Isabel Piper: Speaking in the key of memory
During the recent meeting of the CLACSO Steering Committee in El Salvador, we were able to talk with Isabel Piper, social psychologist, teacher and researcher in the psychology department of the University of Chile.
First, Piper summarized the general guidelines defined at the meeting. He praised the presentation of the new logo and the new website, a symbol of “the fresh wind of transformations, of changes, of some continuities, but also of these new things and these new aspirations.”
When discussing her specialty, “collective memory,” Isabel Piper explained that “I’ve increasingly come to think that collective memory is part of, or a strategy for, transitional processes. During conflicts, during dictatorships, during wars, or during armed confrontations, we don’t talk about memory: we talk about trauma, we talk about the effects of violence. Social scientists and professionals ask themselves how to process the impact of violence, how to end it. We talk about trauma, we talk about prayer, but we don’t talk about memory. The closest thing we have is the idea of leaving a record in archives or some other kind of record so that it can be remembered later. So, I think that issues of memory are introduced in conjunction with attempts to resolve conflicts, something we can see in Colombia, for example, where every time there has been an attempt to develop a peace agreement, some kind of memory initiative is established—university courses, conferences—and the topic begins to enter the public debate.” And in the transitions of the Southern Cone it is very clear, because they have a mark: there are people who talk about the imaginary line, about the transitions, about how an imaginary line is established that marks a before and after.”
Isabel Piper summarizes that “what makes the difference is the theme of human rights violations and political violence: the refounding needs to mark a before and after, to mark what is left behind, and memory is functional to that, because memory begins to speak of what is left behind. So, during the development of the conflict, the violence is denounced. In contrast, in transitions, the violent past begins to be denounced; it is no longer the violent present that is denounced: we speak in terms of memory to refer to something that has already happened or something that is already left behind.”
