Alongside Violence: Everyday Survival in Chocó, Colombia

Lizarazo, Tania

doi:10.1080/13569325.2018.1447447

Cited by 8 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Notably, it was by engaging with people directly and expressing our interest in a rounded and more complex picture of these neighbourhoods that we tried to avoid the justifiable suspicion of researchers briefly visiting such areas to produce either a romanticised report of the supposed transformation of the cities, or a crude retelling of crime, violence and poverty. Such an approach risks reproducing harmful territorial stigma and fails to consider the complexities of living alongside violence, whereby survival is about negotiation rather than actively opposing or resisting violence (Alape 2006; Lizarazo 2018). While there are always limits to how well an ethnographer can understand the everyday dynamics of a particular place that they are not deeply rooted to, we hope to show that close dialogue with participants can fill those gaps.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, the warnings we had been issued indicated the symbolic placement of such neighbourhoods within persistently fragmented cities despite decades of transformation policy. More importantly, these contradictions were constantly negotiated by creative organisations and residents within these neighbourhoods, as they tried to find a balance between celebrating a positive cultural identity while 'living alongside' (Lizarazo 2018) the everyday violence that continues and is at risk of being obscured by the very same transformation policies that are so lauded in the press.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Violence against a backdrop of colours? Ethnographic insights into tensions between urban transformation and ongoing violence in marginalised neighbourhoods

Griffin

Young

2023

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

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Since the early 2000s, the two largest cities in Colombia have been lauded as success stories of urban transformation. However, there is a tension between urban transformation narratives disseminated in international media and political discourse, and the realities of ongoing violence and insecurity. Drawing on ethnographic research following creative arts projects, this article offers empirical detail on how people negotiate this tension in marginalised urban neighbourhoods, which are often the most affected by overlapping forms of violence while being key sites of transformation policies. Through in-depth interviews and participant observation in Bogotá and Medellín, we show the complexities of how grassroots creative projects both mobilise transformation politics and negotiate violence in everyday life. By focusing on the local scale, we consider both the important gains that have been made since urban transformation became a key tenet of local government policy, particularly around challenging stigma, and the challenges that local populations continue to face. Ultimately, we argue that the experiences of the creative organisations we speak to reflect the need to negotiate ongoing structural violence and fluctuating support from the state. In contrast to depoliticised transformation narratives, this has implications for understanding the state’s role in the reproduction of violence in everyday life and appreciating the limitations of aesthetic transformation in marginalised urban communities.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Violence against a backdrop of colours? Ethnographic insights into tensions between urban transformation and ongoing violence in marginalised neighbourhoods

Griffin

Young

2023

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

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“…Furthermore, these interventions are based on creating and imposing categories of identification that cannot grasp the conditions of the populations in need of help (Feldman, 2007). Their bureaucratic procedures depend on donor funding and priorities that generally do not correspond to the needs of the populations they seek to benefit (Lizarazo, 2018). Moreover, local communities are not passive receivers of aid; while subjects of humanitarian concern may strategically conform to a portrait that depicts them as innocent, passive, and apolitical (Ticktin, 2011), knowing that it will have an impact on public opinion, they also disrupt such representations in their ordinary everyday political practices (Das, 2015).…”

Section: Ethical Disconcertmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ethical disconcertment and the politics of troublemaking

Pedraza

2023

American Ethnologist

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In Colombia, I once heard a farmer reject a humanitarian demining project operating in her community. “Land mines are our smallest problem,” she said. Creating a moment of ethical disconcertment, she sought to slow down humanitarian imperatives. I place her in conversation with local pleas for “demining with development,” illustrating how they challenge the logic and temporality of humanitarian mine action, drawing attention to the complexity of the violence that silently stalks rural life despite peace gestures and accords. By making such ecologies of trouble apparent, farmers enact what I call a politics of troublemaking. Offering a feminist take on the pacifying label of “troublemaker,” I understand this politics as a demand to recognize the troubles of the living and dying in abandoned and occupied landscapes. These places are currently objects of a peace process that seeks to recuperate them, but they are also haunted by the dangers of dispossession, development, and postconflict.

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“…Furthermore, anthropology has been concerned with state‐sponsored (Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica, 2017; Grupo de Memoria Histórica, 2013) and community efforts of historical archive‐making, bringing attention to how bodies provide material and symbolic testimonies of war atrocities (Blair Trujillo, 2005; Cabrera, 2009; Lizarazo, 2022; Quiceno Toro and Villamizar Gelves, 2020). We are also in dialogue with environmental anthropologists and feminist geographers whose research interrogates how war transpires and is sustained in the country (Berman‐Arévalo and Ojeda, 2020; Lizarazo, 2018; Oslender, 2008). In these works, rurality is not only configured by atrocious acts but also by seemingly unremarkable everyday expressions of political violence.…”

Section: Explosivenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Explosiveness: Territories of war and technoscientific practices in Colombia

Pedraza

Fontanilla

2023

J Latin Amer Carib Anth

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La Serranía de la Macarena has been a crucial scenario in the Colombian war. In this region, the army and FARC‐EP guerrillas widely deployed aerial bombardment and improvised landmines to control the territory and contain their adversaries. This article is a collaborative ethnographic exploration of retazos—snippets of material‐discursive practices we collected in our fieldworks: a demining project and a state morgue. What can explosive military technologies and their aftermath tell us about the place of war in Colombia? Through two ethnographic retazos, we account of how forensic workers and mine‐removal experts engage with the material traces of explosives and produce bodies and landscapes as territories of war. We reflect on these topographies through the concept of explosiveness. Understood as a tendency, a condition, and a field of forces, explosiveness offers a distinct point of entry to reflect on the material and affective aftermath of landmines and bombs.

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Alongside Violence: Everyday Survival in Chocó, Colombia

Cited by 8 publications

References 13 publications

Violence against a backdrop of colours? Ethnographic insights into tensions between urban transformation and ongoing violence in marginalised neighbourhoods

Violence against a backdrop of colours? Ethnographic insights into tensions between urban transformation and ongoing violence in marginalised neighbourhoods

Ethical disconcertment and the politics of troublemaking

Explosiveness: Territories of war and technoscientific practices in Colombia

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