Talk:Ethnocide

Merge cultural genocide here
Both terms convey the same meaning, "ethnocide" seems more to the point and has been actively theorized as such (Robert Jaulin, etc.). Tazmaniacs 14:14, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

I disagree. They do not. Cultural genocide refers to the destruction of cultural artifacts for genocidal reasons. The act of cultural genocide does not require there to be an existing ethnic group that uses, has ownership of, or feels itself attached to, the destroyed artifacts. Meowy 16:13, 2 August 2007 (UTC)
 * I agree with Meowy. VartanM 01:31, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

The problem with both terms is the root "-cide," which means "to kill." However unjust, what we are referring to as cultural genocide or ethnicide does not involve the death of a human being, and so to refer to it as a "-cide" actually waters down the power and specificity of the original term. So my problem with these words is not that they do not adequately denote what it is we are trying to describe, but that is muddles the language that we have to name other crimes that are, I think it is fair to say, more serious.

Joshuagitelson 18:28, 12 October 2007 (UTC)joshuagitelson


 * The "killing" is the killing of a culture through destruction of its artifacts. I can also point out the existence of the phrase and the concept of "white genocide", which refers to genocide committed without the shedding of any blood. Meowy 18:24, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

BTW, I think that the use of the term "ethnocide" (or "ethnozide") when it overlaps with the definition of "cultural genocide" is mainly used in non-English speaking countries, presumably because "cultural" is an English word. Meowy 20:29, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

It's all Genocide

Genocide's definition shortens to "An attempt to eliminate an ethnicity." This includes "Ethnocide" as confirmed by noting the mental part of the wiki entry for Genocide. Looking at the bible, I'm not surprised monotheism tends to exterminate other cultures, see evilbible.com. Polytheism tends to do this less, possibly because they can theoretically get infinite explanatory power by just adding more deities. This would tend towards a theoretically infinite complexity under polytheism.

An unintuitive example

Corporations packed the U.S. Supreme Court after the Civil War and finally expanded their rights so successfully that few today know that treating them as "persons" was unthinkable to the prior court. Thus the Genocide successfully eliminated the culture that had defeated much of the arbitrary power of corporations we take for granted. jane_ikari@yahoo.com 38.99.84.53 (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 12:45, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

"genocide" is systematic mass murder of the members of a certain nation or ethnicity. Any extension of the term to include mere cultural assimilation amounts to a preposterous watering down of the term. Both "ethnocide" and "cultural genocide" should be discussed in an article with a less idiosyncratic and inflammatory title. --dab (𒁳) 22:30, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Genocide does not include ethnocide. Genocide is the physical destruction of a people. Ethnocide is the destruction of their cultural world and not, as someone said, the destruction of "cultural artefacts". (Quite the contrary, you can destroy a culture and keep its artifacts as trophy. Many museums are all about that, especially those that show the artifacts of rural cultures. The pious excuse of honoring the past hardly disguises the mixture of guilt and pride that often led to their erection in the first place.) As often happens, there is here a lack of appreciation for the notion and the importance of culture, probably because that is something most people will only apprehend when consistently immersed in a substantially different cultural world to the point of realizing that many assumptions that one never questioned as "universal" are actually indissociable from a given cultural world. The "culture" or "cultures" to which ethnocide refers are not to be understood as an overlay of cultural style or as a set of "cultural artifacts." A more appropriate simile would be "soul" or "souls": the very "essence" or "inner core" of the way any people and any person relates to, and, literally, builds the, world as meaning. More that  what  is dear and precious to a person or a people, culture is about  what can be  dear and precious and  how it can be  dear and precious. I find it hard to understand how Western man can be so deprived of a meaningful world and of intimacy with that world as to not understand that culture  is  ultimately more important than biological perpetuation of bodies. Honestly I think some of the above comments denote a clear lack of comprehension of what is discussed in the text to which they refer. That's the only way I can understand how someone could think that "ethnocide" "waters down" the notion of "genocide" on the grounds of their formal similitude. Actually if you look closely at the procedures used by genocidal criminals, you will always find that prior to the actual killing, the people to be exterminated are consistently humiliated, their cultural world scorned, and the dignity of their customs and of their cultural signs of identity attacked and debased: its almost as if you had to kill the spirit before destroying the flesh. The big problem with acknowledging all this is that it makes us realize that far from being a weird and inexplicable anomaly, the Nazis are closer than we would care to admit to Western Civilization and to its misbehavior when relating to other cultures. This is not to excuse other "civilizations" from similar crimes and namely Islam whose record is hardly better than the West's. So watering down the notion of ethnocide is instrumental in watering down the notion of culture and both moves allow the technical insulation of the phenomenon of "genocide". This is not thinking. It's unthinking. And lastly, "culture" and "cultural" is not at all an exclusive of the English language. Before making such statements about the supposed uniqueness of this or that English word, one is advised to learn one or two other European languages.

Bargerb04 (talk) 07:36, 4 November 2009 (UTC) How about culture-cide? That way it is only the culture of a people being destroyed rather than an actual people. To me genocide can be defined as killing a people that are arguably a distinct difference between those killing to those being killed (different races) and the ethnocide of similar members of a race killing each other over a cultural difference. To me there is no difference so long as one defined group of people is killing another. Everyone recognizes genocide and it is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as: the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group. The point of arguing over geno/ethnocide is splitting hairs and sounds more like academic bickering than defining an act of mass-murder. Either way one group wants another group dead because they aren’t them.


 * Disagree. It is a well established scientific definition of a process of cultural elimination. Unlike genocide it does not cause harm onto human beings physically, but rather deteriorates their traditions, history, customs. A person forgets who he is - turning into a mankurt. Aleksandr Grigoryev (talk) 20:16, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

SSCI2831
Jessiealexia

I do not believe that cultural genocide should be merged with Ethnocide due to the fact that cultural genocide involves the assimilation of a an ethnic group through homocide, however ethnocide is the systematic  annihilation  of an ethnic group which does not physically contribute to murder but rather to destroy the customs and traditions of the specific group. Through the stated differences i would like to further explain ethnocide by going in depth by stating historical examples of the phrase through Canadian Indian residential school system as well as the issues in Rwanda.Jessiealexia (talk) 17:48, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Please note that the bulk of the discussion took place on the Cultural genocide talk page. There has been no consensus for the merge, and the discussion on the merge proposal died out quite some time ago. --Iryna Harpy (talk) 22:14, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

POV and unclear statements in section: UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007); please verify, clarify, and/or correct.
The section "UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007)" contains the following unsourced statement: "11 nations abstained, with four nations - Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States - voting against. Arguably, these four nations represent the current best practice in "indigenous affairs" despite their colonial histories and majority invader populations." Please verify or correct this statement. (For example, please provide reliable sources verifying a majority of persons from these nations engaged in "invasion", specifically, that they were born outside the nation, and entered into the territory of said nation by force of arms.) Please also identify what is meant by the "current best practice" in "indigenous affairs", from a reliable source. Thanks! Katana0182 (talk) 23:18, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

In my opinion the right to ethnic identity is a fundamental right. People have the right to preserve their folklore, customs, traditions, myths in a distinctive, non-interchangeable and unmistakable way. So also the Romanians, the ethnical majority of Romania: It should be for everybody clear that when one speaks about ROMANIANS he speaks in an unmistakable way about an EUROPEAN ethnical group, living since ever in the teritory of Romania and speaking a Romance Language. Bot the hystory of the last 20 years teaches us something else: It IS possible to create this kind of confusions - and this is in my opinion a case of ETHNOCIDE. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.181.54.171 (talk) 19:46, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

Note no previous consensus exist on merging cultural genocide and Ethnocide
Please note that no previous consensus exist on merging cultural genocide and Ethnocide. --(comparingChinese Wikipedia vs Baidu Baike by hanteng) 08:24, 1 March 2013 (UTC)

Note Genocide does not exist anymore
Please note that Genocide does not exist anymore: --(comparingChinese Wikipedia vs Baidu Baike by hanteng) 03:54, 3 March 2013 (UTC)

clean up
In order to remove "original research content", I will move the texts without footnotes/citations here.

text
It may involve a linguicide, phenomenons of acculturation, or other cultural genocide practices, etc. Furthermore, by contrast with a genocide, an ethnocide is not necessarily intentional. However, unlike genocide, which has entered into international law, ethnocide remains primarily the province of ethnologists, who have not yet settled on a single cohesive meaning for the term.
 * intro

Subsequently, ethnocide has been used by some ethnologists to refer to a sub-type of genocide. While the United Nations' 1951 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as acts committed against "national, ethnical, racial or religious" groups, ethnocide, taken in this context, would refer only to crimes motivated by ethnicity.
 * word origin

Another definition in use in some writings suggests that ethnocide could refer to actions which do not lead directly to death or harm of living members of a group, but instead have the long-term effect of reducing birthrates, interfering with education or transmission of culture to future generations of a group, or erasing the group's existence or practices from the historical record. This usage is commonly found in discussions of oppressed indigenous peoples and is sometimes referred to as culturecide. Under the UN Convention, some of these practices could also overlap with legal definitions of genocide, such as prevention of births within a group or forcibly transferring the children of one ethnic group to another group.

Although international genocide law focuses primarily on direct violent and repressive actions, Lemkin, in his writings, considered genocide to be a crime above all others not only because of the numbers of persons killed or injured, but because genocide carried with it the intent to render entire, irreplaceable cultures extinct. The broader definition of ethnocide may be useful in addressing perceived shortcomings and restrictions of genocide law and in identifying cultural destruction when it occurs by less violent and less visible means.

Collective and arbitrary murder, systematic abduction of children to raise them away from their parent’s culture, active and degrading religious propaganda, forced work, expulsion from the homeland or compulsory abandonment of cultural habits and social structure, all these practices, described by Jaulin, have in common a deep despise for the other man and woman as representatives of a different cultural world.
 * Robert Jaulin

Along with a detailed description and analysis of Bari’s case, La paix blanche is also a broad reflection on Western civilization’s tendency to ignore, lower and destroy other cultural worlds as it comes in touch with them, while extending its own domain, bringing the focus of the discussion back from the frontiers of Western civilization to its core and its history. As he takes his inquiry back in time, Jaulin shows that the way the West relates to other civilizations is a continuation of the way it has always related to its own inner cultural diversity, from the monotheistic exclusion of the representatives of different and differing cultural spaces (the “other” gods, divinities, entities, etc.) to its reinstatement under the successive garments of Reason, Revolution, Progress or Science.

A long reflection on the dynamics that led to worldwide ethnocide, its different “masks”, its history and, according to him, one of its earliest manifestations, monotheism, led Jaulin to a complete reappraisal of the phenomenal and conceptual fields polarized by the notion of ethnocide.

This reassessment took its final shape in the 1995’s work, L’univers des totalitarismes : Essai d’ethnologie du “non-être” (in free translation: "The Universe of Totalitarianisms: An Ethnological Essay on “Non-Being”"). In this book, the notion of “totalitarianism” (which should not be mistaken for Hannah Arendt’s concept of totalitarianism) depicts the underlying dynamics of which ethnocide becomes a manifestation among others.

Jaulin defines totalitarianism as an abstract scheme or machine of non-relation to cultural otherness characterized by the expansion of "oneself " ("soi") through an election/exclusion logic. The totalitarian machine operates by splitting the universe into its own “agents” on the one side, and its “objects” on the other, whether they be individuals, families, groups, societies or whole civilizations. It proceeds by depriving the later of their quality of cultural subjects through the erosion and finally the suppression of their space of tradition and cultural invention, which mediates their relation with themselves, i.e. their reflexivity. With the mutilation of their “field of cultural potentialities”, as Jaulin calls it, the totalitarian dynamics transforms its “objects” into new “agents” of expansion, reduced to a mock self-relation defined by the horizon of a potential election. However, to become actual this election needs to articulate with a pole of exclusion; thus the need of a new expansion of this universe of non-relation, the universe of totalitarianisms, by definition an endlessly expanding universe whose theoretical limits paradoxically coincide with its own self-destruction.

The election/exclusion logics works by means of pairs of contradictory and, therefore, mutually exclusive terms. Their content may be as varied as the different semantic domains invested by the totalitarian machine: chosen/doomed, religion/magic, truth/falseness, literate/illiterate, savage/civilized, subject/object, intellectual/manual, proletarians/capitalists, science/illusion, subjectivity/objectivity, etc. In all these contradictory pairs, one of the poles “means” to occupy the whole field; but at the same time, its own meaning and “existence” depends on the virtually excluded pole.

According to Jaulin, the asymmetrical relation portrayed by these pairs is but the starting point of totalitarian movement, its static and temporary position. Its dynamics derives from the “wished for” or prospective inversion of the relation between its two poles. This may happen through the totalitarian pair defining the pre-existing situation, the design of a new one or, more often, through recovery and adaptation of old formulas.

The recovery of the Marxist proletarian/capitalistic contradictory pair or the even older monotheistic chosen/doomed couple by many independence or charismatic movements in the former European colonies as a means of inverting the pre-existing totalitarian field is an instance of the shifts through which the “totalitarian trajectory” reinvents itself. This example also shows the place of ethnocide within the overall totalitarian dynamics as the dialectical alternate to totalitarian inversion.

Such an inexorable and elementary logic, with its ability to migrate to, pervade and finally destroy ever-differing cultural and social worlds, accounts for the endlessly restarted trajectory of totalitarianism’s two-pole field through time and space.

singed
--(comparingChinese Wikipedia vs Baidu Baike by hanteng) 04:00, 3 March 2013 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 1 one external link on Ethnocide. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20000408162107/http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/p_genoci.htm to http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/p_genoci.htm

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 18:15, 26 December 2016 (UTC)