ABSTRACT
Argentina's recent trials for crimes against humanity must be understood against a backdrop of forty years of social struggle for truth, justice and memory and against oblivion and impunity. This chapter examines the anthropological literature on violence and examines how local workings of time shape social processes of state violence, transition and reconstruction. It also examines how transitional justice practices are not always linear movements away from violence and suffering, yet can also exist as ongoing moral practices to keep violence and suffering. Assuming that the social world is historically conditioned, temporality is an important dimension of how people experience the world in the here and now. The chapter argues that many people living in post-conflicts societies understand in a different manner how past, present and future are connected, a view that differs from the modern linear time frame quite common in transitional justice theories. It discusses long-term transformative social processes in the aftermath of collective violence.
