Cynthia Lazzaroni

Antioquia, Colombia, is home to the world’s largest cluster of genetic early-onset Alzheimer’s. Families also live this illness as la bobera, or “the foolishness,” a curse said to pass through generations. How families live with forgetting remains largely unaddressed despite being central participants in neuroscience research on Alzheimer’s. This gap is especially significant in Colombia, where these families share experiences of political violence and where efforts to preserve memory sustain a collective reckoning with the past. As their capacity to remember wanes, forgetting itself becomes pathologized clinically, socially, and historically. Following this framing, this project attends to how families live and make sense of forgetting, where memory is at once a biomedical object, a fate, and a political demand. It explores how these overlapping forms of knowledge shape everyday life. What happens when neuroscience and a curse account for the same affliction? What are the stakes of forgetting in a context where memory anchors Colombia’s collective and political life? Grounded in long-term anthropological research with families with early-onset Alzheimer’s, with a particular ethnographic attention to memory loss, this project explores forgetting as an analytic rather than a pathology of the entanglement of experience, neuroscience, and collective memory in contemporary Colombia.