About Blessings and Dispensable Memories. Peasant women, everyday abandonment, and land restitution in Nariño-Colombia
Abstract
This article explores some unintended consequences associated with the implementation of land restitution in a village in the department of Nariño, in Colombia. These effects are approached ethnographically and from a feminist perspective, based on the daily experiences of peasant women. The article highlights the resistance that peasant women enact against the silencing of what is defined here as ordinary abandonment: the one suffered due to the overlapping of discriminations that manifest in daily forms of social suffering. Such concealment occurs when the transitional narrative becomes dominant when understanding the idea of returning to land, leaving out of the analysis forms of abandonment that do not fit within the state definitions of reparations. At the same time, these peasant women oppose the hierarchization of disposable memories: those that narrate ordinary abandonment and do not translate into reparation; and imperative memories: those that the State selects to create legal truths on the abandonment of land and to justify compensations.
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