Solemnidad y consumo: paradojas en torno a la sacralización de la Tablada Nacional (Uruguay) y la ex ESMA (Argentina) como sitios de memoria

Studies of memorial spaces created in places where clandestine detention, torture, and extermination centers operated in Argentina and Uruguay have focused on their social production. In this paper we focus on a less-explored dimension: appropriation, use, and consumption. Drawing on an anthropological perspective with an ethnographic approach we analyze conflictive situations present in these sites in which the consumption of certain goods and services is a source of competition between different actors. This analysis allows us to identify how consumption practices are moralized and some of the strategies employed and plausible arguments used to define obligatory and desirable behaviors within them. Our premise is that the values ​​that guide the social production of these memorial spaces, associated with their commemorative and legal function regarding the enforced disappearance of persons, are actualized through forms of sacralization that reinforce the collective beliefs and moral sentiments of the groups legitimized as managers of these spaces. The data produced during fieldwork in two memorial spaces (La Tablada Nacional and the former Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada) are analyzed from theoretical perspectives that allow reflections on the link between politics, morality, and consumption in the field of memory.