Victims dealing with collective suffering: moral structures and emerging sacralizations.

Abstract

The articles collected here show how the forms of mobilization of victims and the management of collective suffering are crossed by their relationship with the space of the sacred, understood in a broad and diverse sense. They present, in a novel way, the various articulations between the grammars of the sacred and the activism of survivors and relatives of victims, the place of specialists in the consecration of their figures in public space and the policies of managing their suffering. They allow us to review the actions of the black movement and the groups of relatives of urban violence in Brazil, the practices of priests identified with the option for the poor and the emergence of organizations of relatives of victims of institutional violence in Argentina, the emergence of new forms of spirituality and management of the past of victims of state terrorism in Argentina and Uruguay, the initiatives of the movement of relatives of victims of terrorist violence in the Basque Country,  the strategies for the protection and / or denunciation of women victims of sexual violence in Argentina and Paraguay, and the ventures of the groups that manage to get out of apartheid in South Africa. From the reading of the works, the way in which the public intervention of these groups institutes truth regimes that stress and / or resignify the classic demands of memory, truth and justice and the modes of management of the past established from the grammar is highlighted. victim-offender binary.