Faculty Profile: Alex Hinton

Alex Hinton, Ph.D.
Associate Professor

Office: Hill Hall 627
Telephone: 973-353-5345
email: ahinton@andromeda.rutgers.edu

Sociocultural and psychological anthropology; genocide and political violence; Southeast Asia (with a focus on Cambodia); culture and mind; globalization and modernity; self and emotion; anthropological and critical theory.

I am currently working on several book projects. The first, tentatively entitled Genocide, Modernity, and Revitalization: Life under the Khmer Rouge, is a sequel to my most recent book, Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide. In particular, I explore the ways in which the Khmer Rouge revolution may be viewed as a revitalization movement. Second, I am co-editing a volume entitled Genocide, Truth, Memory, and Representation: Anthropological Perspectives. This book signals a shift of my research into issues of related to the aftermath of genocide. My interest in issues of justice, reconciliation, truth, memory, trauma, coping, and memorialization have been heightened both by an upcoming trial of former Khmer Rouge leaders and the recent opening of a branch of the Documentation Center of Cambodia http://www.dccam.org/ at Rutgers--Newark. I suspect that this work will eventually lead to another book. Finally, I am in the initial stages of working on two other books. One is a set of non-fiction essays about Cambodia; the other is a comparative project on genocide.

2006	"Khmerness and the Thai Other: Violence, Discourse, and Symbolism in the 2003 Anti-Thai Riot in Cambodia" Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. 37 (3): 445-68
2006	We Can't Let the Khmer Rouge Escape. Washington Post. August 4.
2006	Seeking Justice for the Killing Fields . International Herald Tribune. June 1
2006	The Stare . Rutgers Magazine Spring 2006.
2005	Genocide and Modernity. In A Companion to Psychological Anthropology: Modernity and Psychocultural Change. Conerly Casey and Robert B. Edgerton, eds. Pp. 419-435. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
2005	Lessons from Killing Fields of Cambodia - 30 Years On. Christian Science Monitor. April 14.
2004	The Perpetrator, the Victim, and the Witness. Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, 16(1):137-153
2004	The Poetics of Genocidal Practice: Life Under the Khmer Rouge. In The Cultural Poetics of Violence Practice. Neil Whitehead, ed. Pp. 157-184. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research.
2002	The Dark Side of Modernity: Toward an Anthropology of Genocide. In Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide. Alex Hinton, editor. Berkeley: University of California Press.
2002	Anthropology and Genocide. In Genocide: An Anthropological Reader. Alex Hinton, editor. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
2001	Purity and Contamination in the Cambodian Genocide. In Cambodia emerges from the past: Eight Essays, Judy Ledgerwood, ed., Pp. 60-90. Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press.
2001	Review of David Chandler's book, Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Poison. Holocaust and Genocide Studies 15 (3): 523-525.
2000	Under the Shade of Pol Pot's Umbrella: Myth and Mandala in the Cambodian Genocide. In the Vision Thing: Myth, Politics, and Psyche in the Modern World. Tom Singer, editor. New York: Routledge.
1998	Genocidal Bricolage: A Reading of Human Liver-eating in Cambodia. Yale University Genocide Studies Program Working Paper (GS 06): 16-38.
1998	A Head for an Eye: Revenge in the Cambodian Genocide. American Ethnologist 25 (3): 353-377.
1998	Why did you Kill? Anthropology, Genocide, and the Goldhagen Controversy. Anthropology Today 14 (3):9-15.
1996	Agents of Death: Explaining the Cambodian Genocide in terms of Psychosocial Dissonance. American Anthropologist 98(4): 818-831.
1993	Prolegomenon to a Processual Approach to the Emotions. Ethos 21 (4): 417-451.

General genocide web-sites with key links (both to other general sites and to sites with information about specific genocides; some of these sites also include on-line bibliographies, news reports, data banks, survivor memoirs, documentation, syllabi, warning alerts, and general information about genocide)

Early Warning, Prevention, and Criminalization