Abstract
The renewed anthropological debate on morality has invoked the idea that local moralities can be analyzed through the phenomenological arrangement of moral breakdown, which is followed by a liminal period of performing ethics that reinstates the unreflective moral disposition (i.e., home) of everyday life. The ethnographic example of the heterogeneous group of Argentinian victims of the last military dictatorship (1976–83) illustrates how ongoing ethical performance about trauma produces a reflective way of engaging with and in the world. These ongoing ethical performances are coined as “traumatic home” and constitute an everyday reflective moral disposition. From this local perspective, trauma is an intrinsic aspect of being alive that needs ongoing verbalization and reflection. The enduring traumas become expressible and meaningful by means of ongoing, shared practices of truth telling and informal therapies. Thus, by ongoing expression, trauma also becomes an influential source for everyday moral comfort.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 537-556 |
| Number of pages | 20 |
| Journal | Ethos |
| Volume | 46 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| Early online date | 29 Oct 2018 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Dec 2018 |
Funding
Acknowledgments. I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers and the editors of Ethos for their constructive comments and the following for their helpful comments in the preparation of this article: Tessa Diphoorn, Kees Koonings, Hans de Kruijf, Carmen Pérez Pérez, Antonius Robben, and Darlene Slagle. The research used here was made possible by the Utrecht University Doctoral Program at the Department of Cultural Anthropology.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Universiteit Utrecht |
Keywords
- trauma
- collective violence
- morality
- Argentina
- phenomenology