Concept

Ethnocide

Summary
Ethnocide is the extermination of cultures. Reviewing the legal and the academic history of the usage of the terms genocide and ethnocide, Bartolomé Clavero differentiates them by stating that "Genocide kills people while ethnocide kills social cultures through the killing of individual souls". According to Martin Shaw, ethnocide or cultural genocide is possible without a genocide. Because concepts such as cultural genocide and ethnocide have been used in different contexts, the anthropology of genocide examines their inclusion and exclusion in law and policies. Raphael Lemkin, the linguist and lawyer who coined genocide in 1943 as the union of "the Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing)", also suggested ethnocide as an alternative form representing the same concept, using the Greek ethnos (nation) in place of genos. However, the term genocide has received much wider adoption than ethnocide. As early as 1933, the lawyer Raphael Lemkin proposed that genocide had a cultural component, a component which he called "cultural genocide." The term has since acquired rhetorical value as a phrase that is used to protest against the destruction of cultural heritage. The drafters of the 1948 Genocide Convention considered the use of the term, but dropped it from their consideration. The legal definition of genocide is left unspecific about the exact nature in which genocide is done, only stating that it is destruction with intent to destroy a racial, religious, ethnic or national group as such. Article 7 of a 1994 draft of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples uses the word "ethnocide" as well as the phrase "cultural genocide" but it does not define what they mean.
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.