This dissertation documents the memories of Medellin's city dwellers and
explores how people in violent urban contexts make sense of violence and deal with its
presence in their lives. This study is defined as an anthropology of remembering; it is an
ethnographic observation of the practices of remembering and forgetting and how these
practices shape and are shaped by the lived experience of violence. The dissertation is
built on extensive fieldwork in the Colombian city of Medellin with a cross section of
women, youth and community leaders.
The thesis argues that when the uncertainty and paradox created by widespread
forms of violence threaten to destroy the social and material worlds of Colombian city
dwellers, memory becomes a strategic tool for human and cultural survival. The creation
of an oral history of death and the dead, the presence of a local social knowledge that
assists city dwellers in their safe circulation in and through the city, and the maintenance
of practices of place making are examples of how city dwellers deal with the devastating
effects of violence in their lives. The thesis develops a place-based exploration of
memory and violence and approaches place as a physical, sensory, social and imaginative
experience that maintains a sense of continuity between the past and the every day life of
Medellin's city dwellers. The two connecting concepts that ground the analysis of the
relationship between people, memory and violence are those of "sense of place" and
"communities of memory."
The dimensions of human agency, cultural survival and human suffering are
central to the exploration of memory, place and violence developed in this thesis. From
this perspective, the thesis takes to task anthropological works on violence that
emphasize the routinization of terror and fear for those who live amidst widespread
violence. The thesis discusses the multiple ways in which memory is disputed in
Colombia and the risks posed by a local reading of violence as intrinsic to the history of
the country. It concludes that when individuals are faced with realities such as life and
death, the familiar faces of the actors of violence and the weakening of the social and
ethical fabric of their communities, they do not stand in definite positions and cannot be
defined in simple terms such as victims and perpetrators. Thus, it can be recognized that
although violence plays a central role in the Medellin city dwellers processes of identity
formation, it does not exhaust these possibilities. / Arts, Faculty of / Anthropology, Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/11157 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Riaño Alcalá, Pilar |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Format | 30498833 bytes, application/pdf |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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