I did not intend to study legal processes when I first arrived in Rwanda in late 2002, nor when I began preliminary work as a graduate student in 2004, I was quickly drawn in. Of course, it has become an anthropological trope to assert that one “did not go into the field expecting to study xyz” but rather “stumbled upon it,” as a means of performing authenticity and expertise. I revert to this explanation here in part to reflexively illustrate the palpable force of “law” in this period but more centrally to make explicit the temporal framing of this research. The unique temporal dimensions of my research came into even clearer relief when I returned briefly to Rwanda in 2013, several years after the close of the gacaca process, when the rhythm of life was no longer marked by regular interruption of the “state of exception” (Agamben 2005) of gacaca days. This book tells a story tightly linked to a particular time period, even as I make claims that may extend beyond it.
Many scholars have noted particular challenges of conducting research in postgenocide Rwanda, including government interference in research (Burnet 2012:25; Chakravarty 2012; Ingelaere 2010a:42, 50; Pottier 2002; Thomson 2010:22) and people’s subsequent “selective telling” (King 2009:128). They note that “simply asking ordinary Rwandans about their experiences before the gacaca courts is unlikely to produce reliable results” and emphasize that “researchers must be able to recognize the government’s version of events” (Thomson 2011a:375–376) in order to avoid “taking the ‘mise-en-scene,’ or stage-setting for granted” (Ingelaere 2010a:42). As a close Rwandan friend and colleague commented, “People will often just tell you what they think you want to hear.” These challenges are arguably best met by ethnographic methods (Burnet 2012:33), with the focus on long-term engagement, repeated social interactions across diverse social fields, and participant observation as well as interviews.
Focusing on specific sites over an extended time allowed me to contextualize the social interactions in the gacaca courts as part of broader life. I spent several days a week in each field site over a full year, and so I became a familiar presence. In analyzing case sessions, I took note of who was speaking, what and how it was said, and how people spoke across sessions, and I compared and contextualized their comments with other conversations and observations in and outside sessions, and over time. Consistent with ethnographic studies of law, I studied legal forums “in context,” aiming for “thick understandings of law in everyday life” (Nader 2002a:71). This meant, for example, not looking at the courts as autonomous institutions but seeing how people and disputes moved in and out of these forums, and how they were linked to other dimensions of daily life. Studying gacaca, comite y’abunzi, and the legal aid clinic ethnographically meant examining not just legal procedures and regulations but also meanings, and seeing not just what should happen de jure but what de facto occurred. As Moore writes, “The goal is to try to understand what is going on, and what it means to the actors, and to the collectivities in which they are embedded” (Moore 2005:3). Throughout the book, I use several specific case examples in detail as exemplary of the many other cases I attended.
Further, consistent with ethnographers of law, I situated my fieldwork, conducted in a specific place and time, in historical and global context to identify how contemporary legal practices are a complex product of past practices and global processes (Moore 2001; Nader 2002a). In my analysis I attend to how, as Mary Moran has written with respect to gender ideologies in particular, “profound transformations … that emerge from any post-conflict situation must be seen as grounded in both pre-war social institutions and forms of authority as well as in the new opportunity structures characterizing both the wartime and post-war contexts” (Moran 2012:52). Much of this framing analysis is provided within Chapters 1 and 2.
I worked closely with a research assistant, for several reasons. While I am fluent in French (and my native English), my Kinyarwanda could not always keep pace with fast-moving, dialect-inflected discussions in case sessions or interviews. Further, our discussions enriched my analysis and aided with professionalizing a Rwandan researcher. Lastly, presenting myself alongside a Rwandan accompanier together with my official paperwork was necessary for following channels of authority and operating in the open to reduce unnecessary suspicion (Burnet 2012:25; Thomson 2010:23). I did translations myself, or with his help. The vignettes included below are condensed from the detailed written notes I took of the proceedings in each case (sometimes supplemented with audio recordings and photographs, for which I had government permission, and which I used sparingly); I spent hours fleshing out my notes each evening.
Conducting ethnographic research during and on the gacaca process brought its own particular challenges. Anxieties were high, and people were cautious about talking, not surprising in a context of public criminal trials where people’s loved ones could go to jail or return home based on oral testimony from neighbors. Government surveillance was pronounced, of me as well as of the Rwandans with whom I worked, given the strong government control over the production of knowledge in and about Rwanda that other ethnographers have noted (Burnet 2012; Pottier 2002; Thomson 2010). I took a conservative approach to following up on specific cases outside of trial sessions, making myself available to talk and asking open-ended questions, while also demonstrating my willingness “to leave some stones unturned, to listen to what my informants deemed important, and to demonstrate my trustworthiness by not prying where I was not wanted” (Malkki 1995:51), as Liisa Malkki influentially said of her work with Burundian refugees two decades ago. Probing questions designed to ferret out the truth of motivations that influenced case sessions often risked being met with silence or hostility, or risked resulting in revocation of my research permit. I sometimes decided not to ask. I listened intently to silences, as Burnet also described doing during her research in postgenocide Rwanda (Burnet 2012:33). I made the choices I deemed to be most ethical in not exacerbating an already fragile situation, and, like many other ethnographers in so-called conflict or postconflict settings,38 I see this empathic, active listening (Borneman 2002) as a strength in humanistic social science research. If I am cautious in my analysis at times, it is to avoid overstating or overimposing certainty upon a complex situation in which people themselves tended to feel unsure.
Crucially, I lived with Rwandans (both in the South Province and in Kigali) throughout my time in Rwanda, including people from different social positions, sharing a roof, meals, and housework on a daily basis. Living with Rwandans (not with other Western expatriates, and not alone) enabled me to at least begin to penetrate the “veil of secrecy” that characterizes much of Rwandan life, with its heavy distinction between private and public (Burnet 2012:36, 144; see also De Lame 2005). This intimacy exposed me to quotidian dimensions of postgenocide life that allowed me to more richly contextualize the discussions I saw in legal forums. For example, lying in bed at midday, curtains drawn, with a friend suffering from headaches and stomachaches she attributed to secondary genocide trauma helped me to understand the pervasive and even destructive force of the genocide commemoration period. Talking with a housemate on gacaca day as he worked from home and would not even venture out to the garden so as to avoid drawing attention to his not attending court that day underscored the realities of state enforcement on participation. Attending weddings or bringing food to ill family friends illustrated the moral economies of care that formed the fabric of daily life. Sharing the news that I was pregnant in the final months of my fieldwork was one of the most unexpected forms of intimacy, as it brought into even more vivid relief expectations about gender roles in relation to life stages, and the relationship between motherhood, pregnancy, and violence, as, for example, people recommended I not attend gacaca trials for fear of harming the growing baby. It also evoked explicit discussions of future-making as I became a proxy for discussions about imagined alternative futures.
Perhaps most important for my arguments here, the sustained personal and social engagement enabled by living with Rwandans allowed me to triangulate from other directions, when I could not generate the detailed linkages between case sessions and everyday life that are exemplified in the work of standard-bearing legal anthropologists of Africa, such as Max Gluckman and Sally Falk Moore. I spoke at length informally with the Rwandans with whom I lived and worked about their
