ABSTRACT
Julie Taylor's interpretation is quite different from those that have tried to enhance the social significance of the Nunca Mas recollections. As Taylor mentions, Thomas Nagel emphasized the importance of acknowledgment alone in the Nunca Mas inquiries, and The New Yorker journalist Lawrence Wechsler tried further to elevate these acts of acknowledgment as being somehow sacramental. One of the many striking aspects of Taylor's discussion of the Nunca Mas documentation of state terrorism in Latin America is the new ground that it breaks in the current revival of interest in the study of collective memory, not only in anthropology but in cultural studies more broadly. In US society, one can think of the Warren Commission, and the Watergate hearings none perhaps as evocative as the Nunca Mas recollections, but certainly in the same category of official rememberings.
