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8 Governing the disappeared-living and the disappeared-dead: the violent pursuit of cultural sovereignty during authoritarian rule in Argentina Antonius C. G. M. Robben Graciela Beatriz Daleo was abducted on 18 October 1977, at the age of twenty-eight. She had been active in the Juventud Peronista since 1966, a Peronist youth organisation whose incessant street demonstrations during the early 1970s had been instrumental in the return of the exiled former president Juan Domingo Perón to Argentina. The Peronist Montoneros, the Marxist People’s Revolutionary Army
This article will investigate the process of confronting death in cases of the disappeared of the last military dictatorship in Argentina. Based on the exhumation and identification of the body of a disappeared person, the article will reflect on how the persons social situation can be reconfigured, causing structural changes within the family and other groups. This will be followed by a discussion of the reflections generated by the anthropologist during his or her interview process, as well as an investigation into the authors own experiences in the field. This intimate relationship between the anthropologist and death, through the inevitable contact that takes place among the bodies, causes resonances in the context both of exhumations and of identifications in the anthropologists wider fieldwork.
This article examines the ways in which missing persons have been dealt with, mainly in the former Yugoslavia, to show how the huge advances made in the search for, recovery and identification of those who disappeared is positively impacting on the ability of families to find their loved ones. The article surveys the advances made in dealing with the missing on a range of fronts, including the technical and forensic capacities. It examines some of the other developments that have occurred around the world with regard to the search for, recovery and identification of people and makes recommendations on how to make improvements to ensure that the rights of families around the world, as well as a range of other human rights, including truth and justice, are enhanced.
In a purely technical sense, the quality of the Disappearing World films was a match for most of the films considered in previous parts of this book. This can largely be attributed to the fact that many of those who worked on the strand were members of television crews who had honed their skills over many years. But this also had a major downside: television crews at that time were required to belong to a trade union and as a result, whatever their personal commitment and interest might have been, they were bound by a series of agreements
3 Disappearing points: V. V., Thomas Pynchon’s first novel, was published in 1963. It was received by critics with a good deal of acclaim, and not a little bafflement: an often-cited review in Time Magazine describes it as a ‘likable, mad and unfathomable first novel’ that ‘sails with majesty through caverns measureless to man’, and concludes that ‘[f]ew books haunt the waking or sleeping mind, but this is one’; and George Plimpton’s review for The New York Times, while not describing much more than a sense of enjoyable confusion with regard to the plot, notes
6 Ireland’s disappeared: suicide, violence and austerity Michael Cronin Introduction The billboard says it all. Or does it? In an advertising campaign mounted by an Irish newspaper over the slogan ‘We are defined by the choices we make’, there are two contrasting pictures. On the left-hand side, there is the photograph of a rioting crowd in Athens with a member of the Greek riot police prominent in the foreground. On the right, there is a photograph of O’Connell Street in Dublin, with the General Post Office and the Spire but, significantly, no people. The
, Ariana, Bob, Brad (2015), which uses satellite software to create landscape views of the human body. While the first two projects are directly related to drone warfare, Price’s work does not have such an immediate link to the topic. Due to its imaging of the human body through the unconventional means of satellite software, it nevertheless gives meaningful insights into the question of how the view of digital technologies and machines such as satellites and drones render the human body into an uncertain image that disappears, appears, and reappears. None of the
This article focuses on the representation of Methodist preacher Mary Bosanquet Fletcher (1739–1815) in her biography by the Revd Henry Moore. His omissions and commentary served to neutralise some of her more radical ideas and early feminism, which can be discovered by reading her manuscript journals, as well as the manuscript correspondence between Mary Tooth, keeper of Mary Fletcher’s papers, and Henry Moore. The product of archival research in the Methodist collections at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, this article owes a great debt to archivists Dr Peter Nockles and Dr Gareth Lloyd.
COVID-19 has reinstated the sovereign enclosures of corpse management that mothers of the disappeared had so successfully challenged in the past decade. To explore how moral duties toward the dead are being renegotiated due to COVID-19, this article puts forward the notion of biorecuperation, understood as an individualised form of forensic care for the dead made possible by the recovery of biological material. Public health imperatives that forbid direct contact with corpses due to the pandemic, interrupt the logics of biorecuperation. Our analysis is based on ten years of experience working with families of the disappeared in Mexico, ethnographic research within Mexico’s forensic science system and online interviews conducted with medics and forensic scientists working at the forefront of Mexico City’s pandemic. In the face of increasing risks of viral contagion and death, this article analyses old and new techniques designed to bypass the prohibitions imposed by the state and its monopoly over corpse management and identification.
In recent years, exhumation campaigns of mass graves resulting from the armed conflict (1980–2000) between the Maoist guerrillas of PCP-Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) and the States armed forces have increased in Peru. People in rural Andes, the most marginalised sectors of national society, which were also particularly affected by the war, are the main group concerned with exhumations. This article examines the handling, flow and re-appropriation of exhumed human remains in public space to inform sociopolitical issues underlying the reparation policies implemented by the State, sometimes with the support of human rights NGOs. How do the families of victims become involved in this unusual return of their dead? Have the exhumations become a new repertoire of collective action for Andean people seeking to access their fundamental rights and for recognition of their status as citizens? Finally, what do these devices that dignify the dead reveal about the internal workings of Peruvian society – its structural inequities and racism – which permeate the social fabric?