An Anthropology of Disappearance : Politics, Intimacies and Alternative Ways of Knowing

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. Contents Acknowledgements Introduction. Why an Anthropology of Disappearance? A Tentative Introduction 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 Chapter 2. On the Slow Silencing of Absences: Sensing Social Disappearances in Cape Verde Chapter 3. ‘What to Do?’ Searching for Missing Persons in Israel Chapter 4. A Right to Disappear? The State, Regulatory Politics and the Entitlements of Kinship PART II. Politics of Disappearances: (State) Violence and Its Aftermath Chapter 5. Disappearance via Adoption: On Missing Children in Spain (1936–96) Chapter 6. Enforced Disappearances, Colonial Legacies and Political Affect in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya Chapter 7. Chroniclers of Violence in Contemporary Mexico: Feminist Reflections on Memory and Disappearance 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 Chapter 9. Being There in the Presence of Absence: Researching the Remains of Migrant Disappearances Chapter 10. Negotiating Epistemic Uncertainties: Coming to Terms with Migrant Disappearances in the Western Mediterranean Chapter 11. The Mediterranean as a Forensic Archive Afterword. Imaginations and Traces of the Disappeared Index