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Philip Gourevitch

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Caliifornia State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: November 12, 2001
Latest Update: November 12, 2001
E-Mail jeannecurran@habermas.org
E-Mail takata@uwp.edu

Social and Criminal Justice Theory
on Genocide

This essay is based on Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You That We Will Be Killed Tomorrow With Our Families. Farrar Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 1998 Philip Gourevitch. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-374-28697-3. First chapter online.

On Monday, November 12, Eclipsebj@aol.com. wrote:

We are studying Philip Gourevitch's novel, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families in my sociology class, and I am stuggling to find enough examples and evidence to fulfill the requirements for my research paper. This novel is obviously related to our sociology in many ways, and if you can send many any information anwsering my questions I would be very grateful:

  1. How is culture at the center of globalization?
  2. How does ethnicity shape people's lives?
  3. How do internal and external forces shape the societies in Rwanda?
  4. How does the idea that "economic ties strengthen as political ties fracture" relate to this novel?

If you are able to send me any helpful information please e-mail me at Eclipsebj@aol.com. Thanks in advance for your help.

On Monday, November 12, 2001, jeanne responded:

Dear Eclipsebj:

I am far more inclined to help those who identify themselves. So let me caution you that this response will be posted on the Internet, with free access to all who seek it, including your teacher. The questions you ask sound very much like your teacher assigned them, so that presents me with a dilemma of structural violence. Either I leave us both open to suspicion that we are circumventing your teacher's implicit instructions to do this alone, or I must frame my response as though I were your teacher. Just bear in mind that it is plagiarism to take the ideas and structure of what I say and not acknowledge it.

  • Examples of Plagiarism Scroll down about two-fifths of the file, to find the example of plagiarism in which the student changed the words, did not copy directly, but lifted the ideas and structure of the paragraph. This is the easiest plagiarism to commit, so you need to look at it carefully, and be sure you understand why and how it's a no-no.

    Scroll down almost to the end of the file to find:

    "Plagiarism by unacknowledged paraphrase and/or use of ideas:

    In Othello, Shakespeare makes frequent use of animal imagery. The specific images he uses are generally distasteful and convey to the reader a constant impression of conflict and misery."

That said, congratulations to your teacher for selecting Gourevitch's book. Now I will take the non-structurally violent route and assume that you are one of my own students seeking guidance on how to conceptually link the scenes which strike you in Gourevitch's Stories from Rwanda to social and criminal justice theory.

  1. "How is culture at the center of globalization?"
    Well, first off, I would connect this question with issues of colonialism. Consider that the general philosophy behind colonialism is, as Edward Said expresses it, is that one people is higher on the status scale than another, and so it is meet and right that other people, not so high on the given scale, whatever the scale is based on, should toil for the benefit of the elite. Now that "elite" is on a sliding scale, so in colonialism, a hierarchy develops, duplicating the hierarchy of power in the colonizer, and each group exploits the one below it in status.

    Now, how is that reflected in Rwanda? Recall that the Hutus were sometimes in power, and the Tutsis were sometimes in power. Why was that? If one people is more peasant like and not trained for semi-skilled tasks, they are likely to be seen as less appropriate to take on the work of the colonizers, and they may be left to the rural areas and their indigenous way of life. But the other group, deigned more appropriate to be taken into the ways and administration of the colonizer will gain more status in the eyes of the colonizer and, and this is important, in the eyes of the group seen as less competent to move up the colonizer's status scale. I would consider this a subtle replacement of the indigenous culture's values with those of the colonizer.

    I also think that in Rwanda you need to consider the imposition of capitalist adversarialism and competition as carrying with them a specific group of values, not necessarily typical of all communities, but certainly typical of the compulsive acquisitors ( or scam artists) in each group. Recall those scenes in which the killings were followed by the appropriation of the homes of the victims in Stories from Rwanda.

    One needs also to consider the long history of violence in the Congo, very close to Rwanda, in which whole towns were massacred, and people slaughtered (the famous cutting off a hand as a token to prove that the person who failed to turn in the proper quota of rubber had been killed.) That society which becomes inured to violence is as harmed by the violence as are its victims. When the opportunity presents itself that very violence turns back on those who taught it by their terrible example. And recall that Africa was not divided up by tribal disputes, but by European colonizers, so that the country borders do not correspond to other than the greed and domination of the colonizer.

    In the process of globalization both the colonizer and the colonized need stability and procedural guidelines that bureaucratize the economic, political, and social spheres. Globalization, at the present time, has come about almost exclusively by the continuous expansion of markets. That connotes a capitalist system.

    Now, if globalization is about maintaining enough stability to expand markets, then there must be some economic, political, and social values that provide that stability and adequate legitimacy and law to maintain world-wide operations. Capitalism is the predominant system, and that system most likely to succeed in enforcing the principles of that capitalism in our world-wide markets. Thus one plausible argument is that the culture with the most economic, political and military power will prevail in the globalization. That says one culture wins over another. Imperialism and hegemony.

    But consider also different approaches. Habermas' faith in democracy. There are those from the South who would disagree that democracy and capitalism are the ideal forms for the world. Giddens offers The Third Way. and social philosophers like Maria Pia Lara consider the role of secular evil. All these are ramifications we would need to look at.

  2. "How does ethnicity shape people's lives?"
    Well, when you consider that the Hutus and the Tutsis are not really ethnically different groups, it kind of makes you wonder, doesn't it? But if someone's giving out ID cards that identify you as one group or another (as we used to in the old days of SIMSOC), and if those cards determine your access to the society's resources, then you've got a status characteristic, and we humans tend to judge each other by the status characteristics that are the best predictors of "success." Of course, if you've got the resources you can buy a different identity card, unless you've got a visible stigma (Goffman) that will identify you without the idenitity card.

    But this is largely a straight race and ethnicity question, so you might turn to critical race theory.

    Why don't some of you take up these later questions? jeanne

  3. "How do internal and external forces shape the societies in Rwanda?"

    Hard to figure which classroom discussions this grew out of. In theory, I'd reference to Homan's internal and external groups, to Rotter's locus of control. I see internal control where both the Hutus and the Tutsis come to accept the values of the colonizers in favor of the less physically demonstrative Tutsis and their affinity for learning to take up entry-level positions in learning administration and management of the country under the colonizers. The Hutus and the Tutsis vied with each other for the approval of the colonizers which meant a higher position in the colonizer's hierarchy. Because the indigenous people submitted to the colonization and because the imposition of the colonizers' bureaucracy reflected the colonizers' value system, this became an internal struggle for the Hutus and the Tutsis.

    However, postcolonialism and subaltern theory indicate that the indigenous narrative has been lost by this imposition of the colonizers' culture onto the indigenous peoples. That certainly would be one plausible theory to consider in looking at the external sources that shaped these societies.

    Professor Munashe Furasa also explained to us the commodification of land as it occured in the colonization of Africa. Land that was not considered an object to be owned, was taken by the Europeans when they understood that land was not privately owned by the indigenous people, but communally shared. Same thing with the Native Americans.

  4. "How does the idea that "economic ties strengthen as political ties fracture" relate to this novel?"
    Well, first of all, I don't consider Stories from Rwanda a novel. I consider it a journalistic narrative. And I guess I'd look at the problem as one of economic and political spheres.

    The economic sphere that is dominant in the Rwanda case is capitalism. Certainly King Leopold had no political interest in Rwanda. He wanted a colony, one that would feed him its riches. He managed this through a kind of feudal system, in which each status group fed on the one below it in status, and the key to success at each level was acquiring the most capital. Essentially, this was late capitalism, the kind that is practiced by conglomerates, or by very, very rich people, whose only concern is profit. That is capitalism at odds with the entire set of principles that led to its favor as an economic system capable of providing growth and development for those who subscribed to it.

    The more capital accumulated, the greater the sovereign's power to take profit without replacing the resources, without developing the country and the people themselves. The political agenda of the Europeans was empire building. This particular sphere was strengthened as the economic sphere strengthened.

    But the indigenous peoples were never part of this scheme. Their political sphere of communally held land, of living off the land, and valuing things other than money was indeed fractured as the European corporate and colonial sphere aggrandized itself. As their governmental process was weakened they became less and less able to fend off the colonizers.

This should give you some sense of some plausible ways in which you might begin to conceptually link the Stories of Rwanda to social justice theory.

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