Democratising Collective Memory Through Forensic Exhumations in Spain

Abstract

Following the close of Spanish Civil War (1936–39) a dictatorship was installed by Francisco Franco which saw his narrative of the conflict embedded in the landscape of an ideologically divided nation through monuments and mass graves. The dictatorship was followed by the period of Transition (1975–81) whereby amnesty was negotiated leaving the crimes of the past ensconced in private memory. The recent wave of exhumations of mass graves aim to shed light on the hidden buried world containing legacies of Spain's recent past. This paper examines the experiences of participants in exhumations with expertise in the disciplines of history, archaeology, forensics, and psychology. It contrasts their narratives of silence and lack of awareness about Spain's mass graves with the work of exhuming the Disappeared, understood by members of the exhumation movement as a pedagogical mechanism of social memory that operates through the resignification of the dead as a counternarrative of the past.