2.3. Bodily approaches and Intergenerational transmission

Compromised bodies, imperiled lives, and threatened stories haunt my work as an anthropologist who studies social memory. In this presentation, I take up the invitation to examine the role of memory in democratic resilience. I present new, experimental writing and thinking that explores several positioned projects on afterlives of violence as memory work. These projects consist of 1) an ethnographic archive of postwar El Salvador; and 2) familial stories of generational loss and silences of migrant life—from narratives of escape from WW II to exile during Argentina’s military dictatorship. Theoretically, the presentation is interested in bringing together hemispheric questions around memory, trauma, and generational shifts around the meanings and practices of democracy in people’s lives.

During the last years of apartheid in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a bitter war opposed the United Democratic Front, a grassroots movement linked to the African National Congress (later to head the first democratic government of South Africa under the leadership of Nelson Mandela), and Inkatha, a Zulu nationalist movement supported by the white government, in the Natal province (currently KwaZulu-Natal) At least 20,000 people were killed and countless were displaced. Could it be that the lack of collective mourning and memorialisation contribute, at least to some extent, to the high level of violence we are currently witnessing in the province? The research will focus on one aspect of the bigger problem of transgenerational transmission of trauma and violence. The focus will be on three monuments erected in the 1990s and 2000s to commemorate the Natal War in the Natal Midlands. Through oral history interviews and documentary evidence, information will be gathered on the goals pursued by the individuals or groups who took the initiative of erecting these monuments and whether these objectives have been attained. The obstacles which may have undermined these objectives will be identified. The purpose of the research is to determine the conditions and contexts which allowed or should have allowed the monuments commemorating the Natal War to contribute to healing and peace building.

This paper examines how contemporary feminist movements in Latin America mobilize sensory and emotional practices (such as music, textiles, silence, and movement) as embodied forms of memory work and resistance. Focusing on feminist collectives in Chile and Argentina, I explore how these resistance practices reconfigure public memory and sustain democratic values in contexts marked by the afterlives of dictatorship and neoliberal inequality. Developed within the framework of my doctoral dissertation, the project asks: (1) How do feminist movements in Latin America use sensorial and emotional repertoires to circulate counter-memories and reimagine collective futures? (2) How do these embodied practices challenge the exclusions and silences produced by institutional memory frameworks? (3) In what ways do they produce democratic attachments grounded in care, vulnerability, and solidarity rather than authority and punishment? Drawing on affect theory, feminist media studies, and feminist approaches to cultural memory, I analyze how emotions circulate through bodies, materials, and media to shape collective remembrance. The corpus includes audiovisual recordings of performances and marches, textile pieces, protest artifacts, and other media produced by feminist collectives in Chile and Argentina between 2016-2025. Methodologically, I combine Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis with conjunctural analysis, both through a feminist lens, to examine how sound, touch, and visual symbols interact across performance, textile, and media practices. Through this approach, I trace how emotions move through different sensorial registers, creating embodied archives. By situating these embodied archives within the longer genealogy of women’s resistance to state violence (from the Madres de Plaza de Mayo and to contemporary feminist protests), this paper shows how feminist activism transforms grief and vulnerability into collective strength. It demonstrates how feminist memory work contributes to democratic resilience, offering sensorial and affective modes of remembering that counter authoritarian nostalgia and open alternative imaginaries of justice and belonging.

This research examines the embodied memories of the Franco-Algerian War of Decolonization (1954–1962) to explore how this war continues to shape racial hierarchies and postcolonial power relations in contemporary France. Hegemonic, state-sanctioned narratives of the war can privilege Francophone and colonial perspectives, in turn marginalising Algerian, Harki, and anti-imperial voices. In response, this research argues the importance of decentering state-sanctioned memory-making (material and spatial commemoration, national days, toponyms and so on), to include and recognize embodied memories of war. Memories live within and through the body, positioning it as an affective, intergenerational, and active site of knowledge. The research advances embodied memory as both an epistemological and political intervention —an approach that repositions the body as a living archive capable of resisting necropolitical erasure and hegemonic silencing. The research leans on de-colonial, phenomenological, Feminist Indigenous epistemologies (such as cuerpo-territorio by Cabnal, 2010; see also Guzmán, 2024 and Goeman, 2013) which conceive body, mind, and land as interconnected. This knowledge supports the development of participatory methodologies that employ walking interviews, movement and mapping workshops to engage participants’ bodily experiences as modes of remembering. These methods position the body as both a methodological tool and a site of knowledge production. By analyzing embodied memories of the Franco-Algerian War, the paper contributes to broader debates in de-colonial and memory studies. It reveals how somatic and intergenerational remembrance continues to negotiate colonial hierarchies of race, identity, and belonging, and argues for embodied memory as a de-colonial practice of reconciliation and re-humanization in postcolonial France. Please note fieldwork will be conducted in Marseille and Algerian from March-June/July 2026 and data findings will be ready and part of the presentation for the conference in July/August 2026.