Violent death, public problems and changes in Argentina

SANDRA GAYOL ; GABRIEL KESSLER

CURRENT SOCIOLOGY

Sage

Lugar: New York; Año: 2017 vol. 65 p. 663 - 679

0011-3921

Nota: es la versión impresa del artículo que había aparecido antes en forma digital en la misma revista, por lo cual se modifica el año.This article makes connections between violent deaths, public problems and changes seenin the past 30 years in Argentina. The authors argue that the ways in which people werekilled, the ways in which their dead bodies were handled and the ways in which the dead andtheir behaviours were described in terms of morality play a key role in determining socialreaction and the challenging of public authorities. It is suggested that shock and outragein the face of the violent death of a defenceless, innocent person trigger political, socialand cultural changes in highly complex ways. Where contemporaries tend to establishalmost immediate causal relationships, a retrospective analysis shows that the rupturesand continuities following each death result from a variety of temporal and causal chains.A death?s ability to pose public problems can help us think about democratic processesin Latin America, indicating that democracies in the region are judged in terms of theircapacity to solve the public problems embodied by deaths like those analysed here.