The Forms of Forgiveness
Discover the 2025 awarded project "The Forms of Forgiveness: An Ethnography of Collective Therapies between Survivors and Perpetrators in Western Rwanda", supported by the Louis Dumont Fund for Research in Social Anthropology.
The project
This research focuses on local mental health intervention initiatives in Rwanda. During a four-month fieldwork in the districts of Karongi and Huye, Basile Mangiante is observing the work of an association that organises group therapy sessions between former genocide perpetrators and their survivor victims. The fieldwork is structured around two main areas.
Firstly, the aim is to analyse how the association implements its intervention projects. Prior to the therapy sessions, Basile Mangiante investigates the processes of securing international funding, defining categories and conditions of care, identifying target regions and villages, and mobilising key partners (including national and local authorities, psychiatric institutions acting as intermediaries, and community-based mediators).
Secondly, the ethnography of the therapy sessions seeks to shed light on the practical modalities of care (therapeutic paradigms, nosography, confrontation methods, post-therapy follow-up). Within these sessions, the research also explores how individual speech and collective narratives are elicited, guided, and shaped by the therapists’ work. Finally, it aims to describe how armed conflicts in the neighbouring Kivu region (DRC) surface in participants’ accounts and impact the therapists’ work.
Basile Mangiante
Basile Mangiante is a Master’s student in Anthropology at the University of Paris Nanterre and a graduate of McGill University (Montreal, Canada). His current research focuses on psychotherapeutic care for both survivors and perpetrators of the Rwandan Tutsi genocide. He is currently undertaking four months of fieldwork in the western part of the country (Karongi and Nyabihu districts), where he studies group therapy sessions involving survivors and former perpetrators. His research is supervised by Anthony Stavrianakis (CNRS–LESC).
