Translated by Blossom Ah Ket.

In one of his most harrowing books, the poet Antonio Gamoneda (2003, 120) (perhaps bringing to the present a childhood of fear and poverty) sang: “Such is the age of iron in the throat. Already / everything is incomprehensible. However, / you still love what you have lost.” This ambivalence of memory, of love for a time gone by, tenderness even, and at the same time the realization that that absent moment was full of iron and cruelty, make these verses a dazzling experience for the reader. But they do so, above all, thanks to a probing of writing, a problematizing search for its limits, as a practice of the sensitive: a straining of the language that reveals the authentic dimension of the human being who forges it. It is in the fierce challenge of embodied language (and its contradictory valences) that it is charged with expressive power.

In my opinion this same spirit is somehow present, in Sin Cesar, a book-object that is the result of an all-encompassing vision of the world. Its anthropological legibility is directed towards the terrible experience of political violence in an area of north-eastern Colombia. Laura Langa Martínez and Ariel Arango Prada have turned it into a body within the publishing editorial Entrelazando, which they themselves decided to set up.

And I say “vision of the world” because this is not your average anthropological monograph. Something like the academic translation of a scholarly investigation whose academic horizon was a scientific journal article, or a volume embedded in a collection oriented to an academic audience. No. Sin Cesar is a bid to go further, to pursue another notion of audience, to engage in dialogue (contagiously and courageously) with a plurality of social knowledge, in pursuit of an organic anthropology which, without being pedagogical, also seeks to encounter others in epistemological (co-)presence. In (co-)theorising, in apprehending the real through different intellectual means, without renouncing at all what is real, it seeks to meet with others in epistemological (co)presence, in (co)theorisation, in the apprehension of the real through different intellectual means. Without renouncing aesthetics, attached to experience, disbelieving the university pulpit as the only source of authority; where analytical rigor, conceptual precision, the methodological use of different existing ethnographic strategies (interviews, participant observation, archives, etc.) are interwoven with the sociological reconstruction of the “structures of the lifeworld” (as Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann 2013 would say) that inhabit the subjects with whom Laura and Ariel have worked. Approaching this work involves touching the space we are told about, soaking up it, and then restoring its credibility as a “historical individuality” (in the words of Jean-Claude Passeron 2011).

But let's slow down. Let us try to approach this book-object with the aim of showing its richness and, along our way, vividly encourage its reading. The different textures of which it is composed are surprising from the outset. We find a multitude of mediums that translate the narrative thread, that turn it into substance, physicality, paper. It is not a minor or secondary element at all. It becomes, in probably one of its most determined efforts, an attempt to transfer the space and the investigated universe (the Department of Cesar, between the Andean and Caribbean regions) to the sensitive experience of the reader. To open its pages is to caress different weights of paper, to endow the graphic body with an ontological status, an embodiment of human diversity, of landscapes, ecosystems, smells, winds, sunsets, wastelands, which populate the entire work. Each turn of the page is also a new layer of anthropological meaning. A brief exploration of a place that reveals itself to us little by little. We advance in our understanding of the events and social practices that took place there as we caress with our hand a plethora of textures that reflect the echo of those same events. Never before have I so strongly felt the heuristic power of a format and design at the service of the pulse of ethnographic writing.

Along with the heterogeneity of textures, we also find a myriad of sociological materials: ethnographic descriptions (with a powerful poetic breath), discursive fragments, documents from various local archives, newspaper clippings, photographs, maps, posters, remains of conversations, literal transcriptions, grey literature, norms, laws, isolated phrases read or heard in the course of fieldwork... The archive becomes more than a mere research resource in this book. It is another social subject, a protagonist in its own right. The archive speaks to us of people who populate life from its historical depths and becomes an unshakeable echo (I would even say idiolect) of themselves, capable of showing in their complex relationality the events that have taken place. Everything is in motion; nothing is completely stabilised. Laura and Ariel's anthropological writing seeks not to close the meaning as it is still an open and disputed wound. Political violence in Colombia is more than an exercise in memory, it is also a tremor of the present. Reviewing (and touching anew) those archival materials that the book accurately takes in means going through them again through experience, which allows us to recover a latency that has nothing to do with the passive review of files that the historian of past events makes on the shelves of administrative warehouses. Seen from here, this collection of materials is an infinite, stammering, impetuous repertoire of a violence (in a remote region of Colombia) that remains stuck to the footprints of its own chronicle.

In addition to the physical plurality (of paper, of different types of information), there is also another plurality of a more conceptual nature. I am referring to the book's own theorization. Sin Cesar distils dramatic social facts and their interpretation, using various cognitive and thinking-feeling (sentipensante) mechanisms. There are moments when the analytical focus stops at the empirical, at emicity, at the construction of ethnographic data of enormous subjective significance for the social actors themselves. At other times, the heart of the writing migrates into territories where the rigor of theory unfolds its own convictions. Words such as “ceasing,” “execution,” “burying,” become the precarious (ephemeral) guide from which the different contents of the work are articulated. We visit sites, attend assemblies and meetings, discover corpses, wander among the remains of mass graves, lose ourselves in the forest and its sounds. We get to know different mining operations, meet people from very different walks of life, in a myriad of perceptions that make this ethnography sensitive. But in all these journeys we are able to gradually weave together, like tesserae, the complete mosaic of the social, political, economic, and cultural reality of a region marked by abuse and structural violence. It is because of this that theorization, emicity, sensitivity, and intellectual rigor christen each other in this text full of reading possibilities.

In anthropology, much has been said about the importance of writing, about the need to problematize our modes of narration in order to restore the channel of communication between the world of empirical obligations and the world of theoretical production, its logical rigor. Having become aware of the false door that the postmodern renunciation of any heuristic possibility implied (and which led to the crisis of representation that the discipline has experienced and, for some, has still been experiencing for decades), the paths are now reoriented towards making the “nucleus of anthropological legitimacy tangible in the research work itself” and in its relationship with the “reality of reference” (as Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan 2018, 2-3 would say). Well, Sin Cesar has the virtue of gaining its own legitimacy in its anchorage to the empirical, to the real world that is told to us, to that “having been there” without renouncing at any time the researcher's own subjectivity, to his or her own preferences and emotions. Far from trying to hide them, they are made explicit so that they also play an epistemic role, in a sort of inter-subjective dialogue between the protagonists of history, the subjects who study and narrate it, and the readers who contribute to its reconstruction through our own intellectual acts.

Every review is also a kind of invitation to read. There are many reasons to get lost in Sin Cesar, but if I had to highlight one, it would be the possibility of inhabiting a social world through displacement, through a strangeness that becomes tangible and physical as the pages turn, and at the same time mundane and close at hand by the end of the book. When we close the last of its pages, a whole moral, political, existential, and ecological universe fills our eyes, and it is difficult to forget that one day we were there, in the tremor, at the scene of the crime.

Notes

Translator’s Note: It was a translation choice to leave the title of the book Sin Cesar in its original Spanish. Sin Cesar is an expression which translates literally to “without cease/ing”, and can mean “unceasingly,” or “endless.” Significantly, the name of the Colombian department which Langa and Arango’s book centers on is Cesar. It is difficult to capture this layered meaning and play on words in English, and as such is best left untranslated.