Experiences of Engagement and Detachment when Counting the Dead for Menos Días Aquí, a Civilian-Led Count of the Dead of Mexico’s Drugs War

Abstract

By looking at the work of the Barcelona-based association for peace in Mexico, Nuestra Aparente Rendición (Our Apparent Surrender), I explore how people participating in a project which carries out a civilian-led national count of the dead as a result of the drugs war in Mexico, Menos Días Aquí (Fewer Days Here), narrate their experience of counting the dead as an interplay between engagement and detachment. Employing theoretical insights from recent anthropological work on detachment, insights taken from perspectivism and also anthropological insights into the nature of embodiment and narrative emplacement, I show how activists’ accounts imply that an alternation between these states affects how they relate to and imagine the dead, forms an essential way of managing the way in which they experience their activism, and affects the way in which they deal with the realities they encounter as a result of counting. I argue that, when describing how people cope with violence knowledge, we need to overcome the dualities inherent in our tools of analysis, and begin to see engagement and detachment as an integrated aspect of experience which, in this case, are not only integral to being able to carry out the process of counting on an individual level, but also for the overall aims of the project itself to be met.

Keywords:

• Mexico
• activism
• violence
• engagement
• detachment

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the UK Economic and Social Research Council for supporting this research through the awarding of an ESRC 1+3 Grant.

Notes

1. There are in fact no ‘proven’ statistics about the number of victims of Mexico’s drugs war. Figures given by different sources vary widely, and the reliability of most is questionable. These figures, then, should be taken more as indicators of the scale of the violence rather than as concrete evidence.