Overview

All over the world, people disappear from their families, communities and the state’s bureaucratic gaze, as victims of oppressive regimes or while migrating along clandestine routes. This volume brings together scholars who engage ethnographically with such disappearances in various cultural, social and political contexts. It takes an anthropological perspective on questions about human life and death, absence and presence, rituals and mourning, liminality and structures, citizenship and personhood as well as agency and power. The chapters explore the political dimension of disappearances and address methodological, epistemological and ethical challenges of researching disappearances and the disappeared. The combination of disappearance through political violence, crime, voluntary disappearance and migration make this book a unique combination.

Full Product Details

Author:   Laura Huttunen ,  Gerhild Perl
Publisher:   Berghahn Books
Imprint:   Berghahn Books
ISBN:  

9781805390725

ISBN 10:   1805390724
Pages:   298
Publication Date:   15 September 2023
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: Why an Anthropology of Disappearance?  A Tentative Introduction Laura Huttunen and Gerhild Perl This chapter is available open access thanks to the support of Tampere University. Part I: Voicing Disappearances: Violence, Intimacies and Afterlives Chapter 1. ‘Who has taken my son (Amar Cheleke Ke Nilo)?’ Pervasive Missingness, Custodial Disappearances and Revolutionary Violence in Urban India Atreyee Sen Chapter 2. On the Slow Silencing of Absences: Sensing Social Disappearances in Cape Verde Heike Drotbohm This chapter is available open access thanks to the support of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Chapter 3. ‘What to do?’: Searching for Missing Persons in Israel Ori Katz Chapter 4. A Right to Disappear? State, Regulatory Politics and the Entitlements of Kinship Anna Matyska Part II: Politics of Disappearances: (State) Violence and Its Aftermath Chapter 5. Disappearance via Adoption: On Missing Children in Spain (1936–96) Diana Marre and Jessaca Leinaweaver Chapter 6. Enforced Disappearances, Colonial Legacies and Political Affect in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya Stefan Millar This chapter is available open access thanks to the support of the University of Helsinki Chapter 7. Chroniclers of Violence in Contemporary Mexico: Feminist Reflections on Memory and Disappearance Rosalva Aida Hernández Castillo Part III: Alternative Ways of Knowing: Mediating Absences, Negotiating Disappearances Chapter 8. Murky Disappearances: How Competing Narratives Obscure Structures of Power along the France-UK Border Victoria Tecca Chapter 9. Being There in the Presence of Absence: Researching the Remains of Migrant Disappearances Ville Laakkonen This chapter is available open access thanks to the support of Tampere University. Chapter 10. Negotiating Epistemic Uncertainties: Coming to Terms with Migrant Disappearances at the Western Mediterranean Saila Kivilahti and Laura Huttunen This chapter is available open access thanks to the support of Tampere University. Chapter 11. The Mediterranean as a Forensic Archive Zuzanna Dziuban Afterword: Imaginations and Traces of the Disappeared Antonius C.G.M. Robben Index

Reviews

This volume is of an excellent standard. The range of case studies chosen highlight the many forms that disappearances can take, and how the particular circumstances of the missing impact on those left behind ...Ethnographic content and participant/informant interviews are used very effectively and sensitively. * Layla Renshaw, Kingston University. The book can be taken as a compendium of political, moral, emotional, legal and other classifications of disappearances and of the rationalizations under which searches for the disappeared take place ...The collection presents various important, discomforting, alternative political discourses and practices of knowledge. * Maja Petrovic-Steger, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts

Author Information

Laura Huttunen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Tampere University, Finland. In 2013-14 she ran a project that focused on the question of missing and disappeared persons in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In 2018-2022 she led a research project with a focus on disappearances in migratory contexts.

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