Introduction

This chapter considers the practices of remembering and forgetting among youth in the Colombian city of Medellin as part of humanistic anthropology project that examines the ways individuals cope with violence and construct themselves as subjects. It examines how youth reconfigure their lives and their cultural worlds in the face of widespread violence that transgresses familiar boundaries and destroys basic social supports and networks of trust. The chapter describes unique type of oral narrative and memory practice organized around death and the dead. It also describes the narrative forms of this oral history, the ways in which death is remembered as event, and some of the genres of this local history. It argues that in Medellín death and the dead have an oral history. The chapter explores local social constructions of fear within specific set of narratives about ghosts, witches, curses, satanic figures and possessed bodies. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.