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One of the most disturbing phenomena during episodes of mass violence concerns individuals who hated a specific group and harmed some of its members while making exceptions for people they had a relationship with. A preexisting social tie, not moral consciousness, produces this aversion to harming a party to the relationship, even if rescuing vulnerable individuals contradicts personal beliefs, orders, or group loyalty. Hatred is stronger than bonds only when the latter are weak, fraught, or missing in the first place. I call this phenomenon relational exceptionalism. Bringing the anthropological literature on interpersonal relationships to bear on studies of mass violence, this article illustrates that to trigger relational exceptionalism, a relationship requires not reciprocity, trust, obligations, affinities, or nearness, but a degree of autonomy. Keywords: relational exceptionalism, social relationships, perpetrator, genocide, ethics., Any research starts with a state of perplexity. The reflection for this article had two. The first occurred while noticing recent trends in mass violence studies. While the first studies [...]

Can people really kill their neighbours – massively and out of hatred? Is it anthropologically possible? Massacres and genocides of neighbours have become a subcategory of mass violence studies over the past two decades. This scholarship implicitly refutes entire parts of anthropology, notably the Durkheimian tradition, for which society is organized to produce bonds and bonds are inherently irenic, while liberally using key anthropological concepts – intimacy, social relationships, and the figure of the neighbour. These terms are rarely defined or explored. This scholarship implicitly makes four articulated assumptions: neighbours entertain social relationships, that is the essence of neighbourliness; vicinity therefore equates sociality; therefore, when neighbours kill neighbours, they commit social violations; therefore, bonds can be overwhelmed by beliefs, hatred, or other circumstances. However, a close reading of the evidence provided by this historiography shows that descriptions of preexisting sociality are briefly sketched, typically stretching vicinity and mixing vicinity with sociality. By overlooking the scope and quality of relationships between victims and perpetrators, this scholarship tends to treat simple connections, or what network sociology would call "weak ties" with intimacy and kinship with sociality; it has also overlooked how human groups tend to organize and limit sociality across antagonist identities. Vicinity does not predict sociality, even in times of peace, even in holist societies, and even more so when relations across antagonist groups are mediated by rumours, envy, and cultural insecurity. This article proposes a way forward with the use of socio-metrics to better understand social ties and their proprieties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The historiography on the François Duvalier regime in Haiti (1957–1971) tends to focus on Duvalier's wanton use of violence and generally overlooks questions of governance, stressing or inferring that Duvalier was a solitary despot. This article is resolutely revisionist and argues that Duvalier (1) did not govern alone; (2) relied primarily on an inner-circle for governance; (3) and that personal identity and intimacy, not ideology, determined the composition of this inner-circle. Paradoxically, membership in the inner-circle offered no guarantee for safety, as relations to Duvalier could shift from intimacy to hostility with staggering speed. This article's scope and methods are historiographic while using several anthropological notions on interpersonal relationships. It thus examined the bonds that shaped the composition of Duvalier's inner-circle in the course of four decades, from 1931 to 1971. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An ethnic church from the Middle East without a missionary tradition has grown in a decade to several hundred parishioners in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. Using anthropology and ethnographic methods, this article argues that interculturality, even if marked by subjectivity, equivocations, culturalism, and ephemerality, can also be characterized by the seduction of symbols, mutual appropriation, and inclusion. I will give particular attention to the role of assigned beauty and awe in the constitution of meaning and show that shared relational intelligence and the emotional security provided by the priests allow for semiotic distortions to be overcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]