Scholars have long recognized that ethnographic method is bound up with the construction of theory in ways that are difficult to teach. The reason, Allaine Cerwonka and Liisa H. Malkki argue, is that ethnographic theorization is essentially improvisational in nature, conducted in real time and in ne[...]
This study of Hutu refugees from Burundi, driven into exile in Tanzania after their 1972 insurrection against the dominant Tutsi was brutally quashed, shows how experiences of dispossession and violence are remembered and turned into narratives, and how this process helps to construct identities suc[...]