Author Archives: Martha Lagace

About Martha Lagace

Ph.D. candidate in social anthropology at Boston University. She focuses on Africa's Great Lakes region. In addition to working on a co-authored book on Rwanda's lieux de mémoire, she is conducting dissertation field research in northern Uganda. She studies how and why individuals speak or act on behalf of others in everyday life, as a lens on social cohesion.

Photo Essay: Tropes of Memory

Despite a burgeoning literature on the macropolitics of social memory, remarkably little is known about the diversity of mnemonic practices in small-scale, living, breathing contexts where violent pasts are to be contended with. The dozen empirical vignettes at the heart of this photo essay provide glimpses of these spheres. Focusing on everyday life in post-genocide Rwanda, we single out tropes of memory that merit careful investigation in situ, there and elsewhere. The empirical vignettes complement what is primarily a methodological argument with closely observed impressions from a country that all too often is rendered in an undifferentiated hue.