Surviving Forced Disappearance: Identity and Meaning

A Conversation with Gabriel Gatti (Prof. of Sociology, University of the Basque Country)
Thursday, November 20
3:00p.m.
Room 710 Social Sciences
(Spanish with translation)




Due in large part to humanitarian law and transitional justice, the categories of detained-disappeared and forced disappearance are today well established - so much so that in some places like Argentina and Uruguay an intense social life has taken shape around them and in their wake. Victims mix with institutions, laws, and professionals (forensic anthropologists, social scientists, jurists, psychologists, artists, archivists, writers), occupying intersecting positions and doing so with varied narratives, from the epic and heroic to the tragic and traumatic. Based on extensive fieldwork in Argentina and Uruguay, Gatti analyzes these worlds in an attempt to understand how one inhabits the categories that international law has constructed to mark, judge, think about, and repair horror.
Gabriel Gatti is Professor of Sociology at the University of the Basque Country, Spain. His research and teaching focus on contemporary forms of identity, in particular those constituted in situations of social catastrophe, rupture, and fracture. He is the author of Identidades débiles, Identidades desaparecidas, Les nouveaux répères de l'identité collective en Europe, and Basque society. His latest work, Surviving Forced Disappearance in Argentina and Uruguay: Identity and Meaning was published in august of 2014. He is also a main researcher behind the Mundo(s) de victimas (World(s) of victims) a study of four cases that deal with the construction of the "victim" category in contemporary Spain.
Professor Gatti's visit is part of the Reframing Mass Violence Collaborative Series. Sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Studies, The Human Rights Program, the Department of Sociology and CHGS.

IAS Collaborative: Upcoming Public Lecture

Uruguayan Memories of Dictatorship: A lector by Mariana Achugar
(Carnegie Mellon University)
Thursday, March 6
Reframing Mass Violence: Human Rights and Social Memory in Latin America and Southern Europe
Thursdays 3:00p.m. to 4:30p.m.
1-109 Herbert M Hanson, Jr Hall



Why do family conversations matter in processes of intergenerational transmission of traumatic pasts? Mariana Achugar will share some examples from a two-year ethnographic project in Uruguay where 20 youth and their families were interviewed. The analysis of the styles of interactions that occur in these families with different backgrounds will show how they make sense of the past and what narratives characterize their recollections. She will then attempt to explain why some conversations produce "more sharable" memories of the dictatorship.



The IAS collaborative explores the particular developments and transnational entanglements of social memories in societies revisiting their legacies of dictatorship, state terror, and grave human rights violations in Latin America and Southern Europe.