The Parody Children
This article examines ways of constructing meaning, action, and identity in a place marked by the radical social catastrophe that was the enforced disappearance of individuals in Latin America’s Southern Cone in the 1970s. I develop my argumentation along three lines : first, I describe the sociogenesis of the enforced disappearance of individuals, proposing that it be understood as a devastating catastrophe for modern readings of identity ; second, I describe the essential characteristics of two narratives dominating the social world of the disappeared : first, the more traditional (the narrative of meaning) and, second, that belonging to the younger generations, the neo-victims, the children of the disappeared (the narrative of the absence of meaning) ; finally, drawing on an analysis of the latter form of narrative, I propose to employ a concept long rooted in the history of sociology — that of anomy — in combination with another that is still very new to the discipline — that of parody — in order to conceptualize the logic of the social construction of identity in extreme situations.