The Performance and Codes of Evil in Genocidal Practices : Selected Aspects and Examples

The topic of this article is the use of selected patterns of the imagery of evil within studies of war atrocities and acts of genocide. The characterization of “evil” in this paper is informed by the anthropological perspective, with the imagery of evil juxtaposed against anthropologically (i.e., cultural, human, and reflective) practices of humiliation, violation of taboos, and the location of victims in matrices of impurity and exclusion. In his analysis, the author Martin Pollack considers the contaminated landscape through the lens of the practices of taboo violation, including the prevention of burial and the performance of genocidal rape