Presenting the (Dictatorial) Past in Contemporary Argentina

Abstract

Drawing upon Isabelle Stengers’ notion of an ‘ecology of practices’ this article explores some of the divergent ways in which truths about the violence of Argentina’s last dictatorship period emerge in different forums. We consider how these forums deploy ‘arts of dramatization’, which is to say, the ways they stage questions about the violence of the last dictatorship period in order to propose, explore, confirm and sometimes refute ‘candidates for truth’. Following Stengers’ provocations, we argue that the various modes of staging the past conjure up its violence in distinct ways, placing different constraints on how it can appear, using different material apparatus and probing it according to different values under different obligations. Based on interviews and observational research with key personnel – including lawyers, artists, forensic anthropologists and psychologists – we suggest that while each of the forums within this ecology is concerned with truth, how and what emerges as truth necessarily differs. What counts as evidence, what is understood as ‘successful’, what is dismissed as irrelevant are all dependent upon the concerns of the forum, such that truths about Argentina’s dictatorship are not only ‘situated’ but also necessarily ‘partial’ forms of world-making. In an attempt to propose a shift from over-determined and usually binary lines of debate, we suggest that these truths exist within an ‘ecology of practices’, to use Stengers’ term, insofar as these forums are not closed off from each other, but are becoming a web of often highly interdependent connections, wherein personnel, practices, audiences and resultant ‘truths’ travel.