Time and the remains of war: Retazos of morgues and minefields in Colombia

Recently, the Army and FARC-EP guerrillas widely deployed aerial bombardment and improvised landmines in Colombia as warfare technologies to control territories and contain adversaries. These devices kill and mutilate bodies, and penetrate and scar landscapes. What can explosive military technologies and their aftermath tell us about how morgue doctors, demining surveyors, and campesinos sense and temporalize the materiality of war? This paper is a collaborative ethnographic exploration of retazos —stories that we craft out of the explosive-related fragments we collected and produced from our separate fieldworks: state morgues and minefields. We offer two pairs of retazos that illustrate how these practitioners developed corporeal sensitivities to feel and give meaning to the material traces of war and how these materialities and the ways they are experienced are shaped by temporal configurations. These retazos show how people and their environments endure war, live despite the war, and make life out of war.