Reflections on El Salvador’s Long Postwar

Lotti Silber, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the Colin Powell School, City College of New York of the City University of New York has a post on In The After: Reflections on El Salvador’s Long Postwar for Panoramas. In it, Lotti reflects on a conference we attended at the UIGCS in 2012.

My work, though not squarely focused on violence or the displacement of young bodies across borders can offer another kind of reading and point to the ways in which people live through the everyday of aftermaths and violence. Since the early 1990s, I have been writing about El Salvador’s now long postwar. My anthropological research took me to the former conflict zone and department of Chalatenango in 1993, a year after the signing of the peace accords. In my book, Everyday Revolutionaries, I provide a peopled account of the entangled aftermaths of war and displacement, aftermaths that have produced postwar deception and disillusionment and an "obligated" migration of former everyday insurgents—Salvadorans who were the backbone of popular organizing and armed struggle.

Recently, I published an article in the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. With this piece I pondered what doesn’t get said about post war El Salvador and why. Specifically, I initiated a conversation on the relationship between humanitarian logics and projects and explored a discursive shift in El Salvador that enunciates a history of militancy. This interest stems from my long-term fieldwork and academic engagement with postwar El Salvador and as such I am invested in thinking through analytic and methodological conversations on longitudinal research and what it means to return to the field.

You can read some of my thoughts from that conference in El Salvador's brutal civil war: What we still don't know (Al Jazeera).