Where war dwells

Abstract

This essay traces the entangled legacies of political violence, memory, and kinship by following the life of the author's father, whose adult years unfolded under Chile's dictatorship (1973–1990). Through intimate conversations and ethnographic attention to domestic life, it explores how closeness to and eventual disillusionment with state violence sediment into everyday gestures, silences, and hauntings, composing the inheritance of dictatorship as a lived condition. As familial love and political history converge, this work considers how the shared labor of remembrance may reopen pathways for healing—and how anthropology may itself become a practice of reciprocal reckoning.