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Part I
Cultural genocide in international law
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1 Raphaƫl Lemkin
Culture and cultural genocide1
Douglas Irvin-Erickson
DOI: 10.4324/9781351214100-2
Much has been written about RaphaĆ«l Lemkin,2 one of the foundational figures in genocide studies.3 Indeed, Lemkinās theories of persecution and mass violence are increasingly influential outside the subfield of genocide studies.4 As this volume would suggest, a particularly important aspect of Lemkinās work relates to the notion of cultural genocide. On one level, it is fitting that scholars studying cultural genocide would turn to Lemkin. Lemkin, after all, coined the word āgenocide,ā which first appeared in print in 1944, and inspired the movement at the United Nations in the late 1940s to outlaw genocide, which culminated in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Lemkin also wrote extensively about culture, genocide, and cultural genocide, and his work to outlaw genocide was inspired by a belief that cultural diversity enriched the human experience and should be protected.
Despite Lemkinās well-known interest in cultural destruction, what Lemkin meant by ācultural genocideā is less well-known, and Lemkinās views on the ādeathā of a culture are complex, nuanced and, at first-glance, counterintuitive. Oftentimes scholars will read Lemkinās writings and substitute their own definitions of āculture,ā ānations,ā and āgenocideā in their interpretations of Lemkinās work. Of course, it is the prerogative of individuals to interpret a text in the way they see fit, but those who seek to understand Lemkinās writings should begin with accepting that Lemkinās definitions of these concepts are very different than the commonly held definitions of these words we have today. What is more, Lemkinās ideas on what āgenocide,ā āculture,ā and ānationsā were changed through time.5
Lemkin never used the phrase ācultural genocideā to refer to a type of genocide, except for a few years after 1946 when, during the second draft of the UN Genocide Convention, the US delegation split the concept of genocide into two concepts of physical genocide and cultural genocide. In my previous work, I have described at length the processes by which āgenocideā was redefined during the drafting process of the UN Genocide Convention between 1946 and 1948.6 As I have explained elsewhere, the US delegationās attempt to split the concept of genocide into two different concepts ā cultural genocide and physical genocide ā was an elaborate ploy to remove from the definition of genocide aspects of Lemkinās ideas that the US delegation found objectionable. Indeed, the US delegation, along with the Soviet Union and the UK, did not want to enshrine a treaty into international law that criminalized the destruction of human groups as sociological entities. Lemkin began using this term ācultural genocide,ā but always in the sense that attacking a culture was a way of committing genocide, and not a different type of genocide. But, as I have argued previously, the fact that Lemkin began using the term ācultural genocideā lent legitimacy to the notion that there was such a thing as two kinds of genocide, the physical and the non-physical. What is more, in the horse-trading of articles and definitions as the UN member states negotiated the treaty against genocide, Lemkin acquiesced. He stopped advocating for his wholistic conception of genocide and allowed what the US called ācultural genocideā to be removed from the treaty, so that he could preserve, in return, a consensus amongst a majority of the delegations drafting the convention that the treaty include provisions for referring the prosecution of genocide to a competent international tribunal (what is now Article VI of the final version of the Genocide Convention).7
Regardless of the minutiae of this history of the legal definition of genocide, Martin Shaw has shown convincingly that it is oxymoronic to refer to ācultural genocideā if the concept of genocide is already defined in reference to destroying a cultural group. Shaw, furthermore, presents an exceptional disquisition on the limitations of Lemkinās theorizing on culture and the destruction of culture.8 This chapter, instead, will attempt to parse Lemkinās notions of cultural genocide, focusing on what Lemkin thought culture was. Indeed, I hope to make clear in this chapter that most definitions of ācultural genocideā that emerged in the writings of later theorists and scholars have very little in common with Lemkinās notion of ācultural genocide,ā precisely because the colloquial definitions of ācultureā in current English-language usages have very little to do with the definitions of culture that emerged in the Anthropology of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, which Lemkin used to define culture.
Crucial to this chapter, finally, is the point that Lemkin believed destroying a culture did not always result in the destruction of a human group and, therefore, attempts to destroy a culture were not always genocidal, and did not always result in genocide. For Lemkin, culture was not the primary object of protection under the UN Genocide Convention; national groups were. What takes many genocide scholars by surprise is that Lemkinās definition of nations was so broad that it could include groups as small as āthose who play at cardsā or groups as large as Jews, Armenians, and Poles. Lemkinās goal was to outlaw a broad range of attempts to destroy a broad range of human groups, and where cultural destruction intersected with attempts to destroy a particular group, then and only then would an act of cultural destruction be genocidal.
The concept of culture in ācultural genocideā
The history of the concept of culture ā not just Lemkinās definition of culture, but the whole social history of the concept ā is marked by several hundred years of definitional stability, with a sudden pattern of drastic changes in what this word has been taken to signify in the past 100 years. The history of the concept of culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is the subject of many dissertations, books, and learned essays. A cursory overview is sufficient to illustrate the points I wish to make. This overview is crucial because oneās notion of what constitutes cultural genocide is dependent upon oneās definition of culture. Definitions of culture employed by those who study ācultural genocideā tend to employ only two possible definitions of culture ā the two usages that are most common in everyday colloquial English. This is important because Lemkinās definition of culture, in contrast, was taken directly from his reading of his contemporaries BronisÅaw Malinowski and Ruth Benedict.
To supply oneās own definition of culture in interpreting Lemkinās writings on culture, therefore, is to fundamentally misread and misinterpret Lemkinās ideas.9 As a result, there are many aspects of Lemkinās thinking that can seem counterintuitive at first. For instance, Lemkin believed that it was a fundamentally positive thing for āworld civilizationā to have cultures that changed, coming into and going out of existence. Lemkinās goal in outlawing genocide was not to prevent social groups from coming and going out of existence, but rather to prevent the intentional destruction of social groups because the intentional act of destruction caused devastating harm. Lemkin was clear, however, that no group had a prior right to exist, and that the disintegration of a given group (and, by extension, its culture) was not necessarily a bad thing. By outlawing genocide, Lemkin sought to protect a world where national-cultural diversity would be allowed to thrive. This necessarily implied that the destruction and creation of social groups was desirable, because he believed that the interactions of groups are what caused groups to change, and that this change was the engine of human progress and human creativity. It was the interaction of nations, and the changing of national groups, that inspired creativity, beauty, ingenuity, and countless other human goods, he believed, at the individual and group levels.
A. Dirk Moses was the first to notice this aspect of Lemkinās thinking. Mosesā important work positions Lemkin, especially Lemkinās late works, squarely in the camp of Malinowski. While Lemkinās conception of cultural genocide is worked out in reference to Malinowskiās theories of cultural functionalism, Lemkin dedicates more space in his unpublished manuscripts to writing about Benedict. The two theories of culture (the Malinowski-functionalism school and the Boas-Benedict historical particularism school) are often presented as being at odds with each other; yet they both recognized two things that became hallmarks of the discipline of Anthropology in the middle of the twentieth century and appear in Lemkinās thought, but are absent from the colloquial understandings of culture in current usage. First, they noted that a given culture was not the same thing as a human group as a sociological entity; and, second, that changes in a culture were necessary for ensuring the continuation of human societies, because these changes allowed people and groups to adapt to new situations and new challenges. Culture, therefore, was not something that existed as a ...
