The aim of this article is to interrogate the concept of cultural genocide. The primary context examined is the Government of Canada's recent attempt at reconciliation through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Drawing on the work of Audra Simpson, Glen Sean Coulthard, Kyle Powys Whyte, Stephanie Lumsden, and Luana Ross, I argue that cultural genocide, like cultural rights, is depoliticized, thus limiting the political impact these concepts can invoke. Following Sylvia Wynter, I also argue that (...) the aims of “truth and reconciliation” can sometimes serve to resituate the power of a liberal multicultural settler state, rather than seek systemic changes that would properly address the present-day implications of the residential school system. Finally, I argue that genocide and culture need to be repoliticized in order to support Indigenous futurity and sovereignty. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the possibility of treating cultural destruction and the destruction of cultural heritage as a genocidal act. My argument proceeds in two stages. I first suggest that we ought to view cultural destruction as a necessary by‐product of genocide and a member of a set of jointly sufficient conditions for genocide. However, to securely establish that cultural destruction and the destruction of cultural heritage ought to be viewed as genocidal (...) acts, we need to additionally show why loss of culture and heritage are significant harms, comparable to other instances of genocide. In light of this, I then propose an account of the harms of cultural destruction that grounds these harms in loss of normative agency and show how destruction of cultural heritage contributes to this. In particular, I argue that cultural heritage can be viewed both as a condition for normative agency and as itself an expression of normative agency. (shrink)

This chapter develops the hypothesis that social death is utterly central to the evil of genocide, not just when a genocide is primarily cultural but even when it is homicidal on a massive scale. It is social death that enables us to distinguish the peculiar evil of genocide from the evils of other mass murders. The evil of genocide falls not only on men and boys but also on women and girls, typically unarmed, untrained in (...) defense against violence, and often also responsible for care of the wounded, the sick, the disabled, babies, children, and the elderly. The damage of war and terrorism is commonly assessed in terms of its ruin of individual careers, body counts, statistics on casualties, and material costs of rebuilding. An injustice becomes an evil when it inflicts harms that make victims' lives unbearable, indecent, or impossible, or that make victims' deaths indecent. (shrink)

Understanding transitional justice and dealing with the past as elements of intergenerational justice puts our focus on the establishment of sustainable, peaceful, social relationships among groups or members thereof within an intergenerational polity or society after violent conflicts, such as genocide or other crimes against humanity. However, what if this process is undermined by institutionally supported denialism? This paper addresses the question of the normative importance of genocide recognition negatively, by examining the way in which subsequent genocide (...) denialism might be considered as a perpetuation of injustice against genocide survivors and their descendants. I will argue that genocide denialism can be considered as a continuation of genocidal violence in epistemic form, that is, an epistemic injustice, whereby members of the victim group are negatively discriminated against with regard to their credibility and intelligibility. Institutional genocide denialism, then, does not just prevent societies from dealing with their genocidal past, but in the first instance constitutes renewed humiliation and violation of the epistemic authority of genocide survivors and their descendants, thus becoming an instance of intergenerational injustice. (shrink)

It is widely thought that stealing, trading and destroying cultural artifacts in time of war are inherently immoral actions, and that it is right that they be treated as war crimes, which, indeed, they currently are. But oppressive cultures have their heritage and cultural artifacts too, in the form of monuments, sites of worship, and so on; and for the oppressed, these things may be awful reminders of their subordination, and may even perpetuate it. This chapter suggests that, (...) since cultural objects can be both tools and symbols of unjust oppression, their theft and destruction ought to be seen as appropriate when this would be a means of overcoming oppression. Whatever current law may say, in these instances, it would be morally inappropriate to count such acts as war crimes. Furthermore, it is bizarre that theft and destruction of cultural property are counted as war crimes when soldiers killing each other is not (due to combatant immunity). Surely killing is worse than property destruction and theft. It is therefore argued that, where possible, it would be better for conflicts to be fought using the latter methods. Finally, the chapter responds to many objections to using theft and destruction of cultural property as a method of warfare. E.g. to the objection that such property has timeless, trans-cultural, aesthetic, historical and scientific value, it is replied that justice is a more important value; and to the objection that these practices amount to cultural genocide it is replied that unjust cultures have no right to exist unmodified. (This chapter was formerly entitled: "Culture Weaponized: A Contrarian Theory of the Sometime Appropriateness of the Destruction, Theft and Trade of Art and Cultural Artifacts in Armed Conflict." The PhilPapers archived version is a pre-penultimate version of the published version.). (shrink)

The origins of genocide have been sought by scholars in many areas of human experience: politics, religion, culture, economics, demography, ideology. All these of course are valid explanations, and go a long way to getting to grips with the objective conditions surrounding genocide. But, as Berel Lang put it some time ago, there remains an inexplicable gap between the idea and the act of mass murder. This article aims to be a step towards bridging that gap by adding (...) a human dimension to the existing explanations. Building on Roger Caillois’s anthropological analysis of ‘war as festival’, Georges Bataille’s concept of society’s ‘excess energy’, and Emile Durkheim’s idea of ‘collective effervescence’, and connecting these terms to those used explicitly in relation to the Holocaust by Dominick LaCapra (‘scapegoating’ and the ‘carnivalesque’) and Saul Friedl‰nder (‘Rausch’ or ‘ecstasy’), I argue that prior to and during any act of genocide there occurs a heightening of community feeling, to the point at which this ecstatic sense of belonging permits, indeed demands, a normally forbidden act of transgression in order to ‘safeguard’ the community by killing the designated ‘threatening’ group. This article is a theoretical starting point aimed at stimulating discussion, in which I refer to the Nanjing and My Lai massacres and the genocides in Nazi Germany and Rwanda to show where empirical research is needed to illustrate this concept of ‘genocide as transgression’. (shrink)

This essay develops a detailed account of the features that make a group susceptible to the harm of genocide. If the members of a group consent to a life in common, if the culture of the group is comprehensive, and if the social structure of the group is such that membership cannot easily be renounced, then the flourishing of the group's culture and social ethos will have profound and far‐reaching effects on the well‐being of its individual members. Systematic destruction (...) of cultural and social institutions under these conditions will eventuate in individuals suffering the harms and deprivations peculiar to the crime of genocide. The later sections of the essay illustrate and further defend the thesis that “social death” is the harm that distinguishes genocide from other forms of political violence. (shrink)

This essay frames systemic patterns of mental abuse against women of color and Indigenous women on Turtle Island (North America) in terms of larger design-of-distribution strategies in settler colonial societies, as these societies use various forms of social power to distribute, reproduce, and automate social inequalities (including public health precarities and mortality disadvantages) that skew socio-economic gain continuously toward white settler populations and their descendants. It departs from traditional studies in gender-based violence research that frame mental abuses such as gaslighting--commonly (...) understood as mental manipulation through lying or deceit--stochastically, as chance-driven interpersonal phenomena. Building on structural analyses of knowledge in political epistemology (Dotson 2012, Berenstain 2016), political theory (Davis and Ernst 2017), and Indigenous social theory (Tuck and Yang 2012), I develop the notion of cultural gaslighting to refer to the social and historical infrastructural support mechanisms that disproportionately produce abusive mental ambients in settler colonial cultures in order to further the ends of cultural genocide and dispossession. I conclude by proposing a social epidemiological account of gaslighting that a) highlights the public health harms of abusive ambients for minority populations, b) illuminates the hidden rules of social structure in settler colonial societies, and c) amplifies the corresponding need for structural reparations. (shrink)

My aim in this essay is to advance the state of scholarly discussion on the harms of genocide. The most obvious harms inflicted by every genocide are readily evident: the physical harm inflicted upon the victims of genocide and the moral harm that the perpetrators of genocide inflict upon themselves. Instead, I will focus on a kind of harm inflicted upon those who are neither victims nor perpetrators, on those who are outside observers, so to speak. (...) My thesis will be that when a whole community or culture is eliminated, or even deeply wounded, the world loses an avenue for insight into the human condition. My argument is as follows. In order to understand human nature, and that which promotes its flourishing, we must certainly study individual human beings. But since human beings as rational and linguistic animals are in part constituted by the communities in which they live, the study of human nature should also involve the study of communities and cultures—both those that are well ordered and those that are not. No one community or culture has expressed all that can be said about the human way of existing and flourishing. And given that the unity and wholeness of human nature can only be glimpsed in a variety of communities and cultures, then part of the harm of genocide consists in the removal of a valuable avenue for human beings to better understand themselves. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Genocide is a political catastrophe. Yet it has not received much academic attention. A few social scientists have studied it. Philosophers have largely ignored it. There is a large literature on the Holocaust, but there is little agreement as to how this should be related to other genocides. Some have argued that the Holocaust represented a crisis of Western culture, but that Western culture has not responded adequately for the lack of the appropriate self‐understanding. This crisis has been (...) attributed to the predominance of scientistic models of rationality in our culture. Social‐scientific approaches to genocide have been criticised because of their commitment to logical empiricism, which is held to be epistemologically and ethically inadequate. Ethical approaches based on liberal humanism have been criticised by post‐Nietzschean philosophers for their attachment to allegedly outworn metaphysical assumptions. However, the deconstruction of social science and liberal ethics leads in the direction of relativism and nihilism, which are either useless or dangerous in the face of evils such as genocide. The arguments against conventional social science and ethics are examined, and a counter‐critique made of post‐modern philosophy in order to clear the ground for constructive thinking about genocide. (shrink)

The paper focuses on genocide and its multidimensional emanations. First, the authors present the definition of genocide and its types as elaborated by Lemkin : physical, political, social, cultural, economic, biological, religious, and finally moral genocide. Next, ten stages of genocide by Stanton are scrutinized with some emphasis placed on the verbal issues enabling polarization and dehumanization. The authors point out that modern means of communication, ubiquitous nowadays, make it possible to dehumanize and discriminate against (...) groups of people on an unprecedented scale. Therefore, hate speech and infodemic spread on the Internet, especially social media may be a skillfully used tool of lynch and genocide incitement. (shrink)

In 2018, the Art Gallery of Ontario retitled a painting by Emily Carr which contained an offensive word. Controversy ensued, with some arguing that unsanctioned changes to a work’s title infringe upon artists’ moral and free speech rights. Others argued that such a change serves to whitewash legacies of racism and cultural genocide. In this paper, I show that these concerns are unfounded. The first concern is not supported by law or the history of our titling practices; and (...) the second concern misses the mark by ignoring the gallery’s substantial efforts to avoid just such an outcome. Picking up on a suggestion from Loretta Todd, I argue that we can use Aboriginal Title as a model for thinking about the harms perpetuated by cultural appropriation, and the practices we should adopt to mitigate them. (shrink)

The trial of Jean-Paul Akayesu is by far the most well known and widely discussed case at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, a distinction that can be attributed to the fact that it was groundbreaking for several reasons. However, with regard to the importance of this trial both as a precedent for subsequent ICTR cases and within the broader context of international jurisprudence, its most significant contribution has undoubtedly been the recognition and prosecution of rape as a means of (...) perpetrating genocide. The task of collecting admissible evidence to that end was heavily impacted by the necessity of interpreting and translating witness testimonies from their original language of expression, Kinyarwanda, into the working languages of the Tribunal, French and English. The multiple challenges associated with this translation process concerned not only questions of semantic equivalence of specific lexical terms. They also highlighted the considerable ‘cultural collision’ that occurred in the courtroom between the Rwandan witnesses and the international judiciary. This article elucidates the complex task faced by the courtroom interpreters in navigating these linguistic and sociocultural considerations underpinning the evocations of rape within the evidentiary framework of the Akayesu trial. (shrink)

Despite the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, assimilationist policies continue, whether official or effective. Such policies affect more than the right to group choice. The concern is whether indeed genocide or “only” ethnocide (or culturecide)—the elimination of a traditional culture—is at work. Discussions of the distinction between the two terms have been inconsistent enough that at least one commentator has declared that they cannot be used in analytical contexts. While these terms, I contend, have distinct (...) senses, yet in cases of governmental and other institutional assimilationist policy for indigenous peoples, such ethnocide effectively entails genocide. Insofar as any people’s cultural practices and beliefs are essential for life and health, individuals in groups value, if tacitly, their culture as highly as their language or any artifact: Thus, attempts to eradicate a culture through assimilation in fact eradicate individuals’ lives and health and so are effectively murderous. Acknowledgement by worldwide organizations that assimilationist ethnocide is effectively genocide should affect policy concerning indigenous peoples and thus has significance for international law. (shrink)

Language is a powerful tool that enables communication and shapes our identity and cultural practices. The right to choose one's language is a fundamental human right that helps preserve personal and communal identities. In a multilingual nation like Ethiopia, language goes beyond communication to define administrative boundaries. Consequently, depriving Ethiopians of their linguistic rights becomes a more complex punishment than food embargoes. This research investigated the motives and means by which the Amhara Regional State-enforced a monolingual and monocultural language (...) education policy in western Tigray through the lens of linguistic genocide. The study involved interviews with ten teachers, selected using a snowball sampling method, and document analysis to reinforce the result. Political and economic factors and a desire to promote the assimilation of Tigrayans into Amhara culture and language, a process known as "Amharanization", appear to have impacted the implementation of the language education policy in western Tigray. Authorities have implemented a variety of measures, including bans, restrictions, penalties, enforcement, forced relocation, and even heinous acts, which have caused the Tigrayan community severe physical and psychological distress. Collectively, these policies, actions, and outcomes constituted an act of linguistic genocide. This study sheds light on the severe repercussions of such policies, examines their implications, acknowledges the inherent limitations, and offers valuable recommendations for future research in this crucial area. (shrink)

_Demons in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Genocide, Slavery and Extreme Trauma in Psychoanalytic Practice_ isthe second of two volumes addressing the overwhelming, often unmetabolizable feelings related to mourning, both on an individual and mass scale. Authors in this volume explore the potency of ghosts, ghostliness and the darker, often grotesque aspects of these phenomena. While ghosts can be spectral presences that we feel protective of, demons haunt in a particularly virulent way, distorting experience, our sense of reality and (...) our character. Bringing together a collection of clinical and theoretical papers, _emons in the Consulting Room_, reveals how the most extreme types of trauma can continue to have effects across generations, and how these effects manifest in the consulting room. Essays in this volume consider traumas that have affected multiple generations of people, such as the Holocaust, experiences in the gulags, and the experience of slavery. Authors here consider the clinical challenges of working with the demonic force in severe childhood abuse and the effects of serious and prolonged physical injury and illness. Inevitably, there is in such difficult clinical work, the combined effects of hauntings in the analysts and in patients and often in the surrounding culture. In this book, distinguished psychoanalysts explore the myriad forms of ghosts and the demonic, which interfere and disrupt the endlessly difficult psychic work of mourning. It will be of interest to psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, as well as social workers, family therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists. _emons in the Consulting Room _ill appeal to those specializing in bereavement and trauma and, on a broader level, to sociologists and historians interested in understanding means of coping with loss and grief on both an individual and larger scale basis. (shrink)

This article argues for the claim that we are morally responsible (in the qualified sense proposed in the article) for the crimes of our ancestors if our ancestors, as a collectivity, were part of a community for whose sake and in whose name crimes were committed that meet the definition of the crime of genocide. This claim of ‘‘vicarious intergenerational moral responsibility’’ is supported by two arguments. The first counters the claim that one cannot have responsibilities for events in (...) the past by arguing that this claim oversimplifies one’s relationship to one’s past and the collectivities in which people live. Such collectivities, both ethnic and religious, have identities across time; identification with these collectivities involves accepting certain moral obligations. The second argument is based on the following premise: the political, social, cultural, and educational institutions that mark all large collectivities, such as nations, provide a degree of moral reliability that is necessary for individuals to carry out their legitimate interests. We count on such institutions to exemplify the values that allow individuals to flourish in their life activities. These institutions are by their very nature intergenerational. The moral reliability of such institutions thus requires that we endeavor to acknowledge and repair the damage caused by the failure of these institutions in the past. Accordingly, their health engenders a moral obligation on our part. Vicarious intergenerational moral responsibility is a responsibility not to the past per se but to the past as it plays an active role in the present. (shrink)

This essay explores several moral issues raised by global warming through the lens of Claudia Card's theory of evil. I focus on Alaskan villages in the sub-Arctic whose residents must relocate owing to extreme erosion, melting sea ice, and rising water levels. I use Card's discussion of genocide as social death to argue that failure to help these groups maintain their unique cultural identities can be thought of as genocidal.

Some features of the ideology motivating the Roman destruction of Carthage in 146 BC have surprisingly modern echoes in 20th-century genocides. Racial, religious or cultural prejudices, gender and other social hierarchies, territorial expansionism, and an idealization of cultivation all characterize the thinking of Cato the Censor, like that of more recent perpetrators. The tragedy of Carthage, its details lost with most of the works of Livy and other ancient authors, and concealed behind allegory in Virgil’s Aeneid, became known to (...) early modern Europeans from briefer ancient accounts rediscovered only in the 15th century, as Europe’s own expansion began. (shrink)

In the third issue of the J. Paul Getty Trust Occasional Papers in Cultural Heritage Policy series, authors Helen Frowe and Derek Matravers pivot from the earlier tone of the series in discussing the appropriate response to attacks on cultural heritage with their paper, “Conflict and Cultural Heritage: A Moral Analysis of the Challenges of Heritage Protection.” While Frowe and Matravers acknowledge the importance of cultural heritage, they assert that we must more carefully consider the complex (...) moral dimensions—the inevitable serious consequences to human beings—before formulating policy to forcefully protect it. -/- A number of writers and thinkers working on the problem of preserving the world’s most treasured monuments, sites, and objects today cite what Frowe and Matravers call extrinsic and intrinsic justifications for the protection of cultural heritage. These are arguments that maintain that protecting heritage will be a key means to achieve other important goals, like the prevention of genocide, or arguments that heritage deserves to be forcefully protected for its own sake. Frowe and Matravers deconstruct both types of justifications, demonstrating a lack of clear evidence for a causal relationship between the destruction of cultural heritage and atrocities like genocide and arguing that the defense of heritage must not be treated with the same weight or urgency, or according to the same international policies, as the defense of human lives. -/- By calling for expanded theory and empirical data and the consideration of morality in the crafting of international policy vis-à-vis cultural heritage protection, Frowe and Matravers present a thoughtful critique that enriches this important series and adds to the ongoing dialogue in the field. (shrink)

Virtually nonexistent in traditional American Indian communities, today American Indian women and children experience family violence at rates similar to those of the dominant culture. This article explores violence within American Indian communities as an expression of internalized oppression and as an extension of Euro-American violence against American Indian nations.

For critical legal scholars, the ongoing far-right assault upon the liberal status quo poses a distinct dilemma. On the one hand, the desire to condemn the far-right is overwhelming. On the other hand, such condemnations are susceptible to being appropriated as a validation of the very liberalism that critical theorists have long questioned. In seeking to transcend this dilemma, my focus is on the discourse of ‘white genocide’ — a commonplace belief amongst the far-right/white nationalists that ‘whites’, as a (...) discrete group, are facing demographic destruction as a result of deliberate policy choices. Such a belief has motivated acts of extreme violence. While libel to dismissal by experts on mainstream understandings of genocide, namely international criminal lawyers, I argue that this ‘white genocide’ discourse deserves careful scrutiny as a jurisprudential and socio-legal phenomenon that reveals key weaknesses in present modalities of liberal justification. Drawing upon an array of recent critical theories, I show how a liberalism unable to face its own decline enables the very far-right assertions it purports to oppose. Thus, given liberalism’s failure to act as a neutral arbiter, an alternative approach for those opposing the far-right is to develop a vision of politics and society that confront believers in ‘white genocide’ on a more substantive level. This, I argue, forces the far-right’s opponents to disavow liberal scepticism towards utopian transformation as well as the juridical understandings and institutions that allow this scepticism to durably persist. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

The sheer number and scale of the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Russian military in Ukraine since the beginning of their all-out invasion, has prompted many experts and politicians to define this brutality as a genocide and seek for the prosecution of perpetrators under international law. The lawyers are cautious in this regard, however, maintaining that crucial element of the criminal case – the clear-cut proof of a genocidal intent on the side of the Russian (...) leadership – might be missing or largely unprovable in the court. This article provides an overview of the ongoing debate on the alleged Russian genocide in Ukraine and argues that the Kremlin’s genocidal intent can be proved if the anti-Ukrainian rhetoric of Russian officials, pundits, and propagandists is systemically scrutinized, deconstructed, and contextualized. (shrink)

The article focuses on Kurt Vonnegut’s lesser-known and underappreciated 1987 novel Bluebeard, which is analyzed and interpreted in the light of Marianne Hirsch’s seminal theory of postmemory. Even though it was published prior to Hirsch’s formulation of the concept, Vonnegut’s novel intuitively anticipates it, problematizing the implications of inherited, second-hand memory. To further complicate matters, Rabo Karabekian, the protagonist-narrator of Bluebeard, a World War II veteran, amalgamates his direct, painful memories with those of his parents, survivors of the Armenian (...) class='Hi'>Genocide. Both the novel and the theory applied to it centre on the problematics of historical and personal trauma, engendered by two genocides which are often the object of comparative analyses: the Armenian Genocide, also referred to as the Armenian Holocaust, and the Jewish Holocaust. The latter is central to Hirsch’s interdisciplinary work in the field of memory studies, encompassing literature, the visual arts and gender studies. In Bluebeard, Vonnegut holds to account a humanity responsible for the atrocities of twentieth-century history: two world wars and two genocides for which they respectively established the context. The article examines the American writer’s reflection on death and violence, man’s destructive impulse and annihilation. In a world overshadowed by memories of mass extermination, Vonnegut interrogates the possibility of a new beginning, pointing to women as agents of renewal and sociopolitical change. He also identifies the role that art plays in the process of potential reconstruction, the story of Karabekian, a failed artist and highly successful art collector, being a Künstlerroman with a feminist edge. (shrink)

In my paper, I document a “travel” journey of concept formation and its concrete expression in law, which also constituted a literal travel journey across continents. Through poetic-hermeneutical approaches to language, guided by previously existing concepts stemming from experiences of the Holocaust, communism, and African-American feminist analyses of rape as an attack on a racial/ethnic group, a previously invisible domain of the human condition was charted. Throughout history, sexual atrocities have been committed within the context of wars, but their weaponisation (...) as acts of genocide remained unarticulated. This changed in the 1990s with Serbia-Yugoslavia’s genocidal wars against its neighbours (Editorial comment: The author uses the term Serbia-Yugoslavia to refer to the entity that succeeded the breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after Croatia and Slovenia declared independence on June 25th, 1991. The SFRY up to that point consisted of the six republics Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia (including the so-called autonomous regions of Kosovo and Vojvodina), and Slovenia. Further declarations of independence by Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina on April 27, 1992, left only Serbia and Montenegro who the same day declared themselves to be the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). In 2003, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was reconstituted as the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro, which existed until Montenegro and Serbia declared their independence (on June 3rd and June 5th, 2006, respectively)). I sketch the genesis of the concept of sexual atrocities as genocide in connection with my personal journey and how it guided legal prosecution of this “new” crime. My own travel-experience began with my association with Asja Armanda, and her discovery of coordinated mass rapes, when she came to the aid of survivors fleeing the Serbian attacks on Croatia, crimes she attempted to bring to international attention to prevent their expansion into Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. Testimonials reached me in the U.S. as well. I went to Croatia to join Armanda, where we named the crime “sexual atrocities as genocide.” On the basis of this new concept, we filed a lawsuit in New York against Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić, pioneering this crime’s recognition under international law. I conclude with philosophical questions that Putin’s similar genocidal attack on Ukraine raises today. (shrink)

I attempt to rebut the following standard objections against cultural relativism: 1. It is self-defeating for a cultural relativist to take the principle of tolerance as absolute; 2. There are universal moral rules, contrary to what cultural relativism claims; 3. If cultural relativism were true, Hitler’s genocidal actions would be right, social reformers would be wrong to go against their own culture, moral progress would be impossible, and an atrocious crime could be made moral by forming (...) a culture which approves of it; 4. Cultural relativism is silent about how large a group must be in order to be a culture, and which culture we should follow when we belong to two cultures with conflicting moralities. (shrink)

We propose that the metaphor of cleansing was a by-product of modernization processes. Based on cultural and historical evidence, we claim that the activation of cleansing metaphor triggered positive associations in times when separation was a positively regarded element of human culture and agriculture, but it should not exert the same effect in times when separation became culturally anachronistic.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 21.1 (2001) 155-157 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Buddhist Peacework: Creating Cultures of Peace Buddhist Peacework: Creating Cultures of Peace. Edited by David W. Chappell. Somerville, Massachusetts: Wisdom Publications, 1999. 253 pp. This earnest book demonstrates the continuing vitality of Buddhism in many parts of the world. The contributing authors are the leading figures of contemporary engaged Buddhism, and they write from firsthand experience. The Dalai (...) Lama outlines methods for promoting harmony among different religious traditions. Thich Nhat Hanh shows how the principle of nonviolence was tested in the rescue ofVietnamese boat people during the 1970s. A.T. Ariyaratne presents the work of the influential Sarvodaya movement in Sri Lanka. Shih Cheng-yen, sometimes called "the Mother Theresa of Asia," describes the relief work ofTzu Chi, the largest charitable organization in Taiwan. Dhammachari Lokamitra documents the impact of an adopted Buddhism among former "untouchables" in India. Robert Aitken surveys engaged Buddhist activity in North America, including hospice work, prison reform, and sustainable farming. Many of the writers have personally suffered the deprivations of war and oppression; in some cases they continue their work amid threats of violence or arrest.An aim ofBuddhist Peacework is to offer a Buddhist response to a declaration that emerged from a 1994 meeting of world religious leaders organized by UNESCO. This document, "Declaration of the Role of Religion in the Promotion of a Culture of Peace," is included as an appendix. Two of the book's contributors, the Dalai Lama and the senior Cambodian monk Maha Ghosananda, participated in the UNESCO meeting. Indeed, some of the declaration's language has an engaged Buddhist ring: "We must be at peace with ourselves; we strive to achieve inner peace through personal reflection and spiritual growth, and to cultivate a spirituality which manifests itself in action."One of Buddhism's distinctive teachings on the subject of peace is the practice of "internal disarmament," the term used by the Dalai Lama in his essay. Unless individuals are able to tame the forces of greed, anger, and delusion in their own minds, the prospects for peace between communities and between nations are slim. For an engaged Buddhist, there must be alignment between "inner" and "outer" disarmament. One cannot work for peace--or any other worthy social goal--in an agitated, antagonistic way. In this collection, peacework is something one does as spiritual practice.Shakyamuni Buddha approached the existential problem of suffering by analyzing the causes of suffering. In a similar spirit, engaged Buddhists have embarked on a Buddhistic analysis of the causes of war and peace. Contributor José Ignacio Cabezón writes: "Peace cannot arise simply by wishing it into existence, but only by the cultivation of its causes.Viewing peace in this way has the salutary effect of shifting the emphasis of peacework from result to causes." Somewhere in that mix of causes we [End Page 155] eventually encounter ourselves. If the world is truly interdependent, we share responsibility for violence and atrocities occurring "elsewhere."Thich Nhat Hanh, in his essay, declares: "If we look deeply, we will observe that the roots of war are in the unmindful ways we have been living. We have not sown enough seeds of peace and understanding in ourselves and others, therefore we are co-responsible: 'Because I have been like this, they are like that.'" The notion of sowing "seeds of peace" is reinforced in the image on the book's cover: two hands tenderly plant a seedling in receptive soil.But internal disarmament is not enough. As editor David Chappell asserts, "Today there is a new urgency for that [inner] peacework to be manifest socially, ecologically, and materially."Witness the plight of several Buddhist (and formerly Buddhist) nations in Asia. "Recently, Buddhist countries have become notorious arenas of genocide and brutality," writes Karma Lekshe Tsomo. Citing Burma, Cambodia, China, Sri Lanka, and Tibet, Tsomo asks, "What went wrong?" Peacework also has new meanings in an age of ecocrisis. For Stephanie Kaza, "a first step in keeping peace with nature calls for contact with ecological suffering." Kaza highlights four ways to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:US War-Culture, Sacrifice and Salvation by Kelly Denton-BorhaugStephen M. VantasselUS War-Culture, Sacrifice and Salvation Kelly Denton-Borhaug oakville, ct: equinox, 2011. 279 pp. $34.95In US War-Culture, Sacrifice and Salvation, Kelly Denton-Borhaug uses cultural and linguistic analysis in order to understand the place of war in American culture and discourse. She begins by noting that war culture is so deeply embedded in America’s ethos that its citizens are generally (...) unaware of the extent to which the United States has been militarized, with both weapons and ideology. With sobering detail, Denton-Borhaug documents how the military has penetrated and shaped institutions ranging from colleges to industry. She explains how militarization is exemplified in the consumer and civilian culture through video games and the rise of a surveillance state. By way of this analysis, the author makes the case that Dwight Eisenhower’s fear concerning the influence of the military-industrial complex has fully been realized in modern America.Denton-Borhaug then addresses what she considers to be the ideological fountainhead for America’s militarism: the Christian doctrine of substitutionary atonement. In short, as Christianity teaches that an innocent man had to sacrifice himself to save humanity, so also American war-culture ideology teaches that soldiers, citizens, and the country must sacrifice on the battlefield in order to achieve national or political salvation. Denton-Borhaug suggests that politicians and others draw on the notion of the necessity of sacrifice as a way to convince people to support militarized conflict and to endure the inevitable hardships that result. By analyzing US political rhetoric between 2001 and 2003, Denton-Borhaug makes a compelling case that the Bush administration used sacrificial images of victims and abusers to set up a simple black-and-white ethical paradigm to justify the war in Afghanistan and Iraq.From there Denton-Borhaug turns to feminist theological and linguistic analysis to deconstruct the language of sacrifice in political discourse. She argues that when sacrifice in war is seen as a necessity, the brunt of its effects is often borne by the weakest groups in society. The sacrifice motif also sets up a problematic model of active masculine protectors and passive women in need of protection, which leaders often exploit to convince the public to “trust them.” [End Page 201]If Denton-Borhaug simply asked Christian leaders to guard against the use of Christian theology to justify national or political war-making interests, I doubt few would object to her case. In fact, I commend her for drawing attention to these critical issues and arguing for tactics that encourage peacemaking. Unfortunately, Denton-Borhaug argues that the solution to the political use of sacrificial theology is to jettison it, or at least to marginalize its use in Christian teaching. She proposes that we replace it with a theology of work, a cure that may be even worse than the disease she diagnoses and that is, moreover, not logically required to achieve the peacemaking she promotes. In this regard Denton-Borhaug could have been more transparent about her own presuppositions. For example, she clearly leans toward nonviolence, leaving readers to wonder whether genocide, nuclear buildup, and state-sponsored terrorism are the only justifications for war (222). Moreover, I am not completely convinced that America’s use of sacrificial language is an unvarnished harm. I suspect that at least some of the United States’ use of sacrificial language stems from a desire to avoid language that glorifies war. Would America be better off if we used militaristic terms like “Death to Afghanistan” that emphasize domination, rather than the suffering associated with “sacrifice”?Despite these weaknesses, Denton-Borhaug’s book is a valuable antidote for Christians who have grown too comfortable with America’s military-industrial complex and ideological war-culture machine. We would do well to take seriously her exhortation to work to remove the roots of war in our effort to create a world of peace.Stephen M. VantasselKing’s Evangelical Divinity SchoolCopyright © 2015 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

The problem with remembering Auschwitz is that the neoliberal paradigm of economic utility, demotic happiness, and programmed consumption has tended to erase its facticity from public consciousness. Technoscientific capitalism functions as a regime of amnesic performance that prevents a ‘working through’ of the Nazi genocide. I argue that Agamben’s work on the implicit violence of the biopolitical paradigm gives a crucial insight into the fate of humanity in the time of global capitalism. However, I contend that the idea of (...) testimony he presents in Remnants of Auschwitz recapitulates a Heideggerian ontology of experience that is enacted outside of the technological dynamics of trauma and memory. I employ Stiegler’s concept of epiphylogenetic memory, first, to explore the economy of fascisms that has emerged within the networks of global capitalism and, second, to examine the material affects through which Auschwitz returns to the scene of this economy. (shrink)

Barely seventeen years into the twenty-first century, our world continues to be plagued by endless wars and violence. Africa is not immune from these crises. As many countries in Africa celebrate more than fifty years of independence from colonial rule, Africa is still the poorest continent in the world. Religious wars, genocides, ethnic and tribal cleansings have come to define the continent’s contemporary history. Corruption, nepotism, dictatorship, disregard for human life, tribalism, and many social vices are normalized realities in many (...) parts of the continent. Rather than despair, a radical refocusing on Africa’s rich history of hospitality that affirms the flourishing of all life ought to be embraced. This article aims to do exactly this by exploring Africa’s role and place in the history of three Abrahamic religions; Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. While celebrating Africa’s unique role as the gateway for the realization of divine hospitality, this article aims to serve as a witness to an ethic of life that is relevant for the global church’s vision and mission to a pluralistic world and for the mission of the churches of Africa to addressing the social, cultural, and political crises faced by the continent. To achieve these, this work appropriates a comparative theological method that sheds light on the centrality of Africa in these three Abrahamic religions with a bias for the flourishing of life. Keywords: Africa, Hospitality, Life, Christianity, Islam, Judaism. (shrink)

More than 7% of all German physicians became members of the Nazi SS during World War II, compared with less than 1% of the general population. In so doing, these doctors willingly participated in genocide, something that should have been antithetical to the values of their chosen profession. The participation of physicians in torture and murder both before and after World War II is a disturbing legacy seldom discussed in medical school, and underrecognised in contemporary medicine. Is there something (...) inherent in being a physician that promotes a transition from healer to murderer? With this historical background in mind, the author, a medical student, defines and reflects upon moral vulnerabilities still endemic to contemporary medical culture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Human Rights, China, and Cross-Cultural Inquiry:Philosophy, History, and Power PoliticsRandall PeerenboomStephen Angle's Human Rights and Chinese Thought: A Cross-Cultural Inquiry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) is a wonderful book that combines philosophically sophisticated discussions of controversial human-rights issues with a detailed intellectual history of the evolution of human-rights discourse in China over the last several hundred years. I will use Angle's book as a platform for consideration (...) of a number of issues regarding the role of philosophy, history, and power politics in relation to human rights in China and elsewhere.Angle focuses his discussion on two claims: first, that countries have different concepts of human rights, and second, that we ought not demand that countries comply with human-rights concepts different from their own.1 These two claims (or something similar) are central to China's official position on rights and to humanrights debates more generally, including the debate about values in Asia.2Angle's response, in short, is that there are distinctive concepts of human rights in China, and that "there have been both continuities and changes in the ways that rights have been conceptualized over the course of China's rich and distinctive rights discourse" (p. 250). However, the only way a community can unilaterally declare its values and practices immune from the scrutiny of others is through "parochialism," which, according to Angle, cuts off that community from making legitimate demands on others. Rather, he suggests, we "should seek an accommodation of differences with one another in the spirit of toleration, and on that basis engage one another on as many levels as possible" (pp. 250-251).One of the many great strengths of this book is that Angle grounds his responses in an interesting and insightful discussion of contemporary philosophers, assessing along the way the contributions and limits of MacIntrye, Rawls, Dworkin, Raz, Walzer, and especially Brandom, among others, to this cross-cultural inquiry of human rights. It might seem, given this list of luminaries, Angle's own training in Western analytic philosophy, and his position in the philosophy department of an American university, that Western philosophy is driving the debate and dictating the fundamental terms and parameters of the inquiry.3 This, of course, is precisely one of the complaints of non-Westerners such as Liu Huaqiu, who argue that they are being measured by Western standards, that rights are concepts grounded in historically contingent modern Western philosophical traditions, and that the rights movement is biased in favor of secular liberalism, which is at odds with and may preclude states based on religious worldviews and communitarian or collectivist [End Page 283] points of view that do not privilege autonomy, choice, and individual interests to the extent that liberals do.Angle's response is twofold. First, he argues, sensibly enough, that we cannot and need not set aside or escape our traditions and value systems. Cross-cultural inquiry must begin from somewhere. But we must remain open-minded and willing to continue the conversation, at least for a considerable while and in most cases indefinitely, even if in some cases we simultaneously must rely on coercion and repression.4 As discussed below, Angle endorses a limited moral pluralism that tolerates some differences while not providing an excuse for appeasing dictators or turning a blind eye to genocide and other atrocities.Second, Angle is not out simply to measure China by the standards of contemporary Western philosophers. Rather, he wants to show that China has its own distinctive discourse on rights, and that this discourse is multifaceted and constantly evolving. According to Angle, "Chinese rights discourse should be seen as an ongoing creative achievement, rather than a reaction to or misunderstanding of Western ideas and institutions" (p. 2).5 He shows this by providing a detailed intellectual history of Chinese rights discourse, another great strength of the book. His primary focus is on several prominent Neo-Confucians and pre-1949 debates, although he also considers some contemporary debates.6 Angle is clearly successful at demonstrating that Chinese thinkers have advanced a number of different views and that rights discourse over the last century and a half has been... (shrink)

Twenty “uncontacted” Taromenani were slaughtered and two female children kidnapped in retaliation for the spearing of a couple of “civilized” Huaorani in March 2013. After months of indecision, the government of Ecuador decided to abduct the two little captives and send six warriors to jail for genocide. Each of these actions caused a moral outrage locally, nationally, and internationally. This article explores the complex constructions through which these violent events have come to be understood, both by the Huaorani and (...) by Ecuadorian nationals, and it shows how two broad concerns—“territoriality” and “compensation”—have structured both the violent conflicts discussed and subsequent attempts at peace restoration. The essay concludes with a brief anthropological discussion of the relationship between ontology and politics. Whereas recent theorizations of Amazonian cosmic economies of alterity sharpen our understanding of “the assimilation of the Other as a mode of reproduction,” they tend to obscure the whys and the hows of intra- and intercultural disagreements, as well as the nature of the resort to violence as a way of asserting one's will. (shrink)

La célébration du 70e anniversaire de la mort de Freud est l'occasion d'une réflexion sur sa théorie de la guerre et de la mort. Fondée sur le mythe de la horde primitive, le meurtre du père et la dette commune, la société, selon Freud, s'organise autour des interdits de meurtre et d'inceste. La guerre fondée dans la pulsion de mort est la conséquence de la levée collective de ces interdits. Freud bâtit ainsi ce que l'on pourrait nommer une " culture (...) du meurtre ". Mais dès la Première Guerre mondiale, il avait saisi qu'un bouleversement était en train de s'opérer avec la guerre totale, industrielle et informationnelle. Tout en restant fondamentalement et radicalement enraciné dans la pensée freudienne, ce travail tente de démontrer un "au-delà " de Freud dans l'apparition d'une " culture de l'extermination " qui trouve son origine dans les grands textes fondateurs des monothéismes, puis son champ de réalisation dans l'histoire occidentale principalement. Cette " culture de l'extermination " n'a pas disparu avec les horreurs du siècle dernier. Elle est toujours bien présente partout dans le monde et prête à ressurgir en Occident comme le laissent entrevoir quelques frémissements politiques dans de nombreux pays. Il faut donc demeurer lucide et vigilant. (shrink)

The contemporary world is passing through a very crucial time. According to UN reports, the world is facing its ‘worst humanitarian crisis’ since the end of World War II, with more than 20 million people facing starvation and famine in four countries.. Different regions of the world are marred by wars and conflicts. Unfortunately, attempts to end those so far have come to naught. As a consequence of these wars and conflicts ordinary people continue to suffer from hunger, and diseases. (...) They continue to be victims of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Despite all efforts to stymie poverty, social, economic and gender inequalities, religious conflicts and extremism of all kinds, these continue to increase at an alarming pace. As if these were not enough, people have to deal with the negative impacts of rapid climate change in terms of increased number of floods, wild fires, and global warming. (shrink)

My aim in this article is to further work on building bridges of communication between Indigenous and Western worldviews through 'magical consciousness', a pan-human participatory and analogical orientation of mind. In a bid to overcome the many cultural differences that have justified the discrimination and genocide of Indigenous peoples worldwide, and the near hegemony of a science based solely on logical knowledge, I seek by comparison a common ground for mutual understanding. Searching out similarities and differences between the (...) world of the Dreaming of Paddy Compass Namadbara, an Australian 'clever man' of north-west Arnhem Land, and the prophetic mythologies of English eighteenth-century artist and poet William Blake, I suggest that it might be possible to find points of conversation and acceptance through stories and mythologies that could aid the healing of differences. (shrink)

What could a social-justice oriented, feminist data studies look like? The current datalogical turn foregrounds the digital datafication of everyday life, increasing algorithmic processing and data as an emergent regime of power/knowledge. Scholars celebrate the politics of big data knowledge production for its omnipotent objectivity or dismiss it outright as data fundamentalism that may lead to methodological genocide. In this feminist and postcolonial intervention into gender-, race- and geography-blind ‘big data’ ideologies, I call for ethical, anti-oppressive digital data-driven research (...) in the social sciences and humanities. I argue that a reflexive data scholarship can emerge from the reintegration of feminist and postcolonial science studies and ethics of care ideals. Although it is not a panacea for all ails of data mining, I offer a road map for an alternative data-analysis practice that is more power-sensitive and accountable. By incorporating a people-centric and context-aware perspective that acknowledges relationships of dependency, reflects on temptations, and scrutinises benefits and harm, an ‘asymmetrically reciprocal’ (Young, 1997) research encounter may be achieved. I bring this perspective to bear on experiences of a two-year research project with eighty-four young Londoners on digital identities and living in a highly diverse city. I align awareness of uneven relations of power and knowledge with the messy relation of dependency between human and non-human actors in data analysis. This framework productively recognises that digital data cannot be expected to speak for itself, that data do not emerge from a vacuum, and that isolated data patterns cannot be the end-goal of a situated and reflexive research endeavor. Data-driven research, in turn, shows the urgency for renewed feminist ethical reflection on how digital mediation impacts upon responsibility, intersectional power relations, human subjectivity and the autonomy of research participants over their own data. (shrink)

In colonial societies such as Canada the implications of colonialism and ethnocide (or cultural genocide) for ethical decision‐making are ill‐understood yet have profound implications in health ethics and other spheres. They combine to shape racism in health care in ways, sometimes obvious, more often subtle, that are inadequately understood and often wholly unnoticed. Along with overt experiences of interpersonal racism, Indigenous people with health care needs are confronted by systemic racism in the shaping of institutional structures, hospital policies (...) and in resource allocation decisions. Above all, racism is a function of state law – of the unilateral imposition of the settler society law on Indigenous communities. Indeed, the laws, including health laws, are social determinants of the ill‐health of Indigenous peoples. This article describes the problem of Indigenous ethnocide and explores its ethical implications. It thereby problematizes the role of law in health ethics. (shrink)

This article employs socio-cultural theories to analyse the psychosocial effects of Gazan women cutting their hair during the 2023–2024 Gazacide. The severe conditions in Gaza, exacerbated by a lack of sanitation and essential resources due to the ongoing blockade, have forced women into extreme precarity. This has led to the compulsory act of hair-cutting as a measure for disease prevention. The act of cutting hair, which disrupts a universally recognised symbol of beauty and health, highlights the broader socio-political crisis. (...) The paper critiques Western feminism for its selective empathy, noting its neglect of Gazan women’s suffering while focusing on issues pertinent to Western contexts. By framing hair-cutting not as individual psychological distress but as a response to aggravated socio-political conditions, the article underscores how this act reflects the broader dehumanisation and suffering imposed by the ongoing genocide. (shrink)

This essay engages Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus as a salient intervention into modern political theory. I analyze the work as a cipher for the tensions inhabiting Euro-modernity’s stitched together fictions of racial determinism and racial dynamism legible in slavery, assimilationist projects and White fears reverberating throughout. Adapting the mythical ancient Prometheus as one who steals fire from the gods to create humans and civilization, Frankenstein dramatizes the risks and monstrous results of White imperial masculinity as a Euro-colonial (...) Promethean project of subject formation and race-making. Viewed through the prism of the Modern Prometheus, modernity in general and liberal humanism in particular are recast as monster-making projects. The European “discovery” of Indigenous peoples amplified Promethean aspirations to create subjects through civilizational processes of religious conversion, the infusion of Enlightenment rationality, and assimilation into whiteness. Politically, the Promethean capacity to engineer humans and proto-humans using Native peoples as raw material allowed progressives to argue against outright extermination in favor of cultural genocide. Seeking to create a subserviant species, Victor Frankenstein confronts a revolting insurrection of his own making—a Creature who refuses slavery, claims mastery over his creator and demands a female companion. Yet Frankenstein’s fear of creating “a race of devils” betrays a terror of what Whites know, but refuse to acknowledge, about themselves and racial others. (shrink)

This article offers an account of settler witnessing of residential school survivor testimony that avoids the politics of recognition and the pitfalls of colonial empathy. It knits together the concepts of bearing witness, Indigenous storytelling, and affective reckoning. Following the work of Kelly Oliver, it argues that witnessing involves a reaching beyond ourselves and responsiveness to the agency and self-determination of the other. Given the cultural genocide of residential schools, responsiveness to the other require openness to and nurturing (...) of Indigenous ways of knowing and being. In order to illustrate the complexities and challenges of settler witnessing, the author reflects on her experiences in attending six of the TRC’s national events and, in particular, what she has learned from Frederick “Fredda” Paul, Passamaquoddy Elder, healer, storyteller, and residential school survivor. The article analyzes (1) aesthetics and emotions in the staging of TRC events and (2) making meaning over time and the temporality of transitional justice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist Meditation for the Recovery of the Womanist Self, or Sitting on the Mat Self-Love RealizedMelanie L. HarrisIn this essay, I will argue that Womanist-Buddhist dialogue is beneficial not only for advancing theory in our respective disciplines, but for the practice of social justice. In the dialogues for which we gathered, we followed a process of learning inspired by chavruse, the method of Torah and Talmudic study found in (...) yeshivas, in which one reads a text with friends, in order to see and understand in ways that would be impossible for individuals alone. The mutually constitutive project of Womanist-Buddhist engagement with Buddhist texts has helped to shift the boundaries within Womanist religious thought and Buddhist studies. We are grateful for the trust—essential to any healthy dialogue—embodied in our work together, and for the deep humility and honor that has been shown by all who are engaged in the process.The Buddhist "self": A Womanist PerspectiveIn a conversation with a friend recently, I was encouraged to hold on to the humanness that suffering teaches by being fully present with a broken heart. My grief was offered tea, and I was invited to join in the depths of suffering for a "spell," sharing stories of strength and longing, through a process of healing meditation. I hear this invitation echoed in essays by Alice Walker in We Are the Ones We've Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness, as well as in the work of Jan Willis. Both scholars are committed to telling the truths in women's stories and uncovering the "true self" through spiritual means. Here, I present some reflections on how engaging Buddhist texts as a Womanist scholar opens up a new perspective on the Womanist theme of self-love and how this can shift our understanding of the Buddhist self.The "Buddhist self," you say? Although Buddhism insists there is "no self"? Yes! The concept of no-self in Buddhism is often equated with "dissolving" the self; I would argue that Buddhist contemplative practices can be seen and experienced as form of healthy self-love and self-care, necessary to sustain activists' work for compassionate justice. According to Walker's definition, a Womanist "Loves herself. Regardless."1 To consider Buddhist meditation as a strategy of self-love and social justice [End Page 67] helps us to see why so many African American women are turning toward Buddhism as a religious orientation.Buddhist meditation invites one to overcome oppression and transform the self and the community, by raising consciousness through a true turning or shifting of mind, in a manner that produces clarity of thought and inner peace. As the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön has observed, most people who are not raised Buddhist come to Buddhism because they are suffering and trying desperately to get out of dukkha. However, when confronted with the First Noble Truth that suffering is just part of life, many people turn away from meditation, pack up their sitting mats, and return home to habitual patterns.Sitting still on the mat for a long time, for any length of time really, seems to most beginners like an otherworldly commitment—unless of course, one has reason to stay, reason to change. As Willis has observed, most people of African descent do have reason.2 She says Buddhism offers at least three major gifts to African Americans—I would add Womanists here—and to all people of color who have experienced historical traumas such as slavery, exploitation, and cultural genocide. They are: (1) confidence in our humanity—a special gift to a people who have endured four hundred years of slavery and oppression, in which the very essence of our humanity was consistently ravaged; (2) a way of being in the world that emphasizes self-love and inner and communal wholeness; and (3) a method for dealing with the frustrations, disappointments, and anger left behind by multilayered oppressions. Rather than negating the self, and everyone else around, by succumbing to practices of patriarchy, or by falling into the traps of internalized oppression, or by pulling out our hair after upsetting meetings, or by indulging... (shrink)

If philosophy addresses concrete ethical challenges, then what shifts in basic concepts must be made to the discipline in the darkness of our genocidal world? What anti-genocidal strains are in Western philosophy? Are we “really” rejects and/ or “still of intrinsic worth” when we fail our excellence tests? How are we represented and how do we participate in representations? Are representational forms historical in origin and development? Is genocide indissolubly linked to our degradation and destruction of animals? Can one (...) slaughter and eat one’s partners in a social bond? If so, what does this tell us about the socio-political world we have formed? Is there a deep center—metacide—in our culture from which genocide receives its impulse? These are some of the pivotal questions addressed in the thirteen thought-provoking essays of this volume. (shrink)

This paper addresses the phenomenological experience of precarity and vulnerability in racialized gender-based violence from a structural perspective. Informed by Indigenous social theory and anti-colonial approaches to intergenerational trauma that link settler colonial violence to the modalities of stress-inducing social, institutional, and cultural violences in marginalized women’s lives, I argue that philosophical failures to understand trauma as a functional, organizational tool of settler colonial violence amplify the impact of traumatic experience on specific populations. It is trauma by design. I (...) explore this through the history of the concept of trauma and its connection to tragedy. I give a brief overview of prominent theories of trauma and contrast these with the work of Indigenous feminist scholar Dian Million (2013), who highlights functional complicity of settler colonial institutions in shaping accounts of trauma in the west. I begin the piece with an important illustration of the kinds of lives and experiences that call for a politicized understanding of trauma in anti-colonial feminist theory. I end by offering an expansive notion of structural trauma that is a methodological pivot for conducting trauma-based gender-based violence research in a decolonial context, which calls for an end to narratives of trauma that are severed from the settler colonial project of Native land dispossession and genocide. [Volume 23, no.1]. (shrink)

Dehumanisation is a puzzling phenomenon. Nazi propaganda likened the Jews to rats, but also portrayed them as ‘poisoners of culture’. In the Soviet Union, the Stalinist regime called opponents vermin, yet put them on show trials. During the Rwandan genocide, the Hutus identified the Tutsis with cockroaches, but nonetheless raped Tutsi women. These examples reveal tensions in the way in which dehumanisers perceive, portray and treat victims. Dehumanisation seems to require that perpetrators both deny and acknowledge the humanity of (...) their victims in certain ways. Several scholars have proposed solutions to this so-called ‘paradox of dehumanisation’ that question the usefulness of dehumanisation as a concept to explain genocidal violence, claim that dehumanisation is characterised by an unstable belief in the non-human essence of the dehumanised, or contend that dehumanisation revolves around a denial of metaphysical human status. The main aim of this article is to present a novel framework for theorising dehumanisation that offers a more straightforward solution to this paradox based on the idea that perpetrators deny their victims’ human standing in a moral sense without necessarily negating their biological human status or human subjectivity. The article illustrates this framework through examples drawn from Primo Levi’s memoirs of Auschwitz. (shrink)