Religion, Social Memory and Conflict

The Massacre of Bojayá in Colombia

Kenneth A. Loparo

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137461841
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Criminología

This book studies how religion influences the way people in Colombia remember a massacre of 79 civilians that occurred in a Catholic church in 2002. It analyses how strategies of memorialisation are part of religious peacebuilding initiatives that aim to resist and denounce crimes against human, ethnic, cultural and economic rights.

1

Social Memory in Post-Atrocity Contexts

Introduction

The construction of social memories that are fair to the past and that can also contribute to peaceful futures is a challenge for societies in the aftermath of conflict; they must dismantle silences that occult complicities and culpabilities, while crafting a balanced account that avoids the perpetuation of violence. The 20th century witnessed a series of atrocities that were covered by repression and denial, which can be evidenced in the systematic use of paramilitary squads and in the disappearance of corpses across many Latin American countries. One of the testimonies of a local leader in the region of Chocó describes this situation:

In 1997, the paramilitary arrived, and well, we already know the methods that they used in that period. They killed and threatened people; they dismembered, tortured, and disappeared them. We did not know where they were; we do not know where they really were buried; they threw their bodies to the river, we do not know. They are completely disappeared.

(Interview, April 2012)

The recent so-called memory boom – the rise of interest in memory in academia and other sectors of civil society and among policymakers – manifests a desire to resist the silence promoted by perpetrators of atrocities and the intention of supporting victims’ rights. At the everyday level, these initiatives might rise in order to obtain information on loved ones who had disappeared, to leave their memory as a permanent testimony of the violence that they suffered or serve as a warning and a plea that this kind of atrocity should never happen again. These initiatives are based on the assumption that uncovering truths about past atrocities and giving a public voice to victims can strengthen democratic processes that are necessary to promote a transition from authoritarian regimes to nonviolent societies.

Transitional and post-conflict societies have developed different types of politics of memory in order to answer to the challenge of remembering past atrocities (de Brito et al., 2001; Hayner, 2010). These mechanisms have been led ‘from above’ as a result of official politics of memory and ‘from below’ as initiatives of the civilians at the grassroots (McEvoy and McGregor, 2008). Official and non-official mechanisms of social memorialisation as part of the transitional justice process have been the subject of rich debates in the field of memory and transitional studies (Aguilar, 2002; Cairns and Roe, 2003; Chapman, 2009; de Brito et al., 2001; Hamber and Wilson, 2002; Hayner, 2010; Van der Merwe et al., 2009, among others). This literature often argues that a conflict needs to reach some kind of closure before a process of social memorialisation as a means for building peace can take place. These societies are called post-traumatic, post-conflict or post-violent because they have reached an agreement in order to stop the conflict, even though violence may still be present (Brewer, 2010).

Contrary to this scenario, Colombia is a country in conflict with a weak political transition (Laplante and Theidon, 2006; Prieto, 2012; Saffon and Uprimny, 2009) but where debates about how to memorialise the conflict have flourished. On the one hand, the recovery of historical memory has been officially supported as a result of the enactment of transitional justice laws. On the other hand, there have been thousands of local initiatives of memorialisation led by grassroots victims’ associations across the country, which were almost a spontaneous reaction to the violence suffered by the local civil society. Clearly, the study of the Colombian case can contribute to informing the debate on the uses of social memorialisation in transitional justice and in peacebuilding amidst ongoing conflict.

Recent or ongoing conflicts are a contested terrain for the construction of social memory, where multiple versions of the past confront each other under the pressure of different compelling political agendas. Politicians often argue that they fear the consequences of social memory for unstable reconciliation processes, such as in the case of post-genocide Rwanda, where the government removed formal modern national history from all school curricula until at least 2005 (Hodgkin, 2006). Despite the risks of social memorialisation igniting the ashes of violence in post-conflict societies, there is evidence that mechanisms of social memorialisation can become tools for peacebuilding, even when the conflict is still occurring, thanks particularly to its potential for denouncing human rights abuses and supporting the defence of victims’ rights.

This chapter explores social memory as a mechanism of transitional justice. It draws on the literature on memory studies and transitional justice, and especially it analyses the relationship between social memory and victimhood. The relationship between memory and emotions such as humiliation, fear and hope will be considered more fully later in this and the following chapters. The main examples are taken from societies that have experienced conflict, such as Argentina, Rwanda and Uganda. The first section presents a brief analysis of the literature on memory studies in general and the theoretical approach to this book in particular. The concept of social memory is analysed in comparison with the concepts of collective and cultural memory. The second section reflects upon the topics of forgiving and reconciliation, which are also studied in Chapter 2.

Defining social memory

The study of social memory is the study of a diverse range of objects, phenomena and processes that have attracted the interest of scholars in different disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, sociology, neuroscience and literary studies. One of the main interests in these disciplines is to try to decipher how and why some events are remembered and some others are left behind in oblivion. Material culture provides artefacts that help to keep our memories alive; other cultural forms, such as storytelling, rituals, songs and dances, maintain tradition alive while new pieces of information are added and others are discarded through generations. Memory is also a process that happens in the brain, and there are psychological mechanisms that repress or trigger our memories in the unconscious. There are different elements at play in the process of remembering, because not only our brains remember, but our bodies are also involved in mnemonic practices (Connerton, 1989). From the perspective of social sciences, society is considered to be the locus of the explanation of memory.

It goes beyond the scope of this chapter to describe the multiple ways in which memory has been studied (see Olick et al., 2011); instead, this chapter establishes a common conceptual ground in order to discuss the role of memory in transitional justice and in the construction of victimhood. The field of memory studies is born as a multidisciplinary field that has observed some inter- and trans-disciplinary collaboration (Vosu et al., 2008). It has been led by a ‘problem or topic, rather than by singular method or tradition’ (Hoskins et al., 2008, p. 5). No single theory is able to encompass all the different aspects of memory; as a result, some of them have opted for emphasising different aspects of memory, which is reflected in the use of concepts such as cultural memory, collective memory and social memory (Olick and Robbins, 1998).

Halbwachs (1992 [1925], p. 53), perhaps the most relevant theorist of collective memory, argues:

We can understand each memory as occurs in individual thought only if we locate each within the thought of the corresponding group. We cannot properly understand their relative strength and the ways in which they combine within individual thought unless we connect the individual to the various groups of which he is simultaneously a member.

Halbwachs considered that collective identity precedes collective memory, in the sense that a group develops a ‘shared image of the past’ that provides an illusion of timelessness and continuity, which could help to ensure that ‘the group remains the same’ (Halbwachs, [1925] 1992, p. 86). This is not a trivial matter and is useful for explaining, for instance, processes of production of national identity (Nora, 1989). Nevertheless, the concept of collective memory has been criticised for being more an ‘illusion of consensus’ than a description of how societies actually remember.

Sontag (2003, p. 76) argues that ‘what is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds’. In that sense, the term ‘collective memory’ has been faulted for being too artificial and external and not reflecting the more organic processes that occur in the construction of memory in society (Elster, 2004, p. 11). According to Hoskins (2005, p. 3), ‘collective memory may thus be an ideal and an aim of societies (and of “social frameworks”) but social memory is their practice’.

This book considers it relevant to underline the malleability and ‘multidirectionality’ of memory in the analysis of the memorialisation of contemporary atrocity and argues that social memory can be the concept that best describes this process. Social memory relies on the interests and interpretations of different groups and can change over time as a result of different negotiations, contestations and intersections. Instead of describing this process as an action–reaction process, where subaltern memories respond to dominant ones, social memory is understood as the result of multiple narratives that simultaneously come from multiple directions (Rothberg, 2009).

The way societies frame social memories influences what is relevant to remember and what to forget. Even individual recollections about specific events are influenced by society; for instance, Loftus and Pickrell (1995, p. 720) demonstrated how ‘misleading post-event information can alter a person’s recollection in powerful ways, even leading to the creation of false memories of objects that never in fact existed’. In her theory of social remembering, Misztal (2003, p. 12) claims that one of the reasons why memory is social is that ‘every memory exists through its relation with what has been shared with others: language, symbols, events, and social and cultural contexts’. She argues that society ‘ensures what we remember and how and when we remember it’. For example, Tankink (2007) claims that in the case of post-conflict Uganda, victims in the Mbara district remained in silence about their memories of past atrocity because there was no public space that facilitated the creation of social memories, ‘no one wants to listen to traumatic narratives’. The absence of a receptive audience and adequate arenas of representation is detrimental for the creation of public narratives of social memory, even though memories can exist on another level, often through cultural representations.

The cultural aspects of memory have been emphasised in the term ‘cultural memory’. According to Erll (2009), cultural memory is an umbrella term that comprises social, mental and material aspects of memory. The term ‘cultural memory’ reflects two processes: the first process occurs when individual memories are shaped by socio-cultural contexts; and the second occurs when ‘a memory, which is represented by media and institutions [that] must be actualised by individuals, members of a community of remembrance’ (Erll, 2009, p. 13). Rodriguez and Fortier (2007, p. 13) explain that ‘cultural mmory transmits an experience rooted in history that has reached a culturally definitive, potentially transformative status’. In order to reach such status, cultural memory needs to be firmly rooted in traditions that reach back into the past (Assmann, 2006, p. 8). Cultural memory and social memory have different temporal structures. Assman argues that once there are no witnesses alive to tell their experience, ‘communicative’ memory (kommunikatives Gedächtnis) will transform itself into ‘cultural’ memory (kulturelles Gedächtnis). According to this argument, social memory is different from cultural memory because the first depends on carrier groups (witnesses, authorities and other transmitters that preserve the memory) to endure through time. Carrier groups create particular claims about social reality and social memory (Alexander, 2004, p. 11). According to Assmann (2006, p. 7), these types of ‘memories can be as short-lived as the collective that makes use of them’.

In that sense, memory can have both a cultural and a social basis, and they are not mutually exclusive. For example, in the Afro-Colombian communities of Chocó, we find some ancestral African traditions that have survived the slavery experience and forced relocation to the Americas; these traditions can become cultural repertoires used in the construction of social memory of contemporary events. It will be explained in the following chapters how narratives of modern violence are connected to the experience of slavery and are performed through rituals inspired by African traditions. However, the concept of social memory has been used in this book in order to emphasise short-term politicised uses of memory. The term ‘social memory’ reflects the multiple intersections between official and non-official initiatives of collective memorialisation and interpersonal memories, which are central aspects of memorialisation in transitional justice. In addition, the term ‘social memory’, as is used in this book, underlines an affinity with the sociological study of memory.

Social memory: Carrier groups and interpretative repertoires

The definition of social memory employed in this book is influenced by Weber’s ([1922]1978) concept of carrier groups. Social memory is understood as the social construction of multiple representations of the past by different carrier groups in the present. In his sociology of religion, Max Weber ([1922]1978, pp. 468–518) argued that social groups such as warrior nobles, peasants or urban aristocrats could act as social carriers for religious ideas. These social carriers had patterns of action with some affinity to certain religious notions and ethical demands, while other notions would appear reprehensible to their status feelings. I consider that Weber’s explanation can be extended to ideas other than the religious ones. These values and ideas ‘must become located in strong carrier groups in order to become effective’ (Kalberg, 2002, p. liii). In that sense, carrier groups’ needs of meaning stand in a relationship of elective affinity to the narratives of social memory that they produce. Otherwise, their narratives run the risk to be abandoned, silenced or forgotten. As a result, some groups become social carriers of narratives about events that have an affinity with their needs of meaning, life patterns, feelings and interests.

However, not every group can carry any idea or value from the past to the present. The construction of narratives about the past is limited by the interpretative repertoires that are accessible to those carrier groups. According to Wetherell (1998, p. 22), ‘an interpretative repertoire is a culturally familiar and habitual line of argument comprised from recognisable themes, common places and tropes’. Interpretative repertoires could be seen as building blocks used for constructing versions of actions, cognitive processes and other phenomena (Potter and Wetherell, 1987, p. 172). A particular repertoire is constructed out of a restricted range of terms used in a specific stylistic and grammatical fashion. Commonly, these terms are derived from one or more key metaphors, and the presence of a repertoire will often be signalled by certain tropes or figures of speech. In this sense, social memories are built by common tropes and are influenced by both dominant and subaltern interests and ideologies.

In sum, social carriers have common interests about how they should remember particular events of the past; the narratives that they construct reflect their values, ethical demands and status feelings. However, their narratives are constricted to a limited amount of information, metaphors and styles (which resemble building blocks). Different groups use these blocks according to the political or social interests that they have, constructing different versions of the past that are often subtly dissimilar. In Chapter 5, the use of interpretative repertoires in the construction of narratives about the massacre of Bojayá will be analysed.

Social memory, representations and trauma

The horror produced by atrocity is unjustifiable and intolerable by definition (Card, 2002, p. 9), and personal experiences of atrocity are difficult to both forget and communicate. These memories are intimate scars and can become holes in victims’ biographies that perhaps will never be fully mastered and have belated effects on people’s lives (Lacapra, 2001, p. 41). For those reasons, it can be counterintuitive to think that something as personal as a trauma can indeed be called ‘social’.

However, some authors have considered that intimate experiences of suffering have a social component and that there are common places that connect the public and the private worlds of victims. Herman (1997, p. 3) claims that there is an intimate connection between different experiences of suffering:

Between rape survivors and combat veterans, between battered women and political prisoners, between the survivors of vast concentration camps created by tyrants who rule nations and the survivors of small, hidden concentration camps created by tyrants who rule their homes.

In addition, Kleinman et al. (1997) have argued that suffering is socially produced as the result of devastating injuries that social forces inflict on human experience. Other authors discuss social traumas; however, it is important to understand that ‘a social trauma is not an individual trauma writ large’ (Robben, 2005, p. 346). According to Robben (2005, p. 347), excessive and massive violence disrupts ‘social bonds, destroys group identities, undermines people’s sense of community, and entails cultural disorientation because taken for granted meanings become obsolete. A massive trauma is thus a wound to the social body and its cultural frame.’

Traumatic memories can be shared despite the fact that the nature of traumatic events implies silences and absences (Jelin, 2003). Individual traumatic memories can also be part of the construction of social traumas, but a social trauma is not only defined by the experience of a group’s suffering. According to Jeffrey Alexander (2004a, p. 10), the study of social trauma focuses instead on how ‘this acute discomfort’ enters ‘into the core of the collectivity’s sense of its own identity’. A social trauma does not only affect those who were direct victims of the event. It occurs when a social group considers that a certain traumatic event is part of their core identity as a group. Alexander emphasises that ‘events are one thing, representations of these events quite another’ (2004a, p. 10). Influenced by Durkheim, Alexander locates trauma in the field of social representations. In this sense, narratives of social memory about traumatic experiences that are central for a group’s identity are concerned with the way the past is represented and not only with the factuality of the events.

The distinction between the factuality of past events and their representation does not mean that representations are false or fake. Memory is still a cognitive issue that claims for truth and faithfulness even though it follows a different set of rules than history to prove its validity. Ricoeur (2006, p. 55) argues that ‘the epistemic, veridical dimension of memory is united with the practical dimension tied to the idea of exercise of memory’. Poole (2009, p. 151) explains the difference between the factuality of the events and their representation in terms of cognitive and conative memory. The first is related to the information about what happened in the past; the second to the knowledge that bears on action....