Memory, media and spectacle:Interviú'sportrayal of Civil War exhumations in the early years of Spanish democracy (original) (raw)
Related papers
Cries and whispers: Exhuming and narrating defeat in Spain today
Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 2008
In this paper, I will reflect on the impact in contemporary Spain of the production, circulation and consumption of narratives and images of Civil War terror and suffering, specifically those resulting from the opening of mass graves from the Francoist repression. This sharing of narratives has to be seen in the context of a broader and highly controversial process of reconsideration of the Civil War as a traumatic past. At a time when Spanish society is engaged in important debates regarding the singularity or plurality of our identity and the structure of our territorial organization, these exhumations are bringing to light rather disturbing information regarding our past, our present, and probably our future as well. The excavation of these “crime scenes” in various parts of the country is provoking heated discussions and performances in family contexts, politics, historiography, the media, the arts, and the public sphere in general. For example, the public display of skeletons, skulls and bone fragments bearing the marks of violence – from “perimortem” tortures to bullet wounds and coups de grâce – is bringing back tragic stories that, for many relatives but also for civil society at large, were for decades mostly silenced, told in whispers, imperfectly transmitted in limited family circles, or simply ignored. The screen of silence, fear and self-censorship has been particularly strong in local, rural contexts. Exhumation and narration are inextricably entwined. Exhumations elicit storytelling; conversely, their meaning and social impact depend on the available repertoire of competing “memory plots".
Memory Studies, 2015
This essay presents a sociological analysis of what is known in Spain as the “recovery of historical memory” and the politics deriving from this recovery. This process was catalyzed by the exhumations of the remains of victims of Francoism that have been under way since the beginning of the twenty-first century. In order to do this, we will use the literature on cosmopolitan sociology and provide a dialogue between this sociology and recent developments in the study of social and cultural memory using concepts like postmemory, multidirectional, and cosmopolitan memory. The article moves beyond the national context and looks at Spanish memory politics through the theory and praxis of Holocaust memory on the one hand and the memory of the Argentinean victims of the military dictatorship on the other hand. This will enable us to identify the components and problems of a culture and politics of globalized memory.
Exhuming Dead Persons: Forensic Science and the Making of Post-fascist Publics in Spain
Cultural Anthropology, 2020
Four decades after the fall of its dictator, Spain still refuses to undertake its legal and moral responsibilities to locate the disappeared. This essay examines how Spanish activists use forensic exhumations to transform the political status of Franco’s victims. Departing from popular and scholarly depictions of forensic science, I show that, in post-fascist Spain, the impact of exhumations has little to do with their ability to extract historical information directly from the bones of the exhumed. Instead, I argue that exhumations transform the disappeared into dead persons, thereby reincorporating them as integral participants in a democratic public sphere. For memory activists, the project of securing Spain’s democratic future depends on recognizing the personhood of long-excluded victims of fascist violence. Absent any official legal framework, I show how Spanish activists train laypersons to recognize the inherent dignity of the dead and see them as potential participants in a...
The 'Logics' of Violence and Franco's Mass Graves. An Ethnohistorical Approach
International Journal of the Humanities Volume 2, Number 3 Article: HC04-0302-2004
A civil war supposes the end of the whole social order and its traditional social values. Since that moment, an extreme and cruel violence appear against people and communities. The experience of those traumatic facts meant a painful heritage not only for the direct victims, but for the next generations too. The Spanish Civil War produced an important group of unrecognized victims, even today. These people experienced a total alienation, they were treated as an object, and became second class citizens during the so long Francoism. They were the leftist men repressed in the rebel part of the country at the beginning of the War. Those so called reds were exterminated and their relatives suffered humiliations, punishments, expropriations and were deprived of their social rights. The knowledge of these victims and experiences has emerged recently in the present life of Spain because the relatives are claiming for the recover the corpses of those murdered by the fascist groups. The bodies were hidden into mass graves which are becoming to be excavated. The claims are directed to obtain the dignification of those murdered through a new burial and the recover of their memory and biographies. In order to dignify these people, first we need to know and think about the tremendous trauma that the assassinated and their families experienced.
Journal of Material Culture, 2020
The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) was triggered by a military uprising against the democratically elected Popular Front government. Away from the battlefield, this war was characterized by the politically-motivated murder of thousands of civilians, many of whom were buried in clandestine graves throughout Spain. Following Franco’s victory and subsequent dictatorship, there were strong prohibitions on commemorating the Republican dead. A radical rupture in Spain’s memory politics occurred from 2000 onwards with the founding of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory and other similar pressure groups that have organized the exhumation and reburial of the Republican dead. This article is based on fieldwork conducted in communities in Castile and León, and Extremadura as they underwent mass grave investigations. It examines the experience of theft and dispossession that occurred as part of the Francoist repression of Republicans. Accounts of these episodes focus on stolen ...
American Ethnologist, 2018
Four decades after the end of the Franco dictatorship, many Spaniards continue to question their country's claims to full democracy. Although Spain is now governed by popularly elected governments, citizens still experience the coercive effects of the dictatorship's policies in their daily interactions with the built environment, state institutions, and even their fellow citizens. These heterogeneous sites through which the dictatorship makes its presence felt constitute an infrastructure of memory that facilitates and impedes the circulation of past experience. In this context, people enact memory politics not only by contesting narratives of the past but also, first and foremost, by dis‐ and reassembling the physical, institutional, and social entanglements that undergird democratic politics. [infrastructures, cultural memory, democratic politics, forensic exhumations, archives, Spain] Cuatro décadas después del fin de la dictadura franquista, muchos españoles siguen cuestionando la calificación de su país como democracia plena. Si bien los gobiernos de España son elegidos popularmente, los ciudadanos siguen siendo afectados por las políticas de la dictadura en sus interacciones diarias con el ambiente construido, con las instituciones del estado, e incluso con otros ciudadanos. Estas ubicaciones heterogéneas, a través de las cuales la dictadura hace sentir su presencia, constituyen una infraestructura de la memoria que facilita e impide la circulación de la experiencia del pasado. En este contexto, las políticas de la memoria consisten no sólo en disputar narrativas del pasado, sino principalmente y ante todo en ensamblar y desensamblar los enredos físicos, institucionales y sociales que afianzan la política democrática. [infraestructuras, memoria cultural, política democrática, exhumaciones forenses, archivos, España]
The return of Civil War ghosts: The ethnography of exhumations in contemporary Spain
Anthropology today, 2006
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.