ABSTRACT
This article examines the collective work of constructing memory during the annual reunions of veterans from a Portuguese artillery division that fought at the Colonial/Angolan Liberation War (1971-73). Based on ethnographic observation of these meetings and on in-depth interviews with ex-combatants, this article puts forward an ethnographic approach to the contemporary revisitation of a past still under scrutiny. These annual meetings offer privileged spaces for the production and negotiation of the past, including intermediation with the literary work of António Lobo Antunes, one of the unit’s conscripts. We argue that veterans’ reunions are intimate acts of commemoration that build an invisible line between the past and the present based on the imaginary and the dynamics of family ties, on the depoliticization of the conflict as a historical event, and on privileging central aspects and experiential narratives.
Keywords:
Colonial War/Angola Liberation War; Memory; Commemoration; António Lobo Antunes; Veterans