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

Pilar Riano-Alcala (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0765803143 | ISBN-13: 978-0765803146 | Publication Date: March 30, 2006

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 Medelln 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 Medelln'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 Medelln. 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. Pilar Riao-Alcal is assistant professor, School of Social Work and Family Studies, University of British Columbia, Canada.

Editorial Reviews

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 attachment to particular places, bodies, senses and experiences-- the book explains lucidly how memory functions as a tool of survival, and how violence, more broadly, emerges within a complex set of social, cultural, and economic factors. Dwellers of Memory is urban ethnography at its best. Informed by the anthropology of place, feminist epistemology, and Latin American popular education participatory research methods, this courageous work also constitutes a tremendous lesson on the ethics and politics of doing fieldwork "in dangerous locations." For far from the position of "writing violence" from a detached perspective as it is often the case in metropolitan anthropologies, what Dr. Riao offers us in this book is a convincing demonstration of the transformative potential of socially responsible fieldwork, when done in meaningful collaboration with the subjects themselves. Dwellers of Memory, finally, makes more intelligible, without aestheticiing it, the violence associated with Medelln youth depicted in otherwise powerful popular films, such as La Virgen de los Sicarios ("Our Lady of the Assassins"), La Vendedora de Rosas, and Rosario Tijeras."--Arturo Escobar, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Director, Institute of Latin American Studies.

About the Author

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

Product Details

• Hardcover: 252 pages
• Publisher: Transaction Publishers (March 30, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765803143
• ISBN-13: 978-0765803146
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,166,690 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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