Circumnavigating La Realidad

In the case of the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, memory has been imagined as a conduit for both the recurrence of trauma and the possibility of redemption. My travels through the order and chaos of Chiapas, which is in a state of counter-insurgency or ‘low-intensity warfare’, revealed a multiplicity of memories and forms of remembering. Focusing on anthropologist Michael Taussig’s ideas of the ‘death-space’ and ‘silencing’, I will show how through story-telling the idea of memory can be understood to transcend discourses of trauma and redemption.