In this talk, I examine the work of anthropologists and human rights activists who revived the notion of ethnocide as a political and scientific category in the Americas and Sub-Saharan Africa from the late 1960s to 1980s. Though common today, ethnocide and its synonym, cultural genocide, were excluded from the UN Genocide Convention of 1948. Yet in the late 1960s, anthropologists specializing in Latin America and Scandinavia-based anthropologists revived the term ‘ethnocide’ during a series of international meetings, which imbued the term with a sense of urgency. Concerned by the destruction of Indigenous cultures, these experts organized a series of symposia and conferences that produced various declarations that adopted the term “ethnocide” to condemn the forced integration of Indigenous peoples of the Americas and which began to reinterpret economic development as a form of genocide. For instance, in the 1981 UNESCO Declaration of San José (Costa Rica) experts defined ethnocide as the denial of an ethnic group’s “right to enjoy, develop and transmit its own culture and its own language, whether collectively or individually.” The 1981 Declaration also called on governments to counter “ethnocide” by implementing policies “guaranteeing ethnic groups the free enjoyment of their own cultures” and dubbed this process “ethnodevelopment”.
I argue that this late twentieth century revival represents a significant shift in the interpretation of violence against Indigenous peoples in the Americas. During much of the fist half of the twentieth century, human scientists studying Latin America labored under the assumption that the Indigenous peoples of the Americas were destined to disappear and that their main task as anthropologists was to stockpile as much data about them as possible so as to ‘salvage’ or preserve their memory for future study. From the vantage of this ‘salvage’ framework, researchers typically interpreted violence towards Indigenous peoples as a natural and or inevitable outcome of ‘contact’ between ‘primitive’ and ‘civilized’ societies. Yet by popularizing the term ‘ethnocide’ from the late 1960s on, anthropologists and defenders of Indigenous rights offered an alternative that re-interpreted violence towards Indigenous peoples as a deliberate strategy dictated by the economic modes of production and expansionist ambitions of Western civilization. Although it has lived in the shadow of “genocide” — a term with greater legal force — “ethnocide” nevertheless represents an important achievement for Indigenous struggles insofar as it offers a way to name and describe forms of cultural erasure often presented as benevolent.
