Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania
Author: Liisa H. Malkki
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Print Length: 374 pages
Genre: Non-Fiction / History, Ethnic Studies, Migration & Refugee Studies, Social Science
Area: Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania
Topic: Activism, Ethnography, History, Asylum & Asylum Seekers, Refugees & Forced Migration, Asylum & Refugee System, Mobility & Immobility, Camps, Development, Ethnic & Ethnicity, Ethnic Cleansing, Exile & Exodus, Genocide, Identity, Media & Narratives; Memory, Remembering and Forgetting; National Consciousness, National Cosmology, Nationalism, Assimilation, Othering & Otherness, Refugee Urban Settlement, Us vs Them Mentality, Violence & Mass Violence
In this study of Hutu refugees from Burundi, driven into exile in Tanzania after their 1972 insurrection against the dominant Tutsi was brutally quashed, Liisa Malkki shows how experiences of dispossession and violence are remembered and turned into narratives, and how this process helps to construct identities such as “Hutu” and “Tutsi.“
Through extensive fieldwork in two refugee communities, Malkki finds that the refugees’ current circumstances significantly influence these constructions. Those living in organized camps created an elaborate “mythico-history” of the Hutu people, which gave significance to exile, and envisioned a collective return to the homeland of Burundi. Other refugees, who had assimilated in a more urban setting, crafted identities in response to the practical circumstances of their day to day lives. Malkki reveals how such things as national identity, historical consciousness, and the social imagination of “enemies” get constructed in the process of everyday life. The book closes with an epilogue looking at the recent violence between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda and Burundi, and showing how the movement of large refugee populations across national borders has shaped patterns of violence in the region.
Table of Contents
List of Narrative Panels
Acknowledgments
Maps
Introduction: An Ethnography of Displacement in the National Order of Things
1. Historical Contexts, Social Locations: A Road Map
2. The Mythico-History
3. The Uses of History in the Refugee Camp: Living the Present in Historical Terms
4. Town Refugees: A Pragmatics of Identity
5. The Danger of Assimilation and the Purity of Exile
6. Consciousness and Liminality in the Cosmological Order of Nations
Postscripts: Return to Genocide
Notes
References
Index
Liisa H. Malkki is Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her research interests include: the politics of nationalism, internationalism, cosmopolitanism, and human rights discourses as transnational cultural forms; the social production of historical memory and the uses of history; political violence, exile, and displacement; the ethics and politics of humanitarian aid; child research; and visual culture. Her field research in Tanzania exlored the ways in which political violence and exile may produce transformations of historical consciousness and national identity among displaced people. This project resulted in Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (University of Chicago Press, 1995). In another project, Malkki explored how Hutu exiles from Burundi and Rwanda, who found asylum in Montreal, Canada, imagined scenarios of the future for themselves and their countries in the aftermath of genocide in the Great Lakes Region of Africa.
Source: https://anthropology.stanford.edu/people/liisa-malkki
More from Liisa Malkki in this library, click here.