Knowledge, Care and Repair. the State-Led Plan for Mass Graves Exhumations in Galicia (Spain).

This paper is based on data gathered during repeated ethnographic fieldwork following the State-led Plan for exhuming mass graves from the civil war and Francoism in Galicia (Spain). It will be essentially based on dense descriptions gathered via the method of participant observation, informal interviews conducted on the spot, and in-depth interviews after the event.

As “landscapes of terror” (Ferrándiz, 2014), mass graves represent a deep necropolitical object, insofar as they were (one of) the Franco regime's expression of “its control over mortality and [its definition of] life as the deployment and manifestation of power” (Mbembe, 2006). These exhumations were first a citizen's process - carried out by civil associations - and then also a state process, as part of the Plan embodied in the Ley de Memoria Democrática of 2022. The aim is similar: to “dignify” the memory of the victims of Francoism.

As a scientific device at the crossroads of various disciplines, exhumations have the legitimacy to raise questions that had long been dismissed in favor of the “exemplary Transition” narrative (Aguilar, 2008). In this context, “the body has an incomparable capacity to reveal crucial features of the conditions in which it lives and dies” (Klinenberg, 2002; p.122), leading to a veritable “corporeal epistemology” (Ibid) in which bodies become revelators of the social norms and situations in which they lived, but also those in force at the time of their exhumation.

The aim of this presentation is twofold. Firstly, to construct a critical reflection on this memorial policy by addressing the question of the construction and use of knowledges in the encounter between citizen and state-led actions. Secondly, to think of exhumations as processes of caring for victims and memories, by focusing on the people and dynamics that put this care in place.