidal potential was latent and pervasive in societies, available for activation in mass-killing campaigns. These “less dramatic, permitted, everyday” acts and atrocities were tied to the human capacity for “social exclusion, dehumanization, depersonalization, pseudo-speciation, and reification that normalize atrocious behavior and violence toward others.” Given the presence of these ideological and institutional features of our environment, Scheper-Hughes argued that we must “exercise a defensive hypervigilance, a hypersensitivity” to the “genocidal capacity “of human beings; and recognize how strategies of marginalization, anathematization, and exclusion “make participation (under other conditions) in genocidal acts possible, perhaps more easy than we would like to know.”
