Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Frank Smith
Silvia Posocco (Birkbeck, University of London)
Send message to Convenors
- Location:
- ATB G209
- Start time:
- 12 April, 2013 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
The panel aims to explore connections between situated experiences of violence and shifting affective states in contemporary Latin America. It considers the way people redefine their socio-cultural and emotional life and how affect permeates the body politics in the context of violence.
Long Abstract:
This panel seeks to bring together scholars focusing on Latin America who have studied the social, cultural and emotional impact of violence to explore connections between situated experiences of violence and shifting affective states in contemporary Latin America. The aim of the panel is to consider the way people continually redefine their socio-cultural and emotional life and how affect permeates and circuits through the body politics in the context of violence and its complex aftermath/s. The panel will explore how violence has impacted on the social organization and expression of emotions in order to both give meaning to violence and to account for individual and collective responses to it. This could include analyses of the way violence has generated specific affective states and public feelings; how violence has redefined traditional socio-cultural categories, everyday social relations and/or psychosocial, psychoanalytic and/or social theory constructs; how affective states and dispositions may be produced and rearticulated in the context of violence and in its immediate aftermath, and what consequences this may yield for subjectivities and sociality. This panel aims to broaden understandings of both the immediate and the longer terms meanings and implications of violence in Latin America.
We welcome papers with an ethnographic focus from a diverse range of theoretical traditions and disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields of enquiry, including anthropology, sociology and cultural studies as well as perspectives from gender, sexuality, critical race and indigenous studies.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
The continuous exposure to situations of violence can affect the way in which the victims of Bojayá construct their emotional responses to atrocities. An emotional shift is necessary in order to counteract the normalization of violence and build the skills to resist in the middle of the conflict.
Paper long abstract:
The category of social emotion has become a crucial aspect for understanding the construction of categories of victimhood in societies in conflict. In this paper I analyse how the emotions of numbness and fear as usual responses to atrocities change in order to support the activities of resistance. However this change does not mean releasing the negative emotions. Emotions draw the boundaries of the sense of self-worth and self-respect of the victims. The ethical problem of letting the negative emotions go is that it could lead to forget that the victim was inexcusably wronged. Negative emotions such as anger or sorrow can still influence rightful behaviour. In this presentation I will focus on dignity as a social emotion constructed in the context of ten years of memorialisation and resistance of the community of Bojayá.
The research is based on a case study of the surviving community of Bojayá. In the Church of Bellavista (Bojayá), 79 people were killed as a result of the armed confrontation between guerrillas and paramilitaries with complicity of some members of the State in 2002. The massacre left 79 civilians murdered, 48 of them were children. The conflict is still taking place. This research is based on the study of informal and official archives, fieldwork and interviews.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the legacy of violence in rural communities of one of the most affected areas by the armed conflict between the Maoist guerrilla of Shinning Path and the Peruvian state (1980-2000), the basin of the river Qaracha in the southern highland region of Ayacucho.
Paper long abstract:
The basin of the river Qaracha is a highland rural area characterised by the presence of peasant communities with very rich Andean traditions, and very poor socio-economic conditions. During the 1980s, this area was much affected by the armed conflict between Shinning Path and the Peruvian army, which radically altered the life and culture of local communities as a result of massive violence, deaths, and displacements. On the basis of extensive ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in this area in the late-2000s, the paper explores the legacy of the armed conflict on local communities, particularly focusing on how their traditional organisation and culture have been affected, and how the role of the state has changed there since then due to the conflict. It is explained how many aspects of local traditions changed or disappeared in the context of violence, and how some of them have been -at least partially- recovered or readapted since then, contributing to the reinvention of local cultures and to a flexibilisation of local societies. It is also explained how the conflict brought an increasing state intervention in these communities, and how this state intervention has become a major motor of change in a context of -and in combination with- wider social changes in recent years. As a conclusion, it is argued that the armed conflict has been a key historical turning point for these communities, which has determinately influenced their evolution since then.
Paper short abstract:
This paper utilizes Michael Warner’s theories of publics and counterpublics to explore how Mexican drug cartels rely on a “reflexive circulation of discourse” to establish the social space to legitimize their conduct and how this new normality of violence affects socio-political behavior.
Paper long abstract:
In recent years, violence related to the so-called Mexican Drug War has escalated to unprecedented levels in quantitative and qualitative terms. As cartels seek to undermine the sovereignty of the Mexican State, they convey their message of social control to the public by utilizing various mediums of communication, such as banners (narcomantas), films (narcocine), commissioned ballads celebrating their violent acts (narcocorridos), and corpse messaging, which involves leaving threatening and signatory messages on or around the bodies of their victims. Cartels use intimidation and brutality to scare the public into complicity, paralyzing its will to act by making violence a pertinent presence in quotidian Mexican life.
This ever-present threat of brutality makes for an interesting relationship between the cartels and Mexican citizens. Some people attempt to impede new trends of violence through community-centered protests, organizations, and education. In a sort of massive case of Stockholm syndrome, other citizens revere their social captors, or at least view them as the better of two evils, recognizing the criminal organizations as more legitimate authoritative figures than the Mexican officials. The propaganda of the narcoculture industry perpetuates this reverence by framing cartel members as modern-day Robin Hoods who contest the hegemonic entities of neoliberal societies, namely the Mexican and United States governments.
This paper brings in Michael Warner's theories of publics and counterpublics to explore how cartels rely on the "reflexive circulation of discourse" of propaganda to establish the social space to legitimize their conduct and how this new normality of violence affects socio-political behavior.
Paper short abstract:
From emotion to affect the Latin American discourse on violence continues to prioritise the relationship between violence and feeling as a way to analyse places with relatively high levels of violence. How robust is this research framework and what can it actually tell us?
Paper long abstract:
How will the 'turn to affect' perpetuate themes of violent determinism and sentient priority already found in the Latin American discourse on violence and what are the methodological and analytical problems with this? The growing movement on affect provides analysis on violence that follows previous work on emotional, cognitive and social transformation that has come out of Latin America (e.g. Taussig, Scheper-Hughes, Green, Rotker). The paper's critical approach to this geneology of discourse reveals why this particular panel discussion was almost inevitable and further questions whether, like earlier work on emotion, the observation of specific 'affects' reveals more about the observer than the observed. Drawing on methodological and theoretical problems encountered with ethnographic work designed to uncover the emotional impact and affective responses to violence among Colombian coffee farmers, the paper sets out challenges that research on affect and violence will need to overcome.
Paper short abstract:
I will explore how Mexican peace activists living in Barcelona experience the realities of Mexico’s Drug War on a day to day basis and the ways in which they engage with, and seek to affect, the reality of living with violence and death in Mexico.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I will explore the experience of war and death in Mexico from varying positions of geographical displacement, and emotional attachment. Since 2006 Mexico has suffered from a conflict in which over 80,000 have died, thousands of individuals have disappeared, and at least 200,000 have been displaced. By looking at the work of Barcelona-based association for peace in Mexico, Nuestra Aparente Rendición (Our Apparent Surrender), I will look at the effects on Mexican migrants living in Catalonia of coming to know a violent reality when not physically present, and how the analysis of war is transformed into practical action via transnational networks and tools. Within the work of Nuestra Aparente Rendición, I will also explore the somatic experience of displaced death, and how that translates to varying notions of shared grief and suffering, as well as assertions of solidarity and shared humanity across transnational networks encompassing Mexico, Europe and the USA. I will do this by examining how volunteers experience counting the dead in Mexico's only civilian-led, nation-wide count of the dead in relation to the Drugs War, Menos Días Aquí. Through this I will discuss the significance of making violence and suffering visible through differing forms of protest and testimony.
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues that a cultural dispute is produced between opposing social norms within a stigmatised, excluded shanty town in Santiago de Chile. These distinctions deepen the cultural and social fragmentation within the community and situate the neighbourhood on the symbolic periphery of the city.
Paper long abstract:
Everyday violence, fragmentation of the cities and absence of the State from the poorest and more excluded districts have been taking place in the last two decades. In this context, it is clear that violent crime has a significantly fracturing effect on society. This paper will present an ethnographic research conducted in a stigmatised, excluded shanty town of Santiago de Chile. I argue that inhabitants arrange strategies to cope with all kinds of undergoing violence taking place within the neighbourhood.
In order to cope with the structural stigma and violence, a cultural dispute is produced between opposing social norms; the community divides itself into two opposing status groups, each with its own value orientation. The complex social class distinctions used outside the shanty town are mirrored and built up inside to differentiate people from each other. They are not simply instrumental but also expressive in operation, which means that not only do they keep people alive, but also enable them to live with honour, infusing public social situations with meaning.
While in the past the shanty town was in Santiago's outskirts, today it seems to be placed on the symbolic periphery of the city. The symbolic periphery refers to the stigma of been a violent and dangerous community with an identity of resistance, something that in a mirror game mutually reinforce the fragmentation processes and urban segregation. The final outcome is a deepening in social and cultural fragmentation within the community.
Paper short abstract:
Some vulnerable young people involved in crime, interiorized the warrior ethos or violent social practices by killing each other with increasing cruelty always justified by the warfare. This altered completely not only the local balance of power but the sociability between neighbours in such areas.
Paper long abstract:
I will present findings about the turf war in Rio de Janeiro regarding its rules and dynamics, its links with local politics and transnational business, as well as the actor's subjective meanings part of the ethnographic data gathered over years. My approach has been to interact with as many actors as possible during long periods of time using multiple sources of data to adjoin the clues and contradictions provided by the various agents interviewed or observed. I followed the precepts developed by Gluckman and Buroway on the extended case method, adapting it to the violent social contexts in the favelas of Rio. I therefore emphasized conflicts and diversity within the group, situation or network studied and expanded my analysis with statistical and historical material. The result was an historical reconstitution with findings collected over several years. In 1980, I found a new neighbourhood organization of which there had been no record prior: drug-dealing gangs engaged in turf wars. In them, a kind of male identity was the crux of the matter to understand the subjective meanings and emotions, the habitus or ethos not revealed on the surface of everyday experience or in general and objective data. Some vulnerable young people, who plunged in violence and crime, interiorized the warrior ethos or violent social practices, becoming their own executioners by killing each other with increasing cruelty always justified by the warfare. This altered completely not only the local balance of power but the sociability between neighbours in such areas.
Paper short abstract:
For the Calon Gypsies of Bahia the constant potentiality of violence is a basic organisational principle. Justified by individuals’ powerful emotions, violence is a form of sociality, a mechanism of coding the space and -- through breakdown it brings to any spatial arrangement -- of deterritorialisation.
Paper long abstract:
This paper argues that for the Calon Gypsies of Bahia the constant potentiality of violence is a basic organisational principle. It is the principle of coding the space - through demarcating one's home range from the space of enemies (inimigos) and unknown Gypsies (Ciganos), violence turns the homogenous space of the non-Gypsies into the heterogeneous space of the Calon. Violence is also a form of sociality: it is a denial of commonality with brasileiros (non-Gypsies) and it places a limit to sociability among the Calon; feuding, in particular, becomes a way to show ones' Gypsyness.
All violent confrontations are justified by emotions - sadness or anger - alone and not by an appeal to any "Gypsy law"; through it men act out their complete presence and preparedness. Any revenge involves only small agnatic groups, and results in a blood feud, i.e. in the killing of a perpetrator by agnates. Like emotions, revenge does not travel well across generations, although it might take time.
Nevertheless, due to the character of settlements, violence impacts all their inhabitants, causing flight or at least a reconfiguration of alliances. Violence thus influences people who are not directly related, might not observe loyalty in the same way, or even refuse to participate, but who live in the same settlement or are related to the people who do. It functions as an "apparatus of counterpower" or a "Clastrian machine" -- interpersonal violence limits the size of settlements and prevents the development of hierarchical order.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will look at the way cultural and emotional categories emerge in context of ongoing violence and how this impacts on affective states in recently established post war Mayan communities.
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on the way violence perpetrated by the military during the civil war in Guatemala altered both people's frameworks of meaning and the way they experienced and related to the world around them. This paper draws on field work carried just after the signing of the peace agreement in 1998 and 1999 and explores the way people formerly displaced from the town of Primavera drew on and redefined traditional Mayan cultural symbols, concepts and meanings and rearticulated them in the immediate post war context. It examines the emergence of a new symbolic landscape that enabled people to give meaning to experience and mediate levels of latent fear and social anxiety in the aftermath of conflict violence. It explores how people were drawing on existing cultural repertoires to redefine their socio-cultural and emotional life in order to both give meaning to their experiences of violence and to account for the emergence of a new symbolic landscape in post-war Guatemala.
Paper short abstract:
One of the impacts of violence is generation of fear which affects people’s actions. By changing usual practices displacement process starts before the actual physical relocation and continues after resettlement as people’s mistrust persists and they continue being informed by their past experiences
Paper long abstract:
This paper is based on a ten-month fieldwork undertaken in the department of Cundinamarca, Colombia. It forms part of a research aimed at better understanding of the experiences of the processes of forced displacement and emplacement. I propose to explore how exposure to (performative) violence, predominately carried out by paramilitaries, influences the feeling of displacement. I assume that not to 'feel displaced' means feeling relatively comfortable where one lives in a given context and situation, with the usual doubts, concerns and problems one faces in day-to -day life. From this starting point my paper examines how fear that is the result of violent conflict launches displacement as a temporal process. While people accommodate living in terror and fear, living in fear means not living one's life fully. One is in a state of alert and changes one's practices. It is no longer only the armed groups that perform surveillance, people themselves also do it. The changes in the usual way-of-being in order to survive, like ley de silencio or short-term relocations, can be seen as the beginning of the displacement process. After the decision to migrate is finally taken, the experiences of life before displacement continue affecting people's view of the world. People continue curtailing their lives - their relations and actions, in some cases also political participation. Thus part of experience of the past continues, and fear takes on a different, recycled, form.
Paper short abstract:
This paper investigates forced and voluntary musical activities in a number of detention and torture centres during the Pinochet regime. It does so through the testimony of an ex-agent of Pinochet's secret police.
Paper long abstract:
On seizing power on 11 September 1973, General Augusto Pinochet established over a thousand detention centres, from the Atacama Desert to the Magellan Strait. Tens of thousands of political prisoners were held in these centres, without recourse to fair trials and lacking elementary judicial guarantees. Most inmates were subjected to serious abuse through physical and psychological torture; many were killed, their bodies "disappeared". Despite the regime of terror, precarious living conditions and censorship, detainees developed diverse musical activities on their own initiative, including composition, performance and teaching. Pinochet's system also used music to indoctrinate inmates and as a form of, and soundtrack to, torture. Evidence of the above is fragmented and little known, and has been largely overlooked by critics. This paper investigates the musical landscape of detention and torture centres through the testimony of an ex-agent of the Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia (DINA, Pinochet's secret police), who I interviewed recently. The paper discusses practices of compulsory and voluntary musical activities in centres in Santiago and provinces, including Villa Grimaldi, Londres 38, Chacabuco, Tejas Verdes, Irán 3037 (aka La Discothéque) and José Domingo Cañas 1305. To present day, this is the most detailed account specifically dealing with forced musical activities in captivity during the Pinochet regime and also the only one coming from a Chilean ex-agent.