Photo Essay: Tropes of Memory

Abstract

historian James Young, with his seminal book Texture of Memory, may have inadvertently started an analytical trend wherein-in context of study of collective violence-official memorials and otherwise privileged lieux de memoire, including memorial museums, are deemed worthier of investigation than everyday sites of social memory.1 Many time, perhaps because they are located far from centers of power, informal sites of memory-what Paul Connerton recently called loci-have fallen through analytical net.2 This is unfortunate, because studying in is particularly instructive in instances where contending narratives about violent past abound but perhaps are not given full or any recognition in national and international debates. Post-genocide Rwanda, subject of this photo essay, is case in point, because memory is neither plural, nor openly contested there.3 The post-genocide state has dominant role in setting limits on whose lives are to be remembered publicly and how.4Unfortunately, growing literature on politics of memorialization in post-genocide Rwanda has nevertheless prioritized study of official at expense of what historian John Bodnar, in American context, termed vernacular memory.5 Most of available scholarship gives pride of place to analyses of country's seven so-called national genocide memorials.6 By leaving aside hundreds (possibly thousands) of formal and informal sites of not actively, or less actively, curated by authoritarian government, existing literature unwittingly contributes to marginalization-at least in policy-oriented discourse about supposed virtues of memorialization in times of transition-of spatial responses to loss that are less coordinated and often more spontaneous than efforts at memorialization prescribed from above. Our field research suggests that variation in mnemonic practices is often more readily observable in peripheral locations than at center in post-genocide Rwanda. Because the nationalized mourning eclipses community-level or family-level commemorations, which can create impression of unified response to loss in countryside that often has no empirical referent, disaggregating mnemonic practices in post-genocide Rwanda is essential for study of social in that landlocked country.7We believe that what we have elsewhere described as a micropolitical turn would benefit students of social more generally, since most remembering and forgetting is done through textures of everyday settings, in contexts frequently invisible and often mundane.8 Despite burgeoning literature on macropolitics of social remarkably little is known about diversity of mnemonic practices in small-scale, living, breathing contexts where violent pasts are to be contended with; nor do scholars understand well enough how meaning is transferred, filtered, defended, and improvised between and among different spheres of social life. dozen empirical vignettes at heart of this photo essay provide glimpses of these spheres. We single out tropes of that merit careful investigation in situ, in Rwanda and elsewhere. Each trope will be familiar to analysts involved in knowledge production about social memory. Singling out such tropes is to invite more observational work on their empirical salience, as well as on salience of related themes. We hope empirical vignettes illuminate our larger methodological argument-that extensive literature on macropolitics of ought to be complemented with ethnographic research on micropolitics thereof-and reinforce policy implications that follow from this argument.Memory in situIn an effort to encourage more fine-grained research on what one of us has elsewhere termed underprivileged memory, below we present deliberately unsystematic evidence about tropes of that we collected in Rwanda's countryside and cities. …