Images of Sub-humanity and their Realization

Abstract

Two extreme cases of state violence are contrasted: one is the Great Leap famine and the Cultural Revolution in Maoist China; the other is the war of conquest and policy of racial purification conducted by Nazi Germany. The anthropological angle of enquiry is to place them in their own historical conditions, even as exceptions, and to ask how they exemplify the realization of inherited images of sub-humanity. The inherited traditions are derived from three sources: those of images of demons and exorcism, those of territorial sovereignty and the enemy within, and (for China) those of cannibalism, of self- devouring sacrifice and disorder. The thesis argued is that the norms of ambiguity in images of the enemy within are split under certain political conditions, and it is in those conditions that they are realized on a large scale. The key political condition is the declaration of a state of exception. In the conditions of both cases they produce in the state’s leadership aggravated indifference to its subjects and demonizing extreme violence upon the targets of demonization.