Between acknowledgment and the possibility of doing harm: The experience of alterity in the case of a former political prisoner of the Chilean dictatorship
Type de matériel :
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Based on a qualitative methodology of a biographical type, this article analyzes the unique case of the life story of a 73-year-old woman who was a political prisoner and tortured during the Chilean civil and military dictatorship. We seek to determine the sense that the other takes on as alterity in her subjective experience. First, it is the figure of the other that appears in the account of prison, torture, and political violence. In this case, alterity is experienced in the passage from places of comfort and support, as in political camaraderie, to others characterized by the violence and brutality embodied in the role of the torturer and the armed forces. A particular situation occurs when the aggressor is paradoxically perceived as a good being. Second, the alterity presents itself a posteriori, downstream from the situation of political violence, in the transmission of that experience. It assumes a form in the role of the witness, as a reparative experience associated with the acknowledgment it implies, but one that is also dreaded because of the risk of “harming” the receiver of the account. Third, the research context is presented as a particular instance showing the encounter between the participant and an other, a researcher, who, as occurred in the previous case, in addition to his role of researcher, serves as a witness.
Réseaux sociaux