Further, consistent with ethnographers of law, I situated my fieldwork, conducted in a specific place and time, in historical and global context to identify how contemporary legal practices are a complex product of past practices and global processes (Moore 2001; Nader 2002a). In my analysis I attend to how, as Mary Moran has written with respect to gender ideologies in particular, “profound transformations … that emerge from any post-conflict situation must be seen as grounded in both pre-war social institutions and forms of authority as well as in the new opportunity structures characterizing both the wartime and post-war contexts” (Moran 2012:52). Much of this framing analysis is provided within Chapters 1 and 2.
I worked closely with a research assistant, for several reasons. While I am fluent in French (and my native English), my Kinyarwanda could not always keep pace with fast-moving, dialect-inflected discussions in case sessions or interviews. Further, our discussions enriched my analysis and aided with professionalizing a Rwandan researcher. Lastly, presenting myself alongside a Rwandan accompanier together with my official paperwork was necessary for following channels of authority and operating in the open to reduce unnecessary suspicion (Burnet 2012:25; Thomson 2010:23). I did translations myself, or with his help. The vignettes included below are condensed from the detailed written notes I took of the proceedings in each case (sometimes supplemented with audio recordings and photographs, for which I had government permission, and which I used sparingly); I spent hours fleshing out my notes each evening.
Conducting ethnographic research during and on the gacaca process brought its own particular challenges. Anxieties were high, and people were cautious about talking, not surprising in a context of public criminal trials where people’s loved ones could go to jail or return home based on oral testimony from neighbors. Government surveillance was pronounced, of me as well as of the Rwandans with whom I worked, given the strong government control over the production of knowledge in and about Rwanda that other ethnographers have noted (Burnet 2012; Pottier 2002; Thomson 2010). I took a conservative approach to following up on specific cases outside of trial sessions, making myself available to talk and asking open-ended questions, while also demonstrating my willingness “to leave some stones unturned, to listen to what my informants deemed important, and to demonstrate my trustworthiness by not prying where I was not wanted” (Malkki 1995:51), as Liisa Malkki influentially said of her work with Burundian refugees two decades ago. Probing questions designed to ferret out the truth of motivations that influenced case sessions often risked being met with silence or hostility, or risked resulting in revocation of my research permit. I sometimes decided not to ask. I listened intently to silences, as Burnet also described doing during her research in postgenocide Rwanda (Burnet 2012:33). I made the choices I deemed to be most ethical in not exacerbating an already fragile situation, and, like many other ethnographers in so-called conflict or postconflict settings,38 I see this empathic, active listening (Borneman 2002) as a strength in humanistic social science research. If I am cautious in my analysis at times, it is to avoid overstating or overimposing certainty upon a complex situation in which people themselves tended to feel unsure.
Crucially, I lived with Rwandans (both in the South Province and in Kigali) throughout my time in Rwanda, including people from different social positions, sharing a roof, meals, and housework on a daily basis. Living with Rwandans (not with other Western expatriates, and not alone) enabled me to at least begin to penetrate the “veil of secrecy” that characterizes much of Rwandan life, with its heavy distinction between private and public (Burnet 2012:36, 144; see also De Lame 2005). This intimacy exposed me to quotidian dimensions of postgenocide life that allowed me to more richly contextualize the discussions I saw in legal forums. For example, lying in bed at midday, curtains drawn, with a friend suffering from headaches and stomachaches she attributed to secondary genocide trauma helped me to understand the pervasive and even destructive force of the genocide commemoration period. Talking with a housemate on gacaca day as he worked from home and would not even venture out to the garden so as to avoid drawing attention to his not attending court that day underscored the realities of state enforcement on participation. Attending weddings or bringing food to ill family friends illustrated the moral economies of care that formed the fabric of daily life. Sharing the news that I was pregnant in the final months of my fieldwork was one of the most unexpected forms of intimacy, as it brought into even more vivid relief expectations about gender roles in relation to life stages, and the relationship between motherhood, pregnancy, and violence, as, for example, people recommended I not attend gacaca trials for fear of harming the growing baby. It also evoked explicit discussions of future-making as I became a proxy for discussions about imagined alternative futures.
Perhaps most important for my arguments here, the sustained personal and social engagement enabled by living with Rwandans allowed me to triangulate from other directions, when I could not generate the detailed linkages between case sessions and everyday life that are exemplified in the work of standard-bearing legal anthropologists of Africa, such as Max Gluckman and Sally Falk Moore. I spoke at length informally with the Rwandans with whom I lived and worked about their disputes (legal and otherwise), even if I did not participate in those case sessions myself, and I sat with them through sidebar conversations about gacaca and other legal disputes, while cooking over a wood fire, drinking tea, sharing meals, or walking slowly, fingers interlaced, through hard-packed paths. These engagements with Rwandans outside legal spaces allowed me to recognize with confidence how the discussions I saw within legal forums were connected with daily life more widely.
One of the greatest ethnographic challenges in Rwanda is remaining open and even neutral, walking a tightrope among people carrying harrowing experiences that are often shaped by very different perspectives. For me, the most important measure of legitimacy of the findings I present in these pages lies in whether, and how, the Rwandans who blessed me with their time and trust recognize that I was listening and hearing. Perhaps from this comes the greatest claim to accuracy in the narratives and arguments within this book: if they can see themselves and one another in these stories and recognize how they are engaged in a fragile, iterative, hopefully commensurable process to rebuild.
Outline of the Book
Chapters 1 and 2 provide background and framing, setting the stage for the ethnographic argument in the subsequent chapters. I begin Chapter 1 by examining the production of history and politics of memory in postgenocide Rwanda. I illustrate the dominant version of history the government used from 2004 to 2008 through a speech provided by President Kagame at the ten-year anniversary of the genocide, in order to show how the government framed belonging and justified current configurations of power, connections, and exclusion. Specifically, I argue that the dominant narrative’s lacunae served to discredit the international community, emphasize national rather than regional dynamics, and mask divisions, which rendered thinkable the use of grassroots harmony models and mass prosecutions for genocide crimes. In Chapter 2, I situate the postgenocide legal forums in historical context, showing how contemporary trends toward local legal forums and inequality in law have echoes in earlier periods in Rwanda. I argue that analyzing Rwanda’s postgenocide legal forums as harmony legal models overcomes three persistent dichotomies within transitional justice discourse: it allows us to overcome a reification of transitional justice to see how disputes about ordinary concerns and political violence are intertwined; it corrects an elusive focus on pure customary law as distinct from universal legal principles by attending to the importance of contextualization; and it foregrounds