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.