The obituary: The inseparability of individual and social history in the genres of finitude

Abstract

Obituary as a journalistic genre acquires special relevance within the current panorama of narratives that would help to weave the inseparability of individual and social history, in the foundation of the genres of life and in the treatment of the present, a statement that forces us to explore the origin of the representations that converge in the genres of life and infer that relationship in a particular way in the obituary. This article explores aspects of that individual and social order that circumscribes the consciousness of finitude, in the life and work of the sociologist Alfredo Molano (1944-2019), Commissioner of Truth for the clarification of the facts of war in Colombia and the construction of the truth (Truth Commission, 2020), who in life contributed to the construction of a culture of peace.
The genres of life have developed in various areas and the stories of death that appear in the obituary genre are not timeless and have their place in history. It is among the funereal origins as a “certain look at life.” It reveals the little-known forms of an event and understood, many times, as a process, whose course and change also transforms the work and the individual.
The various journalistic representations analyzed from the realizations of the genre (typification, serial / individualized portraits, personalization of information, treatment of reality through its actors, descriptive effect, aspectualization, evocation, the appearance in an informative genre or of opinion, interpretation or narrative and section), are focused on finitude (obituaries, obituaries, tributes, biographies), and have been collected with the qualitative saturation technique.