Reconciliation as ritual: comparative perspectives on innovation and performance in processes of reconciliation

In the past three decades, extraordinary developments have taken place in a number of countries making a transition from authoritarian regimes to democratic governments.1 This has given rise to the emergent field of study of transitional justice.2 As for the best means of achieving such transitions, debates are still vigorous about the relative merits of truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs) versus criminal proceedings, whether in the context of the International Criminal Court at The Hague or of hybrid national/international special courts such as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) in Phnom Penh, which is currently trying five former high-ranking members of the Khmer Rouge. TRCs are relatively new political and legal phenomena. Patricia Hayner lists 21 truth commissions formed since 1974-the most successful of which to date appear to have been those in Chile and South Africa.3 She provides an excellent analysis of how these commissions have differed from one another and what they have achieved. Still, many urgent questions remain about how best to ensure the efficacy of the process.4 Questions of social memory - deciding how to remember the past, in order to deal with the future - lie at the heart of all these endeavours. The efforts to enact transitional justice have focused on the felt need to uncover hidden memories of past traumas and to break the culture of silence and impunity created by terror. The question of how people are to continue living together after atrocities have been committed is of profound moral import, but the drive towards reconciliation is complicated by many factors: the political fragility of a new regime, the extent to which those who constituted or benefited from the old order remain in positions of power, the continuing power relations between groups who have come to see one another as enemies, or the hindrances even to establishing what really happened, and thus what it is that a nation should be coming to terms with. In each case, the particular socio-political context is unique. Furthermore, processes of transitional justice generally depart in significant ways from already established legal procedures. TRCs, for instance, even when established by law, typically have a somewhat ambiguous relationship with the justice system, and it is not a foregone conclusion that they will 'work' or their outcomes be considered binding. They are formed in response to specific events and are aiming to achieve something that has never been tried before in that society. Hence they demand a great deal of innovation, and their outcomes are necessarily uncertain. When people innovate, however, they can also find it useful to seek legitimacy in certain ideas, models or precedents that are already available to them within their own cultural repertoire. A factor that as yet has not received all the attention it deserves, therefore, is the question of how, in each context, the cultural resources that people have to draw on in processes of reconciliation must be different.5 What I want to argue here is that TRCs must function on two levels at once: the legal and the ritual. Legal authority, and an articulation with an existing system of justice, is essential for a commission to do its work of getting at the truth (or at least, in the words of historian John Lukacs, to contribute to 'the reduction of untruth') and for its findings to be taken seriously.6 The work towards reconciliation, however, requires the creation simultaneously of an appropriate ritual setting-and it is here that the insights of anthropology into the workings of ritual might usefully be applied. Rituals-as has often been observed by anthropologists-sometimes serve the conservative purpose of reinforcing the status quo, and they tend to gain dignity and efficacy through repetition.7 In contrast, a recent paper by Leo Howe stresses the high degree of risk entailed in the staging of some ritual performances, the very outcomes of which are the result of political struggles between the participants. …