A country without culture is destroyed : making Rwanda and Rwandans through heritage - Bolin, Annalisa Grier; Meskell, Lynn; Giblin, John; Hodder, Ian; Seetah, Krish; Stanford University, Department of Anthropology ([Stanford, California] : [Stanford University], 2019)
In 1994, the people of Rwanda suffered genocidal violence and the destruction of their homes and nation. In the years since, the process of reconstruction led by the Rwandan Patriotic Front government has pursued transformation of the country's economy, justice system, politics, and even sociocultural characteristics such as identity. In the process of building the New Rwanda, the RPF embraces the potential of heritage to reshape national identity and to establish key characteristics of the new country. In particular, the government deploys heritage to revitalize culture, drawing on the pre-colonial Rwandan past, in order to establish a new national identity and re-situate the country in the international context of power. A Kinyarwanda proverb, "A country without culture is destroyed", indicates the necessity of embracing the past—source of Rwandan identity and culture—in order to create a better future of resilience and resistance to the potential resurgence of genocidal violence. This dissertation examines four thematic ways heritage is involved in the RPF's nation- and state-building efforts in the post-genocide era: the production and deployment of ideals of value, dignity, unity, and development. Using the varied methods of heritage ethnography, including interviews, participant observation, site visits, and analysis of texts, the dissertation argues that heritage both shapes and is shaped by the demands of contemporary governance in Rwanda as the RPF seeks to make a new country with new citizens to people it. This focus on the internal processes of heritage production demonstrates the interrelation of heritage with national and international politics and techniques of governance. Ethnographic and historical analysis also reveals the numerous pressures on heritage production, such as those which pull it into exclusionary social processes that privilege certain groups over others, flatten narratives of the past, and undercut the government's stated goals of domestic development and unification. At the same time, heritage has been effectively integrated into initiatives to resist international influence via assertions of dignity and national pride. Through attention to the processes of heritage-making in the post-conflict context, this dissertation reveals the internal systems of state heritage production and its multiply intersecting power dynamics as the government seeks to remake both Rwandans and their country.
Submitted to the Department of Anthropology.
Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2019.
Rights: (c) Copyright 2019 by Annalisa Bolin
Keywords: theses; text