Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (review)

One can sort memory scholarship into two distinct categories, although each individual work may well combine aspects of both. One trend in the scholarship treats memory, with its associated modifiers of public, collective, political, social, hegemonic and so forth, as a metaphor. Various cultural artifacts that represent the past are classified as memory. A second trend in collective memory scholarship locates memory in the minds of individuals, but recognizes a collective and social aspect to this very individual and personal realm. Thus, individual impressions of the past, informed by the collective representations of a society’s past, are seen as central to the study.

Macarena Gómez-Barris’ places the emphasis on the first trend in this work that focuses on the legacy of General Augusto Pinochet’s military regime in Chile, which lasted from 1973 to 1990. She is especially interested in the legacy of the state’s use of violence against its own citizens, and looks for where these memories, or representations of the past, continue to exist in the form of a memorial site, the former concentration camp Villa Grimaldi, the abstract art of Guillermo Nùñez, himself a survivor of torture, several documentaries, the work of Patricio Guzmán perhaps being the best known, as well as an art exhibit that the author helped to organize in Berkeley, California. As a second-generation Chilean living in the United States, and whose family was forced to flee Pinochet’s regime, Gómez-Barris has a very personal engagement with her work. The role of first-and second-generation scholars working in some form of exile has been quite prevalent in the field of memory studies.

The author has consciously chosen to work with the producers of narratives of the past that are operating well outside the official capacity of state institutions. She uses the term “memory symbolic” to identify these struggles between the state and those operating largely independent of the state. Although the Chilean state is democratizing, she remains suspicious of state power, especially the neoliberalism that has continued well beyond Pinochet’s rule. She clearly recognizes the democratic transition, while also mistrusting the willingness of public officials to deal with the dictatorship’s violent past. This leads her to identify, “... a central epistemological inquiry of my book: if management and concealment are primary modes of hegemonic historical transitions, where indeed can memory be found?” She continues, “Reconciliation processes, ‘putting the past behind us,’ are central ways that governments get on with the business of reconstructing the nation, often at the expense of victims and their families... In other words, while power from above moves to close the issue of violence for the nation, from below the heterogeneous effects of violence constantly threaten to rupture and disarticulate the transitional national project.”

After an opening chapter orientated toward theoretical questions, the rest of the book offers a close reading and interpretation of the different social texts, representations, memories or narratives collected. One of the difficulties of pursuing memory scholarship along the lines of the first trend mentioned above is that the author becomes, for the most part, the sole interpreter of these dense social texts. Gómez-Barris recognizes this obstacle at the opening of her work noting, “Herein lies the challenge of examining cultural memory, where artists, their works, and audience engagement reshape and animate contemporary society.” The meaning-making process of culture requires that scholars examine how individuals, embedded in social groups and social contexts, encounter and engage different cultural artifacts and then engage others with their interpretations.

The strength of Gómez-Barris’ work is her first-hand victim perspective on these narratives about Chile’s past. She gives an intimate portrait of her engagement with these works, and especially in the case of Guillermo Nùñez with the artist as well. She is self-reflective on her identity as a second-generation Chilean woman living in exile...