Anthropological Studies of National Reconciliational Processes

Anthropological Theory

Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications(London, Thousand Oaks, CA

and New Delhi)Vol 3(3): 367–387

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Anthropological studiesof national reconciliationprocessesRichard Ashby WilsonUniversity of Connecticut, USA

AbstractThis article examines how social researchers have evaluated the rise of institutions tocreate ‘national reconciliation’ in countries emerging from authoritarianism and staterepression. Reconciliation has been counter-posed to retributive justice by newpolitical and religious elites, who have instead sought to construct a new notion of thenational self and psyche, and in so doing used organic models of state and society andmetaphors of illness and health in the body politic. Intellectuals such as the legalscholar Minow have applauded these efforts as attempts to transcend the limitationsof law and legal discourse in order to construct a different kind of public space andcollective memory, and to engage in emotional and psychological healing.Anthropologists have taken a more mixed and critical view. Some such as Buur andRoss have asserted that truth commissions are not free of the positivism whichcharacterizes the legal process and which excludes certain types of voice andsubjectivity and creates silences of its own. Others such as Borneman and Wilson havecriticized reconciliation strategies for undermining the rule of law and they haveasserted that democratizing regimes must instead attempt to rebuild accountability,and thereby state legitimacy, through retributive justice.

Key Wordsanthropology of human rights • political violence • reconciliation • retributive justice• transitional justice • truth commissions

Plato recognizes only one ultimate standard, the interest of the state. Everything thatfurthers it is good and virtuous and just; everything that threatens it is bad and wickedand unjust. Actions that serve it are moral; actions that endanger it, immoral. In otherwords, Plato’s moral code is strictly utilitarian; it is a code of collectivist or politicalutilitarianism. The criterion of morality is the interest of the state. Morality is nothingbut political hygiene. (Popper, 1945: 107)

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I THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF NATIONAL RECONCILIATIONThe idea of ‘national reconciliation’ emerged from a particular set of historical andpolitical experiences, namely the transitions to liberal democracy that occurred at theend of the Cold War. These transitions from authoritarianism to civilian elected rulebegan with Argentina in 1983 and culminated in the end of apartheid in South Africain 1994. In between these dates, a number of elected civilian governments replacedmilitary dictatorships in Latin America and communist regimes in the former SovietUnion and countries of eastern Europe. In all of these countries, the same kinds ofquestions were raised in peace talks and afterwards. What will happen to perpetrators ofgross human rights violations and how will victims be compensated? How can a newofficial version of historical events be created which challenges the distortions and falsi-fications of repressive regimes? How can the memory of those who suffered from politicalviolence be included in a new official history?

The depth of these political transformations varied widely, but in most cases account-ability for past crimes was heavily constrained by the continued institutional power ofold elites in reformed state institutions. Famously, General Pinochet, who was respons-ible for the 1973 coup and the torture and murder of up to 4000 political opponents,continued to command the Chilean armed forces as Defense Minister after the handoverof the executive to a civilian opposition leader, Patricio Aylwin. Apartheid-era PresidentF.W. de Klerk was Nelson Mandela’s vice president for two years from 1994 to 1996 ina power-sharing Government of National Unity. Military and political leaders of theancién regime took advantage of their sustained institutional power to pass successiveamnesty laws. In Guatemala, there were 12 amnesties between 1982 and 1988 whenapproximately 75,000 were killed in a vicious counter-insurgency war.1 Most involvedblanket amnesties, with one or two exceptions such as in South Africa, where individualshad to prove that they were acting on higher orders and with political intent.

Apart from a few exceptions, amnesties were not directly challenged by incomingpolitical elites.2 In only a very small number of cases were political leaders ever broughtbefore a court, for instance in the successful prosecution of East German former headof state Eric Honecker. In Argentina, President Alfonsín brought successful prosecutionsagainst high-ranking military leaders, only to have them pardoned by President Menema few years into their sentences. The case in South Africa against former apartheid-eraDefense Minister Magnus Malan collapsed in 1996 due to basic failures on the part ofthe prosecution and the Attorney General’s office. By and large, the vast majority ofpolice, military and paramilitary death squad members who committed murder, rape,torture and kidnapping walked free in the streets of the newly democratic states. A wallof impunity and silence protected them from judicial redress, and sealed off the pastfrom legal retribution in the present.

For the anti-authoritarian political opposition, now walking in the corridors of statepower, impunity was seen as a necessary political compromise. It was argued by Presi-dent Nelson Mandela and Argentina’s President Carlos Menem that pardon was the‘price of peace’. Some, such as former Archbishop Desmond Tutu, argued that amnestywas necessary to avert further bloodshed and this is why South Africa’s transition was‘peaceful’.3 Others in Latin America, such as Guatemalan civilian President VinicioCerezo, observed that their countries had endured decades of military rule, and themost important goal was democratic consolidation, however minimal and incremental,

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and even if it did not directly challenge the foundations of military authority andcontrol.

In the context of widespread impunity, international and national human rightsorganizations lobbied successfully for a small measure of accountability. Even if perpe-trators could not be brought to court, tried and sentenced, then at least the truth couldbe told about state crimes. Transnational human rights organizations such as AmnestyInternational and Human Rights Watch argued for domestic prosecutions, but mostsettled for thoroughly documenting abuses, in the hope that it might lead to justice inthe future. ‘Truth commissions’ were set up to carry out this official documentation andhistory-writing, and roughly 20 such commissions – depending on how you define andcount them – were established between the 1970s and the present day, with the majority(15) established in the latter years of the Cold War (1974–1994).

Some commissions were sanctioned and operated by the new state, others by theUnited Nations and still others by the Catholic church and non-governmental organiza-tions. All of them shared the same task of documenting ‘who did what to whom, whenand where’, but they fulfilled this task in many different ways. A few named perpetrators(as in South Africa and El Salvador), whereas the majority (e.g. in Chile, Argentina,Uruguay and Guatemala) did not officially name individuals guilty of politically moti-vated violent crimes, preferring to assert ‘institutional responsibility’. Truth commissionreports tended to report ‘the bare facts’ about individual abuses, and most did not writea serious structural or historical account which integrated individual violations into awider analysis of the causes and motivations of political violence.4

This truth-writing project was valuable and necessary to overturn the relativist defor-mations and denials of truth carried out by repressive regimes.5 If political violence andgenocide have taught us anything about epistemology, it is that relativist and tautologicaltheories of truth do not assist either allocation of responsibility or the breaking of a regimeof denial. Yet new democratizing political elites went a step further than establishingsalient truths about state terror.They overlaid a truth-finding project with a morally thickproject of national reconciliation in order to legitimize tarnished state institutions. Theslogan for the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission would be, therefore,‘Reconciliation Through Truth’, and the clear aim would be post-apartheid nationbuilding. The ideological power of truth finding was harnessed to the project of instill-ing public moral values and constructing a new, shared vision of the nation.

Nation-building strategies appropriated and absorbed truth-finding, and a collectivistvision of politicized morality took precedence over the liberal humanitarian projectinitiated by human rights organizations. In this way, truth commissions became one ofthe main ways in which new elites sought to manufacture legitimacy for tarnished stateinstitutions. And yet, at the heart of these transitions to liberal democracy was anirresolvable contradiction, between the formalized approbation of individual rights,constitutional freedoms and the rule of law on the one hand, and the suspension andabrogation of these rights and freedoms where they concerned the past political conflicton the other. Individual freedoms and entitlements were proclaimed, but then quicklysubordinated in the area of justice to state morality and elite interests. A culture ofhuman rights was constructed upon the quicksand of a culture of impunity.

In many cases, as in the amnesty deal struck between the African National Congressand the National Party in 1994, or between the guerrilla URNG and Guatemalan

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government in 1994, opposition figures were party to the amnesty negotiations them-selves. In the new political dispensation, they had to convince their political constituen-cies of the need for political compromise after so many years of sacrifice and hardenedopposition, and truth commissions and the language of national reconciliation becamethe preferred discourse. This, more than any other factor, explains the widespread popu-larity of truth commissions and other national reconciliation projects. Truth commis-sions were promoted by political elites as a mechanism to construct a new ideologicalhegemony in the area of justice, rights and public morality, a hegemony which divertedpopular legal consciousness away from legal retribution and financial compensation.

Whether in Latin America or South Africa or elsewhere, political and religious elitesused a remarkably similar language of reconciliation, and their discourse was character-ized by the following features: the construction of a new notion of the national self andpsyche, the use of organic models of nation, the use of metaphors of illness and healthand the creation of formulations of the common good which exclude retribution andencourage forgiveness. These discursive forms are not peculiar to truth commissions oreven democratizing regimes, but are features of nationalist discourse. Nationalistdiscourse often constructs the ‘national self ’ in opposition to the essentialized practicesor beliefs of other, usually surrounding, countries.

Truth commissions, on the other hand, construct the national self with regard to theviolent nation of the past rather than against other nations in the present, and they asserta discontinuity with that same past. The new national self is one which is forged in thesuffering and violence of the past, but no element of that political past has entered intothe present. The present political order is presented as purified, decontaminated anddisconnected from the old authoritarian order. Truth commission hearings construct anew vision of the national self by inscribing the individual into a new national narrativeon personhood. Belinda Bozzoli (1998), a sociologist who has written about the TRChearings in Alexandra township in Johannesburg, refers to the ‘sequestration of experi-ence’ when individual narratives were subordinated to community histories and newnational narratives on the experience of apartheid. Idiosyncratic and unique individualpsyches disappear into the melting pot of a new official ‘collective memory’.

Although they may formally appeal to international human rights, national reconcil-ers deploy an organic model of state, culture and society which again has its origins morewidely in nationalist and statist discourse and, if we look even further back, to Plato’sRepublic. In this view, the body politic is not constituted by morally autonomous indi-vidual citizens but by general principles of organicism, holism and collectivism in whichit is the purpose of the individual to maintain social harmony and the unity, stability,and good health of the state. These views are widely expressed in the media and in litera-ture on the subject, but come to their fullest expression in the writings of DesmondTutu. In justifying the amnesty legislation in South Africa, Tutu writes:

Social harmony is for us the summum bonum – the greatest good. Anything thatsubverts or undermines this sought-after good is to be avoided like the plague. Anger,resentment, lust for revenge . . . are corrosive of this good. (1999: 35)

The main metaphor of the organic state is the body politic as a sick body that is inneed of healing. Truth commissions carry out this healing and thus promote national


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reconciliation. The truth commission opens the wounds of the suffering nation andcleanses them, thus healing the national body politic.6 The morality of the nation-statebecomes a question of Platonic moral and political hygiene. Here, the focus is not asmuch on individuals, but on the nation-state, and this brings us much closer to theactual meaning of ‘national reconciliation’ as defined by political and religious elites.Reconciliation between individuals in the sense of victim–offender mediation was notattempted in South Africa, Chile or other countries where truth commissionsconsciously pursued national reconciliation. Sub-national social groups such as classes,races or genders are not to be reconciled with one another either. Instead, reconciliationworks at a much higher level of abstraction. The nation-state is to be reconciled withitself. Thus defined, ‘national reconciliation’ is almost impossible to quantify or measureor assess in any meaningful way. This ideological slipperiness makes it suitable for thetwo main tasks facing political elites that inherit the battered shell of the authoritarianstate: nation building, and the centralization of power and authority in the context of acontested monopoly on both adjudication and the means of violence.

Our understanding of ‘national reconciliation’, then, should not commence on theideological terrain marked out by proponents of reconciliation, that is, the values, atti-tudes and dispositions underscoring moral and legal decision-making (i.e. whether ornot it is morally right and good to forgive one’s aggressors). Instead, we should begin inthe opposite direction with the Weberian problematic of the legitimacy of the state andits institutions in the aftermath of authoritarianism and the attempts of specific interestholders to forge formal conditions of acceptability that lends legitimacy to their exerciseof regulation through institutional means.

II RECONCILING INTELLECTUALSBefore examining anthropologists’ studies of national reconciliation processes, let us lookbriefly at the wider discussions in law and the social sciences. The idea of national recon-ciliation has received an unexpectedly large amount of intellectual backing, especiallyfrom the quarters of law, political science and moral philosophy. There is widespreadconsensus that the truth finding and documentation aspects of the work of truthcommissions can promote a wider political culture of human rights. Breaking a regimeof denial through truth commission reports or public hearings is important, arguesMichael Ignatieff (2001), in order to reduce the range of ‘impermissible lies’ in the publicrealm. Authoritarian rulers constantly denied that anyone had been killed or‘disappeared’ and military rulers in Latin America regularly put out propaganda that thedisappeared had all fled to live in Miami, rather than been brutally murdered. Sometruth commissions (for example the Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarifi-cation) are more effective than courts in establishing an adequate account of an era ofviolence, since they go beyond the guilt of a single individual (think of the narrownessof the Eichmann trial in Israel7) to include a wider social, historical and structuralcontext in their examination of a conflict.

Some commentators have gone beyond applauding the fact-finding function of truthcommissions to endorse a much wider moral project of creating shared values and‘healing the nation’. Martha Minow, professor of family law at Harvard Law School, isone such advocate. In her 1998 book Between Vengeance and Forgiveness, she highlightsthe therapeutic dimensions of truth commissions, which for her are models of social


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rehabilitation and public healing. Like Priscilla Hayner (2001: 133–4), Minow largelydefines reconciliation as ‘societal healing’.

Minow justifies the institutional healing project of truth commissions by reference tothe drawbacks and limitations of their opposite – the legal process. Minow develops herarguments against trials by pointing out that investigations and prosecutions are veryexpensive and time-consuming. Crucially, trials may be damaging to victims who oftenface antagonistic cross-examining from defense counsels. Victims’ psychological needsare better served by truth commission officials who listen sympathetically, acknowledgethe wrongs committed and restore the dignity of victims. This creates an official breakwith the authoritarian justice of the past:

Precisely because it is not a court, the human rights committee [of the South AfricanTRC] avoids chilling reminders to victimized people of the hostility and insensitiv-ity of courts under apartheid. (Minow, 1998: 57)

Minow largely endorses a collective model of national healing and the version of recon-ciliation as therapy for a sick society. For her, whole nations can suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Addressing the national psyche is something that truthcommissions can achieve whereas the courts cannot:

The very vocabularies of healing and restoration are foreign to the legal languageunderpinning prosecutions. Emotional and psychological healing did not figurelargely in the initial and international debates in response to the Holocaust. (Minow,1998: 63)

Minow (1998: 80) is aware of the criticisms that one might make of this model, namelythat nations do not have psyches that can be ‘healed’, that a therapeutic model canobscure the political dimensions of the conflict, and that reconciliation deprives victimsof the right to justice and treats individuals as means to a societal or collective goodrather than as ends in themselves. Minow did not have access at the time of writing tomore recent studies by psychologists and anthropologists which challenge the assertionthat truth commissions promote healing (eg. Hamber and Wilson, 2002). There is nowcompelling evidence from interviews with victims that telling the truth does not necess-arily heal, that many victims experience a decline in their mental health after testifyingin public, that the mental health services of truth commissions are woefully inadequate,and that retribution in the courts may provide symbolic closure for victims as much asnon-legal reconciliation mechanisms.

Minow considers the objections to truth commissions, but ultimately comes down infavor of them on the grounds that restorative justice has deeper cultural roots in placeslike South Africa, unlike the alien retributive justice of state legal systems. This is inter-esting for anthropologists because Minow’s last line of defense for national reconcilia-tion mechanisms relies upon a cultural and historical argument about legal pluralism,tradition and uniquely African approaches to justice. Restoring the dignity of victims ofapartheid is reinforced by a much deeper process of recovering of local culturaltraditions of adjudication suppressed by white colonial and apartheid rule. Instead ofdrawing on the numerous anthropological studies of law in Africa (e.g. Moore, 1991)


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or legal historians’ critique of the idea of African customary law (Chanock, 1985),Minow (1998: 81) relies for her information on TRC Chair Desmond Tutu, whom shequotes thus:

Retributive justice is largely Western. The African understanding is far more restora-tive – not so much to punish as to redress or restore a balance that has been knockedaskew. The justice that we hope for is restorative of the dignity of the people.8

This culturological approach may explain the growing appeal which peace building,international conflict mediation and ‘national reconciliation’ have among some culturalanthropologists. A number of papers at recent panels at American AnthropologicalAssociation meetings on ‘truth and reconciliation’ have for the most part endorsed thereconciliation project of post-authoritarian regimes. Anthropologists working in conflictanalysis institutes have argued that anthropology more widely needs to pay more atten-tion to truth and reconciliation commissions (Avruch and Vejarano, 2001) and otherpeace-building initiatives. An editorial in the June 2002 edition of Anthropology Todaysees a central role for anthropologists in actual conflict resolution as well as in reconcil-iation processes in countries emerging from violence.

Professor Cynthia Keppley Mahmood of the Kroc Institute of International PeaceStudies at the University of Notre Dame encourages anthropologists to play a greaterrole in peace building through promoting dialogue between bellicose parties. Anthro-pologists can call upon their ‘ethnographic sensitivities’ so as to engage in the ‘culturalbridging’ that is necessary between western secularist and fundamentalist religioustraditions: ‘Let us use our professional training to explore whether dialogue may bepossible along avenues political leaders have closed off in favor of military options’(Mahmood, 2002: 2).

The allure of national reconciliation for anthropologists seems to lie in its fusion oftruth commissions and restorative justice, and the idea that mediation is embedded inculture and social networks rather than state institutions. Anthropologists seem to havea pre-disposed intellectual affinity to the idea of restorative justice because of the long-standing concern with legal pluralism in the discipline. The general historical focus ofpolitical and legal anthropology has been on non-state morality, on social norms,Alternative Dispute Resolution and customary law rather than on colonial and post-colonial state law.9 These anthropological studies focus more on social relationships andtheir restoration, rather than rational bureaucratic and legal procedures, which are oftenpresented as far removed from everyday notions of justice.

III ETHNOGRAPHERS OF RECONCILIATIONDue to the history of legal anthropology within the discipline and its focus on publicmorality, popular legal consciousness and cultural norms, we might expect that the fewanthropologists who have actually studied national reconciliation commissions in detailwould be sympathetic to the commissions and antagonistic to legal retribution and therule of law. This has not usually been the case, which just goes to show that anthro-pologists can be an unpredictable bunch. In the discussion that follows, I will focus ontwo lines of argumentation pursued by anthropologists studying national reconciliationprocesses. First I will consider the critique of positivism within human rights


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documentation and official history-writing made by Buur, Wilson and Ross, all of whomstudied the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Then I will turn todiscussions of the relationship between reconciliation and retributive justice in easternEurope (John Borneman) and South Africa (Wilson).

Anthropological critiques of positivismNational commissions of investigation have invariably asserted a causal link betweentruth and reconciliation, and they have generally relied upon a positivist understandingof truth. As a brief aside, positivism in law means something slightly different than inthe social sciences. Broadly speaking, legal positivism sees law as a value-free, neutralactivity guided by the strict application of legal principles as codified in constitutions orlegal precedent. Positivism in the social sciences models itself on empiricist science ofthe material-object world and eschews metaphysical reflection in favor of knowledgeproduced through systematic observation and experimentation. There is, of course, alink between the two insofar as legal forms of knowledge are generally positivistic andshare the value-free and empiricist approach to visible facts that characterizes sociologicalpositivism. Both eschew epistemological reflection. Anthropologists have been criticalof the reliance of human rights institutions on positivistic approaches to knowledge andhistory, on the usual grounds that it is inappropriate to apply natural science principlesto societies, and that positivism excludes consciousness, meaning and intentionality.

This critique of positivism in human rights documentation, although begun earlier(Wilson, 1997), has crystallized in the study of the South African Truth and Reconcilia-tion Commission’s approach to truth, knowledge and history. On 31 October 1998, theSouth AfricanTruth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) released its final Report, whichdocumented gross violations committed during a 34-year period between 1960 and 1994.The Report had taken nearly three years to complete and was a compendious account whichran to 3500 pages and nearly 1 million words. It provided findings on more cases, nearly21,000, than any previous truth commission before it, and the sheer weight of these casesmade a damning indictment of a system of institutionalized racism under apartheid.

Three anthropologists, Buur, Wilson and Ross, looked at the methodology whichguided the TRC’s search for truth and about the past, and constituted the means forcreating the knowledge contained in the final Report. They asked questions such as whatdifferent versions of truth did the TRC hold, how did these versions change over the lifeof the commission and how did this lead to the shape of the Report? What over-archingnarrative on the past did the commission assert, and what view of the relationshipbetween truth and morality did this contain?

The TRC’s final Report (1:100) identified and defined four notions of truth whichhad guided the Commission:

1 Factual or forensic truth: is ‘the familiar legal or scientific notion of bringing to lightfactual, corroborated evidence’.

2 Personal or narrative truth: refers to the individual truths of victims and perpetrators,attaching value to oral tradition and story telling.

3 Social truth: is established through interaction, discussion and debate.4 Healing and restorative truth: repairs the damage done in the past and prevents

further recurrences in the future.


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Yet there were really only two paradigms of truth under which all the other versionscongregated – forensic truth and narrative truth. These two truths were regularlycounter-posed to one another and each was dominant at different stages. Narrative truthwas hegemonic at the beginning of the Commission’s life as public televised hearingshad an unexpectedly dramatic effect, but it was displaced by a more legalistic andforensic paradigm after the first year. In concrete terms, the forensic model was institu-tionally established in the Information Management System (Infocomm), a trans-national methodology for human rights documentation. Variants of this large-scalehuman rights computer database had also been deployed earlier in Haiti, Guatemala andEl Salvador. Infocomm’s positivist model of truth relied upon quantitative statisticalmethods in the production of the Report, whereas other types of truth played a second-ary role. Infocomm had seven stages from statement taking to making national findings,and the whole system was driven by each individual act of violence. The whole systembroke down victims’ narratives into quantifiable acts. Complex events and people weredivided up into their constituent components – either 48 distinct acts in the case ofevents, or 3 categories in the case of persons – victims, perpetrators or witnesses.

Lars Buur’s (2000) ethnography took place within the offices of the TRC in order todemonstrate how the Commission’s ‘global truth’ of the apartheid era was createdthrough internal bureaucratic practices, rather than external political pressures on theCommission – the usual focus of research by political scientists such as Hayner (1994).Buur draws upon Ian Hacking’s (1982, 1985, 1999) work on ‘styles of scientific reason-ing’ to understand the rationality of Infocomm, and its statistical style of producingregularities within populations. Buur’s focus is the bureaucratic mentality of the TRC,and its reliance upon scientific procedures and formal rules. Buur begins with Hacking’sobservation that science operates on the assumption that a truth relation is possiblebetween the world and representations of the world; that is, a ‘correspondence theory oftruth’. Hacking (1982: 49) asserts no such relation is possible, since ‘nothing’s eithertrue-or-false but thinking makes it so’, an assertion which unmistakably questions anyindependent criteria of truth.

Statistical styles of reasoning are thus self-authenticating and circular, and the role ofthe researcher is to describe the conditions under which relations of truth and falsehoodare established. Buur does this well in his critique of a factual and objective approach toTruth with a capital T. He points out how the TRC conceived of its project as the estab-lishing of provable or verifiable facts, which are, in the positivist language of Infocomm,‘found’, ‘retrieved’, ‘captured’ and ‘collected’. In Infocomm’s view, the only knowledgethat matters is that which can be counted or measured. Acceptable knowledge must meetthe criteria of being generalizable, which requires that knowledge be detached from localknowledge which is itself transformed and homogenized.

Buur (2000: 65) states that the Commission’s entire project of documentation of grosshuman rights violations could be understood in terms of the ‘tension between a localontology of engagement and a global ontology of detachment’. This approach to globalknowledge is continuous with a modern and colonial project ‘because the image of theglobe – the global truth – connotes a surface waiting to be conquered, of people with nowill or direction of their own, waiting to be worked on and through, where local dynamicsare obstacles which have to be bypassed, managed and absorbed in its order’ (2000: 64).

A positivist approach to documenting the apartheid era suffers from two types of


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disjuncture. Firstly, Buur notes a divergence between the information system and thenorms and actions of bureaucratic staff, which are replete with all kinds of inconsisten-cies and unintended consequences. Secondly, there is a discontinuity between statisticalscience and the experiential life-world of those people affected by apartheid-era violence.Buur captures well the ambiguity and contradictions of trying to fix and codify indi-vidual and social memories, which are fluid, fragmented, fleeting, transient. He exem-plifies this by examining how the TRC defined and operationalized the category of‘victim’. The TRC Report listed 22,000 victims but excluded many thousands of indi-viduals. This categorical exclusion resulted from the distinctions embedded within themethodology of the database. The TRC’s epistemological system utilized an exclusiveform of power/knowledge built upon positivistic methods of establishing the occurrenceof a ‘gross human rights violation’.

Although insightful, Buur’s framework for understanding the TRC’s methodology isvulnerable to the usual charges against cultural anthropologists – of epistemological andmoral relativism. State violence requires a response from social researchers, and sayingthe truth of an era depends on your style of reasoning is a limited and partial responseat best. At worst it is apolitical and lays the past open to historical revisionism. Wittgen-stein’s sarcastic aphorism is correct: we cannot squeeze between language and its object.Yet in a politically-charged context of competing accounts of violence, social researchersneed epistemologies which allow them to say that some accounts are more plausible thanothers. For instance, in the recent libel case brought by David Irving against DeborahLipstadt (1993), a British court had to verify whether the Nazis had carried out a policyof systematic mass extermination of Jews and others in death camps such as Auschwitz,or whether no such policy existed and the buildings at Auschwitz were in fact air-raidbunkers. In the context of the rise of the European extreme right (Haider in Austria, LePen in France, and the late Pim Fortuyn in Holland), it matters that Holocaust denierssuch as Irving are proved wrong in public settings, and doing so probably requires somekind of correspondence theory of truth.10 This need not imply an unreflexive positivismand a reliance purely on forensic methods, but could also be contingent upon criteria ofplausibility which integrate a concern with logic, coherence and evidence with widerinterpretative and historical understandings.11

The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa (Wilson, 2001) develops acritique of the positivism of the South African TRC which shares many elements ofBuur’s analysis. The study points out that only forensic truth was granted epistemo-logical value in the process of creating knowledge about the past. Forensic truth was seenby the TRC as an end in itself, whereas all of the other three truths are means directedtowards other ends, and specifically towards healing or affirming dignity. The three typesof ‘narrative truth’ are not given any epistemological standing – they are there foremotional ‘catharsis’ and nation building. These types of truth do not contribute to thehistory of South Africa, nor to an improved understanding of the past, nor to thecontext, patterns and causes of violations. For this reason, individual statements fromvictims did not feature in the writing of the Report.

Over the life of the commission, Infocomm became increasingly driven by positivistconcerns and the desire to create legally defensible findings, at the expense of victims’experience of telling their stories and to the detriment of including fine grained narrativeaccounts in the substance of the Report. This could be seen in two areas – the statement


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form and the data coding process. The statement form upon which victims’ stories werewritten went through six different versions, each more like the computer database uponwhich it was entered. In the beginning, these were open-ended forms with a great dealof space for personal narrative. By the end of the process, the statement form had beenstripped down to a checklist as the pressure was increased, in the words of one statementtaker, ‘to get the cold facts’.

The data coding process broke each narrative down into a series of 48 categories ofviolation, called the ‘controlled vocabulary’, or the ‘Bible’ by data processors. Once itwas fixed, all the information had to be classified according to this grid. As one dataprocessor told me: ‘in the beginning there was lots of interpretation of the statement butby the end we were just like robots. You read it and put it in the computer as it is.’ Infor-mation did not ‘exist’ unless it conformed to the controlled vocabulary, showing, à laBuur and Hacking, how conceptual categories selectively define social reality.12 The exis-tential truths replete with the subjectivities of individuals contained within whole narra-tives were lost in the data processing. The integrity of the narrative at the data processingstage was destroyed as processors deconstructed the single narrative and ‘captured’discrete acts and the details of victims, witnesses and perpetrators. The arc of eachpersonal account and its overall narrative structure were fragmented.

The TRC’s final Report has to be understood as the direct result of the methodologyused. The main limitation noted by many observers is that there is no overarching andunified historical narrative linking together the various fragments. The truth commissiondid not try to write a history of the apartheid era; instead, it was led by the need to makeperpetrator findings. There was a crucial shift in the TRC’s work ‘from a narrativelyframed victim-oriented conception of the TRC process to a perpetrator-focused quasi-legal approach’ (Du Toit, 1999: 2). Because of this shift it ended up on the terrain ofthe courts, not on the terrain of the historians. Instead of putting ‘apartheid on trial’,the TRC opted for a more narrow legal quest for findings on individual gross humanrights violations. The Report is little more than a chronicle of wrong acts.

However, in one sense there is a master narrative in the Report, but it is not one a historianor anthropologist would recognize. Instead, it is ‘more a moral narrative about the fact ofmoral wrongdoing across the political spectrum, spawned by the overriding evil of theapartheid system’ (Posel, 1999: 3). The category of evil takes the place of a wider synthesisand explanation, and is a way of avoiding a historical analysis of concrete social conditions.The legal-forensic method gelled nicely with an overarching moralizing and nation-building project. An understanding of the social conditions (racism, class inequality, genderhierarchy, poverty) of wrongdoing was removed and ‘evil’ was put in its place to answer thequestion: why did people commit gross human rights violations? Because apartheid wasevil.13 End of story. This replacement of history by theology is only intelligible if we acceptthat the Report’s overall narrative is a moral one, dedicated to national reconciliation. Thenation-building project relies not upon shared political and historical understanding of anera of state violence, but upon recognizing moral wrongness. The history of apartheid wasnot written by the South African TRC as politics, but as a morality tale.

The critique of positivism developed in Fiona Ross’ (2002) study of women and theSouth African TRC shares key elements with Buur and Wilson’s writings, especially innoting how the Commission’s emphasis on visible acts was at the expense of the silencesin communication, women’s experiences of abuse, and the everyday, mundane aspects


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of oppression under apartheid. Ross carries out a genealogy of the category of ‘women’in the TRC’s work. In the beginning, the TRC was relatively blind to the specific experi-ences of women under apartheid, and treated them as ‘secondary witnesses’ who wouldtestify at public hearings about abuses against their sons, husbands, and brothers,whereas men testified about harms suffered to themselves. The ways in which womentestified located them as ‘witnesses’ rather than as ‘victims’.

There were key silences in women’s testimony, particularly regarding abuses that tookplace against themselves. These silences were cultural – ‘We are not allowed to ask ourhusbands about politics in my culture’ (Ross, 2002: 45) – political – silence as a strategyof resistance against apartheid security police – and categorical, that is to say, as a resultof the framing and definition of ‘human rights violation’ by the TRC itself. Silence wasalso a strategy used by women to cope with the effects of violence on their socialnetworks, and this placed those coping strategies off the radar screen of the TRC’s posi-tivist approach to Truth. As in both Buur and Wilson’s studies, we see how the classify-ing frameworks of the TRC rendered some histories, narratives, subjectivities andexperiences visible, and others invisible.

After women’s rights campaigners drew the TRC’s attention to the gendered aspectsof its work, the Commission attempted to focus more attentively on women’s particu-lar experiences of abuse. It instituted special hearings for women, thus transformingwomen’s experiences of abuse into a category that could be examined and measured.Yet this attention on the more visible obscured from view the more mundane aspectsof women’s experiences. The Commission emphasized visible sexual forms of abuse tothe detriment of the manifold ways in which apartheid era violence destroyed socialrelations. Ross asserts that the Commission’s emphasis on embodied harm had theeffect of naturalizing particular forms and experiences of violence and concealing otherforms. Too close a focus on bodily violation obscured the impairment of, as destruc-tion to, domestic worlds and relationships caused by apartheid. She encourages a moreinclusive approach to women’s testimony (Ross, 2002: 42), that ‘Hidden in thediscourses of domesticity are powerful forms of knowledge and agency that need to berecognized and sensitively understood . . . These have to do with experiences of familylife, with expectations of time, with silence and secrecy and the location of self instories.’

Ross analyses these aspects of pain and suffering which are not amenable to humanrights enquiries in the light of theoretical discussions by Deborah Battaglia (1999),Veena Das et al. (2001) and Elaine Scarry (1985) who she uses to argue for greateracknowledgment and recognition. The categories of violation used by national commis-sions of enquiry need to be expanded beyond the visible in order to consider the effectsof violence upon social relationships and people’s sense of selfhood and identity. In thisway, such Commissions can better document the profound and long-term social costsof state terror and reinforce the attempts by women to recover the everyday and resumethe task of living.

Accountability, justice and reconciliationDemocratic legitimacy depends above all on a system of political and personalaccountability that is institutionalized in the principles of the rule of law. (Borneman,1997: 3)


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As we saw earlier, much of the discussion of national reconciliation processes in otherdisciplines has revolved around the apparent opposition between reconciliation andretributive justice. In the two ethnographies discussed in the following paragraphs, theanthropologists concerned have both arrived at the conclusion that legality and the ruleof law are of paramount importance. John Borneman’s (1997) book Settling Accountswas one of the first attempts by an anthropologist to critically examine the process ofdealing with state violence, and his study sees justice and accountability as the mostdesirable path to ‘national reconciliation’ – understood not as forgiveness but as theabsence of violence.

Borneman focused upon East Germany, but also included the transitions fromcommunism in other eastern European countries such as Hungary, the Czech Republic,Romania, the former Yugoslavia and Russia. He asserted that those countries (such asEast Germany) which had pursued retributive justice and attempted to (re)establishprinciples of accountability and the rule of law were less prone to criminality and cyclesof violence and revenge than those countries (such as Romania and the formerYugoslavia) which did not pursue accountability. Borneman (1997: 110) thereforecontradicts those who argue that democratic consolidation and national reconciliationrequire amnesty laws and political compromise: ‘to avoid a cycle of retributive violence,it may be wise to go through a longer phase of painful historical reckoning with the past– that is, of retributive justice in the present’. Borneman’s position could be summar-ized as ‘reconciliation through justice’.

In its impassioned defense of the idea of the rule of law, Borneman’s book endorsescentral aspects of liberalism in a way that is perhaps surprising for an anthropologist.Legal anthropology has often sailed with the tide of the Critical Legal Studies movementin its criticism of liberal legal institutions on the grounds that they create and maintainrelations of class or racial domination.14 Although liberal in its political implications,Borneman’s understanding of law is underpinned by a decidedly unliberal, Durkheimianand structuralist theory of legal institutions, which emphasizes how law, like religionbefore it, creates group unity. Borneman draws from Maurice Bloch’s structuralistformulation of ‘rebounding violence’ to understand the ubiquity of ideas of vengeance.In asking how to end the closed cycle of rebounding violence, Borneman observes onthe basis of recent eastern European history that the desire for violence and revenge dissi-pates where courts pursue a small number of those most responsible, and there is sometime of reckoning for past state criminality. This does not suppress vengeance, butchannels it in politically useful ways.

Drawing upon René Girard’s (1977) book Violence and the Sacred, Borneman treatstrials as ritual performances of symbolic sacrifice, and their function is to ritually purifythe center, to engage in a process of internal cleansing. Sacrifice among the Aztecs or theAfrican Ndembu is a rite of purification where scapegoating is a way of exteriorizingguilt. This principle is used by post-conflict regimes in order to purify violence.Rebounding violence is attached to certain perpetrators, and the sacrificial act of holdingthem accountable is a type of violence that does not provoke reprisal. Retributive justicere-establishes the state as a moral agent, and restores the legitimacy of state institutionstarnished by decades of complicity in authoritarianism. Conversely, the failure to pros-ecute past injustices undermines the legitimacy of the state. Where there is no rule oflaw, there is more criminalization as society remains locked in a cycle of violence and


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counter-violence. Thus there is a causal link between retributive justice and a lack ofrebounding violence.

Borneman carries out an ethnography of the East German Commissions of Vindica-tion/Rehabilitation set up in workplaces from 1989 to 1994 and he sees an importantrole not only for state law but also national reconciliation commissions. Like trials,reconciliation commissions are a secular moral response that addresses problems of socialcohesion. These Commissions are closer to popular ideas of justice since they work atthe boundaries of state law and popular legal consciousness. East German VindicationCommissions used a broad conception of justice, combining corrective justice (compen-sating victims for harms) and retributive justice (compensating the victim for moralinjuries).

Wrongdoers were held accountable for a wrong, but the focus was more on thedamage inflicted upon the victim, rather than, as in state law, on the wrongness of theact itself. The Commission of Vindication for Radio and Television led open inquiriesto investigate moral injuries that did not entail easily quantifiable injuries. For instance,they heard cases where individuals argued that because they were deemed ‘politicalopponents’ of the Stalinist regime, they had a poor career development or were subjectedto orchestrated plans by the secret Stasi police to discredit them through unsubstanti-ated rumor. In 1993, 100 petitions were heard before the commission; 75 per cent wereupheld in favor of the petitioners, and of those rejected, the majority were due to a failureto establish evidence and the ‘facts of the case’ using fairly rigid positivist criteria. Theremedies pursued by the Commission generally entailed issuing formal public apologies,and in some cases recommending improved pensions.

In a more recent article, Borneman shifts his position closer to supporting nationalreconciliation efforts. He redefines reconciliation here as a ‘departure from violence’(2002: 282), and like many writers such as Minow he asserts the centrality of practicesof ‘listening’ to the silenced voices of victims, and witnessing their narrative re-enactment. Anthropology is, according to Borneman, uniquely positioned to instructthose attempting reconciliation in these practices. Listening and witnessing helps to re-establish networks of trust between citizens and between citizens and the state.Borneman is careful to avoid the ‘harmony ideology’ of collectivist visions of memoryand reconciliation, and he continues to insist upon the centrality of legal and insti-tutional accountability in any departure from cycles of ‘rebounding violence’.

Borneman’s approval for national reconciliation efforts is positioned in a uniquecontext of prosecutions, liberal show trials, and lustration in eastern Europe. Yet as wehave seen earlier, the experience of many victims in countries in Latin America and Africais of reconciliation in the context of amnesty and impunity. Is listening and witnessingenough to make possible a departure from ‘rebounding violence’ for the majority of thesevictims? Wilson’s book on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commissionshares Borneman’s concern with accountability, retributive justice and the rule of law,but is more critical about the degree to which truth commissions complement the courtsand create accountability. This is partly due to the differing position of the rule of lawin South Africa and East Germany. In the latter, high-level politicians including formerhead of state Eric Honecker were successfully prosecuted. In South Africa, high-levelprosecutions were not attempted (e.g. of former apartheid state presidents P.W. Bothaor F.W. de Klerk), or they collapsed as in the trial of former Defense Minister Magnus


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Malan. The national reconciliation project in South Africa was delinked from the projectof challenging impunity.

The ‘reconciliation’ advocated by South African Truth Commissioners was anamalgam of transnational human rights values and a Christian ethic of forgiveness andredemption. It was propagated through dozens of Human Rights Violations (HRV)hearings where selected ‘victims’ spoke of the violations, which they or relatives hadsuffered. The truth commission’s hearings were public rituals, which sought to inculcatea disposition towards forgiveness and away from acts of revenge. In the collective effer-vescence of hearings, individuals were made aware of themselves as particular types ofsubjects, such as ‘victims’, who were placed within particular types of national narra-tives, of suffering, oppression, liberation and finally redemption. The creation of newidentities (like victim or perpetrator) engendered new types of attitudes and dispositions(forgiveness or repentance) that bound individuals to the TRC’s nation-building projectand constructed a version of the nation out of the ashes of failed Afrikaner nationalism.

This all begs further questions – what was the content of this nation-building projectand what impact did it have on individuals and communities affected by politicalviolence? How did local actors respond to a human rights commission’s invocations toforgive? My fieldwork over 12 months in 1996 to 1998 took place in the ‘Vaal’ Africantownships to the south of Johannesburg which had been severely affected by politicalviolence over a 34-year period. In these communities, the language of rights and recon-ciliation had uneven and varied social effects and there were three main types ofresponses to the truth commission’s approach to reconciliation: the first response largelyaccepted the urgings to forgive and reconcile, the second largely ignored it in favor ofother more private aims and the third was openly hostile to it and instead in favor ofretribution and punishment. I will deal with each of these in turn:

Elective affinitiesThe TRC’s version of reconciliation certainly exerted a sway over some individuals. InSouth Africa there was a close affinity between a religious ethic of reconciliation and apolitical ethic of human rights. In the townships, the TRC’s message was reinforced bythe teachings of mainstream anti-apartheid Christian churches. The ritualized nature ofthe hearings was one factor, but equally important were the actions of their religiousleaders in pursuing reconciliation, understood as Christian forgiveness, at a local level.The message of the TRC on how to deal with the past was clearly conveyed to theintended audience, which was largely the African middle class. This group of blackprofessionals, many of whom are employed in local and national government, was over-whelmingly sympathetic to the ruling African National Congress.

Procedural pragmatismMany victims pursued their own agendas through the TRC mechanisms without therebeing any necessary loyalty to the dominant ideology of human rights, reconciliationand nation building. According to official TRC ideology, victims told their stories, thetruth came out, and people shook hands and forgave one another after years of resent-ment. It was not at all clear that the TRC’s values were conveyed in the manner expected.Some of those who appeared before the commission had no understanding of thecommission’s view of reconciliation. Others were motivated by other factors such as a


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desire to clear their name or for retribution. These observations have been echoed bylegal anthropologists such as Sally Merry (1990) and Conley and O’Barr (1990) in othercontexts: people become involved in legal processes for a variety of reasons which maybe very distinct from what the law itself is thinking. In the interaction with human rightsinstitutions, participants make complex readjustments in their thinking about moralityand law, but the end product is not often one where the participants see the law as thelaw sees itself. The mere involvement of victims in human rights mechanisms does notnecessarily signify a deep loyalty to a new language of rights. Instead, the ideology ofhuman rights was primarily a strategy to hold together a fragile political coalitionbetween incoming and outgoing elites in the first unstable years after white rule. This,I think, gives us one reason why human rights have been so prevalent in the democra-tizations of the post Cold War order.

Resistance and oppositionThere was a deep chasm between the national version of human rights and ideas ofjustice pursued by the local courts and armed gangs that still control many African town-ships. Members of gangs and local community courts resist key elements of thedominant post-apartheid value system to such an extent that it might justify theComaroffs’ reference to a dual consciousness in South Africa (Comaroff, 1985). Justiceis understood not as reconciliation but as vengeance and punishment. If reconciliationis a key aspect of the state’s centralizing project, then vengeance guides local institutionsof social regulation. In a number of incidents I document in my book (2001), localvengeance overwhelmed national attempts at reconciliation. The greater the factional-ism within a locale, the more it approximates a Hobbesian moral universe, the greaterthe resistance will be to post-conflict human rights talk. In one case, a police informerwas murdered as a consequence of the competition between two armed gangs whocloaked their criminal protection rackets in political rhetoric. His murder was also aboutthe failure of the post-apartheid state to address criminality and to build an effective andlegitimate criminal justice system. The widespread ethic of vengeance in South Africa isa clear indictment of the legal system and the failed project of nation building usinghuman rights discourse.

What do the ethnographic studies of Borneman and Wilson tell us more generallyabout justice and national reconciliation efforts in democratizing countries? They tell usfirstly that the societal consequences of national reconciliation projects, understood asattempts to build hegemony and manufacture legitimacy by state elites, are ambiguousand paradoxical. As long as the state is unable to address legal pluralism and criminality,then vengeance will remain a central component in how many citizens understand andenact justice. Researchers must give more attention to what social actors and institutionsactually do with rights talk and reconciliation institutions and what legitimacy they mayor may not have. Participants in new human rights institutions often have their ownagendas, which may or may not coincide with the nation-building project of a new elite.

Following on from that, social actors, from individual victims to collectivistcommunity courts, adopt a variety of strategies of social action which contest the direc-tion of social change in the area of justice, or what Alain Touraine (1995) calls ‘historic-ity’. Post-authoritarian citizenship is fluid and in motion, and can be understood as ashifting and diverse set of claims which transform the ongoing context of social action.


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As a result, we have to be more cautious about what human rights talk and reconcilia-tion can achieve in the new global order, and refrain from some of the more vauntedclaims of political elites who promise to ‘reconcile or heal the nation’.15 These are empiri-cally-derived theoretical insights which can contribute to the project of documentingand understanding the transformations of post-conflict societies, and more widely tounderstanding the meaning of national reconciliation in a neo-liberal and post-Cold Warinternational order.

IV NEW DIRECTIONS FOR ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCHImagining departures from violence has not been a major project among anthro-pologists or other social scientists. But if we are to contribute to reconciliation in themany communities in which we work, then such imaginings are an essential part ofour work. They are perhaps the major contribution we might make to internationalpeacekeeping efforts. (Borneman, 2002: 300)

Thus far, anthropologists have primarily focused upon reconciliation projects confinedto individual nation-states, yet more recently there has been a globalization of humanrights and reconciliation discourse though non-governmental organizations such as theNew York based International Center for Transitional Justice, and intergovernmentalinstitutions such as the United Nations. In the 1990s, as internal conflicts proliferatedso did international peacekeeping operations and, in their wake, internationally organ-ized reconstruction operations. Since 1990, there have been over twice as many humani-tarian interventions by the United Nations than in the preceding 45 years. The statedaims of these interventions are ensuring international human rights standards, facili-tating national reconciliation, mediating in conflict and engaging in post-conflict recon-struction. ‘National reconciliation’ (usually defined in the ‘thick’ sense of forgiveness)became a key component of international post-conflict reconstruction efforts, and aglobal reconciliation industry sprang up to formulate and implement policies.16

Anthropologists need to give greater attention to the discursive formations of inter-national multilateral institutions, the unintended consequences of their interventionsand the reception, transformation and rejection of these ideas by ‘locals’ and local humanrights activists who translate between the abstract universalism of the intergovernmen-tal organizations and the local understandings of peace and justice. Anthropologicalinvestigations should not be confined to local responses but also include the people whoinhabit what Ulf Hannerz (1992) calls the ‘third culture’ of UN workers and non-governmental organization personnel.

National truth and reconciliation commissions (e.g. in Sierra Leone, Bosnia, EastTimor) are being established, funded and run by UN peacekeeping missions, which seethem as the best way of achieving post-conflict nation building and addressing the legit-imization crisis of post-conflict states. Unlike truth commissions in the early 1990s, theyare increasingly taking place in the context of prosecutions for human rights offenders,as in the Special Court for Sierra Leone, which provides for a linking up of truth findingand retributive justice. This research should aim to expand our understanding of theactual impact of large scale humanitarian relief operations on state sovereignty, statebuilding and on the actual lives of Africans, Asians, Europeans and Latin Americans.This would inform wider debates about the globalization of human rights and global


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forms of deterritorialized regulation, and perhaps engender a more realistic assessmentof influential assertions that there is a single, unified world system (e.g. Hardt and Negri,2000). That ‘system’, to my mind, is pluralistic and fissured with internal conflict andcontradiction and is not adequately explained by sweeping neo-Marxist theories ofglobal regulation and domination.

Anthropological contributions to globalization theory and international studies arevital, but our main emphasis should remain on the unintended social consequences oftenignored by policy makers and globalization theorists alike. In the kinds of places thatanthropologists go, and especially in Africa in the last 10 years, ordinary people’s livesare greatly affected by issues such as failed states, political violence and civil war, and theinterventions of international organizations in post-conflict reconstruction and nationbuilding. This global context requires that we pay close attention to these matters andthat we attempt to document them in a way that is sensitive to the everyday problemsthat people face. We must also try to explain the consequences of humanitarian actionsso that intergovernmental institutions are more informed about the consequences of thepolicies on post-conflict reconciliation they adopt.

Notes1 On amnesties see Roht-Arriaza, 1995; Roht-Arriaza and Gibson, 1998; and Popkin,

1999.2 Such as President Raul Alfonsín’s prosecutions of Argentinean military junta leaders

in 1983, who were later pardoned by President Menem.3 ‘Peaceful’ according to Tutu (1999), despite the fact that 14,000 people died in

political violence between 1990 and 1994, more than in the previous 10 years.4 The Guatemalan CEH Report being one of the obvious exceptions to this criticism.5 See Cohen (2001).6 For more examples of Latin Americans and South Africans using body metaphors

for the nation, see Boraine and Levy (1994).7 See Arendt (1963).8 The view that African jurisprudence is restorative and not violent and/or vengeful

is also found in the post-apartheid legal system, and perhaps most famously in thedecision of Constitutional Court judges to abolish the death penalty in 1995.

9 With apologies for the usual long list of exceptions such as Merry (1990), Conleyand O’Barr (1990) and others.

10 Perhaps relevant here is the debate between Richard Rorty (1998) and Charles Taylor(1990), which pivots on the correspondence theory of truth.

11 A Holy Grail for social scientists, I realize, but Jürgen Habermas’ (1971) concept ofthe ‘ideal speech situation’ comes closer than most. In opposition to positivistscience, Habermas seeks to maintain the place of subjectivity and interpretation inthe creation of knowledge. Habermas’ subject is social as well as potentially rational.Subjects are conditioned by historical experience and therefore rationality dependsas much upon subjectivity and intersubjectivity as it does upon logic and reason.

12 Hermeneutic interpretation, of course, does this also, but at least it is more reflex-ive about the relationship between the historian or ethnographer and his/her subjectmatter.

13 Tutu, in his introduction to the Report, uses apartheid and racism indistinguishably


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as a single evil, without attempting to distinguish how racism and apartheid arehistorically specific and not quite the same thing. One could say that there has beenracism since 1652, but a grand project of apartheid (in the Verwoerdian sense ofdenationalization of black South African citizens) only after 1948.

14 See, for instance, the work of Peter Fitzpatrick (1992).15 As I write, a number of victims in the Khulumani Support Group in South Africa

are bringing a law suit against Desmond Tutu on the grounds that he promised themreparations which they never received.

16 With non-governmental organizations such as the International Center for Tran-sitional Justice in New York and Just Associates in Washington DC.

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Legitimizing the Post-Apartheid State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

RICHARD ASHBY WILSON is Gladstein Professor of Human Rights at the University of Connecticut and

author of numerous works on human rights, and political violence in Guatemala and South Africa, including

The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa. His edited and co-edited books include Human Rights,

Culture and Context, Culture and Rights and Human Rights in Global Perspective. Address: Department of

Anthropology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, 06269, USA. [email: [email protected]]


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Anthropological Studies of National Reconciliational Processes

Documents

state eric honecker

columbia university press

harvard university press

popular legal consciousness

human rights institutions

national reconciliation projects

south african truth

south african trc