Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to introduce the panel and discuss the main theoretical and methodological issues that emerge from the analysis of the memories of traumatic times and events, specifically the rememoration processes.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to introduce the panel and discuss the main theoretical and methodological issues that emerge from the analysis of the memories of traumatic times and events, specifically the rememoration processes.

From our joint-experiences in working about the past - through memories of dictatorship and revolutionary contexts in Portugal and Chili - we'll discuss the inner tensions in approaching historical events from social memory framed discourses, characterized by being dominated or counter-hegemonic.

Paper short abstract:

Le film ethnographique comme méthode pour recueillir et restituer la mémoire d’un massacre nazi dans un village d’Italie, Civitella, où en juin 1944 tous les hommes du village ont été tués et les maisons incendiées. L’inquiétude liée à cet événement traumatique demeure cinquante ans après et imprègne les relations sociales de cette communauté.

Paper long abstract:

Nous avons appliqué la méthodologie de l'enquête filmique dans le contexte d'une recherche ethnographique concernant la mémoire d'un massacre nazi durant la seconde guerre mondiale en Italie. En juin 1944, les troupes allemandes opérèrent un gigantesque massacre en tuant tous les hommes (environ 250 personnes) de Civitella della Chiana, un village de la Toscane, en province d'Arezzo.

L'évocation du drame provoque encore une extrême anxiété chez les protagonistes interviewés, ce dont le chercheur doit tenir compte, durant l'enquête de terrain, tout comme dans l'élaboration de la représentation qu'il restitue.

Au sein de la collectivité concernée, les doutes qui restent liés à l'événement déterminent, encore cinquante ans plus tard, les relations sociales.

L'extrême violence du drame inattendu, imprévu par les villageois malgré le contexte de guerre et de guerre civile, laisse une trace ineffaçable dans la conscience collective.

De plus, beaucoup d'incertitude demeure sur les responsabilités du massacre, que les nazis pourraient avoir perpétré comme représailles suite à une action de la Résistance. Avec le temps, cette éventuelle motivation devient pour certains presque une justification, tandis qu'augmente la responsabilité attribuée aux partisans. La mémoire devient partagée, voire conflictuelle, et le silence s'impose comme unique voie pour permettre la reconstitution de la collectivité. La transmission aux jeunes générations en subit bien de conséquences.

Le dialogue collectif est recréé par la construction narrative du film qui reconstitue l'événement comme si les protagonistes se parlaient et se renvoient entre eux le vécu tragique de ce jour, ainsi que les émotions, sentiments et jugement qu'ils en gardent.

Paper short abstract:

This paper proposes a methodological and epistemological reflection on the collection of autobiographical memories, based on empirical material concerning two separate migratory situations: that of Portuguese families who immigrated to France in the 1960s and that of Portuguese families repatriated from Angola in 1975.

Paper long abstract:

This paper proposes a methodological and epistemological reflection on the collection of autobiographical memories, based on empirical material concerning two separate migratory situations: that of Portuguese families who immigrated to France in the 1960s and that of Portuguese families repatriated from Angola in 1975. In both cases, the ethnographic enquiry was marked by a temporal rupture: the transition from a generalized silence about a traumatic memory to a "collective remembering" in published accounts, novels, documentaries, etc. However, analysing this kind of material circulated in public space is one thing, going to collect words, including those of people who do not necessarily want to talk about the past, in private space is another. In a context in which the collective memory becomes prescriptive, and taking into account the status of words in our societies (Bourdieu, 1982), does the interview situation not become a command to evoke, therefore to remember? In revealing what might not have been expressed outside the interview situation, does anthropology not alter the social meaning of what might not have been mentioned (but had not necessarily been forgotten), by thus acting "on a resource put by for future social representations" (Bloch, 1998)? What is the status of silence (Lapierre, 1989) and of forgetting (Augé, 1998) in our societies and what methodological challenges do they present?

Paper short abstract:

Dans mes recherches sur le thème de la mémoire politique, en particulier des ceux qui ont participé à la résistance armée au Brésil, il a été possible de détecter des différences significatives dans les récits autobiographiques sur les années de militantisme politique. Malgré les difficultés de généraliser des expériences si extrêmes, trois questions se sont révélées décisives. La première se réfère aux différences de genre, la seconde au degré de violence subie et la troisième, et peut-être la plus importante, à la position subjective du sujet actif face à celle position de la victime.

Paper long abstract:

Dans mes recherches sur le thème de la mémoire politique, en particulier des ceux qui ont participé à la résistance armée au Brésil, il a été possible de détecter des différences significatives dans les récits autobiographiques sur les années de militantisme politique. Malgré les difficultés de généraliser des expériences si extrêmes, trois questions se sont révélées décisives. La première se réfère aux différences de genre, la seconde au degré de violence subie et la troisième, et peut-être la plus importante, à la position subjective du sujet actif face à celle position de la victime.

Les différences entre les genres concernent surtout le fait que les femmes avaient transgressé les codes de l'époque, à prendre les armes. Ainsi, lors de son arrestation, ont également été punis pour cette transgression. Mais, en prison, elles ont crée des liaisons de fraternité qui persistent jusqu' aujourd'hui.

En ce qui concerne les cas de violence, les suicides d'anciens militants et les séquelles psychologiques résultant attestent de la dévastation causée par cette expérience indicible qui est la torture. Ces souffrances sont le plus difficiles à mettre en mots.

La question de la position subjective concerne les effets moraux et psychologiques de l'expérience de chaque militant. Il y a une nette différence entre être le sujet de son choix, ou une victime impuissante du destin. Ainsi, ce que on peut se souvenir dépend en grande partie des conditions et des positions subjectives du sujet.

Paper short abstract:

Completing a doctoral research about the history of the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda through the analysis of the local trials, I was led to work with the witnesses of this traumatic event. During my fieldwork, I was confronted to the violence of the memories and compelled to question the relation I had with the witnesses. This question was different from a category of witness to another. Indeed, I conducted biographical interviews with perpetrators as well as with survivors. In both cases, this relation raised three dimensions: the research of historical facts, the way the witnesses modeled the representations of the past and the “ethnographical relation” created by the interview with a foreigner – above all French in this very specific context. One have to keep in mind that, here, were are not only a foreigner due to the nationality we have but also –and maybe above all – because we are confronted to an extreme experience.

Paper long abstract:

In this presentation, I would like to question the methodological tools a researcher can conceive to face with this very specific context where violence is still so present. How do you react when the person you are with is experiencing a traumatic breakdown? Could the researcher been considered as an agent of "traumatization"? Is this relation a kind of violation of the witness intimacy? Which kind of back-effects this living apprehension of the violence could have on the researcher himself? In reference to Michael Pollack's work on the testimony of the Holocaust survivors, we would like to question the conditions of possibility, which allow the Rwandan survivors' narratives. This issue will also be addressed from the survivors' point of view. What do they think about their testimonial experience? How did they understand the research they were participating in? I will try to answer these questions by exposing the way I worked in Rwanda, through empirical examples.

I will follow my reflection by questioning the relation with the perpetrators, especially when the interviews occurred in the prison environment. First, as we have attended the trial, we are aware of the accusations, sometimes confessed crimes of the prisoner. Then, our status of foreigner is always a bargaining stake to obtain some favors in order to improve the daily life in jail. We are in a strategic relation to obtain information, when the witness is trying to build a morally acceptable image of him. These questions will be enlightened through empirical examples drawn from my fieldwork in Rwandan jails.

Paper short abstract:

We examine the theoretical and methodological instruments of approach to the event and the trauma, from a research concerning a far-left movement in Portugal, during the last moments of the dictatorship and the revolutionary process that followed the military coup of April 25th, 1974.

Paper long abstract:

We intend to examine the theoretical and methodological mechanisms of approach to the event and the trauma, from a research concerning a far-left organization in Portugal, during a period that includes the last moments of the dictatorship and the revolutionary process that followed the military coup of April 25th, 1974. The revolutionary processes, with the density of time that characterizes them, leave profound traces on its participants, creating a distinction between a before and an after. The notion of event, long undervalued by anthropologists, leads to the passage of the field of memory and the possibilities of new principles of comprehensibility. In this communication we focus on two moments that emphasize the caesura of time in biographies of the members of a militant group that meets monthly to socialize. These memories are contaminated by ucronia that characterizes the trajectory of the collective group, requiring the questioning of various scales of reality, of the various "pasts" and its many layers that emerge with a localized and detached approach, where the macro processes affect the micro levels.

Paper short abstract:

Everyday life in totalitarian Romania brought about experiences of uncertainty at every level. I seek to explore some methodological issues regarding life story interview as way of accessing memories that enhance the symbolic value of a place representing freedom for a group of intellectuals.

Paper long abstract:

Everyday life in totalitarian Romania brought about experiences of uncertainty at every level in society. Life story interviews seem to be a very useful tool for bringing these experiences in the anthropological discussions.

The interviews analyzed here focus on memories of intellectuals regarding a particular place in a town from Romania that was invested with symbolical value during the communist period. A cafeteria in the center of the town became a meeting place for intellectuals and came to symbolize freedom in a society of total surveillance - its unofficial name, Arizona, stands up for this. Those interviewed are those who managed to keep the place alive two decades after the fall of communism, reinvesting it with value each time they came back, and making a ritual out of it.

As with any life story interviews, several methodological discussions are required considering the interviewer - interviewee relation, as well as the ethical way of gathering and processing the information and the level of involvement the interviewee has in these processes.

It is important that the researcher manages to convince the interviewee to trust him/her and to share his/hers experiences, especially if they are traumatic ones. When the researcher is younger than the interviewee he/she will have to prove him/her self worthy and able to understand the experiences of a different regime.

One can try approaching the interviewee as a collaborator and involving him/her in the gathering and processing of the information in order to create the life story narrative that represents his/her experiences.

Paper short abstract:

This proposal reflects on a particular situation that surfaced during the research I conducted at the beginning of the 2000s in Cluj-“Napoca” (Romania), a multiethnic and multi-religious city, inhabited by a Romanian majority and Hungarian minority: it is the silences of my interviewees.

Paper long abstract:

This proposal reflects on a particular situation that surfaced during the research I conducted at the beginning of the 2000s in Cluj-"Napoca" (Romania), a multiethnic and multi-religious city, inhabited by a Romanian majority and Hungarian minority: it is the silences of my interviewees. The city is renown for the exacerbated ethnic gestures of the local administration dominated by Romanian nationalist politicians between 1992 and 2004 (for example, the installation of national flags on the main boulevards, the painting of benches and dumpsters in Romanian flag's colors (Coman 2008).

When questioned regarding the changes supervened during the postsocialist period, most of my interlocutors kept being silent and avoided answering. Why do they choose to stay silent, speak minimally? What is the tension behind their shrugs? How to deal with and address these silences? How to understand the speechless "responses"? The interviews had a retrospective character involving a mix-up of a subjective selection of the facts and events of the socialist periods, an interpretation "a posteriori" of the events, and a past still present through the urban landscape marked by the signage of the postsocialist events.

My proposal focuses on formulating a methodological response to the uncertainty interview situation considering both my role as a researcher and my social status (professional, geographical origin, etc.). Furthermore, I will propose an analysis of the tension produced by the particular silences and its underlying meanings. In the end, I will advance an interpretation of the reasons that determine or justify this type of responses.

Paper short abstract:

This conference is going to analyze the tensions in anthropological fieldwork and writingwork that emerge from working with Colombian officers. He/She has to narrate the army’s pain. He/She needs to fallow the way to write dealing with the dialogical and poliphonic issues in conflict time.

Paper long abstract:

This conference is going to analyze the tensions and problems in anthropological continuum between fieldwork and writingwork that emerge from working with Colombian officers. They reclaim a specific tone and a way of representation from the anthropologist. They desire to read about their traumas and their pain. They need an ethnography full of complicity and comprehension. But their desires enter in conflict with the anthropologist subjectivity. He/She has to narrate (Benjamin) the army's pain and wounds during the conflict time. He/she does fieldwork and writing during the time in which the frontier among the categories victims and perpetrators are fuzzy. The demands of the officers, the demands of the otherness, don't coincide with the desires and necessities of the anthropologist who has to deal with the dialogical and polyphonicall desire. This conference will be centred in the difficulties and contradictions that emerge from narrating the elite's pain and traumas in Colombia, a country that could be characterized, fallowing Michel Taussig's interpretation of Benjamin, as a place in a permanent state of exception. In other words it will focus on the difficulties in represent the army in the present moment.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I will try to explain the affect of being Armenian in Turkey, based on the new political atmosphere after the assassination of Hrant Dink, through the notions of trauma, memory, mourning and melancholy.

Paper long abstract:

The Melancholic Nature of Being Armenian in Turkey:

On January 19 2007, Hrant Dink, an Armenian journalist who had dedicated his life to Turkish-Armenian reconciliation and known by his critiques of Turkey's denial of the Armenian genocide, was assassinated in the street by a radical nationalist. After the event, a strong civil resistance movement was ignited unexpectedly. Istanbul saw one such demonstration. Rather than a mere protest, it was a spontaneous reaction, where a hundred thousand people gathered and started shouting slogans such as: "We are all Armenian, we are all Hrant" and "Long live the brotherhood of the people." In many ways similar to the Armenian genocide of 1915 committed by the Ottoman Empire, the assassination of the Armenian journalist and peace activist Hrant Dink can be seen as an act of militant Turkish nationalism. An act that has left an indelible mark on the Armenian community. In this paper, I will try to explain the affect of being Armenian in Turkey, based on the new political atmosphere after the assassination of Hrant Dink, through the notions of trauma, memory, mourning and melancholy. I will examine the civil associations and organizations founded after the assassination and their healing effect following this traumatic event. This paper will give me the chance to review the literature that turns the corpus of melancholy and trauma upside down by attributing to them an activating role ant to think about how does disquiet become a methodological tool in situations of radical uncertainty.

Paper short abstract:

Based on accounts of forgiveness and wrongs after the war in Northern Uganda we explore ideas about trauma, forgetting and forgiving, keeping quiet and talking. We discuss our experimental method of sharing accounts locally and the ethical questions arising from this.

Paper long abstract:

After 22 years of brutal war in Northern Uganda between the Lords Resistance Army and the national army, former abductees, rebels and Internally Displaced People are recovering and moving back to their rural homes. NGOs taught ex-child soldiers that they have 'traumas' and that they need to forgive themselves and others in order to move on. Others regard it as unwise to talk about wrong-doings in the past, because this make these present and hence 'stuck' in your heart.

In this context we are exploring accounts of forgiveness and wrongs at an interpersonal level. Our method is unconventional and based on collaboration with a Danish conceptual artist inspired by Hannah Arendt, and a team of researchers from Gulu University. We record accounts of forgiveness and give people the opportunity to listen to the accounts of others and to record their own stories of situations where they 'kept something in their heart' and eventually 'let it go'.

The focus on forgiveness means that we talk to people who have already processed their experiences to some extent. However, telling about wrong-doings arouses a lot of ethical questions even when there is a forgiving 'ending' to the account. The material also raises questions about strategies of forgetting versus forgiving, ideas about whether talking or keeping quiet is 'good'. What processes do we get started when we as researchers ask people to tell about things they - or someone else - may consider better left in the quiet?

Paper short abstract:

In contemporary debates on memory of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, claims for justice and reparation collude with demands of silence. Speaking out hidden memories calls researchers and relatives to position, bridging intimate and public divides, to confront ethical and political dilemmas.

Paper long abstract:

More than 75 years have gone by since the beginning of the Spanish Civil War that gave way to one of the longest dictatorships in Europe. Commemoration was one of the main pillars of the Francoist regime, dividing Spanish society between winners and losers, acknowledging to the first the right to honor their dead, and forbidding to the latter any possibility to publicly mourn them. Memory of the war and its aftermath became a major taboo after the death of Franco, with the Pact of Amnesia established as a prerequisite for democracy. Family transmission of traumatic past events, including disappearing of relatives, imprisonment and other forms of repression, was in many cases absent. Public transmission of the events was also scarce, even in educational contexts. Since 2000, the opening of unmarked mass graves memory has become a major issue in the Spanish political agenda. Claims for truth, justice and reparation have arisen in the last decades from bottom up social movements articulated mostly, but not only, around the exhumation of unmarked mass graves. Exhumations offer a valuable insight to unveil contemporary displays of intimate processes, such as mourning and memory transmission, bringing intimate feelings into a public scene. Often, relatives discover facts that had never been disclosed to them. Exhumation processes allow too to go in depth into unexplored postmemory building processes. Demands to know what happened calls into the keyrole of survivors, witnesses and perpetrators as makers and keepers of narratives. Speaking out hidden memories calls both researchers and relatives to position in the contexts in which such events are taking place, bridging intimate and public divides, and facing them with the dilemma of survivors deciding whether to disclose traumatic memories or not.

Paper short abstract:

Societal needs and demands in peacebuilding democratization settings are not met. As well, on the ground, governance is implemented over the need for government. The democratic process transforms through Culture of Violence, a metanarrative of fear and memories from war impregnates the democratic process.

Paper long abstract:

The international intervention in Afghanistan expands on the light of the ideas that justified the creation of democratic systems in post-conflict settings in 1992 Agenda for Peace (Boutros-Ghali, B.)., this research draws on the critiques to the ‘governance’ approach, that after almost twenty years of endeavour, this blueprint has become. It describes the effects, influences, and transformations that sprung from underestimating societal needs and demands at the local level (Chandler) in peacebuilding settlements. It does so through the prism of violence and fear (developed into the concept ‘Culture of Violence’). It suggests that the culture of violence is an underrated confining condition (Path Dependency, and Bourdieus’ Habitus) which transforms the democratic process on the ground into power balances, legitimacies, and decision-making processes based on values and social structures that, as Connerton posed it, are ‘Images from the past which legitimize the present social order’ instead of supporting new democratic institutions and values (Connerton). This recall of the past is used as a source of power in violent contexts. This research suggests that fear, as an effect of violence, is, in peacebuilding settings, the means to forms of power exercise (Foucault). As a response this paper draws on the communitarian literature, especially the paradigm of ‘me and us’ (Etzioni), to analyse how communitarian societies approach peacebuilding new political settings.