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Anthropology Matters Journal 2002
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A Reply to Linda Melvern
Nigel Eltringham (SOAS)
Let me start by thanking Linda Melvern for her response. Like many of my colleagues I believe that dialogue between the academic and journalistic communities is sorely lacking. It has therefore been a pleasure to encounter Linda's willingness to engage in such discussion.
I would like to make it clear that I recognise the difference between the books by Linda Melvern and Philip Gourevitch mentioned in my original article. As I said at the time both are valuable contributions to the corpus of work on Rwanda. Whatever its failings, Gourevitch's book has provided a highly accessible entry point to Rwanda for a broad readership. Likewise, Linda Melvern’s book contains a long overdue exploration of international complicity in the 1994 genocide. Furthermore, I also recognise that the two books differ stylistically, and reflect the generic division between the feature writer and the investigative journalist. However, I do not believe that Melvern's comment that I suggest that facts can be 'easily dismissed' is a correct reading of my article, for three reasons.
First, as Linda Melvern points out herself, initial reporting of the genocide in 1994 was misleading. And yet many commentators continue to stand by many of the 'factual' observations made at the time. In this sense I think Melvern corroborates my comment that 'today's fact is tomorrow's fiction'.
Second, there remains a substantial difference between the static observations of external observers (in which category I would place myself, Melvern and Gourevitch) for whom 'facts' form part of an analytical, distanced project and the processual, protean experience of those immersed in violent conflict. Our representations of conflict are amalgams of multiple 'message fragments' pieced together in a never-to-be-completed mosaic. Some fragments are observed or empirical (documents, for example), some intuitive, some specific to the conflict itself, and some universal and abstract. Each of us places in our own mosaic what seems relevant, and groups fragments together into a partial, but apparently coherent picture of the conflict. Any attempt to represent a conflict requires these acts of exclusion, inclusion and interpretation – such a process is not suspect, but necessary.
Third, in contrast to observers, those implicated in ongoing violent conflict must continuously try to impose some sense of coherence on their frequently chaotic experiences. They are engaged in an inevitable and legitimate attempt to impose meaning on this lived experience. By necessity, this requires interpretation of that experience and the fixing of 'key points' within that interpretation; i.e. the production of 'facts'. But central to all of this is that even those implicated in a conflict only encounter it partially – not fully. In addition, actors fashion their representations (clusters of 'facts') in order to fulfil strategic/instrumental objectives and to satisfy different constituencies. Consequently, my work is concerned with exploring the mechanisms by which this proceeds. In such a context, the issue is not one of dismissing facts; rather, it is to embrace the issue of how actors determine what is (and what is not) considered a 'fact', and how this contributes to maintaining a 'sense of conflict'. Rather than taking some kind of anti-factual stance, I elevate the importance placed on facticity (or the fetishisation of facts) as a central component in explaining how conflicts both arise and continue to perpetuate.
Thus, the 'facts' that I am referring to are those 'fixed key points' used by protagonists, not the UN report, arms deal documents, or whatever. My concern is the dynamic 'long distance argument' in which protagonists constantly seek to capture and hold the 'factual high ground', and how this contributes to making conflict intractable.
In the same way as other writers I rely heavily on documentation. But the documents to which Linda Melvern refers are fragments of, or windows into, a much wider picture. How they interconnect does not inhere in the documents themselves. The documents merely answer the question, for example, of whether there were or were not arms shipments from Egypt. While these documents fulfil the questions of 'what', 'where', 'when', 'which', and 'who' they do not tell us, in and of themselves, the ‘why’. To answer this question requires that we make partial connections between these documents, and place them in a far wider framework of understanding. But to construct this framework requires interpretation on the part of the writer.
None of us can produce a complete 'as it happened' representation of the genocide – the documentary evidence is simply too vast. We must, instead, choose to focus upon a particular aspect, to ask a particular question, to be selective. Such selectivity is not suspect, but necessary for any form of inquiry. Our selection is determined by the questions we choose to ask of these bodies of text. The questions asked by Linda Melvern of these documents differs from the questions I ask of them. Even if we were to ask the same question, each of us takes for granted different key concepts and ideas, and write for different audiences. As a consequence, were I to ask the same question as Linda Melvern, the resultant analysis would differ. There is nothing suspect in this. Rather, it is an outcome of the idiosyncratic proclivities of each writer, her/his personal biography, professional methodologies, and the audience we are writing for. In other words, the body of documentary evidence and Melvern's book are not the same thing. If Linda Melvern had merely collated these documents, leaving them intact (as for example, the UN has done), then she could claim that she was merely 'stating the facts', where facts = documents. But in producing a book based on these documents, she has blurred the strict delineation between 'fact' and interpretation.
Of course, I do exactly the same thing in my own writing. Thus, as writers, we must always be aware that there is a difference between the extant documents and our interpretation of them. I should add, however, that Linda Melvern should be praised for collating such an impressive and invaluable collection of documents and placing them where they can be easily consulted.
At the end of the day, I remain committed to raising the profile of the Rwandan genocide. I would therefore encourage as many people as possible to read both Melvern's and Gourevitch's books. But, then again, how each of us responds when reading these books introduces yet another level of interpretation, that of the readership itself.
Nigel Eltringham is a postdoctoral researcher (funded by the ESRC) in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He has previously worked for a conflict resolution and development NGO in Rwanda and in rural development in Latin America. A book based on his Ph.D. research is to be published by Pluto Press in 2003 (Accounting for Horror: Post-Genocide Debates in Rwanda).
