The Argentine Silent Majority: Middle Classes, Politics, Violence, and Memory in the Seventies

摘要

'Member of a violent society - without being violent himself', wrote Panorama magazine when declaring the 'average Argentine' person of the year in 1971 (p. 109). The reference is indicative of contemporaneous perceptions of the Argentine middle classes as mere observers to the escalating violence of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a silent majority caught between noisy - or, more appropriately, violent - minorities. Whilst previous studies on memory and the dictatorship have tended to focus on the middle-class activists, there is a paucity of scholarly work on the broader role of the middle classes as a social group during this period. Sebastian Carassai's work is undoubtedly a welcome contribution to the scholarly literature due to the author's exhaustive examination of the complex and shifting relationship between the 'average' Argentine and violence. The study abounds with neglected and new empirical data, ranging from opinion polls to newspaper articles and adverts. Particularly valuable are the interviews with middle-class Argentines, for which, the author compiled a documentary of historic images and clips that was shown to participants as a sort of visual aide-memoire, with a view to fostering spontaneous discussion and remembering. The meticulous methodological approach and detailed analysis of a range of data thus contributes to a nuanced understanding of the 'non-activist' majority of the middle class, who constitute heterogeneous protagonists rather than monolithic spectators.