Piergiorgio Di Gimianini

The proposed workshop brings together socio-cultural anthropologists from Latin America and the global north whose research focuses on the logics and socio-political effects of reparation in Latin America. Participants will explore the profound implications of reparation within fields such as post-conflict reconciliation, inter-ethnic relations and state intervention, and natural resource disputes, which are often treated as separate domains of analysis in existing literature. Contributions will explore three processes significant to the analysis of reparation politics: the imagination of pasts, presents and futures set in motion by the promises of reparations among both governmental actors and targeted beneficiaries; the translation of past damages and ongoing suffering into governmental interventions and/or the social responsibility programs of private enterprises; and the reconfiguration of contested forms of belonging that emerge from the implementation of reparation policies. Taken together, different contributions of this workshop will illustrate how reparation policies’ promises of restoring past life conditions coexist with new ways of imagining the future and in turn, new social and political practices subject to emerging contestations. With a focus on the future effects of reparation rather than its implication for memory and historical consciousness, this workshop aims to provide new analytical frameworks for the study of reparation politics in Latin America and beyond.