Making losses visible: death, memory and material culture

ABSTRACT

Our aim is to analyze the actions and cultural practices by which the subjects rebuild their memories in the context of violence. Identify the political uses of the memory as political resistance in the everyday life, in the family or the community intimacy. It is a qualitative research, and the method used was the case study for its focus on the particular and for approaching the meaning of experience from the systematic analysis of a same phenomenon. We have identified four kinds of experience regarding the creation of "spontaneous altars" in the city of Medellín, Colombia. We have chosen micro-histories to understand the political sense of the return to everyday life after facing violence situations. The spontaneous shrines are mourning rituals in the public space built as an answer to the deaths considered unfair. They are ways of non-institutional political action whose objectives are to get attention to what happened, express indignation and avoid that such thing happens again. In the studied cases, we find that in the creation of altars it is expressed a mourning narrative which demands the recognition of loss and vulnerability.

Keywords:
Spontaneous shrines; Mourning narrative; Resistance; Violence; Medellín - Colombia