Peaceful Selves

<p> This ethnography of personhood in post-genocide Rwanda investigates how residents of a small town grapple with what kinds of persons they ought to become in the wake of violence. Based on fieldwork carried out over the course of a decade it uncovers how conflicting moral demands emerge from the 1994 genocide from cultural contradictions around good personhood and from both state and popular visions for the future. What emerges is a profound dissonance in town residents' selfhood. While they strive to be agents of change who can catalyze a new era of modern Rwandan nationhood they are also devastated by the genocide and struggle to recover a sense of selfhood and belonging in the absence of kin friends and neighbors. In drawing out the contradictions at the heart of self-making and social life in contemporary Rwanda this book asserts a novel argument about the ordinary lives caught in global post-conflict imperatives to remember and to forget to mourn and to prosper.</p>