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2019 Thesis - Maystorovich Chulio
Abstract
The exhumation of clandestine graves by NGOs and relatives of the disappeared involves human rights narratives and scientific forensic techniques. This research investigates the meaning generated by the exhumation and reburial of victims of enforced disappearance in Spain. The dissertation is theoretically anchored in symbolic interactionism and explores how contemporary forensic techniques enhancing the evidentiary value of the body to testify enable human remains to be constructed as political and national subjects and mortuary rights are used to reconstitute relations between the living and the dead. The investigation utilised ethnographic data produced from participant observation, semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis. Exploring the ability of legal activists to forge links globally through legal and forensic collaboration. The Law of Historical Memory was passed after successful lobbying to establish a legal avenue of recognition and access to documentation and sites for the purpose of exhumation and identification of the disappeared. The thesis provides an original contribution to the literature with respect to the continuing bonds that are established through the materiality of human remains, not simply the objects tied to life. The thesis offers significant contribution to ethnographic studies of forensic exhumations by addressing the involvement of Argentine national courts demands for exhumations. This reinforces human rights narratives, highlighting the capacity of national courts to pressure foreign legal and political systems. The movement aims to change the legal architecture that has prevented investigations and recognition of the past, contributing to the continued discrimination of the vanquished. The contribution to the literature on transitional justice is distinctive given the exhumations are not connected to legal investigations and the attribution of guilt. The thesis argues the exhumation serves wider needs for justice and reconciliation through the acknowledgment of the past as part of an inclusive national narrative through the use of forensic evidence. It is the resignification of the dead in the public sphere to revive the political struggles of the past.
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Established during the Guatemalan Peace Process, the Oslo Accord contemplates the question of compensating the victims of internal armed conflict. Not only was this accord founded on the principles of victims rights, but it also intends to contribute to the democratic reconstruction of Guatemalan society through a process of recognition of victims status and memory – intended to have a reconciling function. The article focuses on the work of two organisations implementing the Oslo Accord and aims to analyse the discourses and practices of the local actors and their perception of the application of victims rights. Civil society actors and members of the National Compensation Programme demonstrate different approaches both in practical work and in representations of what is right. However, revendication of local cultural values is present in all actors discourse, revealing their ambiguous position in regard to state government.
This book brings to life the social and textual worlds in which the representation of contemporary Greek historical experience has been passionately debated, building on contemporary research in history and anthropology concerning the social production of the past.
En la guerra civil y en la posguerra, decenas de miles de republicanos fueron fusilados y enterrados en fosas comunes sin que se permitiera a sus allegados rendirles ningún tipo de tributo ni ofrecerles una sepultura digna. Tras la muerte de Franco, a pesar de los muchos años transcurridos, el anhelo de los familiares por desenterrar a sus deudos, ofrecerles un funeral y llevarles al cementerio se había mantenido intacto. Incluso podría decirse que se agudizó gracias a las posibilidades que comenzaron a abrirse durante la transición a la democracia. En muchos pueblos los familiares consiguieron localizar las fosas comunes, celebrar funerales multitudinarios y trasladar los restos a los cementerios, pero en ninguna provincia española el proceso se hizo de forma tan organizada y eficaz como en Navarra. En este artículo tratamos de explicar por qué atendiendo a los factores que propiciaron la coordinación de estas audaces iniciativas, sin desatender los muchos obstáculos a los que se hubo de hacer frente.
Resumen: La movilización durante la transición de los familiares de los fu-silados de republicanos en la región de Murcia desembocó en una de las primeras exhumaciones de las fosas comunes de la guerra civil en España. El estudio de las acciones, discursos y recuerdos de los fami-liares muestra cómo la coyuntura de cambio de régimen creó oportu-nidades para una acción colectiva basada en la memoria colectiva del grupo y la despolitización de sus discursos, anticipando la construcción de la figura de las víctimas del franquismo. Palabras clave: acción colectiva, exhumación, memoria, transiciones, víctimas.
Abstract: The mobilisation of the relatives of executed republicans in the region of Murcia, during the Democratic Transition, led to one of the first exhumations of the Civil War mass graves in Spain. The study of the actions, souvenirs and discourses of the parents proves how the transitional juncture created opportunities for a collective action based on the collective memory of the group and channelled through the de-politicisation of theirs discourses, anticipating hence the construction of a new figure of the francoist victims.
Purpose
Gaining access to the research field has received much academic attention; however, the literature focusing on the changing and/or multiple roles that researchers adopt during fieldwork has at times been oversimplified. The purpose of this paper is to outline the multiple stages of the fieldwork journey, a more reflexive approach to fieldwork and the research process can be attained.
Design/methodology/approach
Data were generated from a four-year ethnographic study of the match-day experiences of the fans of Everton Football Club. In total, over 100 hours were spent doing fieldwork observations with an additional 25 semi-structured interviews forming the data set.
Findings
This paper argues that researchers should be more critical of their position in the field of their research, and should seek to identify this more clearly in their scholarship. This in turn would enable for more discussions of how each stage of the fieldwork journey affected the scope and overall findings of the research.
Originality/value
This paper provides an alternative framework for ethnographic researchers to better recognise and acknowledge reflexivity throughout the research process. This is done by outlining the various stages of fieldwork engagement more clearly to better understand how researchers change and adapt to the research environment.
Despite the widespread use of disappearances as a central tool of terror in recent decades, little is known about the emergence of the phenomenon or its underlying rationale. We argue that growing international accountability norms, coupled with the improved quality of reporting human rights abuses, paradoxically reshaped the repressive strategies of certain regimes and pushed them to deploy more clandestine and extrajudicial forms of repression, predominantly disappearances. We also explore the timing of disappearances; when a state decides to deploy a particular instrument of terror can greatly benefit our understanding of why it was used. We show repressive regimes tend to use disappearances in the first period after a coup, taking advantage of the general confusion and opacity to secure strategic benefits and protect the regime from external scrutiny and future accountability. Our findings contribute to the growing literature on human rights and political repression by highlighting an ‘unintended consequence’ of international accountability norms: repressive regimes turn to clandestine crimes.
It has been abundantly argued that the Spanish transition was based on an implicit ‘pact of silence’ by which the main political forces accepted to leave the thorniest aspects of past behind as the only way to peacefully construct a democratic future. And it has been widely accepted that Spanish society subscribed to this. This article defends a more nuanced version of this state-level agreement by focusing on memory-related initiatives at the local level. By doing so, it poses some challenges to existing literature on the politics of memory in general and the Spanish transition in particular.
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, Spain has experienced a cycle of exhumations of the mass graves of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and has rediscovered that the largest mass grave of the state is the monument that glorifies the Franco regime: the Valley of the Fallen. Building work in the Sierra de Guadarrama, near Madrid, was begun in 1940 and was not completed until 1958. This article analyses for the first time the regime's wish, from the start of the works, for the construction of the Valley of the Fallen to outdo the monument of El Escorial. At the same time the regime sought to create a new location to sanctify the dictatorship through the vast transfer to its crypts of the remains of the dead of the opposing sides of the war.
The foundation of a stable democracy in Spain was built on a settled account: an
agreement that both sides were equally guilty of violence, a consensus to avoid
contention, and a pact of oblivion as the pathway to peace and democracy. That
foundation is beginning to crack as perpetrators’ confessions upset the silence and
exhumations of mass graves unbury new truths. It has become possible, even if
not completely socially acceptable, to speak openly about the past, to disclose the
testimonies of the victims, and to ask for truth and justice. Contentious coexistence
that put political participation, contestation, and expression in practice has begun
to emerge. This book analyzes how this recent transformation has occurred. It
recognizes that political processes are not always linear and inexorable. Thus, it
remains to be seen how far contentious coexistence will go in Spain.
This chapter draws upon publications, personal experience and a survey of others who have conducted forensic archaeological/anthropological fieldwork in Canada. Forensic archaeology as a distinct discipline and practice is not well established in Canada; many view it as a part of forensic anthropology and, in general, forensic archaeological work is performed by those who consider themselves to be biological anthropologists or biological anthropologists as well as archaeologists. Canada's vastness, provincial administration of death investigation and lack of professional standardisation in the subject area mean that what is said are inevitably a generalisation and ultimately fail to capture all experience. Mark Skinner and K. Bowie provide a thorough discussion of forensic anthropology in Canada, in which they consider archaeology as a part of forensic anthropology. Overall forensic archaeology in Canada exists, albeit in various forms and with no particular standard operating procedures.
Cartographies of Knowledge examines the theoretical foundations that shape both the premise and logic of qualitative social research. It critiques the politics of knowledge production by exploring some of the ways that a 19th-century philosophy of science both enables and constrains qualitative research as currently practiced. In particular, Cartographies of Knowledge takes up analytic induction, symbolic interaction, and ethnomethodology.
How war has been remembered collectively is the central question in this volume. War in the twentieth century is a vivid and traumatic phenomenon which left behind it survivors who engage time and time again in acts of remembrance. This volume, containing essays by outstanding scholars of twentieth-century history, focuses on the issues raised by the shadow of war in this century. The behaviour, not of whole societies or of ruling groups alone, but of the individuals who do the work of remembrance, is discussed by examining the traumatic collective memory resulting from the horrors of the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, and the Algerian War. By studying public forms of remembrance, such as museums and exhibitions, literature and film, the editors have succeeded in bringing together a volume which demonstrates that a popular kind of collective memory is still very much alive.
The eleven essays in this volume, supplemented by an editorial introduction, centre around three overlapping problems. First, why would a society want to limit its own sovereign power by imposing constitutional constraints on democratic decision-making? Second, what are the contributions of democracy and constitutions to efficient government? Third, what are the relations among democracy, constitutionalism, and private property? This comprehensive discussion of the problems inherent in constitutional democracy will be of interest to students in a variety of social sciences. It illuminates particularly the current efforts of many countries, especially in Latin America, to establish stable democratic regimes.
How war has been remembered collectively is the central question in this volume. War in the twentieth century is a vivid and traumatic phenomenon which left behind it survivors who engage time and time again in acts of remembrance. This volume, containing essays by outstanding scholars of twentieth-century history, focuses on the issues raised by the shadow of war in this century. The behaviour, not of whole societies or of ruling groups alone, but of the individuals who do the work of remembrance, is discussed by examining the traumatic collective memory resulting from the horrors of the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, and the Algerian War. By studying public forms of remembrance, such as museums and exhibitions, literature and film, the editors have succeeded in bringing together a volume which demonstrates that a popular kind of collective memory is still very much alive.
The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was set up to deal with the human rights violations of apartheid during the years 1960–1994. However, as Wilson shows, the TRC's restorative justice approach to healing the nation did not always serve the needs of communities at a local level. Based on extended anthropological fieldwork, this book illustrates the impact of the TRC in urban African communities in Johannesburg. While a religious constituency largely embraced the commission's religious-redemptive language of reconciliation, Wilson argues that the TRC had little effect on popular ideas of justice as retribution. This provocative study deepens our understanding of post-apartheid South Africa and the use of human rights discourse. It ends on a call for more cautious and realistic expectations about what human rights institutions can achieve in democratizing countries.
Since the mid-1980s, forensic scientists have played a crucial role in the international response to mass violence, contributing evidence to war crimes tribunals and identifying bodies to end the tortuous uncertainty of loved ones. Recently, experts at the International Committee for the Red Cross have described these activities using the term “humanitarian forensic action,” applying it from the field's origins in Argentina to the multiple organizations and types of projects that exist today. This article cautions against any account of the history of humanitarian forensic action, or its contemporary landscape, that is so simple and unified. It points to divergent mandates, working methods, and even definitions of humanitarianism, focusing especially on new ways in which forensic scientists are addressing the mass suffering caused by structural violence.
Four decades after the end of the Franco dictatorship, many Spaniards continue to question their country's claims to full democracy. Although Spain is now governed by popularly elected governments, citizens still experience the coercive effects of the dictatorship's policies in their daily interactions with the built environment, state institutions, and even their fellow citizens. These heterogeneous sites through which the dictatorship makes its presence felt constitute an infrastructure of memory that facilitates and impedes the circulation of past experience. In this context, people enact memory politics not only by contesting narratives of the past but also, first and foremost, by dis- and reassembling the physical, institutional, and social entanglements that undergird democratic politics. [infrastructures, cultural memory, democratic politics, forensic exhumations, archives, Spain].
'Imagined Communities' examines the creation & function of the 'imagined communities' of nationality & the way these communities were in part created by the growth of the nation-state, the interaction between capitalism & printing & the birth of vernacular languages in early modern Europe.
Sontag discusses war and atrocity imagry. "The understanding of war among people who have not experienced war is now chiefly a product of the impact of these images". Meaning and response to a photo depends on words. Photos are useful against an unpopular war but "absent such a protest, the same antiwar photograph may be read as showing pathos, or heroism." Photos help us remember, but not understand. "Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us." "Image-glut keeps attention light, mobile, relatively indifferent to content. Image-flow precludes a privileged image". Images are meant to invite reflection and consideration but "cannot dictate a course of action".
Humanitarian forensic action is the application of the knowledge and skills of forensic medicine and science to humanitarian action, especially following conflicts or disasters. It has its early roots in the experience of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team and that of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, is moulded by International Humanitarian and Human Rights Law and was developed by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Having demonstrated its worth, this new field of application of forensic medicine and science needs further development, integration and research.
Memory has become a central focus of much academic work in the humanities today, arguably replacing the concentration on ideology that characterized the mid-twentieth century. As fallout from the exhaustion of postmodernism’s querying of the grand narratives of History and Society, memory constitutes a new epistemological approach to the relationship between the individual and society, and to our perceptions of the relations between the past, the present, and the future. Memory is not simply individual; it is also social and collective, and it has manifold cultural dimensions that are embedded in our sense of shared identities. Memories—personal, collective, and cultural—are thus part of how we see ourselves and others, and these intersections have a currency beyond the academic sphere, in national and transnational debates concerning the burden of traumatic and unmastered pasts. Memory is also increasingly a global phenomenon, widely theorized and examined both in national and transnational contexts. As a cypher for unspeakable horror, the Holocaust is the fundamental point of reference; more recently, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has come to be taken as a worldwide benchmark for transitional justice processes, as have, to a lesser extent, prosecutions with regard to human-rights crimes in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda.
The law works with a concept of violence which can be defined as follows: an act of violence occurs when injury or suffering is inflicted upon a person/s by an agent knows (or might reasonably have known), that his actions would result in the harm in question. Thus the crime of public violence for example is defined as consisting of the unlawful and intentional commission by a number of people acting in concert of acts of serious dimensions which are intended forcibly to disturb public peace or security or to invade the rights of others.1
The article discusses how relatives of left-wing Republicans killed and buried in mass graves by Francoist groups during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) recompose the stories of violent death of their ancestors in connection to documentary evidence that emerges during the search for their human remains. Mass grave searches have taken place in the midst of a process of historical investigation that has brought families, historians, activists and archaeologists together in order to document and seek official recognition for these extrajudicial executions. In so doing, they have also prompted the circulation of personal papers and official Francoist files that bear poignant information about the victims. Both sets of documents converge in the family archive, eliciting different re-readings and acts of memory. The article considers how familial interactions with these material sources attempt to grasp and recreate a history of loss marked by rupture and filled with absences. It also explores how such historical and familial uncertainties marks the experience of disappearance in the Spanish context.
In 1984, a group of Argentine students, trained by US academics, formed the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team to apply the latest scientific techniques to the excavation of mass graves and identification of the dead, and to work toward transitional justice. This inaugurated a new era in global forensic science, as groups of scientists in the Global South worked outside of and often against local governments to document war crimes in post-conflict settings. After 2001, however, with the inauguration of the war on terror following the September 11(th) attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, global forensic science was again remade through US and European investment to increase preparedness in the face of potential terrorist attacks. In this paper, I trace this shift from human rights to humanitarian forensics through a focus on three moments in the history of post-conflict identification science. Through a close attention to the material semiotic networks of forensic science in post-conflict settings, I examine the shifting ground between non-governmental human rights forensics and an emerging security- and disaster-focused identification grounded in global law enforcement. I argue that these transformations are aligned with a scientific shift towards mechanized, routinized, and corporate-owned DNA identification and a legal privileging of the right to truth circumscribed by narrow articulations of kinship and the body.
The paper synthesizes data obtained from the excavation and observation of several western Venezuelan cemeteries of the 17th to 19th centuries, with documentary information obtained from testaments and other written sources of the same period on the Spanish Catholic funerary ritual. The combination of these two lines of evidence has permitted a preliminary reconstruction of the characteristics of the Venezuelan colonial burial practices, and some of the changes that occurred through time.
Since the military uprising in 1936 the Franco dictatorship sought to eradicate and silence various elements within Spanish society. Through the creation of retroactive laws, various political figures and civilians were murdered or experienced extreme repression and surveillance by authorities. This contributed to the silencing of victims preventing dissent. Franco sought to generate a revisionist myth of the failure of the second republic, with all blame for the civil war on the reformist non- traditional elements of society. During this period, hundreds of thousands of people were convicted of political crimes, sentenced to death or placed in various concentration camps in Spain and abroad. I argue that this label continues to inhibit the exhumation of mass graves. This chapter argues that despite the transition to democracy these victims continue to be overlooked and ignored in the nations’ collective memory. While in the last 15 years social activists groups such as ARMH (Association for the Recuperation of Historic Memory) seek to rectify this situation through exhumation of mass graves, they remain unsupported and underfinanced by the state. This chapter considers how exhumation serves as a mechanism to redress the legacy of silence established by the Franco regime and maintained by subsequent Spanish governments. The act of exhuming remains from clandestine graves creates a counter narrative to the dominant discourses of the power elite. However, the discursive historical memory during this period remains a challenge to the continued survival of activist groups exhuming graves. While the recovered remains provide irrefutable proof of the fragility of the victims and violence committed against them, there appears to be a lack of political or social will to assist in recuperating the missing. I ask in this chapter: How can society continue to refute the scientific facts evidenced through the exhumation process and support government policy silencing the voice and rights of these victims?
This edited volume brings together well-established and emerging scholars of transitional justice to discuss the persistence of amnesty in the age of human rights accountability. The volume attempts to reframe debates, moving beyond the limited approaches of 'truth versus justice' or 'stability versus accountability' in which many of these issues have been cast in the existing scholarship. The theoretical and empirical contributions in this book offer new ways of understanding and tackling the enduring persistence of amnesty in the age of accountability. In addition to cross-national studies, the volume encompasses eleven country cases of amnesty for past human rights violations: Argentina, Brazil, Cambodia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Indonesia, Rwanda, South Africa, Spain, Uganda and Uruguay. The volume goes beyond merely describing these case studies, but also considers what we learn from them in terms of overcoming impunity and promoting accountability to contribute to improvements in human rights and democracy.