Researching Violence and Everyday Life in the 1970s: An Ethnographic Approach to the Argentine Military Family

Abstract

This article develops an alternative perspective on the Argentine military, addressing their narratives of everyday life in the 1970s and during the last dictatorship (1976–1983). By approaching the military as a community of families, it analyses how former officers of the regime, their wives and their children recount the years of political violence. Due to its ethnographic bottom‐up approach, the article challenges the traditional focus on the monolithic masculine narratives of the military in Latin America. Instead, it presents an innovative interpretative framework in which different understandings of violence and political confrontation emerge, showing a plurality of under‐researched elements that compose military identities in Argentina.