Dwellers of Memory: Youth and Violence in Medellin, Colombia (Memory and Narrative) - Hardcover

Riano-Alcala, Pilar

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0765803143 ISBN 13: 9780765803146

Publisher: Routledge, 2006

Synopsis

Dwellers 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.

About this title

About the Author:

Pilar Riaño-Alcalá is associate professor, School of Social Work and Family Studies, University of British Columbia, Canada.  

Review:

"This textured ethnography of how young barrio dwellers from Medelln, Colombia, collectively weave their memories of violence into the very space of death where they live, provides new directions for the anthropology of violence, moving us beyond fatalism and voyeurism, to a constructive engagement with the very people with whom we work. The actors in this ethnography are eloquent witnesses to the Colombian conflict, presented by Pilar Riao-Alcal as agents in the reconstruction of their world--although they are not always successful in this respect. Riao shows us how their memories of violence are lodged in urban space, embodied in narratives and in sound and movement. In this thought-provoking book, Riao-Alcal recounts how she transformed the traditional ethnographic enterprise, not with innovative modes of writing, but through an innovative field methodology in which tangible connections with and among her respondents are built through collective remembering, making the researcher part of the very story she is investigating. Riao-Alcal's workshop approach--itself, a Latin American contribution to anthropology--is an eloquent example of how anthropological methods can contribute to dialogue and peacemaking. "Dwellers of Memory" is engaged anthropology at its very best." "--Joanne Rappaport, Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies and Anthropology, Georgetown University"

""Dwellers of Memory" is an outstanding examination of Colombian violence, with lessons for much of the contemporary world. Rather than taking "violence" as an undifferentiated and unavoidable fact affecting countless numbers of faceless people, Dr. Riao takes us through a difficult but intellectually and politically instructive voyage of discovery and understanding of the intimate details that account for the more visible forms of violence. Focusing on the cultural dynamics of remembering and forgetting by poor urban youth in Medelln over the past twenty-five years --in their attachme

"This textured ethnography of how young barrio dwellers from Medelln, Colombia, collectively weave their memories of violence into the very space of death where they live, provides new directions for the anthropology of violence, moving us beyond fatalism and voyeurism, to a constructive engagement with the very people with whom we work. The actors in this ethnography are eloquent witnesses to the Colombian conflict, presented by Pilar Riao-Alcal as agents in the reconstruction of their world--although they are not always successful in this respect. Riao shows us how their memories of violence are lodged in urban space, embodied in narratives and in sound and movement. In this thought-provoking book, Riao-Alcal recounts how she transformed the traditional ethnographic enterprise, not with innovative modes of writing, but through an innovative field methodology in which tangible connections with and among her respondents are built through collective remembering, making the researcher part of the very story she is investigating. Riao-Alcal's workshop approach--itself, a Latin American contribution to anthropology--is an eloquent example of how anthropological methods can contribute to dialogue and peacemaking. "Dwellers of Memory" is engaged anthropology at its very best." "--Joanne Rappaport, Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies and Anthropology, Georgetown University"

""Dwellers of Memory" is an outstanding examination of Colombian violence, with lessons for much of the contemporary world. Rather than taking "violence" as an undifferentiated and unavoidable fact affecting countless numbers of faceless people, Dr. Riao takes us through a difficult but intellectually and politically instructive voyage of discovery and understanding of the intimate details that account for the more visible forms of violence. Focusing on the cultural dynamics of remembering and forgetting by poor urban youth in Medelln over the past twenty-five years --in their attac

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0765803143
• ISBN 13: 9780765803146
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 252