ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to attempt Raphael Lemkin’s notions of cultural genocide, focusing on what Lemkin thought culture was. Lemkin’s theories of persecution and mass violence are increasingly influential outside the subfield of genocide studies. Despite Lemkin’s well-known interest in cultural destruction, what Lemkin meant by “cultural genocide” is less well-known, and Lemkin’s views on the “death” of a culture are complex, nuanced and, at first-glance, counterintuitive. For Lemkin, genocide signified “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The key detail is that the destruction of culture, in Lemkin’s thinking, is one of many ways in which genocide can be committed. Lemkin believed genocide was a colonial practice, and he said so explicitly. Genocide was the destruction of nations, which entailed the destruction of the national patterns of the oppressed group and the imposition of the national patterns of the oppressor.
