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

“In Purity and Exile, Malkki (1995) detailed how a large number of the Hutu refugees moved to camps in parts of Tanzania and were able to re-establish their identity within their state of displacement.”

“Scholarship on forced migration has long been divided between two tendencies: one that emphasizes the structural precarity of statelessness (Arendt [1951]1973; Agamben 1998; Bloom 2017), and another that foregrounds refugee agency (Malkki 1995; Isin and Nielsen 2008; Sigona 2012).”

“The idea of a “Greater Rwanda” is, itself, a “mythico-history” (Malkki, 1995), based on the idea that European borders divided a supposedly homogenous group (the Banywarwanda), and that what is now eastern DRC was annexed from precolonial Rwanda (Mathys, 2017).”

“Their mundane nature was instrumental to circumvent the highly bureaucratic procedures that are often required to gain access to sites of refugee ‘care and control’ (Malkki 1995) such as camps, shelters, deportation centers and the like (cf. Vogler 2007).”

“This perception of belonging is based on the principle of sedentariness inherent in the ‘ national order of things ’ (Malkki, 1995).”

“Thus, making migrant devoid of their agency, presented as objects of media and philanthrophic mode of power that is diassociated from migrant’s own historical, political, biographical specificities (Malkki, 1995; 1996; Nikunen, 2019).”

“These societal concerns around impurity then can be connected with immigration; a prominent outsider group, such as refugees and asylum-seekers are, in particular, often linked to disease and threats to national security (Malkki 1995).”

“Sociology and anthropology have studied ethnicity and gender (Evans-Pritchard, 1940; Eidheim, 1969; Malkki, 1995) and how people’s sense of living in ethnic groups is contingent on the situational maintenance of boundaries, which can be crossed in multiple ways.”

“The production, circulation and consumption of such images are power-laden processes that shape particular imaginaries, inform knowledge production, trigger emotional responses and justify political responses to the movement of people that disrupt the ‘national order of things’ (Malkki 1995).”

“Malkki (1995) highlights the inclusive boundary surrounding refugees, making them the ‘ embodiment of pure humanity ’ .”

“12Patterson 1975; Malkki 1995; Laitin 1998; Brubaker 2002; Posner 2004; Wilkinson 2004; Eifert, Miguel, and Posner 2010.”

“21 Similarly, the concept of ethnic violence proposed by Malkki (1995), Appadurai (1998) analyzed the ethnically constructed violence between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda and Burundi.”

“Malkki (1995) stresses that isolated refugee camps are more insecure than urban settings where refugees intermingle with the local community and have access to independent livelihood opportunities.”

“Compared to ‘common people’, refugees are regarded as ‘an anomaly requiring specialized correctives and therapeutic interventions’ (Malkki 1995, 8).”

“These Myanmar wives seem to disrupt idealized representations of what Malkki (1995) terms “the national order of things”: an explicitly common-sensical system of ordering and categorizing people into national kinds and types in order to promote rooted-ness and boundedness.”

“Malkki (1995, 1996) shows how camp residents produce identity and meaning, and warns against the dehistoricizing humanitarian gaze that strips refugees of political voice.”

“Research on forced migrants shows that nostalgia often becomes collective , serving as a shared language through which communities articulate pain, continuity, and dignity (Bissell 2005; Malkki 1995).”

“…of migration – such as “migrants”/“refugees”, “economic migration”/”forced migration” – as well as the politics of naming, including efforts or arguments that problematize and deconstruct rigid or clear-cut distinctions between these labels or categories (e.g. Malkki 1995; Zetter 1991, 2007).”

“Scholarship in refugee and internally displaced persons (IDP) studies frames Palestinian displacement as a protracted condition rather than a temporary humanitarian crisis, situating it within prolonged occupation (Brun 2016; Feldman 2012; Malkki 1995; Zetter 1991).”

“…the mnemonic processes that arise within camps—transforming them into spaces for the (re)construction of collective histories and identities (Malkki 1995; Chatty 2010; Feldman 2008; Peteet 2005)—this article proposes to examine a specific situation in which encampment, understood as the…”

“This condition, also identified by Malkki in her study of Hutu refugees in Tanzanian camps (Malkki 1995a), materialises what this article conceptualises as nonselection: the systematic deferral of belonging within the global border system.”

“Malkki (1995) demonstrates how racialized myths about Tutsi identity in Rwanda framed them as existential threats, paving the way for genocidal violence.”

“…(1977), fascinating studies on the Hmong camps in Thailand (Conquergood 1988; Long 1992), and detailed work on camps across Africa (Hansen (1981) in Angolan camps in Zambia; Kibreab (1993) in Somali camps, Harrell‐Bond (1986) in Ugandan camps in Sudan and Malkki (1995a) in Hutu camps in Tazania).”

“As Malkki (1995) wrote, “The territorializing metaphors of identity—root, soil, trees, seeds—are washed away in human floodtides, waves, flows, streams, and rivers.”

“Displacement camps have been theorised as paradigmatic ‘spaces of exception’, where sovereign power suspends legal norms to govern populations as homogenised ‘bare life’ (Malkki 1995; Agamben 2000, 2005; Malkki 2002; Redfield 2005; Agier 2011b; Hyndman & Giles 2016).”

“But unlike the rite of passage the result of mutilation is the victim ’ s excision from the community, debilitated and dehumanized: s/he suffers or dies no longer an individual but a type, a specimen (See Malkki 1995: 92 – 93; Feldman 1991: 64).”

“The period preceding and following Rwanda’s independence in 1962 saw violent conflicts between the purported ethnic groups (Taylor 1999; Malkki 1995).”

“I use “ mobility ” to depart from a sedentary order of things that de fi nes migration negatively, as a lack of roots or a mere transition toward stasis (Malkki 1995).”

“Anthropologists have long been attending to “partial truths” (Clifford 1986), embracing the truth-telling capacity of composite accounts (Malkki 1995; Sanford 2003), the revelatory power of semi-fictionalized ethnography (Narayan 1999; Abu-Lughod 1991), and most recently, of ethnographies of…”