Encyclopedia of Sociology Vol

gender and then go down the line, looking for the most qualified each time. Another variable employers factor in is the going pay scale for the workers they want; they may have to settle for less preferred workers to see more of a profit or sacrifice some profits to avoid protests from highly paid entrenched workers.

Although worker demographics, industry growth, and employer preferences produce changes in occupational gender composition, the main factor that redistributes workers of different races and genders is change in the structure of the work process and in the quality of particular jobs within occupations, which can be manipulated by employers. That is, jobs can be automated and deskilled or made part time or home based to justify reducing labor costs, with a few better-paid workers retained in supervisory positions.

During shifts of labor queues up and down the job ladder, the potential for conflict between women and men as well as between members of dominant and subordinated racial and ethnic groups is high. Dominant men want to perpetuate the work conditions that justify their high pay; employers who want to reduce their labor costs degrade the work process so they can hire cheaper labor, and then these new workers are accused of depressing the job’s qualifications and skills. Gender segregation of jobs is historically the way employers have kept their men workers satisfied, while expanding the number of cheaper women workers. Such job divisions undercut unions that want to organize women and demand the same pay for them as similarly situated men workers. In a growing or stable job market, dominant men are much less resistant to incoming new types of workers, since they do not see them as competition. In those cases, the job may come closer to being integrated along lines of gender and race.

Occupational gender segregation does not result in separate but equal jobs. Rather, women’s work tends to be lower in pay, prestige, and fringe benefits, such as health insurance. Workers themselves rate jobs where most of the employees are women as inferior to jobs where most of the employees are men. The criteria are number and flexibility of hours, earnings, educational requirements, on-the-job training, having a union contract, extent of supervision and place in the hierarchy, repetitiveness, risk of job loss, and being a

government employee. Workers rate women’s jobs as better in vacation days and not getting dirty at work, even though changing bedpans is as ‘‘dirty’’ as changing oil pans. If wages were used to compensate for unattractive nonmonetary job characteristics, women’s jobs would have to pay four times as much as men’s jobs for workers to rate them equally. Nor is there a trade-off of pay for compatibility with child care—most full-time jobs held by mothers are incompatible with parenting demands; flexibility of schedules and control and timing of work-related tasks are the prerogatives of men managers, not their women secretaries.

The best-paid jobs are shaped on an ideal, dominant man’s career—long-term, continuous work in the same occupation, with steady pay raises and a pension at retirement. Men’s gender status is an advantage to them as workers; they are expected to earn more money when they marry and when they have children, so employers tend to view them as better workers than women. Women workers are felt to be entitled only to supplementary wages, whether they are married or single, because they are not considered legitimate workers but primarily wives and mothers. In actuality, research has shown that married women with children work harder and are more productive than married men with children.

The structured patterns of opportunities and access far override most individual employers’ tastes or individual workers’ motivations, ambitions, personal desires, and material needs. By the 1970s in the United States, adolescent girls were considerably less likely than in previous years to plan on entering an occupation in which most of the workers were women, especially if they lived in a woman-headed household. But they continued to value working with people, helping others, using their abilities, and being creative; boys wanted jobs with status, high earnings, freedom from supervision, and leadership potential. The jobs women are likely to end up in are more gender typed and less fulfilling than their occupational aspirations, but ambitious and hard-working men can often reach their early goals.

Women of all educational levels and men disadvantaged because of race, immigrant status, lack of education, or outmoded job skills are profitable workers because they tend to receive low wages; they also get promoted less frequently and

therefore receive fewer raises. Many work part time and get no benefits. They can be paid little because the pool of such workers is larger that of privileged men workers. The size and social characteristics of the pool of low-waged workers are affected by state policies encouraging or discouraging the employment of women, the influx of immigrants, and the flight of capital from one area of a country to another or offshore.

Other processes that segregate and stratify occupations are segmentation and ghettoization. Segmented occupations are horizontally or vertically divided into sectors with different educational or credential requirements for hiring, different promotion ladders, different work assignments, and different pay scales. Typically, these segments are gendered and frequently also exhibit racial and ethnic clustering. However, occupations in which almost all the workers are of one gender can also be segmented. For instance, in the United States, doctors and nurses are gender-segregated segments in hospitals. Physicians are segmented between those in primary care and those who are hospital-based specialists, who have more prestige and power and higher incomes. Women physicians are often found in primary care. Nursing is also segmented into registered nurses, licensed practical nurses, nurses’ aides, and home health workers. Nurses are virtually all women, but the segments are racially differentiated: The majority of registered nurses tend to be white or AsianAmerican; most of the lower-paid health workers tend to be black or Hispanic. Men who go into nursing tend to specialize in the more lucrative specializations and become administrators.

Segmentation is legitimized by bureaucratic rules or legal requirements for qualifying credentials, but ghettoization separates the lower-paid ‘‘women’s’’ jobs from the better-paid ‘‘men’s’’ jobs within an occupation through informal gender typing. What is dubbed ‘‘women’s work’’ or ‘‘men’s work’’ has a sense of normality and naturalness, an almost moral quality, even though the justification for such typing is usually an after-the-fact rationalization. The assumption is that the skills, competence, strength, and other qualities needed to do a job are tied up with masculinity and femininity, but gendered identities as workers are constructed in the gendered organization of the workplace and reinforced in training and organizational sociability, such as company golf games and sports teams.

Within gender-typed occupations, jobs or specialties may be gender typed in the opposite direction. For example, the majority of physicians are men in the United States and women in Russia, but the same specialties are seen as appropriate for one gender—pediatrics for women and neurosurgery for men. In both countries, neurosurgery pays better and has more prestige than pediatrics.

Both structural segmentation and gender typing that puts some jobs into a low-wage ghetto have the same results. They limit the extent of competition for the better positions, make it easier for privileged workers to justify their advantageous salary scales, and create a group of workers whose lack of credentials or requisite skills legitimate their lower pay. Credentials and skills, however, as well as experience, are manipulated or circumvented to favor workers with certain social characteristics, as when men with less lower-rank experience in women’s jobs are hired as supervisors. In addition, femaleness and maleness are stereotypically linked to certain capabilities, such as finger dexterity and physical strength; gender then becomes the discriminant criterion for hiring, not what potential employees can actually do with their hands, backs, and heads.

Promotion ladders are also gender segregated. Women and men who are not of the dominant racial or ethnic group tend not to rise to the top in their work organization, unless practically all the workers are women or men of the same racial or ethnic group. White men tend to dominate positions of authority whether or not they are numerically predominant. This pattern is known as the glass ceiling—the lid on women’s rise to the top of their work organizations. In occupations where the majority of the workers are women, positions of authority tend to be held by men—elementary school teachers are predominantly women in the United States, but principals and superintendents are predominantly men. That is, token men in a woman’s occupation tend to be promoted faster than the women workers. This parallel phenomenon has been dubbed the glass escalator.

These pervasive patterns of occupational segregation and stratification are the result of deliberate actions and also inaction on the part of governments, owners and managers, and organized groups of workers—and change has to come from the same sources. Since gender segregation involves

occupations and professions, job titles, and specific work sites, integration has to involve more than simply increasing the numbers of women. True occupational gender equality would mean that women and men would have the same opportunities to obtain professional credentials and occupational training, and would be distributed in the same proportions as they are in the paid work force across workplaces, job titles, occupations, and hierarchical positions. Instead, in most industrialized countries, women are overrepresented in clerical and service jobs, low-prestige professional and technical work, and sales. In developing countries, and in areas of industrialized countries where there are concentrations of poor people and recent immigrants, women tend to be concentrated in labor-intensive factory work, agriculture, and the informal (off-the-books) economy.

This gendered organization of paid labor dovetails with the gendered organization of domestic labor. Low pay, uninteresting jobs, and the glass ceiling encourage single women to marry and married women to devote energy and attention to child rearing and domestic work. The job market encourages women to be a reserve army of labor— available for full-time work in times of scarce labor, but fired or put on part-time schedules when there is less work. Better job opportunities are offered to men of the dominant racial and ethnic groups to encourage them to give their all to the job. Employers (mostly men) benefit from women’s cheap labor and men’s need to earn more to support a family; men who live with women benefit from women’s unpaid labor at home. Highly educated and professional women are caught in the structural conflicts of these two forms of labor; in order to compete with the men of their status, they have to hire ‘‘wives’’—other women to do their domestic work. This pool of paid domestic labor historically is made up of the least advantaged women—native poor and recent immigrants of a variety of racial and ethnic groups.

GENDER INEQUALITY

Gender inequality takes many different forms, depending on the economic structure and social organization of a particular society and on the culture of any particular group within that society. Although we speak of gender inequality, it is usually women who are disadvantaged when compared to

similarly situated men. In the job market, women often receive lower pay for the same or comparable work and are frequently blocked in their chances for advancement, especially to top positions. There is usually an imbalance in the amount of housework and child care a wife does compared to her husband, even when both spend the same amount of time in waged work outside the home. When women professionals are matched with men of comparable productiveness, men get greater recognition for their work and move up career ladders faster. On an overall basis, work most often done by women, such as teaching small children and nursing, is paid less than work most often done by men, such as computer programming and engineering. Gender inequality also takes the form of girls getting less education than boys of the same social class. It often means an unequal distribution of health care services between women and men, and research priorities that focus on diseases men are more likely to get than women.

Gender inequality takes even more oppressive and exploitative forms. Throughout the world, women are vulnerable to beatings, rape, and mur- der—often by their husbands or boyfriends, and especially when they try to leave an abusive relationship. The bodies of girls and women are used in sex work—pornography and prostitution. They undergo cosmetic surgery and are on display in movies, television, and advertising in Western cultures. In other cultures, their genitals are mutilated and their bodies are covered from head to toe in the name of chastity. They may be forced to bear children they do not want or have abortions or be sterilized against their will. In countries with overpopulation, infant girls are much more often abandoned in orphanages than infant boys. In cultural groups that value boys over girls, if the sex of the fetus can be determined, it is girls who are aborted.

Gender inequality can also disadvantage men. In many countries, only men serve in the armed forces, and in most countries, only men are sent into direct combat. It is mostly men who do the more dangerous work, such as firefighting and policing. Although women have fought in wars and are entering police forces and fire departments, the gender arrangements of most societies assume that women will do the work of bearing and caring for children, while men do the work of protecting them and supporting them economically.

Most women in industrial and postindustrial societies do not spend their lives having and caring for babies, and most women throughout the world do paid and unpaid work to supply their families with food, clothing, and shelter, even while they are taking care of children. The modern forms of gender inequality are not a complementary exchange of responsibilities, but a social system within which women are exploitable. In a succinct summary of gender inequality, it was estimated by a United Nations report in 1980 that women do two-thirds of the world’s work, receive 10 percent of the world’s income, and own 1 percent of the world’s property.

The major social and cultural institutions support this system of gender inequality. Religions legitimate the social arrangements that produce it, justifying them as right and proper. Laws support the status quo and also often make it impossible to redress the outcomes—to prosecute husbands for beating their wives, or boyfriends for raping their girlfriends. In the arts, women’s productions are so often ignored that they are virtually invisible, which led Virginia Woolf to conclude that Anonymous must have been a woman. Much scientific research assumes that differences between women and men are genetic or hormonal and looks for data to support these beliefs, ignoring findings that show gender overlaps or input from the social environment. In the social sciences, gender is entered into research designs only as a binary, erasing the effects of racial, social class, and ethnic variations.

Except for the Scandinavian countries, which have the greatest participation of women in government and the most gender-equal laws and state policies, most governments are run by socially dominant men, and their policies reflect their interests. In every period of change, including those of revolutionary upheaval, men’s interests, not women’s, have prevailed, and many men, but few women, have benefited from progressive social policies. Equality and justice for all usually means for men only. Women have never had their revolution because the structure of gender as a social institution has never been seriously challenged. Therefore, all men benefit from the ‘‘patriarchal dividend’’—women’s unpaid work maintaining homes and bringing up children; women’s low-paid work servicing hospitals, schools, and myriad other workplaces.

Gender inequality is deeply ingrained in the structure of Western, industrialized societies. It is built into the organization of marriage and families, work and the economy, politics, religion, sports, the arts and other cultural productions, and the very language we speak. Making women and men equal, therefore, necessitates social, not individual, solutions.

CHANGING GENDER

Changing a gendered society entails structural and institutional change. Attitudes and values must change, too, but these are often altered when social policies and practices shift. Which changes have occurred since the beginning of the feminist movement of the early 1970s and which have not? What kind of programs target institutions and social structures? What is still needed for gender equality?

Affirmative action and comparable worth pay scales were two efforts to effect structural change— one to desegregate occupations and the other to distribute economic rewards for work on a genderneutral basis. Affirmative action (hiring women in occupations dominated by men and men for work usually done by women) was widely implemented in the United States and did desegregate some occupations, but without continuous effort, gender segregation reestablishes itself as jobs and work organizations change. Another effort to establish gender-neutral work policies was comparable worth pay scales—assessing the characteristics of the job and paying on the basis of type of work done, not on who does the work. These programs were not widely implemented; women’s work continues to be paid less than men’s even when a man does the work. Women have entered the professions, especially medicine and the law, in large numbers and have moved up career ladders, but in most large-scale corporations and professional organizations, the top positions of authority are still held by men.

Sexual harassment guidelines have been another effective effort at changing thinking about acceptable behavior, and again, while the results are imperfect (and the guidelines are being used in ways that do not empower women), thinking about what was ‘‘normal’’ behavior in the workplace did change drastically.

In Europe, but not in the United States, subsidized parental leave for either parent and child care for every mother has changed mothering from a full-time occupation to something that can be combined with paid work out of the home without a constant struggle. The Scandinavian countries provide ‘‘daddy days’’—leave time in the first year of a newborn’s life that the father must take or it is forfeited.

A radical effort at restructuring government has taken place in France—a proposed program for mandating equal numbers of women and men representatives at the national level of government. Parity is not likely to become a widespread policy, but even redressing gender imbalance would give women and men a more equal opportunity to make laws and influence social policy. Gender differences in voting patterns in the United States indicate that women do have a different perspective on many issues. For women to be elected in greater numbers, powerful men now in politics would have to encourage young women to consider a career in politics, foster their advancement through mentoring, nominate them for national offices, and campaign with them and raise money for them when they run for office. Paradoxically, it has seemed easier for women to become heads of state than for these same states to vote in an equal number of women and men in their governing bodies. It has also been easier for women to become heads of parliamentary governments, where a party chooses the prime minister. The appointment of women to high positions, such as Madeleine Albright as U.S. Secretary of State, has also been welcomed. Yet when it comes to directly putting women into leadership positions of great authority, whether in government or in major corporations, there is still a public reluctance to grant women as much power as men.

On a more personal level, some people have structured their families to be gender-equal on every level—domestic work, child care, and financial contribution to the household economy. However, as long as work is structured for a married- man-with-wife career pattern, and men’s work is paid better than women’s work, gender-equal families will be very hard to attain by the majority of people. Other heterosexual couples have reversed roles—the woman is the breadwinner and the man cares for the children and keeps house. Here, the problem is that the domestic world is so gendered

that male househusbands suffer from ostracism and isolation, as well as from a suspicion of homosexuality. Oddly, lesbian and gay couples who have reared children in a variety of family arrangements have blended more easily into hetero-coupled social worlds, at least in some communities. Corporate and government policies that offer health insurance and other benefits to any couple in a long-term household arrangement have also helped to restructure family life in ways that do not assume heterosexuality and marriage. Note, however, that communal domestic households have waned in popularity in Western countries, although they are the norm in polygamous cultures.

Least amenable to change have been the gendered divisions of work in the global economy. Financed by capital from developed countries, work organizations around the world exploit the labor of young, unmarried women under sweat- shop-like conditions, while reserving better-paid jobs and support for entrepreneurship to men. The policies of the International Monetary Fund and other financial restructuring agencies do not include among their goals gender desegregation or encouraging women’s education and access to health resources. In many developing countries, violence and sexual exploitation, as well as the heterosexual spread of AIDS, seriously undermine efforts to upgrade the lives of women and girls.

In sum, to change gendered social orders to be more equal (or, alternatively, less gendered) will take individual effort and modification of genderstereotyped attitudes and values, but most of all, a restructuring of work and family through the policies and practices of large-scale corporations and the governments of dominant nations.

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JUDITH LORBER

GENERAL LINEAR MODEL

See Analysis of Variance and Covariance; Causal and Inference Models; Correlation and Regression Analysis.

GENOCIDE

When, in 1881, the German anti-Semite Dühring urged a ‘‘final settling of accounts’’ with the Jews, he spoke, rather obliquely, of the need for a ‘‘Carthaginian’’ solution (p. 113f.). This was not merely a euphemism, however, as it might now seem. On the contrary, it was well known that Rome had utterly destroyed Carthage in the last Punic War. Hence Dühring’s meaning was clear. But his phrasing remained cryptic because the vocabulary of mass death had not yet attained technical precision. Not until World War II, in fact, were the terms ‘‘genocide’’ and ‘‘crimes against humanity’’ introduced. Thus, in December 1948, when the United Nations declared the willful destruction of an entire people to be a breach of international law—a principle enshrined in the U.N. Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide—the very word for mass murder was still novel.

CONCEPTUAL ROOTS

The word ‘‘genocide’’ was coined by the jurist Raphaël Lemkin in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. ‘‘New conceptions require new terms,’’ Lemkin wrote. ‘‘By ‘genocide,’ we mean the destruction of a nation or. . . ethnic group’’—that is, ‘‘murder, though on a vastly greater scale’’ (1944, pp. 79, 91).

Mass murder, of course, is hardly new. But only since the French Revolution has there been widespread concern with what the philosopher Hegel called ‘‘the fanaticism of destruction,’’ which

aims, Hegel said, to eliminate all enemies, real or imagined ([1821] 1991, p. 38). An early expression of this concern came from Gracchus Babeuf, the leading socialist in the French Revolution, who decried the ‘‘exterminating wheel’’ of Robespierre’s Terror. Robespierre’s ‘‘general system of government,’’ Babeuf contended, is also a ‘‘general system of extermination’’ ([1794] 1987, pp. 96–98). In a similar spirit, the liberal poet August von Platen deplored the Russian repression of the Polish revolution of 1831 as an instance of ‘‘Volksmurder’’ (Jonassohn 1998, p. 140). Others later made similar charges. But it was not until the Nazi Holocaust that the international community felt the need to adopt a special term for the attempted murder of a people.

In 1945, soon after Lemkin’s book appeared, the defeated Nazi rulers were charged with ‘‘deliberate and systematic genocide.’’ A year later the United Nations ratified a working definition of genocide as the ‘‘denial of the right of existence of entire human groups’’ (Kuper 1981, pp. 22–23). Lemkin’s new coinage had won swift acceptance. Since then, it has become universally popular— and equally controversial.

GLOBAL VIOLENCE

The popularity of the idea of genocide reflects its continuing relevance in today’s world. Globally, there were at least forty-four state-organized mass slaughters in the period from 1945 to 1989, many of which were quasi-genocidal by almost any definition. These massacres resulted in an average of 1.6 million to 3.9 million deaths per annum— significantly more, that is, than the total number of fatalities caused by all wars and natural disasters in this period. And in every decade since 1945 another 1.85 million people have died in wars and civil wars (Gurr and Harff 1989). Nor has the picture improved since 1989. In 1993, for example, there were twenty-three wars, 25 million refugees, and a record number of armed U.N. interventions in conflicts around the world (Gurr and Harff 1994). In 1994, a genocidal massacre in Rwanda caused roughly 850,000 deaths (Smith 1998). Elsewhere— in Burundi, east Timor, and myriad other places— similar if smaller tragedies have unfolded.

Many groups, in other words, have been victims of systematic violence in the recent past, and

allegations of genocide abound. Yet the concept itself remains elusive—partly, indeed, thanks to its own success. So many people now equate genocide with evil that nearly every conflict is marked by charges and countercharges of genocide. Abortion, birth control, forced sterilization, intermarriage, and desegregation are just a few of the countless practices that have been labeled genocidal. Almost anything controversial, it seems, can be called genocide.

For social scientists, plainly, the matter is more complex. This was clear from the outset in Lemkin’s work, which remains paradigmatic in many ways.

TOTAL WAR

Sociologically, Lemkin believed that the Holocaust was not a contingent feature of German Nazism but rather an expression of intrinsic Nazi tendencies. As an absolutist form of nationalism, Nazism claimed absolute sovereignty over nonGermans on the ground of purported German racial-national superiority. This, in turn, led to a Nazi conception of war as Total War—the conviction, that is, that wars are not merely struggles between states but rather inevitable racial contests between peoples, with total victory or defeat as the ultimate outcomes. And the Nazi repudiation of universalist ethics inspired the belief that, in Total War, enemy peoples may be totally destroyed without ethical qualms.

Genocide was not, however, the entire Nazi agenda. On the contrary, in Lemkin’s view, genocide was a single part of a many-sided strategy. The ultimate Nazi goal was to build a German empire, and in pursuing this goal only certain types of enemies were slated for annihilation: Jews, who were seen as the poisonous racial antithesis of everything German; so-called Gypsies, who were regarded as racially inferior pests; and a variety of others (including democratic intellectuals, Marxists, and resistance fighters) whom the Nazis saw as irreconcilable political foes. Enemies of other kinds, however, were to be ruled rather than massacred. Some, indeed, were to be incorporated into the Nazi empire as lesser ‘‘Germanic’’ peoples (including the Dutch, Flemings, and Scandinavians). Others, including Russians, Serbs, and Poles, were to be enslaved and reduced in numbers (by limits on

birthrates, food rationing, etc.) but were not to be liquidated per se.

AN AGE OF ABSOLUTES

For Lemkin, that is, genocide was a strand in the fabric of Nazi war aims. And though the genocidal aspect of Nazi policy had historical precedents, it was also uniquely modern in many ways. Neither of the two pillars of the Holocaust (‘‘master-race mythology and aggressive technology’’) could be grasped apart from specifically modern forces, including science and industry, nationalism, racism, and statism. Nor could modern German militarism be equated with the warrior ethics of times past. Other peoples had periodically committed mass murder, but German militarism had risen to new heights of virulence, driven, Lemkin concluded, by an acute ‘‘national and racial emotionalism’’ that was given a uniquely destructive force by modern technology (1944, p. xiv).

The consequence, as the sociologist Jessie Bernard noted shortly after the war ended (1949, p. 652), is that ‘‘ethnic conflict in our day has taken an unexpectedly brutal turn,’’ even reaching the level of ‘‘exterminating whole peoples—genocide.’’ Previous conflicts, however brutal, now seemed relatively small and unsystematic by comparison.

VARIETIES OF GENOCIDE

This is not to say, however, that genocide is entirely unique to modernity. In recent decades, sociologists have tended to agree that the willful destruction of entire peoples is, in fact, an ancient practice, common to many cultures. But it is also widely accepted that mass murder has assumed new forms in the twentieth century (as Lemkin said). This change is not merely quantitative but qualitative, and it is often framed in terms of a contrast between two ideal-types: (1) instrumental genocide, or mass murder to achieve pragmatic goals; and

(2) ideological genocide, or mass murder as an end in itself.

Save for a relatively small proportion of cases that prefigure contemporary trends (e.g., wars of religion like the Crusades), most premodern genocides were essentially instrumental in nature. Modern genocides, in contrast, are often said to be largely if not primarily ideological—though instrumental motives remain powerful as well.

THE ORIGIN OF MASS MURDER

Many scholars, like Kurt Jonassohn, believe that genocides have occurred ‘‘throughout history in all parts of the world’’ (Jonassohn 1988, in Chalk and Jonassohn 1990, p. 415). Leo Kuper, in a classic study, called genocide ‘‘an odious scourge which has inflicted great losses on humanity in all periods of history’’ (1981, p. 11). Sociobiologists, meanwhile, have been even bolder, claiming that genocide is not only universal for humanity but for our closest evolutionary relatives as well (including chimpanzees and our evolutionary ancestors; cf. Diamond 1991, p. 264). E. O. Wilson, the founder of sociobiology, has speculated that genocide may be a ‘‘primitive cultural capacity,’’ rooted in ‘‘the possession of certain genes,’’ that confers a selective advantage on predatory groups that wish to spread their genes at the expense of their neighbors (1980, p. 298).

In reality, however, there is very little evidence of anything like genocidal violence in the evolutionary or historical record until comparatively recently. Sociobiologists who defend the idea that people and chimps share ‘‘a continuous, 5-million- year habit of lethal aggression’’ have offered, as their best evidence, the testimony of witnesses who report that, in more than 100 years of observation at four sites, seven chimps were assaulted by groups from neighboring chimp communities; and though none of the victims were killed on the spot, several later died or disappeared (Wrangham and Peterson 1996, pp. 16–21, 63).

This, it seems plain, is slight evidence for the large claim that people and their relatives and ancestors are genocidal by nature. Little else in the ethological or evolutionary record seems to lend credibility to this claim. Nor does history before the discovery of agriculture show significant evidence of mass murder.

To date, the earliest known evidence of collective violence is a gravesite in the Nile Valley containing fifty-nine men, women, and children, most of whom were killed by weapons with projectile points. This massacre, dating back 12,000–14,000 years, was ‘‘almost certainly’’ a consequence of disruptions produced by a crisis in the protoagricultural system that was evolving in the region (Reader 1998, p. 146). The only other authenticated evidence of mass violence in remote antiquity is

a similar but smaller burial ground in Bavaria dating back 7,700 years (Frayer 1997).

PLOUGHSHARES INTO SWORDS

In general, archaeological evidence makes it clear that wars, massacres, and even murders were comparatively rare in pre-agricultural days (Ferguson 1997). And the ethnographic evidence shows that, while hunter-gatherers are seldom entirely nonviolent, they have significantly fewer wars, internal conflicts, and interpersonal violence than agrarian peoples (Ember and Ember 1997;Ross 1993). Even the famously ‘‘fierce’’ Yamomami of northern Brazil and Venezuela seem to have been driven to violence as much by the influence of outside forces as by internal pressures (Ferguson 1992). ‘‘It seems unlikely,’’ as the genocide scholars Chalk and Jonassohn conclude, ‘‘that early man engaged in genocide during the hunting and gathering stage’’ (1990, p. 32).

For some peoples, this stage lasted until the recent past. For humanity as a whole, hunting and foraging remained universal until roughly 11,000 years ago. Shortly afterwards, agriculture arose in the Middle East; and then, in succession, in China 11,000 years ago in Papua, Mexico, and the Andes 10,000 years ago in West Africa 6,000 years ago and elsewhere.

Once agriculture had appeared, mass violence assumed new dimensions.

EMPIRE AND TERROR

The first weapons of war, and the earliest signs of mass warfare, appeared at the dawn of the agrarian era. In the ensuing millenia the first true wars were fought (Ferrill 1997, pp. 18–19). The intent of these wars was usually instrumental—to win land and labor, to keep enemies at bay, to build states and empires. This was the context in which mass violence became familiar. Genocide in particular was almost always linked to empire building in this period.

Historically, empire builders generally seek tribute or servile labor from the peoples they conquer, which leads them to spare the lives of noncombatants, especially peasants. This was the

spirit in which Sumerian, Hittite, and Babylonian epics of remote antiquity warned of the folly of genocide (Cohn 1996). But as fortified cities emerged as obstacles in the path of empire, conquest sometimes took more brutal forms. And peasant resistance often provoked vengeful repression. Hence, by the third millenium B.C.E., genocidal conquests had become comparatively common in the early Egyptian empire (Jonassohn 1998). Elsewhere, genocidal massacres seem to have become common by the first milennium

B.C.E.

The Assyrians in particular became legendary for their merciless assaults on fortified cities, including Babylon, which Sennacherib decimated in 689 B.C.E. The goal of such assaults was usually to destroy an imperial or commercial rival. The preferred method was to lay siege to a city and starve its citizens into submission by burning crops and destroying livestock. Once a campaign of this kind triumphed, the conquerors would often raze the defeated city, salt the earth, and slaughter the citizens. The legalistic Romans dubbed this practice ‘‘devastation.’’

Early ‘‘devastations’’ included the destruction of Melos by Athens in 416 B.C.E. (for refusing to take sides in the Peloponnesian Wars); the destruction of two Sicilian cities by Carthage in 409 B.C.E.; and the annihilation of Carthage by Rome in 146 B.C.E. In the latter case, as many as 150,000 people are said to have died.

THE CONTINUATION OF WAR BY

OTHER MEANS

Sociologists have identified a range of motives for instrumental genocide. Chalk and Jonassohn, for example, say that most genocides of this type (which they call ‘‘utilitarian’’) have been prompted by the wish to acquire wealth, to terrorize real or potential enemies, or to avert threats (1990, pp. 34–36). Until comparatively recently, motives of this kind have been the main effective spurs to genocide both in the circum-Mediterranean world and elsewhere. In brief, it seems that whenever empires fight, great opportunities and equally great dangers are at stake. In such cases, genocidal massacres can become the extraordinary means of attaining goals that, in other contexts, would be pursued by ordinary statecraft.

Examples abound. Canton was gutted in 879 C.E. and its population was decimated. In the twelfth century C.E., Afghan conquerors from Ghur destroyed the city of Ghazni and all its men. In the next century the Mongols laid waste to Transoxania and Khurasan, evidently killing hundreds of thousands of people. Not long afterwards, all 12,000 of the Meos people (south of Delhi) were killed in the wake of a failed uprising. Many events in the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of the Americas were plainly genocidal. And many other examples of this kind can be cited as well (Chalk and Jonassohn 1990; Jonassohn, 1998).

A related form of genocide accompanied the rise of modern colonialism. In the Americas, for example, the English Puritans liquidated the Pequot in 1637, the French destroyed the Natchez in 1731, and Argentine settlers virtually eliminated the Araucanians in 1878–1885. In Africa, many peoples have been devastated by colonial conquests; some (including the Herero of Namibia and the Matumbi of Tanzania) have suffered mass destruction. Many indigenous peoples in Australia have been destroyed, and in Tasmania the entire aboriginal population was extinguished by 1876.

These are just a few of the many cases in which genocide has accompanied instrumental conquest.

IDEOLOGICAL GENOCIDE

In some cases, however, genocide is not an instrumental means to an end, but rather an end in itself. Genocides of this type, in which the destruction of entire peoples is sought for intrinsic reasons, are generally classified as ‘‘ideological’’ (Fein 1993; Smith 1987). These massacres, which are typically fueled by religious or ethnoracial fanaticism, are often among the deadliest of genocides, since they seek to destroy targeted peoples for reasons of ‘‘principle,’’ not simply expediency. And they are often instrumentally irrational in an almost chemically pure sense. In 1994, for example, the rulers of Rwanda were so preoccupied by the wish to annihilate an unarmed ethnic minority that they left themselves virtually defenseless against an army of invading rebels from Uganda (Des Forges 1999). Between 1975 and 1979, the Pol Pot regime wrought havoc across the length and breadth of Cambodia in a vain effort to purge Cambodia of every trace of foreign, urban, and intellectual influence (Kiernan