Dwellers of memory : an ethnography of place, memory and violence in Medellin, Colombia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation documents the memories of Medellin's city dwellers and explores how people in violent urban contexts make sense of violence and deal with its presence in their lives. This study is defined as an anthropology of remembering; it is an ethnographic observation of the practices of remembering and forgetting and how these practices shape and are shaped by the lived experience of violence. The dissertation is built on extensive fieldwork in the Colombian city of Medellin with a cross section of women, youth and community leaders. The thesis argues that when the uncertainty and paradox created by widespread forms of violence threaten to destroy the social and material worlds of Colombian city dwellers, memory becomes a strategic tool for human and cultural survival. The creation of an oral history of death and the dead, the presence of a local social knowledge that assists city dwellers in their safe circulation in and through the city, and the maintenance of practices of place making are examples of how city dwellers deal with the devastating effects of violence in their lives. The thesis develops a place-based exploration of memory and violence and approaches place as a physical, sensory, social and imaginative experience that maintains a sense of continuity between the past and the every day life of Medellin's city dwellers. The two connecting concepts that ground the analysis of the relationship between people, memory and violence are those of "sense of place" and "communities of memory." The dimensions of human agency, cultural survival and human suffering are central to the exploration of memory, place and violence developed in this thesis. From this perspective, the thesis takes to task anthropological works on violence that emphasize the routinization of terror and fear for those who live amidst widespread violence. The thesis discusses the multiple ways in which memory is disputed in Colombia and the risks posed by a local reading of violence as intrinsic to the history of the country. It concludes that when individuals are faced with realities such as life and death, the familiar faces of the actors of violence and the weakening of the social and ethical fabric of their communities, they do not stand in definite positions and cannot be defined in simple terms such as victims and perpetrators. Thus, it can be recognized that although violence plays a central role in the Medellin city dwellers processes of identity formation, it does not exhaust these possibilities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".