Protracted violence leaves wounds both on people’s bodies and in the landscape where it occurs, regardless of whether rural or urban. These wounds, despite being unhealed, provide a rich opportunity to explore life beyond the undeniable suffering associated with political violence. Wounds invoke action; they require tending and attention. Thus, they also become sites for practices of care. In this talk, I explore how, in the context of armed conflict and war, a geography emerges that simultaneously encompasses spaces of terror and suffering alongside those of solidarity and social resistance. These spaces are, thus, a complex entanglement of death-making and life-sustaining practices. I will focus on the life- affirming practices and collective care that are intricately connected to place and place-making. My aim is to highlight how people and landscapes shape one another, revealing a grammar that articulates the continuum of life and death amidst war through the unhealed wounds that persist in both individuals and their environments. My observations and arguments are informed by two strands of ethnographic research related to the Colombian armed conflict: one concerning forensic practices for victim identification, and the other centered on the efforts of victims; families to search for the disappeared.
María Fernanda Olarte-Sierra is a medical anthropologist and anthropologist of science. She bases her research practice on feminist and decolonial ethnographic methods. She explores the intersections of health, law, technology, and the body in Latin America, particularly in relation to collective suffering and mass violence. Her primary focus is on forensic victim identification and the search for the forcibly disappeared in the Colombian armed conflict, as well as the experiences and care of childhood cancer in Latin America.