Memory and the Senses. We are two PhD students in Visual Anthropology and working for the Bosnian Bones Spanish Ghosts (BBSG) project interested in the forms in which the Spanish war and postwar past is remembered, performed and its...
moreMemory and the Senses. We are two PhD students in Visual Anthropology and working for the Bosnian Bones Spanish Ghosts (BBSG) project interested in the forms in which the Spanish war and postwar past is remembered, performed and its traces recollected in present civil society political, familia! and scientific endeavours. With a common goal to analyze the relation that different generations have with the history of violence of the country, and in the light of the decisive temporal distance that defines the Spanish case, our work aims to engage with the experiential and experimental treatment of these dislocated histories, the subjects that enact them, and the spaces where these forms of "sharing the past" take place. Paying attention to the way in which different sites and materialities interconnect with subjective experiences of war, loss and reconciliation, we propase then the use of the visual in ethnographic fieldwork as a methodology but also as an analytical tool that can:
a) Capture the affective relations and, most importantly, sensations that define our field site, especially in connection to our main referent in recent years: the exhumation site (though we are also interested in other sites of social interaction and memory recall such as domestic spaces and public scenarios like commemorative acts, reburials, or political forums at local and national levels).
b) Create a type of visual engagementjethnography that appeals to the viewer's sensory reactions with the purpose to transpose the most intimate emotive traces of individual and collective exchanges and their intensities-especially in relation to the war dead, the conflict, and its afterlife in rural communities and urban enclaves post 1939 (when the war ended and Franco's regime began) and post 1975 (after the transitional measures promoted by the so-called pacto del olvido-pact to forget).
c) Experiment with an anthropological approach in post-conflict contexts in which the visual can articulate the contentious characteristics of "the act of recalling", exploring the silence and the rhythms, the gestures and idioms prompted by time, transgenerational trauma or "haunting" (Cho 2011), and forgetting. How can such visual ethnography become a meaning-making device to interpret the intricate means and displays of such memory work?
