Ellen Moodie
Assistant Professor
My work addresses violence and insecurity in Central America, with a particular focus on social suffering as it is constituted and revealed through talk, mass media, and historical archives. Much of my research has taken place in the postwar ruins of San Salvador, El Salvador, where I have carried out ethnographic fieldwork over the past twelve years.
I first arrived there in 1993 expecting to learn about the changes wrought by peace accords. I quickly discovered that talking about peace meant talking about crime and insecurity. The country’s murder rate in the mid-1990s put it among the most dangerous places in the world. I heard countless versions of the angry Salvadoran saga of violence after war. Discourses on fear and loss of control linked all remnant “sides” from the conflict. So I began to explore how meanings of violence and citizens’ expectations of the state—circulating in conversation, daily news, and later on the Internet— were transformed in the transition from war.
The research yielded my Ph.D. dissertation and now book manuscript, “It’s Worse than the War”: Telling Everyday Danger in Postwar San Salvador. In that study I attempt to comprehend the convergence—or clash—of the borders of the intimate and the public. I investigate intricacies of fear, distrust and insecurity through analysis of fragments of experience entextualized in conversational narratives, as well as of discourse circulated publicly in mass media and literature. How, I ask, are these feelings, these ways of knowing and being, shared? How do they circulate in public signs? And what are the consequences for public life, especially in a time of a consciously narrated political and cultural transition?
Through articles, chapters and other presentations of my work, as well as the book (see my curriculum vita), I propose that the circulation of stories of danger and violence, occurring at the intersection of self and other, citizen and state, powerful and powerless, in the 1990s became a way to talk about and evaluate the advent of a fragile and conflictive democracy. The joint production of such stories among Salvadorans has reshaped memories of war and produced emergent understandings of social relations in the postwar period.
The implications of my research on postwar experiences in the city of San Salvador reach beyond the bounds of my specific conclusions and past their immediate context. Rising crime rates, fear of crime, and the limits to the rule of law continue to demand attention not only throughout Latin America but around much of the globe. Post-conflict, post-authoritarian transitions are commonly accompanied by widespread violence, violence that infuses new versions of insecurity into everyday life and violence that refashions views of the past through shifting historical consciousness. More and more theorists point to a privatizing or depoliticizing of violence corresponding to globalization and the recalibration of state functions towards a post-national neoliberalism. Such violence stymies efforts toward democratization. Human-rights discourse, with its focus on states, has only recently begun to confront issues of citizen insecurity in a transnational, globalizing era.
Research Interests:
Semiotics, narrative and mass media, violence, death and human rights, post-conflict transition; Central America, El Salvador.
EDUCATION:
Ph.D. University of Michigan, 2002
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:
Articles & Book Chapters:
| 2007 | "Dollars and Dolores in Postwar El Salvador." In Encounters with Money, edited by Allison Truitt and Stefan Senders. Oxford, U.K.: Berg Publishers. |
| 2006 | “Microbus Crashes and Coca-Cola Colones: The Value Of Death in 'Free Market' El Salvador." American Ethnologist 32 (1) Feburary 2006. |
| 2005 | “Como rastrear al delincuente salvadoreño a través del siglo veinte." In Memoria del Primer Encuentro de Historia de El Salvador, edited by Margarita Silva and Carlos G. López. San Salvador, El Salvador: CONCULTURA. |
| 2004 | “El Capitán Cinchazo: Blood and Meaning in Postwar San Salvador." In Landscapes of Struggle: Community, Politics and Society in El Salvador, edited by Aldo Lauria Santiago and Leigh Binford. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. |
| 2001 | "Prologue: Desire." In Michigan Feminist Studies 15 (2000-01). |
COURSES TAUGHT:
| ANTH 103 | ANTHROPOLOGY IN A CHANGING WORLD |
| ANTH 182 | LATIN AMERICAN CULTURES |
| ANTH 471 | ETHNOGRAPHY THROUGH LANGUAGE |
| ANTH 515E | ANTHROPOLOGY OF CENTRAL AMERICA |