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Representations of Rwanda have been shaped by the display of bodies and bones at Tutsi genocide memorial sites. This phenomenon is most often only studied from the perspective of moral dimensions. This article aims in contrast to cover the issues related to the treatment of human remains in Rwanda for commemorative purposes from a historical perspective. To this end, it is based on the archives of the commissions in charge of genocide memory in Rwanda, as well as interviews with key memorial actors. This study shows the evolution of memorial practices since 1994 and the hypermateriality of bodies in their use as symbols, as well as their demobilisation for the purposes of reconciliation policies.
apartheid regime. She shows this by clarifying not only the issues of political positioning, but also of social class, which are set up around families who are returning the body of a loved one. For his part, histo rian Rémi Korman analyses the interactions and competition between the different agents’ agendas towards the exhumations in Rwanda. He deconstructs the sources of state attempts to impose a funerary and memorial policy which is not always the one desired by the Church and survivors, including the routine anonymization of reinterred victims. The final text in
, the mission principally sought to identify the bodies of political deportees and resistance fighters, but in application of the strict post-war memorial policy, which refused any distinctions between political and racial deportees (with the exception of pensions, which were higher for political deportees), the families of the Jewish deportees were also able to benefit from the law. Research was nonetheless limited to the new borders of the two Germanys following the Potsdam conference, and the six Nazi death camps HRMV.indb 138 01/09/2014 17:28:40 The French