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This dissertation centers on fragments of Salvadoran postwar experience entextualized as crime narratives, shared in everyday conversation and absorbed into newspaper articles and television reports produced in the mid-1990s. In 1996, El Salvador's murder rate surpassed wartime levels and showed it to be the most violent in Latin America. This thesis thus asks, what does unremitting, everyday violence mean to people in the context of transition from war? It argues that the circulation of stories of danger and violence, occurring at the intersection of self and other, citizen and state, the powerful and powerless, became one way to talk about and evaluate the postwar transition in El Salvador. It suggests that the joint production of such stories among Salvadorans worked to reshape memories of the war and to yield emergent understandings of social relations in the postwar period.
The thesis is based on research conducted in San Salvador between 1994 and 1999, using ethnographic field methods, mass media and literature research, and tape-recorded interviews. Drawing on anthropological and linguistic anthropological theories of semiotics, performance, narrative and social memory, this work offers a culturally focused way of theorizing about crime, violence and social relations, and contributes to an ethnographic perspective on postwar transition and human rights in Latin America. Its implications reach far beyond its immediate context. Crime rates continue to rise not only throughout Latin America but around the globe; post-conflict, post-authoritarian transitions are often accompanied by widespread non-“political” violence.