On the question of historical injuries: Transitional justice,anthropology and the vicissitudes of listening (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

In this paper I am concerned with how certain kinds of violence and injuries, located simultaneously in multiple spaces and temporalities, question the prospect of what I call an ‘imagined new future’. I take the proceedings of a recent workshop on transitional justice, held in a university situated in the global North, as an avenue to unpack this idea. Here, I distinguish two instances when testimonies of violence embodied by survivors, may challenge broader assumptions about transitional justice. Firstly, when the prospect of historical injuries emerge, when difference and inequality – despite the promise of new post‐violence nations – are in fact woven together into a longue durée, a longer temporality, that remains beyond the theoretical contours and technical mandates defined by experts in the field. From this perspective, transitions may be experienced by specific communities not as fractures but as relative continuities, for example, of historically rooted political and economic hegemonies. Secondly, when the voice of survivors fracture the theoretical space created by larger discourses of reconciliation. In this case, they may incarnate an unforgiving victim, displaced outside the moral economy of reconciliation that stresses forgiveness and unity over resentment and fragmentation. In the end, the question I would like to pose is how certain forms of violence are rendered unintelligible by mainstream transitional justice discourses.     

To see or to be seen… is that the question? An evaluation of palaeolithic sites’ visual presence and their role in social organization

Visibility is one of the most common features considered when analyzing site location; visual control of a territory is usually considered to be a desirable characteristic for a prehistoric settlement. However, the role that visibility could have played in the perception of sites, as a significant element of palaeolithic landscapes, has been rarely evaluated. Sites can act not only as settlements but as places for population aggregations, social interactions and symbolic activities; in this context, the relevance presence of a site within the landscape could have been an influencing factor in site location preferences. This paper focuses on the visual presence of a set of sites from Late palaeolithic Cantabria (Northern Iberian Peninsula), and evaluates how the way they were perceived could have been related to their role in the social organization of foraging communities.