Discomforting ethnography and contentious biographies: the case of Argentina

This article explores the entanglements of emotion and thought that are a pre‐condition to personal and professional engagements with place, particularly where temporal and spatial dislocations produce unexpected gaps and connections between the ethnographer and her or his research subjects. Personal memory and experience provide an awkward but necessary guide when exploring Argentina's history of violence and its connection to different kinds of survival and recognition that shape the interactions between different political and generational cohorts. I explore the contradictory ways in which memory and politics may contribute to defining and redefining historical subjects by focusing on the example of a victim of violence who does not fit easily within the commemorative and politicised delineations of what is considered to be a ‘lost’ and, sometimes, a heroic generation. Through this exploration, the article aims to reconnect the personal and the political through a dialogue between ethnographic and biographical encounters as discussed in the Introduction to this collection.