![Sample our Built Environment journals, sign in here to start your access, Latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5926/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Built-Environment.jpg"})
Abstract
What can Rwandans’ post-genocide experiences of house and home tell us about how people live with histories of violence? Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the university town of Butare, I argue that educated town residents’ relationships to ‘home’ are a nexus of the genocide’s legacy, of the contingencies of lives not lived, and of post-genocide politics. Drawing from participant observation and interviews, I delineate four relationships between home, temporality, and genocide to elicit the broader tension between settlement and what remains unsettled in the wake of violence. Central to this tension is how seemingly private talk of home offers a powerful critique of the former colonizer, of the actors who planned the genocide, and of post-genocide social and political conditions. Butare residents’ relationships to house and home thus uncover the inherent contradictions in the idea that people ‘move on’ from violence by ‘settling down.’
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the members of the Canadian Network for Critical Sociology for their feedback on an earlier draft of this paper, especially Mervyn Horgan whose insightful suggestions greatly strengthened the article. Thanks also to the anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Laura Eramian
Laura Eramian is the author of Peaceful Selves: Personhood, Nationhood, and the Post-Conflict Moment in Rwanda (Berghahn 2018). She has also authored numerous journal articles based on her long-term research in Rwanda, some of which appear in the Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, Anthropologica, and the Journal of Modern African Studies.