Dwellers of Memory: Youth and Violence in Medellin, ColombiaDwellers of Memory is an ethnographic study of how urban youth in Colombia came to be at the intersection of multiple forms of political, drug-related, and territorial violence in a country undergoing forty years of internal armed conflict. It examines the ways in which youth in the city of Medellin reconfigure their lives and, cultural worlds in the face of widespread violence. This violence has transgressed familiar boundaries and destroyed basic social supports and networks of trust. This volume attempts to map and understand its patterns and flows. The author explores how Medellin's youth locate themselves and make, sense of violence through contradictory and shifting memory practices. The violence has not completely taken over their cultural worlds or their subjectivities. Practices of remembering and forgetting are key methods by which these youth rework their identities and make sense of the impact of violence on their lives. While the experience of violence is rooted in urban space and urban youth, the memory dwellers use a sense of place, oral histories of death, and narratives of fear as survival strategies for inhabiting violent neighborhoods. The book also examines fissures in memory, the contradictory constructions of young people's subjective selves, and practices of gendered violence and terror. All have and continue to pose risks to the historical memory and cultural survival of the residents of Medellin. Dwellers of Memory offers an alternative ethnographic approach to the study of memory and violence, one that calls into question whether the, role of the ethnographer of violence is to be a mere witness of terror, or to oppose it by writing against it. It will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, and students of, ethnography. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
1 Local Histories in a National Light | 27 |
Making and Sensing Places | 65 |
Oral Histories of Death and the Dead | 101 |
Narratives of Fear and Gendered Violence | 131 |
5 A Generational Forgetting? | 153 |
Epilogue | 173 |
187 | |
215 | |
Other editions - View all
Dwellers of Memory: Youth and Violence in Medellin, Colombia Pilar Riano-Alcala Limited preview - 2017 |
Dwellers of Memory: Youth and Violence in MedellÃn, Colombia Pilar Riaño Alcalá Limited preview - 2006 |
Dwellers of Memory: Youth and Violence in Medellin, Colombia Pilar Riano-Alcala No preview available - 2010 |
Common terms and phrases
actions activities Antioqueño areas armed actors armed groups assassinated Barrio Antioquia became bodies Bogotá casas juveniles Chunes circulation city of Medellín city’s collective Colombia construction context Cuadradero cultural daily dead death described disappeared drug cartel dynamics economic El Colombiano emotional established ethical everyday fear fieldwork fighting forced disappearances friends gendered guerrilla human individuals involved Juancho killed La Violencia leader lence lived experience located lunfardo Marquetalia Medellín drug cartel Medellín’s youth memory practices memory workshop ment militias Miltón narrative negotiated networks non-governmental organization northeastern zone organized Pablo Escobar pact paramilitary participants past police political rape realm regional relationship residents Revista Semana Riaño Roldán Salazar sector sense of place sensorial sexual sicarios social sorcerer stories street suffering symbolic tango music territorial terror tion trafficking urban militias Uribe victims Villa Villatina Violencia walkabouts witness women youth gangs youth group zone of Medellín