Anthropology Matters Journal 2006, Vol 8 (1)

Post-socialist disclosures: an imperfect translation of personal experience into ethnographic writing By Madalina Florescu (SOAS) During the 1980s, disappearance was one of the means that authoritarian regimes used to control the knowledge of the population. State terror structures political subjectivities, for it produces cultures of fear, where speech becomes as diffused and unlocalisable as fear itself: rumours, denunciations, suspicion. The genre of the bodily practice of the commemoration of terror is, in this text, a symbolic exhumation, which allows the living to mirror themselves in the reflections of the dead. Disclosure is the aesthetic category of this post-mortem fissure that seeks to grasp the past that flashes up at moments of danger, to paraphrase Benjamin (1990), and to endow social disjunctures and the disappearance of language with a cultural form. ‘The tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living