Chirp, chirp

5.5 hours researching/reading, 0.5 hours administrivia

Greetings from Bryant Park, right next to the NY Public Library. There's free WiFi here, so I'm blogging outdoors on a lovely summer afternoon. There's a little sparrow behind me chirping his heart out. Guess it must be mating season. It's rare that you can see an individual bird moving its beak to chirp, as opposed to hearing birds chirping ambiently.

Birds are on my mind, as the Spanish equivalent "pajaros" is one of the many nicknames given to irregular armed forces during La Violencia in Colombia. I was at the NYPL this afternoon looking into regional studies of La Violencia. This morning, in preparation, I started putting together a database of information about the different states of Colombia, to help me decide whether comparing two states makes sense for my dissertation.

The bottom line from today is that the regions of Tolima and Antioquia each have one very strong regional study that draws upon significant primary evidence available through the state government or local universities. Whether those two make sense for a comparison is another question, but it's good to have that base to work with.

One of the studies I reviewed had one of the strangest and most disturbing sets of images I've ever seen. One of the hard things about studying La Violencia is the extreme forms that violence took in the countryside. This book, a study of the violence in the state of Tolima (not the primary one for that region, but still useful), featured a series of illustrations based on interviews with peasants who lived through the period. They illustrate the forms of murder that took place. The illustrations themselves are little more than silhouettes of a generic human form, like the outline of a crash-test dummy. But on successive pages, that innocent, clinical silhouette went through the most outlandish tortures, one at a time, demonstrating what interviewees recalled having seen happened. (Exhibit A, Exhibit B, etc.) These are schematic drawings, and no blood is shown, but the schematic little body parts are simply...elsewhere. The ratio of horror of content to blandness of presentation was astronomical, and quite unsettling, to say the least.

Anyway, kind of a downer note to end on, but it was a productive day overall. Tomorrow I'll be back to continue looking at regional studies, and I'm hoping by the end of the week to be able to make a decision about the regional comparison piece.

In the meantime, I'll try to take some time to write tomorrow to balance out the research.