Lessons from a catastrophe: The emergence of new social and political actors in post -dictatorship Argentina, 1984--2004.

In December 1983, democratic elections ended a brutally repressive seven-year military dictatorship in Argentina. When the military fell, new social and political actors began to surface to assume the space left vacant by the military. These actors emerged from widely disparate domains throughout Argentina, including journalism, law, politics, public health, education, the arts, labor, and many others. In this dissertation, I trace the growth and evolution of some of these new actors, focusing on the emergence of figures from within the specific contexts of civilian political activity, the educational system, and the realm of cultural production. I have chosen these industries because the power of their emergence has made them particularly visible examples of the eruption of social activity that followed in the wake of the dictatorship. Among the topics treated in this dissertation are human rights trials and retroactive justice, peacekeeping operations, educational reform, the development of libraries and archives, state cultural programs, and individual cultural producers and their work to commemorate the traumas of the dictatorship. This dissertation is a story of the intellectual labor of widely disparate individuals in Argentina. I argue that this labor has come to function as a primary element in the building of democracy, and I explore the establishment of new ethical principles and the importance of intellectual work within that process. I also argue that the 1983 transition to democracy brought a remarkable shift that instigated a sudden and powerful upsurge of social and political activity in Argentina. Within this dissertation, I focus on the words and deeds of civilian politicians, military personnel, teachers, librarians, archivists, activists, writers, musicians, architects, and artists, and I explore their active processes of attempting to build a new nation and to come to terms with the trauma of the past.PhDCultural anthropologyLatin American historySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/125543/2/3192818.pd