Abstract

Over the past two decades, I have done ethnographic fieldwork amongst Burundians in Burundi and in exile, exploring the different ways they deal with the violence that the country has witnessed over the decades. In this presentation Iexplore how long-term engagements, revisits, and diachronic comparisons in ethnography may help us understand violence and violent events. I explore how violent events have affected the past, the present, and the future, causing those who experience it to reorient their understanding not only of their pasts but also of their anticipations for the future.

Bio

Simon Turner is professor of social anthropology at Lund University. He works on forced displacement, diaspora, conflict and humanitarianism in the African Great Lakes region. Presently, he is engaged in a project on anticipating violence in the Burundi conflict and another project on everyday humanitarianism in Tanzania. He is the author of ‘Politics of Innocence: Hutu Identity, Conflict and Camp Life’ (Berghahn, 2010), and the co-editor of ‘Stuckness and Confinement: Reflections on Life in Ghettos, Camps and Prisons’ (Ethnos, 2019) and ‘Invisibility in African Displacements: From Structural Marginalisation to Strategies of Avoidance’ (Bloomington 2020).