The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

146 annihilating difference
ories and their significance to Rwandan Hutu nationalism, because the latter derived
much of its passionate force from a mythic logic constitutive of being and
personhood:
Broadly, the legitimating and emotional force of myth is not in the events as such but
in the logic that conditions their significance. This is so when the logic is also vital in
the way human actors are culturally given to constituting a self in the everyday routine
world and move out toward others in that world. Mythic reality is mediated by
human beings into the worlds in which they live. Where human beings recognize the
argument of mythic reality as corresponding to their own personal constitutions—
their orientation within and movement through reality—so myth gathers force and
can come to be seen as embodying ultimate truth. Myth so enlivened, I suggest, can
become imbued with commanding power, binding human actors to the logical movement
of its scheme. In this sense, myth is not subordinated to the interests of the individual
or group but can itself have motive force. It comes to define significant experience
in the world, experience which in its significance is also conceived of as
intrinsic to the constitution of the person. By virtue of the fact that myth engages a
reasoning which is also integral to everyday realities, part of the taken-for-granted
or “habitus” [Bourdieu 1977] of the mundane world, myth can charge the emotions
and fire the passions. (Kapferer 1988:46–47)
Nevertheless, in order to get at these mythic and prereflective dimensions of ontology,
we need to move beyond Kapferer’s and Dumont’s categories of “egalitarian
and individualistic” vs. “hierarchical and encompassing.” We need to shift
analysis to an almost “molecular” level and to consider the structures of thought
that underlie the construction of the moral person in Rwanda and that constitute
a specific practical logic of being in the world. These structures must be seen both
in their formalist dimension and in specific instances of their use and enactment
in everyday social life. Proceeding in this fashion we may then be able to appreciate
that, lurking beneath the extraordinary events and violence of the genocide,
one perceives the logic of ordinary sociality.
Much of this ordinary, practical logic can be discerned in Rwandan practices
related to the body and aimed at maintaining it or restoring it to health and integrity.
Based on Rwandan popular medical practices that I observed during the
1980s, I have elsewhere advanced the hypothesis that a root metaphor underlies
conceptualizations of the body (Taylor 1992). Basically, these conceptualizations
are characterized by an opposition between orderly states of humoral and other
flows to disorderly ones. 8 Analogies are constructed that take this opposition as their
base and then relate bodily processes to those of social and natural life. In the unfolding
of human and natural events, flow/blockage symbolism mediates between
physiological, sociological, and cosmological levels of causality. Popular healing
aims at restoring bodily flows that have been perturbed by human negligence and
malevolence. Bodily fluids such as blood, semen, breast milk, and menstrual blood
are a recurrent concern, as is the passage of aliments through the digestive tract. 9