Phenomenal Justice: State Violence, Emotion, and the Law in Argentina

Abstract

This ethnography is about the trials for crimes against humanity in Argentina, which belong to complex social processes dealing with the human rights crimes that were committed during the last dictatorship that ruled from 1976-1983. In academic debates the term ‘transitional justice’ is often used to refer to the set of judicial and non-judicial measures, like the trails in Argentina, that have been implemented by different countries in order to redress the legacies of massive human rights abuses. This dissertation describes these measures in Argentina from an anthropological perspective. The main research question that needs to be answered is how victims and perpetrators experience the emotions that lie beneath local transitional justice trajectories and interact with the current pursuit of retributive justice in Argentina, and consequently reveal important intertwined everyday moralities regarding violence and suffering amid two conflicting groups. Particularly by looking at emotions from ‘within’, this anthropological study on the case of Argentina problematizes the idea that transitional justice and its practices would induce a movement away from violence and suffering. Pre-established assumptions of violence and suffering in the debates of transitional justice and reconciliation have often been ineffective in disclosing alternative ideas of truth, memory, and justice practices among people whose lives have been affected. Instead, the combined anthropological analyses of how victims and indicted military officers experience state violence, trauma and justice in their lifeworlds gives rise to alternative ideas on transitional justice. Consequently, in Argentine idiom, the focus on transitional justice shifted from reconciliation and accountability to cultural notions of a ‘traumatic home’ and a ‘quiet disgrace’. This culture sensitive approach has moved this ethnographic research on transitional justice into the conceptual reconsideration of the anthropology of emotions and phenomenological (or existential) anthropology as valuable analytical tools. By theoretically combining phenomenological anthropology with the anthropology of emotion, the advocated phenomenal justice approach facilitates new knowledge productions about the role emotions play within social processes regarding truth, justice, and memory that are still missing in current debates about transitional justice and reconciliation. In summary, the main goal of the ethnography is to uncover how these emotions are put to work in different lifeworlds, which exemplifies everyday moralities of victims and military officers that to a great extent stir the practical outcomes and underlying motivations of the trials for crimes against humanity. The conceptual combination of feeling and lifeworld in this ethnography exemplifies how victims and military officers experience pain, guilt, remorse, shame, indifference, and revenge, which are the outcome of intersubjective engagements rather than existential facts. Based on these feelings, the ethnography shows how victims and military officers have quite different conceptions of justice, time, and truth that, to important extent, stir the social processes concerning the violence of the last dictatorship in Argentina. The suggested phenomenal justice approach emerged from my findings in Argentina, but in locally adapted form can be used to examine how people from different cultures define and experience emotions that engender social processes concerning atrocities, human rights abuses, and injustices in general.