Description
This study of the Rwandan genocide considers the relation among ethnicity, violence and culture. It synthesizes evidence from historical, liguistic, and cultural sources as well as from firshand encounters with Rwandans during several stints of fieldwork. The objective is twofold. First, to correct the misimpressions created by media sources concerning the nature of tribalism and ethnicity in Rwanda; and second, to demonstrate the degree to which the violence was conditioned by specifically Rwandan modes of cultural thought about the body and social experience. Recent scholarship has demostrated that local cultural realities shape incidents of masss violence, but this is among the first to show this at the level of symbolic thought about the body, the ultimate target of politically motivated aggression, contributing to our knowledge about sectarian and ethnic violence in the post Cold War world.
