Doing ethnography of the silences of violence
It is often noted, in terms of people’s memories of atrocities, that these are partially if not totally impossible to put into words. However, even though numerous survivors bear witness to the absence of words able to translate the magnitude of the horrors they have been through, words are used nonetheless. These life stories of course contain silences. If we listen to them, as I learned to do in analyzing the life stories of survivors of the Guatemalan armed conflict, we can sometimes learn more from them than from the stories themselves. Beginning with an examination of Mateo’s silence (who is the sole eye witness of the massacre finca San Fransisco, Nentón, Huehuetenango), I seek to show the importance of an attention to the unsaid if we want to really understand what it means to “survive” in contemporary Guatemala.