Penn Calendar Penn A-Z School of Arts and Sciences University of Pennsylvania

Violence and the Legacies of Civil War (Lotti Silber and Deborah Yashar)

Thursday, February 12, 2015 - 4:30pm to 6:30pm

Silverstein Forum, Stiteler Hall First Floor (Accessibility)

Co-sponsored by the Penn Latin American and Latino Studies Program.

Lotti Silber: "In the After: Anthropological Reflections on Postwar El Salvador"
Note: Prof. Silber will present ongoing research extending from this previously published paper.
Deborah Yashar: "Institutions and Citizenship: Reflections on the Illicit"
Moderated by Deborah Thomas (Penn Anthropology).

THIS WORKSHOP PRESENTS two papers that examine the causes, effects and remedies of violence in a region so often torn by civil war.

Lotti Silber is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the City College of New York. The recipient of various fellowships and awards, Lotti has published her work widely. Her overarching work explores postwar processes in one of El Salvador's former warzones and a region known for its peasant revolutionary participation. She documents what she terms the entangled aftermaths of war and displacement, aftermaths that have produced postwar deception and disillusionment and an "obligated" migration. Her book, Everyday Revolutionaries: Gender, Violence and Disillusionment in Postwar El Salvador (2011) unmasks how community members are asked contradictorily and in different contexts to relinquish their identities as “revolutionaries” and to develop a new sense of themselves as productive yet marginal postwar citizens via the same rubric of “participation” that fueled their revolutionary action. Everyday Revolutionaries received the 2013 International Latino Book Award in the Best First Book, Nonfiction category.

Deborah J. Yashar is Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University. She is also co-director of the Project on Democracy and Development. Her research focuses on the intersection of democracy and citizenship, with publications on the origins and endurance of political regimes; the relationship between citizenship regimes, local autonomy, and ethnic politics; collective action and contentious politics; interest representation and party systems; and globalization. She is the author of two books: Demanding Democracy: Reform and Reaction in Costa Rica and Guatemala (1997) and Contesting Citizenship in Latin America: The Rise of Indigenous Movements and the Postliberal Challenge (2005), which received the 2006 Best Book Prize, awarded by the New England Council on Latin American Studies (NECLAS) and the 2006 Mattei Dogan Honorable Mention, awarded by the Society for Comparative Research. She has also written several articles published in leading journals and edited volumes.