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Portrait of Simon Turner. Photo: Emma Lord.

Simon Turner

Professor

Portrait of Simon Turner. Photo: Emma Lord.

'Winning Life' and the Discpline of Death at Iwawa Island

Author

  • Rose Løvgren
  • Simon Turner

Summary, in English

This article analyses Iwawa, a rehabilitation centre for ‘delinquent’ young men in Rwanda. Like prisons, detention centres and refugee camps elsewhere, Iwawa is both a place of nurture and abandonment; of improving life and disallowing it. We argue that in order to grasp these tensions, we might pay attention to the role of death in disciplining those who are confined. A common way for these young men to address their experience was to say that they had to ‘win life’, and that those who did not win life would often die. Death as a possibility animates life in the camp and explains how the camp is at once a place of abandonment and improvement. The possibility of death also creates hierarchies in the camp between those who win and those who loose; those who become ideal developmental subjects of the Rwandan state and those who do not.

Publishing year

2019-01-01

Language

English

Pages

27-40

Publication/Series

Ethnos

Volume

84

Issue

1

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Routledge

Topic

  • Social Anthropology

Keywords

  • Rwanda
  • Camps
  • Confinement
  • Death
  • Animals
  • discipline

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 0014-1844