GENO - Appel Spécifique Génocides et violences de masse

Facing the irretrievable: Towards a comparative history of Armenian and Tutsi genocides' survivors – FALI

Submission summary

Facing the irretrievable:
Towards a comparative history of Armenian and Tutsi genocides' survivors

The present project ambitions to study two genocidal events which have never been submitted before to a comparative analysis, namely the endeavours to exterminate the Armenians and the Tutsi. Together they frame the 20th century, but they still constitute a blind-spot of current historiography, especially when compared with the destruction of the European Jews they precede and follow. As these crimes appear remote, either because they were committed long ago or far away from Europe, they roused only a limited interest in the Academic community until recently. Their study suffered from condescending bias, as their actors were considered deprived not only of any articulate ideology, but also of planning and implementation capacity: and this assumed lack of rationality seemed to push the events beyond the scope of scientific analysis. The historian is confronted with a series of obstacles when trying to collect the primary evidence he will built upon. Not only is the mastery of rare languages a prerequisite, but the documentation is problematic to gather, being both scattered, in the case of the Armenian diaspora which spanned worldwide along its migratory patterns, and often only partially filed, as far as the Rwandan archival material is concerned. This project presents a specific patrimonial dimension, as the constitution of a comprehensive corpus of evidence, including oral testimonies, will both ensure its survival and its easy availability for further studies by successive generations of scholars. The evidence is further threatened by the very frailty of the specific social category taken into consideration and the fleeting nature of oral memories. Institutional archival material offers a host of information regarding refugees registered in medical records and paperwork both from NGO and public administration implementing humanitarian policies. The present project aims to address this material documenting the aftermath of violence in a different perspective, supplementing its testimony with more modest, down to earth, sources mirroring individual experience. By confronting individual agentivity in front of violence and the subjective inner mechanisms allowing to cope with such violence, the reflexion will shed light on the genocidal trauma as experienced from the point of view of whose who face daily an irretrievable loss.
A critical approach of the concept of “reconstruction” implies to scrutinize meticulously the conditions under which survivors negotiated their identity as social actors both during and after a traumatic event which cast them primarily as passive objects of others’ agentivity. Three-fold analysis of the survivors’ experience will be built, delving into the material (axis 1), familial (axis 2) and psycho-physical dimension of their individual existence. The difference between the two case-studies will also be stressed in order to isolate contingent from structural features of the genocidal experience: while the Armenians were collectively expelled from Turkey and experienced exile in third countries, the majority of Tutsi remained in the immediate vicinity of their relatives’ killers, and the difference between a foreign and an alien environment as framework of the “reconstruction process” has to be explored. How to envision life after the contemplation of mass murder? What are the forces, interpersonal, collective and symbolic, at play which explain differentiated level of individual resilience? How to build a new social and juridical status? And which one? How and where to tread a migratory path, doted by its residential and familial milestones? And what insight can an in-depths analysis of long-term, protracted, death born of years, or decades, of suffering triggered by a short-term burst of disproportionate violence offers to the historiography of post-traumatic reconstruction process.

Project coordination

Hélène Dumas (Centre d'études sociologiques et politiques Raymond Aron)

The author of this summary is the project coordinator, who is responsible for the content of this summary. The ANR declines any responsibility as for its contents.

Partner

CESPRA Centre d'études sociologiques et politiques Raymond Aron
IRIS Institut de recherche interdisciplinaire sur les enjeux sociaux Sciences sociales, Politique, Santé
IHTP Institut d'histoire du temps présent

Help of the ANR 206,363 euros
Beginning and duration of the scientific project: December 2019 - 24 Months

Useful links

Explorez notre base de projets financés

 

 

ANR makes available its datasets on funded projects, click here to find more.

Sign up for the latest news:
Subscribe to our newsletter