Transforming the present into past: grammars of the processes of management of violences in the South African local intimacy

• Grant number: 16/22643-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Post-doctor
• Effective date (Start): April 11, 2017
• Effective date (End): December 20, 2017
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Omar Ribeiro Thomaz
• Grantee: Adriana Maria Villalón
• Supervisor: Heidi Grunebaum
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Research place: University of the Western Cape (UWC), South Africa
• Associated to the scholarship: 13/21800-5 - Learning to live together: Ethnography of post-violence in the Basque Country. An interpretation as compared to South Africa, BP.PD

Abstract

Following my former post-doctoral project, this new proposal based in the South African scenery looks to address the structures of the policies of management and institutional intervention of events of violence in the local intimacy. This project will take place by a research stay in the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), under Prof. Heidi Grunebaum supervision. The research is focused on deconstructing the various sides of management and implementation of public policies that regulate internal political conflicts. Importation and application of internationally established concepts in the local context (or exporting them); development of institutional rituals based on reconciliation, pain, empathy and national unity moralities& the interaction with principles of (social and spatial) inclusion and exclusion that endorse national reparation policies from the present and turn it into past. My aim is to analyze how the stellar concept of reconciliation, leading category in the rainbow nation project, still affects the management of the so desired South African national reconfiguration. We need to remark the institutional efforts and investments made to protect its realization and evolution. But, where is the post-apartheid consolidated? How does it take place in spaces where apartheid continues to be part of the everyday life of mostly black communities? How is the evolution of reconciliation being measured? How is, the understanding of apartheid as something negative, taught as a way to construct (internally and externally) a national unity?