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Publications (66)
Over the last two decades, the interdisciplinary field of genocide studies has dramatically expanded and matured. No longer in the shadow of Holocaust studies, it is now the primary subject of journals, textbooks, encyclopedias, readers, handbooks, special journal issues, bibliographies, workshops, seminars, conference, Web sites, research centers,...
How do societies come to terms with the aftermath of genocide and mass violence, and how might the international community contribute to this process? Transitional Justice, the first edited collection in anthropology focused directly on this issue, argues that, however well-intentioned, transitional justice needs to grapple more deeply with the com...
Individuals can assume—and be assigned—multiple roles throughout a conflict: perpetrators can be victims, and vice versa; heroes can be reassessed as complicit and compromised. However, accepting this more accurate representation of the narrativized identities of violence presents a conundrum for accountability and justice mechanisms premised on cl...
If many people were shocked by Donald Trump's 2016 election, many more were stunned when, months later, white supremacists took to the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting "Blood and Soil" and "Jews will not replace us!" Like Trump, the Charlottesville marchers were dismissed as aberrations-crazed extremists who did not represent the real...
Despite its rapid proliferation over the past fifteen years, genocide and atrocity crimes prevention studies are often blinded by normative assumptions and conceptual blinder. This essay argues that any effort at prevention must begin with a first critical lesson, one revealed in the essay’s opening line and writing style. This first lesson suggest...
Long considered a subfield of international relations and political science, Peace Studies has solidified its place as an interdisciplinary field in its own right with a canon, degree programs, journals, conferences, and courses taught on the subject. Internationally renowned centers offering programs on Peace and Conflict Studies can be found on e...
Long considered a subfield of international relations and political science, Peace Studies has solidified its place as an interdisciplinary field in its own right with a canon, degree programs, journals, conferences, and courses taught on the subject. Internationally renowned centers offering programs on Peace and Conflict Studies can be found on e...
In April 1975 the Khmer Rouge embarked on a radical campaign to remake Cambodia, one that, in under four years, claimed the lives of approximately 2 million people. We take a critical genocide studies perspective to examine this mass death, arguing that a key dynamic driving the violence was an “impassability.” If the revolutionary society was “to...
Is there a point to international justice? This book explores this question in Cambodia, where Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge revolutionaries committed genocide and crimes against humanity in an attempt to create a pure socialist regime (1975-1979). Due to geopolitics, it was only in 2006 that a UN-backed hybrid tribunal, the Extraordinary Chambers in the C...
What are the legacies of genocide and mass violence for individuals and the social worlds in which they live, and what are the local processes of recovery? Genocide and Mass Violence aims to examine, from a cross-cultural perspective, the effects of mass trauma on multiple levels of a group or society and the recovery processes and sources of resil...
This essay explores the interrelationship of justice and time at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia [ECCC hyperlink: http://www.eccc.gov.kh/en] (ECCC, or “Khmer Rouge Tribunal”). In doing so, it follows the trial participation of the late Vann Nath, a survivor of S-21, a torture and detention center operated by the Khmer Rouge. Fr...
This important collection of essays expands the geographic, demographic, and analytic scope of the term genocide to encompass the effects of colonialism and settler colonialism in North America. Colonists made multiple and interconnected attempts to destroy Indigenous peoples as groups. The contributors examine these efforts through the lens of gen...
Why are some genocides prominently remembered while others are ignored, hidden, or denied? Consider the Turkish campaign denying the Armenian genocide, followed by the Armenian movement to recognize the violence. Similar movements are building to acknowledge other genocides that have long remained out of sight in the media, such as those against th...
This article describes a culturally sensitive assessment tool for traumatized Cambodians, the Cambodian "Somatic Symptom and Syndrome Inventory" (SSI), and reports the outcome of a needs assessment conducted in rural Cambodia using the instrument. Villagers locally identified (N = 139) as still suffering the effects of the Pol Pot genocide were eva...
Anthropology, Morality, and Violence After World War II The Anthropology of Political Violence Recent Directions The Anthropology of Violence and Morality Conclusion Acknowledgments References
This panel is a series of presentations by a father and his three sons. The first is a critique of the concept of theUnus Mundus, an idea that goes back at least as far as Plato's Cave in western intellectual history. A longing for unchanging foundational ideas lies at the core of much of our culture, psychology, and theology. The subsequent presen...
How do societies come to terms with the aftermath of genocide and mass violence? And how might the international community contribute to this process? In recent years, transitional justice mechanisms such as tribunals and truth commissions have emerged as a favored means of redress, one that is now the focus of international workshops, academic con...
Analyzing the Cambodian genocide, this article proposes that the concept of ''psychosocial dissonance'' (PSD) can be fruitfully used to understand how individuals come to commit genocidal atrocities. PSD arises when salient cultural models that motivate behavior in contradictory ways (such as the injunction to kill versus prosocial norms) come into...
This article explores the nightmares of Cambodian refugees in a cultural context, and the role of nightmares in the trauma ontology of this population, including their role in generating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Among Cambodian refugees attending a psychiatric clinic, we found that having a nightmare was strongly associated with havin...
In April 2000, the Phnom Penh Post, an English-language newspaper, published an interview with a former Khmer Rouge cadre who had studied in Paris with Pol Pot and helped to found the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). When asked why Pol Pot killed millions of people, the former cadre, who chose to remain anonymous, replied, "A s far as the killin...
Genocide, Collective Violence, and Popular Memory: The Politics of Remembrance in the Twentieth Century. David E. Lorey. and William H. Beezley, eds. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Books, 2002. 258 pp.
This chapter maintains that, as opposed to being an "aberration" or a "regression" to a state of "barbarism," genocide is powerfully influenced by modernity. Reflecting on the work of Zygmunt Bauman, the chapter argues psychological anthropology provides an important and distinct vantage on the interconnection between genocide and modernity, illust...
This book analyzes the individual and collective experience of and response to trauma from a wide range of perspectives including basic neuroscience, clinical science, and cultural anthropology. Each perspective presents critical and creative challenges to the other. The first section reviews the effects of early life stress on the development of n...
One of the ways in which people make collective sense of the world is by connecting the present time to past time through participation in myth and ritual. In some rituals, people make the connection through conventional symbols and perfunctory displays of emotion. The annual Remembrance Day ceremony in Britain and Canada, commemorating the war dea...
On 29 January 2003, a Cambodian mob burned down the Thai Embassy in Phnom Penh. This article explores the roots of this violence, arguing that the anti-Thai riots were linked in part to a set of discourses and imagery that have long been central to assertions of ‘Khmerness’ and constructions of the ‘Other’.
Of all the horrors human beings perpetrate, genocide stands near the top of the list. Its toll is staggering: well over 100 million dead worldwide. Why Did They Kill? is one of the first anthropological attempts to analyze the origins of genocide. In it, Alexander Hinton focuses on the devastation that took place in Cambodia from April 1975 to Janu...
Manoa 16.1 (2004) 137-153
Cambodia's killers live on in quiet infamy the newspaper headline read. The short article, by a respected American journalist, described how the man known as Grandfather Khan continued to live unpunished among the villagers he had terrorized during the years of Democratic Kampuchea.
Khan, the article explained, had killed...
This chapter discusses genocide and the role anthropologists play in advocating for the rights of indigenous peoples and focusing on political violence in complex state societies. It first defines the concept of genocide, and notes that while it has only been recently invented, the types of destructive behaviors that it references go far back in hi...
Genocide is one of the most pressing issues that confront us today. Its death toll is staggering: over one hundred million dead. Because of their intimate experience in the communities where genocide takes place, anthropologists are uniquely positioned to explain how and why this mass annihilation occurs and the types of devastation genocide causes...
Analyse et critique de la these anthropologique de Daniel Goldhagen sur l'origine de la violence genocidaire dans son ouvrage Hitler's Willing Executioners : Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. L'explication unidimensionnelle de Goldhagen, par le modele culturel de l'antisemitisme eliminationiste, l'amene a nier et a minimiser l'importance de proce...
More than one and one half million Cambodians died from disease, starvation, overwork, and execution under Khmer Rouge rule (1975–79). To help redress the lack of anthropological research on the origins of such large-scale genocides, in this article I explore how the Cambodian cultural model of disproportionate revenge, in combination with Communis...
Alexander Laban Hinton examines the cultural origins of the Cambodian genocide (1975-79), a period when over one and a half million of Cambodia's eight million inhabitants died of starvation, disease, overwork, or outright execution. During this time, the Khmer Rouge reorganized Cambodian society along strict communist lines that glorified peasant...
At a first glance, it might seem difficult to see the threads connecting David Chandler's essay "Songs at the Edge of the Forest" to his more recent works on Democratic Kampuchea (DK), such as Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison.1 How, for example, does one move from an ancient story ("How the Kaun Lok Bird Got Its Name"...
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Emory University, 1997. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 279-305). A psychopraxis approach to the study of genocide -- Mandala politics -- Face, honor, and the struggle for power spit -- Obedience, power displays, and fearful hearts. Microfilm. s