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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how war and post-conflict are lived simultaneously in Colombia through sensory experience. Drawing on ethnography at Casa de la Paz, it shows how sound, touch, and atmosphere mediate violence, memory, reconciliation and everyday forms of resistance.

Paper long abstract

Despite the signing of the 2016 peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrilla, violence persists. Everyday life unfolds under a profound ambiguity: Colombia is simultaneously narrated as a post-conflict society and lived as a territory where war endures. Drawing on the sensory turn in anthropology (Pink, 2015; Howes & Classen, 2014), this paper examines how this simultaneity is sensed and embodied through everyday sensory experience.

I explore how sensory practices mediate the contradictions of the transitional context, based on ongoing ethnography at Casa de la Paz, a community organization and cultural center committed to reconciliation and led by former FARC combatants. Central to the analysis is the Hall of Butterflies, a memorial room at Casa de la Paz, where fabric butterflies hang, each representing an ex-combatant killed since the peace deal. The room’s atmosphere (Bille, Bjerregaard & Sørensen, 2015) operates as a site of mourning, remembrance, and resistance, a sensorial assemblage (Navaro-Yashin, 2012) where political affect is condensed.

Through attention to sound, touch, and materiality, this paper argues that sensory knowledge is key to understanding how people inhabit this troubled reality as these registers unlock the ineffable dimensions of political violence that exceed verbal narration (Das, 2007) and shape how loss and endurance are lived.

By foregrounding sensory ethnography in a context of ongoing armed violence framed as post-conflict, this paper contributes to debates on how bodies and environments of violence remain entangled, and how sensory practices become forms of everyday resistance in zones of unresolved war.