The Aftermath of War: Survival and History
In 2013, a rural Syrian community living not far from the Syrian-Lebanese border, involved in the revolution, was violently expelled from their home during a counterinsurgency campaign led by the Syrian regime and its allies. Displaced in Lebanon, the community built a camp and a school adorned with lush gardens that recalled their lost land, while shrouding the horrors of the war in silence. However, memories of the war spontaneously resurfaced in children’s paintings and nightmares, as well as in adults’ recollections of their past everyday lives, requiring a renewed effort to tame and mould this past into a specific historical knowledge for the community.
In this talk, I ask: Why is this past so crucial in shaping survival in the aftermath? I examine what type of history/story this collective wartime predicament requires and why it is essential when crafted for the community’s youngest generation, who lived through, witnessed and survived the violence of the counterinsurgency and expulsion. Survival, I argue, requires not only a retrieval of the ordinary (Das 2007), but also a serious engagement with questions of responsibility and complicity, history and historicity, even in the immediate aftermath of war or disaster.
Veronica Ferreri is a Global Marie Curie Fellow at the Dept of Humanities in Venice’s University of Ca’ Foscari and an affiliated researcher at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Waterloo (Canada). Her MSCA project Archivwar – Archives in Times of War – examines the centrality of the archive of legal documents in the life of Syrian families living in Europe. She works at the intersection of Social Anthropology and Migration Studies with a focus on exile and displacement, solidarity and vernacular humanitarianism, and bureaucracy and documents. She gained her PhD from SOAS University of London in 2018 and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin between 2018 and 2021. Her PhD thesis entitled “A state of permanent loss: war and displacement in Syria and Lebanon” examines the experience of loss and survival in the aftermath of revolution and war and it was awarded with the Leigh Douglas Memorial Prize by BRISMES in 2019. Her work appears in Citizenship Studies, Allegra Lab, Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
Online, 5 December 2024