2024-03-28T19:52:55Zhttp://digital.csic.es/dspace-oai/requestoai:digital.csic.es:10261/279852021-06-21T10:07:55Zcom_10261_117com_10261_7col_10261_370
The Return of Civil War Ghosts: The Ethnography of Exhumations in Contemporary Spain
Ferrándiz Martín, Francisco
Ferrándiz Martín, Francisco [0000-0002-4095-6344]
Anthropology of violence
Transitional Justice
Mass Graves
Exhumation
Social Memory
Mass graves resulting from episodes of extreme violence are crucial evidence of the wounds of history, and a key to understanding the dynamics of terror. The intentional jumbling of unidentified corpses in unmarked graves is a source of disorder, anxiety and division in many societies
(Robben 2000). As a sophisticated instrument of terror, this type of grave is intended to bury the social memory of violence and thus to strengthen the fear-based regimes of the
perpetrators, which can survive for decades. Yet as social and political circumstances evolve, social memory eventually
returns to confront these unquiet graves. Events of recent decades in countries such as Argentina, Guatemala,Spain and Rwanda show us precisely this. What happens
as a result of these return visits, often involving exhumations, depends on the national and international contexts
in which the remains are found, investigated and manipulated(Verdery 1999). This paper explores the contemporary controversies around the exhumation of Civil War (1936-1939) mass graves in Spain, as well as the ethnographic challenges posed by them.
Peer reviewed
2010-09-23T13:33:10Z
2010-09-23T13:33:10Z
2006
artículo
http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_6501
0268-540X
http://hdl.handle.net/10261/27985
en
open
3642568 bytes
application/pdf