El recuerdo y la interpretación. Investigación entre las memorias de la dictadura uruguaya

The essay is based on the materials collected during an ethnographic research on the politics and rhetoric of the memory of the Uruguayan civil-military coup (1973-1985) and takes into account some of the issues that are linked to fieldwork that is characterized by violence and traumatic memory. If violence deeply moulds subjectivities, it is inscribed in bodies and embedded in the daily practice of people, its memory haunts victims for a long time after the occurrence of events and represents a history that seems, at the same time, unthinkable and unforgivable. The disruptive experiences lived by victims and their families are marked by silence and of- ten remain unexpressed in a narrative form. The author shows how traumatic memory is a social practice that finds better possibility of expression beyond verbal narratives through embodied and tacit dimensions. The unspeakable that wraps the accounts of witnesses is also mirrored in the features of the ethnographic writing and becomes a problem of untranslatableness. Moreo- ver, the condition of scandal represented by violence brings out the ethic and epistemological placement of the researcher. The suggestion is not to dissolve the ethnographic investigation in mere political and moral adhesion, but to understand the “seductive” difficulties of accounts with high sensitive involvement. The fieldwork, therefore, appears as a negotiated space that is both intellectual and affective, where the cognitive feature permeates through both aspects.