Anthropology of Disappearance

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.

“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 Petrović-Šteger, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Why an Anthropology of Disappearance?  A Tentative IntroductionLaura Huttunen and Gerhild PerlThis chapter is available open access thanks to the support of Tampere University.Part I: Voicing Disappearances: Violence, Intimacies and AfterlivesChapter 1. ‘Who has taken my son (Amar Cheleke Ke Nilo)?’ Pervasive Missingness, Custodial Disappearances and Revolutionary Violence in Urban IndiaAtreyee Sen Chapter 2. On the Slow Silencing of Absences: Sensing Social Disappearances in Cape VerdeHeike DrotbohmThis chapter is available open access thanks to the support of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.Chapter 3. ‘What to do?’: Searching for Missing Persons in IsraelOri KatzChapter 4. A Right to Disappear? State, Regulatory Politics and the Entitlements of KinshipAnna MatyskaPart II: Politics of Disappearances: (State) Violence and Its AftermathChapter 5. Disappearance via Adoption: On Missing Children in Spain (1936–96)Diana Marre and Jessaca LeinaweaverChapter 6. Enforced Disappearances, Colonial Legacies and Political Affect in Kakuma Refugee Camp, KenyaStefan MillarThis chapter is available open access thanks to the support of the University of HelsinkiChapter 7. Chroniclers of Violence in Contemporary Mexico: Feminist Reflections on Memory and DisappearanceRosalva Aida Hernández CastilloPart III: Alternative Ways of Knowing: Mediating Absences, Negotiating DisappearancesChapter 8. Murky Disappearances: How Competing Narratives Obscure Structures of Power along the France-UK BorderVictoria TeccaChapter 9. Being There in the Presence of Absence: Researching the Remains of Migrant DisappearancesVille LaakkonenThis 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 MediterraneanSaila Kivilahti and Laura HuttunenThis chapter is available open access thanks to the support of Tampere University.Chapter 11. The Mediterranean as a Forensic ArchiveZuzanna DziubanAfterword: Imaginations and Traces of the DisappearedAntonius C.G.M. RobbenIndex