CAPAZ Working Paper (3-2020): Local memories and the shaping of commemorative narratives
Cover of the CAPAZ WP 3-2020
CAPAZ Working Paper (3-2020), entitled “Local memories and the shaping of commemorative narratives. A case study in Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta, Colombia”, is based on the results of a study supported by CAPAZ, Universidad de Medellín, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Abstract:
This document is the result of extensive fieldwork in the palaphitic settlement of Nueva Venecia and the areas surrounding Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta, Colombia. It analyses the way in which community accounts of the localised experience of violence, here referred to as near memory, are configured on the one hand, and on the other, the institutional management of memory that constructs expert narratives or distant memory, which is based on and at the same time shifts away from those accounts. Thus, the object of examination in this document is the continuity and rupture that exist between close memory, defined on the basis of the exercise of remembrance that is proper to it, and distant memory, whose purpose is to commemorate. It also studies the two epistemological spaces that emerge from these different exercises in memory building, and concludes that the narration of accounts is a mediating element between the ineffable of the experience and the intelligible of the narrative.
Keywords:
Memory, story, remembrance, commemoration, epistemological space, violence, Colombia.
Author/researcher:
Gabriel Ruiz Romero:
PhD in Social Anthropology from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. In 2012, he was a doctoral researcher at the Centre for Conflict Studies at the University of Utrecht (The Netherlands), within the framework of the European Commission’s Sustainable Peacebuilding (SPBUILD) project. In 2019, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Lateinamerika-Institut (LAI), Freie Universität Berlin (Germany), thanks to the support of the Georg Forster Research Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He is currently a Senior Researcher in the Conflict and Peace research group at the School of Social and Human Sciences at Universidad de Medellín.
CAPAZ Working Paper 3-2020 (.pdf, in Spanish)
Gabriel Ruiz Romero. Local memories and the shaping of commemorative narratives. A case study in Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta, Colombia. CAPAZ, Bogotá: May 2020. ISSN: 2711-0354.
(NW Text: Claudia Maya based on CAPAZ Working Paper 3-2020. English version: Tiziana Laudato)