Researcher ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0009-0008-5651-3530
Graduation Year
2024
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Anthropology
Reader 1
Ángela Castillo-Ardila
Reader 2
Gabriela Morales
Reader 3
Michelle Berenfeld
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
© 2024 Diego P Borgsdorf
Abstract
The civic-military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) represented a period of unprecedented political violence in Chile — a time in which the government of the socialist president Salvador Allende was overthrown in a bloody coup d’etat, army and police forces detained and tortured people suspected of affiliation with leftist activism, and hundreds of thousands of people were exiled from national territory. Post-dictatorship transitional governments have materialized a contested apparatus of institutions with the purpose of memorializing the victims of such violence, principal among them being the memorial museum. Based on ethnographic and collections research as a worker in the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, I draw from theoretical contributions in new materialism, affect theory, representational theory, and critical infrastructure studies to propose a new way to understand the Chilean memorial museum: affective infrastructure. This thesis is an argument for understanding the Chilean memorial museum as the milieu where converging feelings about the post-dictatorship are acted out. Such feelings occur in the encounter between objects and audiences and take diverging forms, often being suspicious, joyful, or memorial. This contentious emotional texture shows how the post-dictatorship’s affective regime is an unfinished political project, meaning that affective infrastructures do not simply replicate statist ideologies about the transition, but rather, serve as sites of affective transformation, intensity, and controversy. My project focuses on the history of such affective regimes in the post-dictatorship, the indexical representations of political violence offered by rubble and objects associated with exile, and the role of affective infrastructure in de/centralization. These explorations help to project an emotional topography of the post-dictatorship using matter.
Recommended Citation
Borgsdorf Fuenzalida, Diego, "Affective Infrastructure and the Chilean Memorial Museum" (2024). Pitzer Senior Theses. 192.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/pitzer_theses/192
Included in
Latin American Languages and Societies Commons, Museum Studies Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons
Comments
Embargo - 6 months