A Generation Without Memories: Understanding Pinochet's Dictatorship Among Chilean University Students
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Through this project, I investigated perceptions and understandings of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973-1989) among university students in Chile, a generation that did not live through the dictatorship yet still interacts with those who did. The main framework for the analysis is that of generations, drawing primarily on Karl Mannheim’s essay “The Sociological Problem of Generations” (1923) and engaging with his ideas of generational location and generation units. As memory is an important discourse surrounding the dictatorship in current Chilean society, I also engage with literature about memory, including Pierre Nora and Andreas Huyssen. In performing this research, I spent summer, 2016 in Santiago, Chile, interviewing students from La Universidad de Chile and La Universidad Católica while also sitting in on a class at La Universidad de Chile and exploring sites of memory. I argue that, not experiencing the dictatorship directly but still having their lives shaped by those who did, university students experience a unique generational location, one that divides itself into generational units due to the controversy over the dictatorship and political spaces of their universities. These students still engage in the discourse of memory surrounding the dictatorship, particularly emphasizing that it can’t be forgotten. However, their temporal distance from the dictatorship creates an emotional distance as well, something that enables them to acknowledge the dictatorship while still focusing on important current issues. The generation of university students therefore illuminates Chile’s process of reconciliation and moving forward while still interacting with the past and the polarization it created.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | [ca. March 2016] - May 14, 2017 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Fischer, Kylie |
|---|
Subjects
| Subject | generations |
|---|---|
| Subject | memory |
| Subject | chile |
| Subject | pinochet |
| Subject | students |
| Subject | Stanford Department of Anthropology |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC-ND).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Fischer, Kylie. "A Generation Without Memories: Understanding Pinochet's Dictatorship Among Chilean University Students." Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: http://purl.stanford.edu/vb795px8802
Collection
Undergraduate Research Papers, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University.
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- Contact
- kyfisch@stanford.edu
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