Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina

Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina PDF Author: Antonius C. G. M. Robben
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812203313
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
For decades, Argentina's population was subject to human rights violations ranging from the merely disruptive to the abominable. Violence pervaded Argentine social and cultural life in the repression of protest crowds, a ruthless counterinsurgency campaign, massive numbers of abductions, instances of torture, and innumerable assassinations. Despite continued repression, thousands of parents searched for their disappeared children, staging street protests that eventually marshaled international support. Challenging the notion that violence simply breeds more violence, Antonius C. G. M. Robben's provocative study argues that in Argentina violence led to trauma, and that trauma bred more violence. In this work of superior scholarship, Robben analyzes the historical dynamic through which Argentina became entangled in a web of violence spun out of repeated traumatization of political adversaries. This violence-trauma-violence cycle culminated in a cultural war that "disappeared" more than ten thousand people and caused millions to live in fear. Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina demonstrates through a groundbreaking multilevel analysis the process by which different historical strands of violence coalesced during the 1970s into an all-out military assault on Argentine society and culture. Combining history and anthropology, this compelling book rests on thorough archival research; participant observation of mass demonstrations, exhumations, and reburials; gripping interviews with military officers, guerrilla commanders, human rights leaders, and former disappeared captives. Robben's penetrating analysis of the trauma of Argentine society is of great importance for our understanding of other societies undergoing similar crimes against humanity.

Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina

Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina PDF Author: Antonius C. G. M. Robben
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812203313
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 481

Get Book Here

Book Description
For decades, Argentina's population was subject to human rights violations ranging from the merely disruptive to the abominable. Violence pervaded Argentine social and cultural life in the repression of protest crowds, a ruthless counterinsurgency campaign, massive numbers of abductions, instances of torture, and innumerable assassinations. Despite continued repression, thousands of parents searched for their disappeared children, staging street protests that eventually marshaled international support. Challenging the notion that violence simply breeds more violence, Antonius C. G. M. Robben's provocative study argues that in Argentina violence led to trauma, and that trauma bred more violence. In this work of superior scholarship, Robben analyzes the historical dynamic through which Argentina became entangled in a web of violence spun out of repeated traumatization of political adversaries. This violence-trauma-violence cycle culminated in a cultural war that "disappeared" more than ten thousand people and caused millions to live in fear. Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina demonstrates through a groundbreaking multilevel analysis the process by which different historical strands of violence coalesced during the 1970s into an all-out military assault on Argentine society and culture. Combining history and anthropology, this compelling book rests on thorough archival research; participant observation of mass demonstrations, exhumations, and reburials; gripping interviews with military officers, guerrilla commanders, human rights leaders, and former disappeared captives. Robben's penetrating analysis of the trauma of Argentine society is of great importance for our understanding of other societies undergoing similar crimes against humanity.

Iraq at a Distance

Iraq at a Distance PDF Author: Antonius C. G. M. Robben
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812203542
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
The Iraq War has cost innumerable lives, caused vast material destruction, and inflicted suffering on millions of people. Iraq at a Distance: What Anthropology Can Teach Us About the War focuses on the plight of the Iraqi people, caught since 2003 in the carnage between U.S. and British troops on one side and, on the other, Iraqi insurgents, militias, and foreign al Qaeda operatives. The volume is a bold attempt by six distinguished anthropologists to study a war zone too dangerous for fieldwork. They break new ground by using their ethnographic imagination as a research tool to analyze the Iraq War through insightful comparisons with previous and current armed conflicts in Cambodia, Israel, Palestine, Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, and Argentina. This innovative approach extends the book's relevance beyond a critical understanding of the devastating war in Iraq. More and more parts of the world of long-standing ethnographic interest are becoming off-limits to researchers because of the war on terror. This book serves as a model for the study of other inaccessible regions, and it shows that the impossibility of conducting ethnographic fieldwork does not condemn anthropologists to silence. Essays analyze the good-versus-evil framework of the war on terror, the deterioration of women's rights in Iraq under fundamentalist coercion, the ethnic-religious partitioning of Baghdad through the building of security walls, the excessive use of force against Iraqi civilians by U.S. counterinsurgency units, and the loss of popular support for U.S. and British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan after the brutal regimes of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein had been toppled.

Cultures Under Siege

Cultures Under Siege PDF Author: Antonius C. G. M. Robben
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521784351
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Collective violence changes the perpetrators, the victims, and the societies in which it occurs. It targets the body, the psyche, and the socio-cultural order. How do people come to terms with these tragic events, and how are cultures affected by massive outbreaks of violence? This book is a groundbreaking collection of essays by anthropologists, psychologists and psychoanalysts, drawing on field research in many different parts of the world. Profiting from an interdisciplinary dialogue, the authors provide provocative, at times deeply troubling, insights into the darker side of humanity, and they also propose new ways of understanding the terrible things that people are capable of doing to each other.

Acts of Repair

Acts of Repair PDF Author: Natasha Zaretsky
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781978807457
Category : Collective memory
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
"Acts of Repair explores how ordinary people grapple with political violence in Argentina, a nation home to survivors of multiple genocides and periods of violence, including the Holocaust, the political repression of the 1976-1983 dictatorship, and the 1994 AMIA bombing. Despite efforts for accountability, the terrain of justice has been uneven and, in many cases, impunity remains. How can citizens respond to such ongoing trauma? Within frameworks of transitional justice, what does this tell us about the possibility of recovery and repair? Turning to the lived experience of survivors and family members of victims of genocide and violence, Natasha Zaretsky argues for the ongoing significance of cultural memory as a response to trauma and injustice, as revealed through testimonies and public protests. Even if such repair may be inevitably liminal and incomplete, their acts seeking such repair also yield spaces for transformation and agency critical to personal and political recovery"--

Resonant Violence

Resonant Violence PDF Author: Kerry Whigham
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978825579
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
From the Holocaust in Europe to the military dictatorships of Latin America to the enduring violence of settler colonialism around the world, genocide has been a defining experience of far too many societies. In many cases, the damaging legacies of genocide lead to continued violence and social divisions for decades. In others, however, creative responses to this identity-based violence emerge from the grassroots, contributing to widespread social and political transformation. Resonant Violence explores both the enduring impacts of genocidal violence and the varied ways in which states and grassroots collectives respond to and transform this violence through memory practices and grassroots activism. By calling upon lessons from Germany, Poland, Argentina, and the Indigenous United States, Resonant Violence demonstrates how ordinary individuals come together to engage with a violent past to pave the way for a less violent future.

Moving Otherwise

Moving Otherwise PDF Author: Victoria Fortuna
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190627018
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Moving Otherwise examines how contemporary dance practices in Buenos Aires, Argentina enacted politics within climates of political and economic violence from the mid-1960s to the mid-2010s. From the repression of military dictatorships to the precarity of economic crises, contemporary dancers and audiences consistently responded to and reimagined the everyday choreographies that have accompanied Argentina's volatile political history. The titular concept, "moving otherwise" names how both concert dance and its off-stage practice and consumption offer alternatives to and modes to critique the patterns of movement and bodily comportment that shape everyday life in contexts marked by violence. Drawing on archival research based in institutional and private collections, over fifty interviews with dancers and choreographers, and the author's embodied experiences as a collaborator and performer with active groups, the book analyzes how a wide range of practices moved otherwise, including concert works, community dance initiatives, and the everyday labor that animates dance. It demonstrates how these diverse practices represent, resist, and remember violence and engender new forms of social mobilization on and off the theatrical stage. As the first book length critical study of Argentine contemporary dance, it introduces a breadth of choreographers to an English speaking audience, including Ana Kamien, Susana Zimmermann, Estela Maris, Alejandro Cervera, Renate Schottelius, Susana Tambutti, Silvia Hodgers, and Silvia Vladimivsky. It also considers previously undocumented aspects of Argentine dance history, including crossings between contemporary dancers and 1970s leftist political militancy, Argentine dance labor movements, political protest, and the prominence of tango themes in contemporary dance works that address the memory of political violence. Contemporary dance, the book demonstrates, has a rich and diverse history of political engagement in Argentina.

Accounting for Violence

Accounting for Violence PDF Author: Ksenija Bilbija
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822350424
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
Offering bold new perspectives on the politics of memory in Latin America, scholars analyze the memory markets in six countries that emerged from authoritarian rule in the 1980s and 1990s.

Daughters of the Air

Daughters of the Air PDF Author: Anca L Szilágyi
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781941360118
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Tatiana "Pluta" Spektor was a mostly happy, if awkward, young girl--until her sociologist father was disappeared during Argentina's Dirty War. Sent a world away by her grieving mother to attend boarding school outside New York City, Pluta wrestles alone with the unresolved tragedy and at last runs away: to the streets of Brooklyn in 1980, where she figuratively--and literally--spreads her wings. Told with haunting fabulist imagery by debut novelist Anca L. Szilagyi, this searing tale of love, loss, estrangement, and coming of age is an unflinching exploration of the personal devastation wrought by political repression.

Fieldwork Under Fire

Fieldwork Under Fire PDF Author: Carolyn Nordstrom
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520089945
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
"Required reading for anyone about to leave for the field. . . . A timely, deserving, and original contribution to a rapidly growing body of literature on the study of violence."—Jean-Paul Dumont, George Mason University

Displaced Memories

Displaced Memories PDF Author: M. Edurne Portela
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 0838757324
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
Displaced Memories analyzes the representation of traumatic memories--political imprisonment, torture, survival, and exile--in the literary works of Alicia Kozameh, Alicia Partnoy, and Nora Strejilevich, survivors of Argentina's "Dirty War" (1976-1983). Beginning with an examination of the history of Argentina's last dictatorship, the conditions that led the authors to exile, and the contexts in which the texts were published, Portela provides the theoretical tools for the understanding of narratives of trauma and displacement caused by political violence. The author proposes a theory that critiques post-structuralist paradigms of trauma, which present trauma as an unclaimed experience impossible to apprehend, as she argues for an analysis of the symbolic uses of language, presenting trauma as a claimed experience that can be brought into representation and therefore create the conditions of possibility for working through.