Experiences of violence: ethnography and social recomposition in Colombia

Why recalling violence experiences? Why do we anthropologists seek accounts of pain? Can ethnography be a tool that encourages personal and collective reconstruction in societies that lived traumatic events? From what point of view traumatic event memories are built, and how memory narrative is at play in power and subordination relations on one side, and in counter-hegemony and self-affirmation on the other? This questions are approached in the study of a particular indigenous and peasant group from southwestern Colombia that in 2001 suffered a massacre followed by forced displacement by paramilitary groups. In this article we reconstruct the use of the ethnographic approach to understand in which way a specific group of people affected by the massacre of the Naya remember the event, re-shape the meaning of life and embody their memory in the production of new cognitive-emotional references. By remembering they not just condemn the use of violence, but also identify the persons behind the action and the set of forces that made it possible; with time, they open new identity horizons. We propose that the relation between the anthropologist and the subject of study through the testimonies of suffering establishes a social-emotional reciprocal tie, which is projected over the social and citizenship action of both.