Mending Broken Lives Recovery among Argentina's Family Members of the 'Disappeared'
Date of Award
2007
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelors
Department
Social Sciences
Second Department
Humanities
First Advisor
Vesperi, Maria
Keywords
Political Violence, Cultural Trauma, Recovery, Social Suffering
Area of Concentration
Anthropology
Abstract
Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted thirty years after Argentina's most gruesome dictatorship (1976-1983), this thesis examines the mutual reconstitution of selves and society in the wake of cultural trauma. In a decidedly 'person-centered' fashion, I focus on the stories of family members of the 'disappeared' who have added political action to their grief process. Framing the experience of the' disappearance' of a loved one as a social wound, I suggest that individual coping and the procedural recovery of the nation are inextricably linked. The current trials against ex-repressors were a performative context that elicited self-presentations of family members both as wounded citizens and as ethical redeemers of their own lives, and sometimes of the nation. This is a philosophically-informed ethnography, which draws largely on the work of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault. Using these theorists, I account for the constitution and maintenance of new patterns of sociality through political action and story telling-specifically, how the persistence oHoss and pain in the experience of the everyday is made meaningful in contexts of social suffering and the public sphere. Finally, I privilege agenthood over victimhood by claiming that for many, the reconstitution of a shattered self has generated oppositional social identities.
Recommended Citation
Murray, Timothy, "Mending Broken Lives Recovery among Argentina's Family Members of the 'Disappeared'" (2007). Theses & ETDs. 3832.
https://digitalcommons.ncf.edu/theses_etds/3832
Rights
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