Abstract

JARAMILLO MARIN, Jefferson; PARRADO PARDO, Erika Paola; RODRIGUEZ ARIAS, Mery Edith  and  SOLARTE RODRIGUEZ, Mario Roberto. Imagining the future in the midst of conflict in Magdalena Medio, Colombia. Hallazgos [online]. 2021, vol.18, n.36, pp.323-363.  Epub July 01, 2021. ISSN 1794-3841.  https://doi.org/10.15332/2422409x.6307.

Institutional and community exercises on the memories of the Colombian conflict have gained prominence in the last two decades. In the midst of the lights and shadows of this memorial boom, this reflection article poses the question: in what sense does the recourse to memory allow us to understand local ways of navigating the convulsive present and imagining individual and collective future scenarios when one has been the victim of disappearance or forced displacement? The research from which the article derives was based on a qualitative, interdisciplinary and participatory work developed between 2014 and 2017 in the Magdalena Medio region (Middle Magdalena Region, Colombia) with displaced persons and relatives of the disappeared. The field experience and the dialogue with the social and cultural studies of memory allow us to perceive that, although the present of the people with whom we talk are full of uncertainty, the social imagination of the future is a daily resource to face contexts affected or fractured by various types of violence. The main conclusion is that the memories that are recognized in their transformative potential advocate for the activation of local hope and community illusion, rather than being only reconstructive exercises of the affections suffered.

Keywords : Armed conflict; Future; Imagination of the future; Collective memory; Transforming potential of memory; Social transformation.

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