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- Title
Ethnicity without labels? Ambiguity and excess in 'postethnic' Rwanda.
- Authors
Eramian, Laura
- Abstract
Following the 1994 genocide, the government of Rwanda embarked on a 'deethnicization' campaign to outlaw Tutsi, Hutu, and Twa labels and replace them with a pan-Rwandan national identity. Since then, to use ethnic labels means risking accusations of 'divisionism' or perpetuating ethnic schisms. Based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork in the university town of Butare, I argue that the absence of ethnic labels produces practical interpretive problems for Rwandans because of the excess of possible ways of interpreting what people mean when they evaluate each other's conduct in everyday talk. I trace the historical entanglement of ethnicity with class, rural/urban, occupational, and moral distinctions such that the content of ethnic stereotypes can be evoked even without ethnic labels. In so doing, I aim to enrich understandings of both the power and danger inherent in the ambiguous place of ethnicity in Rwanda's 'postethnic' moment.
- Subjects
ETHNICITY; TUTSI (African people); HUTU (African people); BATWA (African people); RWANDAN Genocide, 1994; RWANDAN politics &; government, 1994-
- Publication
Focaal, 2014, Vol 2014, Issue 70, p96
- ISSN
0920-1297
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.3167/fcl.2014.700108