Description
"A Spectral Reconciliation: Rebuilding Post-War El Salvador" is about the unfolding legacies of political violence, collective tauma, and continued injustice in El Salvador's negotiated transition from war to peace to democracy. It is an ethnography of reconciliation that privileges rural peoples daily struggles and theories of explanation as they seek to make meaning of their past sacrifices and a present political economy that continues to marginalize them. Through a focus on social memory grounded in an analysis of the contested and gendered nature of wartime survivors' narrative practices, it explores the broken promises and bankrupt dreams that characterize postwar life. While this work concentrates on survivors of El Salvador's violent civil war, it also raises questions on the aftermath of revolutionary mobilization, civil society, grassroots, and development, and in so doing contributes to theorizing on the relationship between history, memory and truth, and democracy and citizenship. Additionally, it provides insights for understanding the challenges to building peace, in three contexts: first, for the region (Nicaragua and Guatemala); second, for theorizing on other "successful" transitions to peace (i.e. South Africa and Mozambique); third, for understanding peacebuilding in crisis (i.e. Cambodia, Gaza and the West Bank). This anthropological perspective is an important contribution as it privileges agency, context, lived experiences, and the ways in which people, through their actions and their speech acts, reconfigure their worlds.
