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Anthropology and sociology
28 November 2014

The Limits of Truth-Telling: Reflections on a Victim-Centered Truth and Reconciliation Commission

The Lausanne Anthropology Lecture Series on Law, Memory, and Contested Histories presents

The Limits of Truth-Telling: Reflections on a Victim-Centered Truth and Reconciliation Commission

by Ronald Niezen (McGill University, Montréal/Canada)

Monday 8 December, 17h30, Géopolis 2208, UNIL -Lausanne

During the past twenty years or so, truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs) have become a widely used way to overcome major international crimes committed by states toward their own citizens. Their goals are usually to better understand and come to terms with the past, with a focus on testimony provided by individual victims and perpetrators of harm, while supporting a new form of governance. This talk is based on a five year ethnographic study of Canada’s current TRC on Indian residential schools, an assimilation oriented system of education sponsored by the federal government and run by Churches over a period of more than a century. In this TRC, arriving at truth, achieving reconciliation, and above all creating a movement from truth to reconciliation are highly problematic. With a limited, victim-centered mandate, it shapes testimony through a preferred kind of narrative, producing an orthodoxy which then influences future testimony. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to see current harms that are analogous to those of the schools or to reconcile those who see and experience the past differently.

Ronald Niezen holds the Katharine A. Pearson Chair in Civil Society and Public Policy at McGill University, where he also holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in the Anthropology of Law, and is a Professor and former Chair of the Department of Anthropology. He is an anthropologist with a wide range of fieldwork experience, including a study of an Islamic reform movement in West Africa, as well as a long term study of the global indigenous movement in a variety of institutional settings, including the Working Group on Indigenous Populations, the World Health Organization, and the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. His books include: The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Difference (University of California Press 2003), Public Justice and the Anthropology of Law (Cambridge University Press 2010), and Truth and Indignation: Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools (University of Toronto Press 2013).

 

The Lausanne Anthropology Lecture Series on Law, Memory, and Contested Histories presents

The Limits of Truth-Telling: Reflections on a Victim-Centered Truth and Reconciliation Commission

by Ronald Niezen (McGill University, Montréal/Canada)

Monday 8 December, 17h30, Géopolis 2208, UNIL -Lausanne

During the past twenty years or so, truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs) have become a widely used way to overcome major international crimes committed by states toward their own citizens. Their goals are usually to better understand and come to terms with the past, with a focus on testimony provided by individual victims and perpetrators of harm, while supporting a new form of governance. This talk is based on a five year ethnographic study of Canada’s current TRC on Indian residential schools, an assimilation oriented system of education sponsored by the federal government and run by Churches over a period of more than a century. In this TRC, arriving at truth, achieving reconciliation, and above all creating a movement from truth to reconciliation are highly problematic. With a limited, victim-centered mandate, it shapes testimony through a preferred kind of narrative, producing an orthodoxy which then influences future testimony. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to see current harms that are analogous to those of the schools or to reconcile those who see and experience the past differently.

Ronald Niezen holds the Katharine A. Pearson Chair in Civil Society and Public Policy at McGill University, where he also holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in the Anthropology of Law, and is a Professor and former Chair of the Department of Anthropology. He is an anthropologist with a wide range of fieldwork experience, including a study of an Islamic reform movement in West Africa, as well as a long term study of the global indigenous movement in a variety of institutional settings, including the Working Group on Indigenous Populations, the World Health Organization, and the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. His books include: The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Difference (University of California Press 2003), Public Justice and the Anthropology of Law (Cambridge University Press 2010), and Truth and Indignation: Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools (University of Toronto Press 2013).