Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania

“…of inner-city America (Bourgois 1996, Broughton 2001 ), the bleak cit?s that ring French cities (Bourdieu 1998, Leclerc 2001 ), refugee camps (Malkki 1995), and rapidly growing urban metropolises in developing coun tries (Caldeira 1996)?have identified characteristics that are present across…”

“This work of continuity maintenance is usefully and insightfully discussed by Hirschon (2001) and Parkin (1999) in their Colson Lectures, by Liisa Malkki (1995a) in her study of Burundian refugees in Tanzania and by Graeme Rodgers (2002) in his recent Ph.”

“…and the specific social fabric may be used by inmates and residents to reconstitute and reshape their identities and possibly claim their rights (Malkki, 1995; Peteet, 2005; Ramadan, ; Sanyal, 2011; Rygiel, 2012; ; Woroniecka-Krzyzanowska, 2013, 2017; Feldman, 2015; Katz, 2015b; Sigona, 2015;…”

“living in exile (Malkki 1995), the Bikinians have maintained a very strong sense of collective identity based on their shared historical narrative of dispossession, their collective confinement to formerly uninhabited (or very sparsely inhabited) islands, and their political defiance of the traditional paramount chief…”

“In this way, it can be seen how Lesotho migrant labourers working in South Africa frame their social world(s) through the oral poetry of ‘word music’ (Coplan 1994); how various refugees give meaning to their lives by creatively imagining their history and homeland (Malkki 1995; Wilson 1994); and how certain nomads ima…”

“Numerous scholars have explored this process in the context of the making of national subjects and the establishment of ‘‘the national order of things’’ (Malkki 1995, p.1) (Anderson 1983; Fox 1990; Rosaldo 2003; Scott 1998; Weber 1979).”

“…refugees in the camps, while Sahrawi children themselves are positioned centre-stage as performers who ‘belong’ to the Sahrawi cause (a cause which they represent as ‘pure victims’ of the conflict, cf. Malkki 1995: 11–12; also see Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2009b), rather than ‘belonging’ to their parents.”

“Often viewed as innocents, without political attachments and involvement, they embody a sense of pure humanity because being refugees has made them into pure victims (Malkki 1995: 8–17; Fair 1996).”

“Sometimes you don’t ask questions but listen to ‘snippets’ of narratives that emerge in mundane conversations and exchanges (Malkki, 1995).”

“…anthropologists to take up citizenship as part of a turn toward then-new subjects such as nationalism and state-formation (Chatterjee 1990, 1993; Malkki 1995; Mamdani 1996; Scott 1990; Verdery 1999), to analyses of globalization and transnational neoliberalism in the early 1990s,…”

“However, critical scholars (e.g. Brun, 2016; Griffiths, 2014; Malkki, 1995) have problematised such framings of liminality, which, according to Georgina Ramsay (2017), imply a linearity of experience and characterise the refugee ‘as a particular category of experience, rather than as a person with…”

“…become more extreme as growing numbers of irregular migrants, asylum-seekers, and refugees have seemingly disrupted idealized imaginaries of what Malkki (1995) famously called “the national order of things”: the notion that the world is naturally divided among nation-states territorializing…”

“Sometimes it can a be positive experience and refugeeness becomes part of a collective identity in exile; however, it can also be experienced as a label/burden that overrules their social identity in many different ways (Malkki 1998).”

“Malkki (1995) studies two different communities of Burundian refugees in Tanazania, one in a camp, and another living in a city.”

“On the one hand, scholars working on humanitarian action have argued that there seems little room for reflection on either the future (Brun, 2016) or the past (Malkki, 1995).”

“As a result of the proliferation of such overdetermined stereotypical frames, the majority of western audiences construct their knowledge and ‘ have a strong visual sense of what ‘ a refugee ’ looks like ’ (Malkki, 1995: 10).”

“The voices of the young people we work with are not commonly heard and mainstream media in particular offer limited frames of ‘what “a refugee” looks like’ (Malkki, 1995: 10).”

“…camps simultaneously provide the potential for (external and internal) „managers‟ to observe and „regularize‟ refugees‟ status and „normalize‟ their lives (Malkki 1995:112), and yet also provide a space for social and political invention and change, including for the re/production of…”

“…to a study of the semiotics of accommodation, in tension with, and complementing recent studies on the semiotics of v i o l e n c e, part i c u l a rlyethno-nationalist violence that occurs under c e rtain political fo rms (see Nord s t rom 1995, Tambiah 1996, Daniel 1996, Malkki 1995).”

“In camp areas, Malkki (1995) describes parents’ resistance to civic lessons refugee children learned in schools, including “malign knowledge” and replication of power structures of conflict.”

“This relates to a third important message, whereby survivors frequently argued that the Hutu extremists had internalized a particularly vehement hatred for Tutsi women in particular because they allegedly used their superior beauty to enslave Hutu men (Malkki, 1995).”

“However, from within anthropological and historical perspectives (Fabian 1983; Malkki 1995; Koselleck 2004; Hutchins 2008; Herzfeld 2009) a critique of accounts of time that hegemonize the temporal structures of western modernity and capitalism, have attempted to draw attention to the unquestioned…”

“…wish to note that methodologically, our aim in this paper is not to excavate factual details about how these networks operate – we take our cue from Malkki (1995) who notes that ethnographers are not ‘police detectives’ searching for ‘the’ truth – but instead to show how migrants stuck between…”

“These crossing points were chosen because of their size and unique dynamics, which are shaped by international commerce and daily migration (Malkki 1995).”

“Like Burundian Hutu refugees in Tanzania, their displacement led them to create ‘nationness, history and identity’ (Malkki, 1995: 1).”

“Second, there is a tendency to generalize what may well be the characteristics of certain members of the othered community to all in that group (Bukari and Schareika 2015; Jackson 2006; Malkki 1995; Mamdani 2002; Neocosmos 2010).”

“…represents so-called formal citizenship, in the absence of which, ‘the refugee’ and ‘the displaced’, occupy a position of heightened interstitial instability (Malkki 1995).1 In the negotiations of this interstitiality, the paper asks, where ‘formal’ status is situated and how it is understood?”

“Perfectibility is a normative aspiration predicated on ideas of purity, often achieved by the exile of polluting others (Malkki, 1995).”

“…ambiguous persons, and in political context meaning a ‘double agent.’xi As a result, alternative ways of identification were deployed by the killers, most prominently ‘body maps’ (Malkki 1995) or rumored narratives of ‘real origin’ – histories of migration and subsequent re-classification.”

“The classic refugee study by Malkki (1995) is an early work that adopts the latter paradigm.”

“This disregards a more problematic understanding of home, as a complex and changeable phenomenon for scholars and the people they study (Malkki 1995, Hannerz 2002:218, Hammond 2004:10-11), and presumes that returning home is natural and desirable.”

“…by guest on 07 M ay 2021 settled urban refugees from Burundi in western Tanzania, Malkki argues that ‘sedentrist’ thinking based on ‘nationalist discourses’ exaggerates the extent to which displaced people feel a connection to a former home (Malkki 1995; Kibreab 1999: 390).”

“In camp settings, relational and identity-formation processes are seen as occurring in very specific ways (Malkki 1995; Boateng 2010; Gladden 2013), although the relational contexts of ‘self-settled’ refugees— refugees outside of camps—have been less explored.”

“Refugee narratives are particularly structured by themes of massacre, exile, and reconstitution within the collective imagination, as Malkki ( 1995 ) has so brilliantly explicated among Hutu refugees in Tanzania.”

“was reinforced by the 1994 Rwandan genocide where the Hutus were the perpetrators (Turner, 2010), which Malkki (1995) discusses in her concluding chapter. Research that addresses the persistence of ethnic hatred in a national context, such as Tanzania, where ethnicity as a factor in the post-colonial state had been do…”

“Looking at the Sahrawi case, this article has shown evidence of the impact of digital transnational gossip as a mechanism for maintaining refugee community ‘purity’ (Malkki, 1995).”

“Ghost stories have the potential to engage visitors in a ‘mythico-history’ (Malkki, 1995) where historical fact is embellished and intertwined with a wider mythical potential.”

“Not just ‘ordinary people,’ they are constituted, rather, as an anomaly requiring specialized correctives and therapeutic interventions” (Malkki, 1995, p. 8).”

“Since their establishment, Sahrawi refugee camps have been perceived as places for reinforcing ‘the national order of things’ (Malkki, 1995).”

“For instance, farming activities were seen as part of Hutu original identity, and intermarriage with locals was considered as a threat to the long-term project of returning home (Malkki 1995, 105–152).”

“…reinforce both the perception of irregular or transit migrants as people out-of-time and out-of-place compared with ‘normal’ citizens, and the assumption that their reinsertion in a ‘national order of things’ (Malkki 1995) would work as a solution to their condition of a lack of legal inclusion.”

“Looking, in particular, to the ground-breaking studies of Gil Loescher (1993), Liisa Malkki (1995), Nevzat Soguk (1999), Jennifer Hyndman (2000), and Emma Haddad (2008), “refugee” itself is an identifier of persons formed, variously, over a very recent period of international history, in relation to the recent formati…”

“Malkki (1995, 2002).”

“In line with these conceptualizations, reception centers have been analyzed as techniques to control population segments that challenge the “national order of things” (Malkki, 1995b ).”

“Refugee narratives, however, often belie those assumptions (Al-Ali and Koser 2002; Den Boer 2015; Jansen and Löfving 2007; Korac 2009; Malkki 1995; Pearlman 2016; Um 2015).”

“Various scholars assert that they engage creatively in self-organizing, political mobilization and protest (Amisi & Ballard, 2005, p. 3; Lecadet, 2016; Malkki, 1995; Tazzioli, 2020).”

“Rather than pursuing research as an investigator seeking to know everything, Malkki advocates that “there may be a greater wisdom in refraining from the blind accumulation of ‘data’ and the extraction of truth for its own sake” (Malkki 1995 , 51 ).”

“In Israel, we see how the social status of the dominant ethnic group of Ashkenazi Jews is intimately connected to the mythico-history of the creation of the state and their unique contribution within it (Malkki, 1995).”