An Anthropology of Disappearance: Politics, Intimacies and Alternative Ways of Knowing 9781805390732

Table of contents :
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

Citation preview

AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF DISAPPEARANCE

EASA Series

Published in Association with the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) Series Editors: Jelena Tošić, University of St. Gallen Sabine Strasser, University of Bern Annika Lems, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle Social anthropology in Europe is growing, and the variety of work being done is expanding. This series is intended to present the best of the work produced by members of the EASA, both in monographs and in edited collections. The studies in this series describe societies, processes and institutions around the world and are intended for both scholarly and student readership. Recent titles: 46. AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF DISAPPEARANCE Politics, Intimacies and Alternative Ways of Knowing Edited by Laura Huttunen and Gerhild Perl 45. ETHNOGRAPHIES OF DESERVINGNESS Unpacking Ideologies of Distribution and Inequality Edited by Jelena Tošić and Andreas Streinzer 44. Ethnographers before Malinowski Pioneers of Anthropological Fieldwork, 1870–1922 Edited by Frederico Delgado Rosa and Han F. Vermeulen 43. TRACING SLAVERY The Politics of Atlantic Memory in The Netherlands Markus Balkenhol 42. ETHNOGRAPHIES OF POWER A Political Anthropology of Energy Edited by Tristan Loloum, Simone Abram and Nathalie Ortar

41. EMBODYING BORDERS A Migrant’s Right to Health, Universal Rights and Local Policies Edited by Laura Ferrero, Chiara Quagliariello and Ana Cristina Vargas 40. THE SEA COMMANDS Community and Perception of the Environment in a Portuguese Fishing Village Paulo Mendes 39. CAN ACADEMICS CHANGE THE WORLD? An Israeli Anthropologist’s Testimony on the Rise and Fall of a Protest Movement on Campus Moshe Shokeid 38. INSTITUTIONALISED DREAMS The Art of Managing Foreign Aid Elżbieta Drążkiewicz 37. NON-HUMANS IN AMERINDIAN SOUTH AMERICA Ethnographies of Indigenous Cosmologies, Rituals and Songs Edited by Juan Javier Rivera Andía

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/series/easa

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

Edited by Laura Huttunen and Gerhild Perl

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2023 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2023 Laura Huttunen and Gerhild Perl All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Huttunen, Laura, editor. | Perl, Gerhild, editor. Title: An anthropology of disappearance : politics, intimacies and alternative ways of knowing / edited by Laura Huttunen and Gerhild Perl. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2023. | Series: EASA series; 46 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023007851 (print) | LCCN 2023007852 (ebook) | ISBN 9781805390725 (hardback) | ISBN 9781805390732 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Disappeared persons--Case studies. | Disappeared persons' families--Case studies. Classification: LCC HV6322 .A584 2023 (print) | LCC HV6322 (ebook) | DDC 362.87--dc23/eng/20230630 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023007851 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023007852 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-­1-80539-­072-­5 hardback ISBN 978-1-80539-364-1 epub ISBN 978-­1-80539-­073-­2 web pdf https://doi.org/10.3167/9781805390725

Contents

Acknowledgementsvii Introduction. Why an Anthropology of Disappearance? A Tentative Introduction Laura Huttunen and Gerhild Perl1 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 Sen31 Chapter 2. On the Slow Silencing of Absences: Sensing Social Disappearances in Cape Verde Heike Drotbohm52 Chapter 3. ‘What to Do?’ Searching for Missing Persons in Israel Ori Katz73 Chapter 4. A Right to Disappear? The State, Regulatory Politics and the Entitlements of Kinship Anna Matyska94

vi  ◆ Contents

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 Leinaweaver119 Chapter 6. Enforced Disappearances, Colonial Legacies and Political Affect in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya Stefan Millar142 Chapter 7. Chroniclers of Violence in Contemporary Mexico: Feminist Reflections on Memory and Disappearance Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo162 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 Tecca187 Chapter 9. Being There in the Presence of Absence: Researching the Remains of Migrant Disappearances Ville Laakkonen207 Chapter 10. Negotiating Epistemic Uncertainties: Coming to Terms with Migrant Disappearances in the Western Mediterranean Saila Kivilahti and Laura Huttunen228 Chapter 11. The Mediterranean as a Forensic Archive Zuzanna Dziuban247 Afterword. Imaginations and Traces of the Disappeared Antonius C.G.M. Robben269 Index283

Acknowledgements

This book has been in the making for a long time. The idea first came up during a meeting of the European Association of Social Anthropology (EASA) in Milan in 2016. Together with junior and senior scholars, and with Maja Petrović-­ Šteger as a discussant, we tackled questions about the interrelationship between missing persons and unidentified bodies. We also discussed various social, political and symbolic negotiations regarding ‘unusual’ deaths and explored how totalitarian governments use forced disappearances as a strategy to regulate populations through terror. At another online EASA meeting in Lisbon, four years later, we continued this conversation by focusing on disappearances during migration. The lively discussions we had during these meetings inspired the book. Thus, we want to thank everyone who took part in those meetings for setting this book in motion. Participants in the research project ‘Governance and Grieving: Disappearing Migrants and Emergent Politics’, funded by the Finnish Academy and led by Laura Huttunen, have contributed to our thinking during the past four years. Some of the researchers in that project have written chapters for this volume, but we also want to thank other project members, especially Mari Korpela and Dimitri Ollikainen, for their comments, ideas and discussion along the way. Moreover, we are grateful to all the participants who attended the closing seminar of the project in Tampere, Finland, in June 2022 for their inspiring insights. We wish to thank Antonius C.G.M. Robben, who agreed to write the afterword to the book. Our heartfelt gratitude goes to all the contributors for committing to the book and making it possible with their inspiring ideas and research. Moreover, two anonymous reviewers gave valuable comments to the first version of the manuscript; we are grateful to them.

viii  ◆ Acknowledgements

Warm thanks go to Megan Caine and Julene Knox for their careful language editing, to Jannika Samson for her editorial assistance, to the editors of the EASA book series and to Tom Bonnington from Berghahn Books for the pleasant cooperation and smooth production process.

Introduction Why an Anthropology of Disappearance? A Tentative Introduction Laura Huttunen and Gerhild Perl

This book is a suggestion for an ‘anthropology of disappearance’; it discusses the anthropological dimensions of the disappearance of people in different contexts, in particular geographic locations and at various historical moments. Acknowledging that human absences and presences are intertwined in complex ways, the book sets out to understand the social, political and cultural processes around disappearances: both processes that make people disappear, and processes that follow from disappearances, allowing some of the disappeared to reappear while others remain missing. People disappear from their families and communities, as well as from the state’s bureaucratic gaze. Such diverging modes of going missing may take place simultaneously, but not necessarily. Natural catastrophes, fatal accidents and state violence figure most prominently in public discourse on disappearance, but currently, alarmingly large numbers of people disappear while migrating, often undocumented. And sometimes people disappear voluntarily to escape from unbearable circumstances, and frequently coercion and voluntariness get blurred to the extent that it becomes difficult to distinguish one from the other. ‘The disappeared’ is a slippery category, and it is challenging to get an analytic grip on it. Disappeared from whom? And for how long should somebody be missing to be counted in this category? Despite its slipperiness, disappeared is also a productive category to think with; it brings us face to face with profound questions about human life: not only about absence and presence, but also about life and

2  ◆  Laura Huttunen and Gerhild Perl

death, rituals and mourning, liminality and structures, citizenship and personhood, protection and vulnerability, oppression and power, politics and intimacies. Moreover, disappearances have economic implications. Access to the missing person’s property might lead to conflict; protracted struggles over compensation to the victims of political violence might be frustrating; and migrant disappearances are entangled in complex ways with growing ‘migration industries’ (Gammeltoft-­Hansen and Nyberg Sørensen 2013). In their An Anthropology of Absence (2010), Bille, Hastrup and Flohr Sørensen discuss the absence of both things and people. They claim that ‘sometimes phenomena may have a powerful presence in people’s lives precisely because of their absence’ (ibid.: 4). In this book, we emphasize the unaccounted-­for absence of people, the disappeared or missing persons, and we show that those who have become absent often have a powerful presence in the lives of those left behind exactly because they are missing. In other words, the unaccounted-­for absence of people exerts an affective force on the lives of individuals and communities left behind, as several authors in this volume show (Sen; Drotbohm; Katz; Matyska; Tecca; Kivilahti and Huttunen, all this volume). While we focus on the often-­excruciating experience of a human being’s disappearance, we take inspiration from Bille and colleagues’ discussion (2010) on the various ways in which the absence of objects and practices shapes human conduct and social relations. People’s presences and absences in the context of disappearances are mediated through various kinds of things and practices, ranging from photographs and other memorabilia to burial ceremonies arranged in the absence of the body, from life vests and other objects left behind by undocumented migrants (Laakkonen, this volume) to artwork addressing migrant disappearances (Dziuban, this volume), from passports and other official documents, such as a police file containing a missing person’s complaint (Sen, this volume), to text, sound and video messages travelling along unofficial routes to the families of the missing (Kivilahti and Huttunen, this volume) and social media (Katz, this volume). In our time, characterized by heightened mobility of people, we are accustomed to living for varying periods with the absence of family members, friends and colleagues. Communication technologies give us abundant means to keep in touch across distances, and to create presences in the absence, so to speak. When such communication fails, worries emerge. The bearable length of an absent one’s silence varies greatly depending on the political, familial and

Introduction  ◆  3

biographical circumstances, but, in every context, there is a limit after which failed communication raises deep concern among families and communities. The inexplicable disappearance of a person leaves a void, and if the unaccounted-­for absence continues for a long time, not only emotional but also practical issues arise, such as the statuses of family members left behind (Drotbohm, this volume) and access to the property of the missing person. At the same time, the missing are often culturally liminal figures between life and death, who create a disturbing absence in the larger community (Tecca, this volume), and such voids generate what we call ‘disturbed intimacies’. Yet these disturbed intimacies may give rise to new relationships (Marre and Leinaweaver, this volume) and serendipitous communities of fictive kinship that are intimately linked in their shared loss, indignation and search for a loved one (Hernández Castillo, this volume). The socially and culturally liminal character of the category of the disappeared points to the ever-­present fear that the missing person is dead. People missing from their families for a protracted period are, of course, not always dead. Some of them may be alive in captivity, or they may have decided not to contact their families for one reason or another. But the protracted absence always raises the possibility of death, and this liminality has been fruitfully approached within the anthropology of death (Robben 2004a, 2004b, 2018). Perhaps more than anyone else, the disappeared indicate the porous boundaries between life and death. While evidenced deaths provide the living with answers, or at least with the certainty of demise, thus allowing them to mourn, disappearances cause great uncertainty among the living. The bereaved are not only robbed of a friend or family member, they are also deprived of knowledge. However, sometimes those left behind do not want to know what happened to the missing person, because the state of not-­knowing also allows for the hope of recovery, reunion, reconciliation and, ultimately, life itself. In addition, in post-­war contexts survivors might feel pressured to provide evidence for purposes of body identification and war crime investigations and might find solace not only in disclosing but also in withholding information. Others might harbour the desire to close this cruel chapter in their own history and try to direct their attention, feelings and thoughts towards the future. And sometimes the disappeared themselves withhold knowledge about their whereabouts (Matyska, this volume) and intentionally disappear from certain social sites, relationships and networks (Drotbohm, this volume). To develop an ‘anthropology of disappearance’, tracing both the causes and consequences of disappearances is crucial. Therefore, we

4  ◆  Laura Huttunen and Gerhild Perl

put centre stage the analysis of both the conditions and ramifications of disappearances in the intimate lives of those left behind and in the political lives of the communities from which the disappeared are absent. Moreover, the analysis of (missing) state practices related to the search for the disappeared advances our understanding of the disappeared’s reappearance in alternative political discourses. Such an analysis sheds light on the emergence of a disparate and discontinuous field of various non-­state actors that addresses disappearances (Huttunen forthcoming), and points to the global architecture of such actors, currently in the making.

Conceptualizing Disappearance How to conceptualize the disappearances of people? How to name them? What are the implications of varying concepts that address human absences? These questions have been tackled not only by scholars, but also by civil society, family members, activists, human rights organizations, political groups and international humanitarian legal professionals around the world. Thus, any existing category of ‘missing persons’ or ‘disappeared persons’ is the outcome of interpretive work, and often of contestations with both global and local implications. The practice of making people disappear has existed throughout history, in one form or another. During colonialism, particularly in the slave trade, and in the context of genocides, ethnic cleansing and population resettlements, countless people have disappeared. Used as a terror tactic, enforced disappearance in the form of arbitrary detention, forced displacement and targeted killing has largely been implemented by military dictatorships and authoritarian regimes. State-­ sponsored disappearances seek to create submission among citizens by placing some people outside the protection of the law and by refusing to reveal their fate to their families and communities. As such, enforced disappearance is an effective way of creating cultures of fear, targeting political opposition and accomplishing genocidal projects (e.g. Gatti 2014; Huttunen 2016; Robben 2005; Sanford 2003; Wagner 2008). Historically, the term ‘enforced disappearance’ refers to the political significance of state terror since the systematic use of state-­ sponsored disappearances in Latin America, particularly in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay in the 1970s and 1980s (Frey 2009; Gatti 2014; Robben 2005). During the dictatorship in Argentina

Introduction  ◆  5

(1976–83), los desaparecidos became a new ‘ontological condition’ as the vanishing of people was the deliberate goal of the military government (Schindel 2020b: 37). The relentless search for the disappeared of Argentina’s military dictatorship by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo figures as the most prominent movement of civil protest and political activism that demands truth, justice and accountability from the state. The ways in which enforced disappearance has become defined and codified in international human rights law, from the 1978 UN resolution to the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance in 2006, are based on Latin American experiences, and the active work and international cooperation of Latin American NGOs and activists (Frey 2009; Guest 1990). Yet the violence of disappearances in Latin America and beyond has increasingly become an issue that exceeds direct state violence. Organized crime, such as drug cartels and kidnapping gangs, uses the practice of making people disappear to gain control over territories, migratory movements and natural resources, often with state complicity (González Villarreal 2012; Calveiro 2021; Schwartz-­Marin and Cruz-­Santiago 2016). The empirical insights and theoretical considerations of state-­ sponsored disappearances put forward in Latin American scholarship (e.g. Calveiro 2004; da Silva Catela 2001; Gatti 2014) have informed academic research on disappearances in other world regions (Gatti 2011) and advanced methods of forensic identification (e.g. Fondebrider 2005; Ferrándiz and Robben 2015; Stover and Peress 1998). Scholars who have themselves fallen victim to enforced disappearances, were forced into exile or grew up with the inheritance of these histories have provided critical analysis on the totality and complexity of the regime of disappearances (Calveiro 2004; Gatti 2014), and this work has considerably contributed to the public awareness and legal recognition of enforced disappearances as a state crime. In addition, experiences with the politics of disappearance in one’s own family and community are also reflected in participatory research approaches and the merging of activist involvement and anthropological research (Hernández Castillo, this volume). Alongside important explorations of civil society’s political engagement, social movements, small acts of resistance in everyday life, and feminist struggles (e.g. Calveiro 2004; Delgado Huertas 2016; Iliná 2020), scholars have produced critical knowledge on the political importance of kinship in the context of enforced disappearances. These insights have influenced research in other world regions such as Kashmir (Zia 2016), Lebanon (Comaty 2019) and Cyprus (Sant

6  ◆  Laura Huttunen and Gerhild Perl

Cassia 2005) – to name just a few. Against this backdrop, it does not come as a surprise that disappearance as a translation of desaparición is a concept developed in the Global South, and as such challenges the hegemonic division of knowledge production, ‘where the South provides the case studies and the North the theories and concepts applied to them’ (Schindel 2020b: 33). Today the concept has experienced a transnational, transdisciplinary and trans-­scalar journey, and in 2006 it became a legal category in the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (UN 2010) and was codified in international law as a crime against humanity. Taking a cue from Zuzanna Dziuban (2020), we understand disappearance as a ‘travelling concept’ (cf. Bal 2002) that is always in flux, reworked, changing and multivocal. It is a concept that travels between geographical places, historical periods, social and cultural contexts, political movements and different disciplines (Dziuban 2020: 63–64). The diverse meaning of the word in different languages expresses its entanglement with local histories and cultural contexts. The untranslatability of vernacular notions into English, or the other way around, shows that there is no single origin of the concept (Rubin 2015), and scholars have explored the term’s nuances in a variety of languages such as Spanish, Arabic, Polish and Bosnian (Dziuban 2020; Frey 2009; Matyska 2020; Slyomovics 2005; Wagner 2008). Besides, and as Susan Slyomovics (2005: 51) argues, the cruel practice of making someone disappear also takes place without precise wording. To address the multilayered nature of this concept and to grasp the subtle differences, contextual specificities or generalizable shared dynamics, scholars have coined such terms as the ‘original disappeared’ (Gatti 2014), ‘social disappearances’ (Gatti 2020; Schindel and Gatti 2020), ‘detained-­disappeared’ (Gatti 2014), ‘mundane disappearances’ (Willis 2021), ‘disappeared-­dead and disappeared-­living’ (Robben 2014), ‘new disappeared’ (Gatti 2020), ‘individual disappeared’ (Huttunen forthcoming), ‘accidentalized disappearances’ (Feldman 2019) and ‘extended disappearances’ (as we suggest further below). The shared constitutive element of these context-­specific particularities and diverging semantic meanings is the unaccounted-­for absence of somebody (Rubin 2015: 15). The multiplicity of concepts also mirrors the anthropological importance of contextualizing the complex politics and practices of disappearances in their specific time and place. Moreover, the variety of both vernacular conceptions and scholarly definitions points to the fact that delineating the category of the missing or disappeared is always an interpretive process.

Introduction  ◆  7

In this book, state violence and state complicity in the form of disappearances are discussed in the chapters by Atreyee Sen, Diana Marre and Jessaca Leinaweaver, Stefan Millar, and Anna Matyaska. Sen’s chapter shows in painful detail how the disappearance of a young man caused by the Indian state shatters the life of a family in the aftermath of a revolutionary movement. Marre and Leinaweaver’s chapter expands our understanding of disappearances by conceptualizing state-­sponsored forceful adoptions during the Spanish dictatorship as a specific mode of enforced disappearances. Millar analyses the colonial legacies of enforced disappearance in the context of the governing of present-­day refugee populations by the postcolonial Kenyan state. Finally, Matyska’s chapter discusses the ways in which civil society challenges the democratic state by demanding that it takes responsibility for protecting all citizens from disappearance. Absences, however, are not always conceptualized as disappearances. ‘Missing person’ is another rather widespread category, deployed especially by humanitarian organizations (e.g. ICRC 2013), but also by some scholars (e.g. Wagner 2008; Huttunen 2016). While the term ‘enforced disappearance’ refers quite clearly to state crime and the intentionality of disappearances, the existence of an identifiable perpetrator and the quest for responsibility, the term ‘missing person’ foregrounds the void left behind in the social world by someone’s disappearance. ‘Missing person’ as a term is embedded in international humanitarian law (UN 2010) and not in international human rights law, and rather than posing questions of accountability, it foregrounds the need to search for the missing and give information to those left behind. As such, it is safer for humanitarian organizations to use, and it enables their access to conflict zones and their efforts to address immediate needs. However, absences conceptualized as ‘missing persons’ can also be mobilized successfully in political projects of demanding accountability, as the example of the ex-­Yugoslavian territories shows (Nyberg Sørensen and Huttunen 2020; Huttunen forthcoming). While enforced disappearance as a political strategy targets certain populations and specific individuals considered subversive and dissident citizens, a new category of disappeared has emerged since the 1990s, reflected in the vanishing of lives deemed illegal. To improve their livelihood and in search of a viable future, people migrate and seek refuge in more stable and wealthier countries. Due to visa restrictions and ever more intensified border controls, undocumented migrants and refugees risk their lives during arduous journeys and

8  ◆  Laura Huttunen and Gerhild Perl

many go missing for an indeterminate period. Therefore, migrant disappearances add a further dimension to the discussion of accountability for disappearances, and of various forms of intentionality and force in making people disappear. The politics of deterrence, detention, deportation and, increasingly, death lie at the centre of critical migration and border studies (Andersson 2014; Kalir and Wissink 2016; Kalir 2017; de León 2015, Drotbohm and Hasselberg 2015; Follis 2015). With this book, we contribute to this body of knowledge by suggesting that disappearance is a further condition and consequence of the contemporary governance of human mobility. Around the world, migrants and refugees are denied legal pathways to apply for asylum and are thus forced to cross borders without authorization and through ever more remote, depopulated and perilous regions (De León 2015). Deserts and waters are operationalized as ‘hostile terrain’ where dead bodies and disappeared persons function as deterrence to future migrating people (ibid.: 27). Although migrants know about the dangers such a journey entails, they still take the risks in order to actively modify their and their families’ lives and futures (De Genova 2017; Lucht 2011; Perl 2018; Zagaria 2020). In public and political discourse, responsibility for death and disappearance during migration is frequently displaced and deflected to environments, accidents, smugglers and refugees themselves (Perl and Strasser 2018: 510; see also Laakkonen 2022). However, recently migratory disappearances have been incorporated into the studies of the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (Schindel 2020a; UN Human Rights Council 2017). To elucidate the role of nation states in migrants’ disappearances, we loosely build on Allen Feldman’s (2019) notion of ‘accidentalized disappearances’, which signals the discursive masking of underlying structural violence. Framing migrants’ deaths and disappearances as ‘desolate accidents, unavoidable tragedies or necessary evils’ allows states to exempt themselves from any responsibility for death and disappearance that their rigorous migration policies cause (Perl 2019: 222). Yet, differently to enforced disappearances of citizens as victims of authoritarian regimes, in the context of migratory disappearances, an individualizable and identifiable agent can mostly not be determined. The lack of a single ‘disappearing agent’ (Gatti 2020: 32) raises severe ethical and practical problems in terms of accountability and compensation. Sometimes, however, the ‘disappearing agent’ is a person or group who can be named and identified also in migratory contexts, for instance in cases of illegal pushbacks carried out by state

Introduction  ◆  9

agencies, or when smugglers detain or kill migrants and hide their bodies (see Duhaime and Thibault 2017). While scholars have thoroughly discussed the alarming ‘politics of letting die’ (Basaran 2015; Heller and Pezzani 2017; Perl 2018) performed in the Sonoran Desert, the Mediterranean Sea, the Sahara Desert and the Pacific Ocean, in this book we put the particularities of ‘politics of letting disappear’ centre stage. The context of migration shows that some people are more ‘disappearable’ than others. Laakkonen (2022) claims that ‘disappearability’ is a structural condition that makes some people more vulnerable to disappearance because of their lack of citizenship in countries of settlement, their class position in their countries of origin, their racialized bodies and their place in global hierarchies of wealth and protection. Moreover, many states do not systematically register all their citizens, which necessarily makes them more disappearable. In addition, the need to hide one’s identity to get access to the West and to avoid deportation makes people more disappearable if they die en route without identity documents. In this book, chapters by Victoria Tecca, Ville Laakkonen, Saila Kivilahti and Laura Huttunen, and Zuzanna Dziuban address migrant disappearances in the English Channel and the Mediterranean Sea and the vulnerabilities of undocumented migration from different angles. Tecca’s chapter offers an intimate account of the fear and ambiguity in a migrant settlement in France, created by the disappearance of a migrant woman while crossing clandestinely to the UK. Laakkonen’s chapter depicts the island of Lesvos as deeply marked by both the presences and absences of undocumented migrants. He argues that the traces of their former presence only become understandable through contextualization in the historical and political structures that make migrants susceptible to death and disappearance. Kivilahti and Huttunen’s chapter shows the importance of informal social networks for the families of disappearing migrants in the absence of state protection. Finally, Dziuban’s chapter discusses the specific violence of being exposed to death and disappearance on the high seas and analyses artistic projects protesting such violence. Besides differences, there are important similarities between enforced and migratory disappearances. Whether it is the individual citizen actively abducted, detained and even killed, or the collectivized category of ‘illegal migrants’ who are abandoned at sea or in deserts, both are ideologically rendered as threats to an imagined nation’s security, value system and culture. Antonius Robben argues that the Argentine military dictatorship deemed citizens classified as

10  ◆  Laura Huttunen and Gerhild Perl

subversive ‘unfit to live in Argentina for not embodying Argentine culture and traditional values, and therefore subject to annihilation’ (Robben 2014: 147). Such an underlying dynamic of denying cohabitation, not to say existence, also takes place in the Mediterranean Sea and beyond, and so-­called ‘pushbacks’ speak volumes to that. Forcefully removing ‘unwanted’ bodies from the (imagined) national spaces in the Global North, thereby accepting possible death and disappearance, reveals the lingering colonial and racist ideologies underpinning the contemporary governance of mobility (Perl 2020). Although causes, circumstances and practices of disappearances differ greatly between enforced disappearances in authoritarian regimes and accidentalized disappearances in liberal democracies, they both build on denying certain people the right to cohabit the earth, which for Hannah Arendt is the precondition of political life (Arendt 1963; Butler 2012; Feldman 2019). These are extreme examples of disappearances that have shaped our world throughout the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries. However, there are also other modes of disappearances that fall into neither the category of politically motivated enforced disappearances nor that of the political abandonment reflected in accidentalized disappearances. Some disappearances are connected to individual life courses and idiosyncratic situations, to mental health problems, economic hardships or sometimes criminal situations, to suicide attempts or a will to disappear ­intentionally – ­for example by going into hiding and changing one’s identity. How to make sense of the hundreds of cases where the disappearing agent is the missing person themselves? Why integrate disappearances that at first glance seem voluntary, intentional and apolitical into an ‘anthropology of disappearance’ that is concerned with the politics surrounding human vanishing? Because we understand ‘disappearances’ as a travelling concept with multiple origins, as mentioned above, we contend that including ‘mundane missing’ in the discussion allows us to broaden existing conceptualizations. What connects the diverse realities of disappearances is that they all create a ghostly existence between life and death, and they all leave the families and communities to tackle excruciating uncertainties. The disappeared index a spectral existence that is neither dead nor alive. Moreover, all disappearances challenge the governing logics of the modern state, where citizens are categorized as dead or living, and those falling between these categories create problems for the smooth running of the state machinery. Marriage, inheritance and rights to property are codified in laws, customs and state regulations. The disappearance of a person disturbs the

Introduction  ◆  11

individual’s relationship with the state, and the protracted absence of the disappeared makes many practical things difficult for those left behind. Intimate relations are disturbed by disappearances not only in emotional and cultural but also legal and practical terms (Matyska 2020). In addition, ‘mundane disappearances’ further reveal the inseparable intertwining of intimacies and politics. As contributions to this book show (see Drotbohm; Katz; Matyska), mundane disappearances are not merely an individual problem but are connected with poverty, class, race, gender and unattained mental care. In addition, mundane disappearances bear a similarity with state-­sponsored and accidentalized disappearances, since they disclose the importance of family members as the key actors in the search.

Disturbed Intimacies Disappearances are often aggressive invasions in people’s lives that disconnect experiences, separate worlds and desynchronize times (cf. Feldman 2019). The disappeared, though spatially and physically no longer present, impose themselves through their absence. When people are suddenly gone and nothing is heard from them, those left behind experience great uncertainty. Such ‘intimate uncertainties’ (Strasser and Piart 2018) disturb the life course and open up to various modes of imagining the whereabouts, causes and reasons for disappearing. Thus, politics of disappearance shape the most intimate relationships. The sudden disappearance of a loved one intrudes subjectivities and leaves families to struggle with unanswerable questions, agonizing fears or nagging feelings of guilt and shame. Yet sometimes feelings of grief and indignation get intertwined, and they enable serendipitous encounters resulting in new political communities that protest state violence and, moreover, restore and reinvent kinship ties in unexpected ways (Hernández Castillo, this volume). Thereby, and as Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo shows in the case of Mexico and Atreyee Sen in the case of India, kinship relations, especially motherhood, become politicized both on a collective and an individual level. Ethnography is often grounded in intimate relationships built during fieldwork, and as the contributions to this book show, the complex nature of disturbed intimacies is best approached with ethnographic sensibilities and the analysis of historical legacies (Drotbohm; Hernández Castillo; Kivilahti and Huttunen; Sen; Marre and Leinaweaver, all this volume). Following survivors’ and

12  ◆  Laura Huttunen and Gerhild Perl

families’ accounts of disappearances makes the singularity of each story and the incommensurable experience of each person visible (cf. Edkins 2011). Yet, despite the incomparability of individual suffering in the experiential realm, all these stories speak of the devastating impact disappearances have on intimate lives. Thus, the ethnographic approach needs to pay attention to details and nuances by providing carefully textured accounts of disturbed, and also restored and reinvented, relationships and family histories. To substantiate this claim, here we present some ethnographic details to illuminate the long shadows that disturbances throw on intimate relations. A young woman of Bosnian origin living in Finland, talking to Laura Huttunen some twenty years after her father’s disappearance, describes in rather ghostly terms her encounters with relatives and other residents in the village from which she and her mother had escaped during the Bosnian war (1992–95). Invading soldiers abducted her father, and the family never heard from him again. When the woman visits her childhood village now, people greet her, repeating time and again that she looks exactly like her disappeared father. To be seen as the embodiment of the disappeared parent is a deeply ambiguous inheritance for a young person. Through this resemblance, the woman’s body has become a reminder of her disappeared father and the devastating war. The ethnically cleansed person and, thus, the terror of genocidal violence are literally inscribed in her body. Another Bosnian woman, whose husband disappeared around the same time, is torn between being the widow or the wife of a missing ­man – ­a point showing clearly the difference between the death and the disappearance of a loved one. After the war, she returned to the Srebrenica area, to live in a remote village almost emptied by the genocidal violence, without many social connections or possibilities for a proper livelihood. She now stubbornly inhabits the house built by her disappeared husband, as it is the only tangible thing remaining of him. Leaving the house would mean leaving her husband and accepting that he will never return (Huttunen forthcoming). As these examples show, disappearances do not mark the end of existing relationships; rather the disappeared become an implicit presence in the world of the living, and those left behind maintain, willingly or not, affective and social bonds with them. In the regime of enforced disappearance, terror does not stop at the targeted individual, but spreads. Therefore, conceptualizing disappearance as ‘extended disappearance’ allows us to better analyse how the threat and act of making people disappear stretches beyond the individual to entire families, communities and properties, hovering

Introduction  ◆  13

over the population and paralysing them with fear (see also Millar, this volume). Kinship ties in particular become dangerous in such contexts, and families of the disappeared might be surveilled and harassed for years and even disappear themselves (Slyomovics 2005: 48). Disappearance can become a ‘collective punishment’ that engulfs relatives, friends, people living in the same household or simply someone who is in the wrong place at the wrong time (ibid.: 54). The following example from Morocco during the ‘years of lead’ – the period between the 1960s and the end of the 1980s, which was marked by oppression and state v­ iolence – ­is particularly telling in this regard. Mohamed Oufkir, close confidant of King Hassan II and feared interior minister responsible for the killing, arbitrary detainment and enforced disappearances of political opponents, participated in an unsuccessful coup d’état in 1972. In retaliation, King Hassan II had him killed, and made Oufkir’s wife and six c­ hildren – ­the youngest only three years ­old – ­and two family friends disappear by sending them to one of Morocco’s dreaded secret prisons. Perpetrator in one instance, victim in the other, Mohamed Oufkir was executed and his family came to experience the cruel reality of enforced disappearance, which he played a major role in shaping (Oufkir and Fitoussi 2002; Slyomovics 2005: 54–56). Under almost unbelievable circumstances, they managed to escape fifteen years later. The Oufkir family’s story exemplifies that in authoritarian regimes, no one is immune from disappearance, not even young children. The danger of disappearance affects the entire population and governs them through fear, destroying existences and annihilating subjectivities. What is more, the end of terror regimes does not mean that the terror ends for families. Even after regime change, states such as Morocco and Argentina have used the absence of bodies and the occasional reappearance of a disappeared person as a cover-­up strategy. Government authorities have denied their violent practices of eliminating dissidents and their families and claimed that those who went missing are living a normal life in exile (Slyomovics 2005: 45; Robben 2000: 89). Such blatant lies weigh heavily on the families because states thus exempt themselves from any responsibility and deny recognition of what happened to the disappeared and their families. The disappearance itself disappears (Feldman 2019). This book’s strong focus on ethnographic particularities in a variety of field sites allows us to reveal disturbances caused by disappearances in different contexts. Thus, to approach the disturbed intimacies in different political and social settings and to explore the

14  ◆  Laura Huttunen and Gerhild Perl

voids left by the disappeared, but also the new emerging communities, contributions to this volume (Drotbohm, Hernández Castillo, Katz, Marre and Leinaweaver, Sen) ask how those left behind refashion their mnemonic attachments to the disappeared and modify their affective bonds to pacify disturbed intimacies. How are the disappeared apprehended? How, if at all, can the disappeared be socially and emotionally assimilated? How do the disappeared still exist in the minds of others and how are they embodied? What kinds of practical effects do the disappearances have in the lives of families? And how do they mould the past, present and future? In her contribution in this volume and through a close reading of an individual story, Atreyee Sen shows how the entire life of an Indian woman whose son disappeared in police custody was changed dramatically; in her analysis, state violence translates into the social death of close family members of the disappeared person. Heike Drotbohm shows that the disappearance of Cape Verdean migrant mothers can become charged with shame and not only leads to social reorganization but also to a ‘slow silencing’ that conceals the disappearance itself. Stefan Millar’s study on enforced disappearances and colonial legacies in the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya demonstrates how fear and threat penetrate both the intimate and political lives of a whole community. Anna Matyska engages the question of disturbed intimacies by asking whether or not bereaved Polish families have a right to search for their missing kin if they disappeared intentionally. Does kinship justify the quest to know their whereabouts? Whatever the answer to this question, the intimate lives of family members left behind are severely affected by the absence of the disappeared person. Yet, and as we show further below, individuals and collectives who have to cope with absences also enact their agency and contest, intervene and protest political conditions and practices of concealment. Although we emphasize the affective and emotional dimension of disappearances, and the importance of mourning for those left behind, we do not want to propose a simplified or normative understanding of what such affective engagement should look like. While some people are probably mourned more than others, and, on some occasions, mourning is expressed more strongly than in others, there is no way to measure ‘grades’ of mourning or anxiety. What we do suggest, however, is that disappearance is always socially and culturally disturbing, and in most cases intimately painful, giving rise to questions, anxieties, insecurities, worries and practical problems in different combinations, but also to resistance.

Introduction  ◆  15

The Politics of Reappearance The disappeared and their families do not keep quiet. The disappeared-­living and the disappeared-­dead reappear either as surviving witnesses, mortal remains or haunting spectres. They refuse the denial of cohabiting the earth imposed upon them and instead inscribe themselves in history, in one way or another. Survivors’ testimonies and accounts from children and grandchildren in the form of novels, films, memoirs and interviews have been crucial for the political recognition and public acknowledgement of both enforced and also accidentalized disappearance (Blejmar 2016; Gatti 2014; Slyomovics 2005). In addition, truth commissions, criminal trials and exhumations have played a major role in prosecuting perpetrators, or at least in the global recognition of disappearance as a crime against humanity (Anstett 2014; Anstett and Dreyfus 2014; Moon 2020; Renshaw 2011; Ferrándiz and Robben 2015; Rosenblatt 2015). Thus, the disappeared re-­enter the social and cultural sphere as political actors in various projects and discourses across the world. The mothers of the disappeared in Argentina and their stubborn protest have become iconic figures in the struggle to make the disappeared reappear, either dead or alive or symbolically. Similar social movements of mothers and other family members have emerged elsewhere as well, for example in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Wagner 2008). In connection with migrant deaths and disappearances as well, families and a concerned public have become key political actors, which is mirrored in the current proliferation of organizations addressing the issue, with differing political agendas. Some of these organizations, such as grass-­roots family networks, work to clarify the fate of the missing, while others address the political circumstances that produce disappearances in the first place, such as oppressive state policies or restrictive migration regimes. Sometimes researchers also participate in the struggles to make the disappeared re-­appear (Hernández Castillo; Dziuban, both this volume). Some of the projects are very local, tied to context-­specific conditions and experiences, while others address larger issues of inequality and power on a global scale. Sometimes the projects succeed in returning the ­missing – ­often this means locating and identifying the dead and bringing the bodies of the disappeared back to the families for rituals and mourning. In other cases, the disappeared are not found, but are symbolically present in political discourses and practices. Many political projects connected with disappearances aim exactly at finding the missing and returning them to families. However, this

16  ◆  Laura Huttunen and Gerhild Perl

is often not enough. Families keep asking questions about accountability for the deaths and disappearances, and reappearing bodies evoke further political trajectories. The reappeared dead bodies of the disappeared have given rise to political struggles in such places as Argentina, Bosnia, Spain, Rwanda and Cambodia, to name just some of the best-­known examples. However, there are some important critiques that probe the connection between burial and closure and question the taken-­for-­granted assumption of the importance, or even ethics, of excavating and returning the body to families and relatives (Rosenblatt 2015: 125–36). Dead bodies, human remains and identification processes can become sites of bitter political contestations, and the remains are appropriated and manipulated for various ends (Petrović-­Šteger 2009; Verdery 1999). Consequently, recovered bodies become evidence of crimes and atrocities only through interpretive work (e.g. Aragüete-­Toribio 2022; Moon 2013). It is precisely the polyvocal nature of human remains and the complexities of the interpretive work in politically tense conditions that make processes of addressing past atrocities so susceptible to political manipulation. Various modes of interpretation and contestation show that the political dimension of human life is implicated in disappearances in many ways. For anthropological analysis, this raises questions both of the politics of disappearance and the politics of reappearance. While the politics of disappearance delineates the social and political conditions that make people disappear in the first place and allows an anthropological mapping of oppressive and violent politics, or indifference, extreme poverty and other forms of deprivation, the politics of reappearance points to the polyvocal modes in which missing or disappeared persons enter political discourses. The question of how these discourses succeed or fail in mobilizing resources to make the disappeared reappear in real life thereby becomes crucial. Therefore, an ‘anthropology of disappearance’ needs to address the following questions: When, and by whom, are the missing searched for? Who raises questions about disappearances? Who are the actors and what are the arenas for politicizing disappearances? How are disappearances conceptualized by political actors, and how is accountability addressed? Instead of understanding (re)appearances and disappearances as strict opposites, the ‘anthropology of disappearance’ we seek to put forward with this book further asks: at what point in history do the disappeared reappear and why? What are the ethico-­political conditions and psychosocial necessities that make the disappeared reappear? And how do they r­ eappear – a­ s persons still alive, as dead

Introduction  ◆  17

bodies or human remains, or in more symbolic forms, such as politicized victims in political discourses, as ghosts and legends, or in loved ones’ dreams and nightmares? These multiple modes of reappearance also refer to what Susan Slyomovics (2005: 47) has called ‘subtle gradations of disappearance’: the fact that some disappeared reappear while others remain missing, or the fact that some reappear to be judged, persecuted again or liberated and re-­disappear to protect themselves and their families. In the contributions to this volume, the disappeared reappear in different forms. In Saila Kivilahti and Laura Huttunen’s and in Victoria Tecca’s work, they reappear in competing stories, narratives and witness accounts. In Ori Katz’s research, the missing are present in the actual work of searching, while in Atreyee Sen’s chapter a disappeared son materializes in the case file carried for forty years by his mother. In Zuzanna Dziuban’s research, the disappeared reappear in various politically motivated art projects, in Ville Laakkonen’s chapter as life jackets, shoes, water bottles and other debris left behind by migrants, and in Diana Marre’s and Jessaca Leinaweaver’s chapter, entangled practices and political projects both hide and reappear disappeared children. The material and discursive, the personal and political, the symbolic and affective are entangled in many ways in the reappearances of the missing, as the examples in this book show.

Knowledge Trouble and Alternative Ways of Knowing Inevitably, anthropological research on disappearances and the disappeared remains incomplete: although some of the disappeared return alive, many reappear only as spectres unable to give their testimony, and thus, knowledge often remains inaccessible, elusive and contested. As such, disappearance and the disappeared index the limits of empiricism, pose methodological challenges to anthropologists and raise questions about the possibility of knowing. Disappearances and the disappeared challenge the practice of ethnography inasmuch as they elude the realm of the observable and materialize instead in distorted rumours, disjointed fantasies and competing narratives. Researching disappearances and the disappeared thus calls for an engagement with the voids, hollows, traces and gaps left behind by those who are no longer present. Yael Navaro (2020) recently termed this line of questioning a ‘negative methodology’ to challenge conventional research approaches and to advocate

18  ◆  Laura Huttunen and Gerhild Perl

for an anthropologists’ methodological position beyond ‘evidentiary knowledge making’ (ibid.: 162). Navaro turns to the inverse of the observable presence by conceptually engaging erasure, voids, inaccessibility and unavailability, and productively confronts the limits of empiricism, which become especially apparent when researching disappearance and the disappeared. Tightly interwoven with these methodological considerations is the troubling question of knowing. Intrinsic to disappearances is not only a person’s absence but also the absence of knowledge. Unanswered questions regarding the whereabouts and the conditions of the missing person, and about the causes and circumstances of the disappearance, haunt the bereaved, who are left to wonder what the person thought, felt, suffered and maybe said during and after the event of disappearing. To quell such concerns, knowledge often becomes an indispensable good for moving forward in life. However, and as contributions to this book show (Sen; Katz; Kivilahti and Huttunen, all this volume), even if knowledge is only accessible in a ‘piecemeal, compromised way’ (Navaro 2020: 164), families and communities left behind create alternative ways of knowing in the search for the disappeared. Centring an ‘anthropology of disappearance’ in epistemic uncertainties and alternatives allows for a powerful lens to study the absent not through the linearity of a singular history but through an assemblage of different stories, imaginaries and interpretations that all contribute to the production of the category of the disappeared. Inspired by Gatti, who identifies disappearance as ‘a powerful category that helps us understand social life when social life is impacted by a strong breakdown of meaning’ (2020: 37), we locate disappearances in the realm of political and epistemic contestation. Disappearances index the dim edges of human existence and challenge the human capacity for meaning-­making. However, confronted with the often senseless event of disappearance, interpretive work by individuals and communities might also open new ways of knowledge production. The chapters of this book depart from a mode of knowing that goes beyond positivist data, and consider contextualization and interpretation as central paths to knowing. We contend that besides analysing the structural conditions that make people vulnerable to disappearances, the ethnographic task is to contextualize the various traces left behind by the missing, to reveal interconnections and to interpret knowledge fragments, including competing narratives and contradicting imaginations. Hence, instead of patching together scattered information and trying to reconstruct the ‘true’ and ‘whole’

Introduction  ◆  19

course of events that cause disappearance and loss, the contributions to this book show that fragile knowledge needs to be approached through a process of contextualization. In other words, disappearances say as much of what is not as of what is (Laakkonen; Katz; Sen; Matyska, all this volume). Against this backdrop, the chapters initiate reflections on methodological challenges in the study of what is not there (Tecca, this volume) and on the multilayered negotiations of epistemic uncertainties (Kivilahti and Huttunen, this volume), and ask about the intertwinement of knowledge and interpretation in the construction of the category of the disappeared (Katz, this volume). There exists, however, also positive knowledge about the disappeared, often en masse. One needs only to consider disappearances in the context of natural catastrophes and plane crashes, where often tourists and so-­called ‘expats’ go missing, or the identification of the exhumed scattered mortal remains of the mass graves in the ex-­Yugoslavian territories (Wagner 2008). Forensic scientists in particular produce a massive amount of knowledge about the missing (Rosenblatt 2015). Therefore, it is important to ask what knowledge is accessible to whom and address the qualities, sources and transmission of knowledge. The emergence of novel identification technologies and an unprecedented transnational effort to identify human remains have given rise to what Anstett and Dreyfus (2014) call a ‘forensic turn’: the expectation that exhumations and scientifically grounded identification are the default method of encountering unidentified human remains. A whole humanitarian culture of exhumations, identification and reburials has emerged (Rosenblatt 2015), leading to the commercialization of identification technologies (Smith 2016). It appears that a new forensic industry has been established in the twenty-­first century. In such forensic settings, official identification procedures aim at creating positive knowledge based on scientific identification. However, this does not mean that the knowledge is always made available to the families, leaving closure still out of reach. In the context of migrant disappearances in particular, there is a blatant lack of political will by states to create viable conditions for the identification of deceased migrants, leading to a significant fragmentation of this positive knowledge. As Gerhild Perl observed during her research on death and disappearance during irregular migration in the Western Mediterranean Sea, the Spanish police meticulously collect such forensic data as photographs, (restored) fingerprints and DNA samples about the unidentified bodies found in Spanish waters. This information, however, rarely arrives in the disappeared persons’

20  ◆  Laura Huttunen and Gerhild Perl

countries of origin, and if it were to, most of these countries lack digitized databases to compare forensic data. There are initiatives to institutionalize and standardize transnational collaboration for DNA comparison in the Mediterranean region,1 but so far, the outcomes have remained rather vague. Moreover, if families suspect that a relative has died on the way to Europe, they cannot come and identify the body because European states do not issue visas for this purpose.2 Since neither the families’ knowledge nor their desire to know are taken into account, these identification efforts are half-­hearted. Due to visa restrictions and the lack of a successful transnational exchange of forensic data, in most cases the recovered bodies of deceased migrants remain unidentified and end up in anonymous graves in European cemeteries. Thus, although the competent authorities’ archives are awash with forensic information on the missing persons, this knowledge remains inaccessible to the bereaved. For them, their loved one remains caught in limbo between life and death, even though they most likely died at sea. Concealment, manipulation and disinformation about circumstances and whereabouts often go hand in hand with control over narratives, especially in authoritarian regimes. State authorities not only remain indifferent to the information requests of the bereaved, they can also inflict violence on those searching for the disappeared. Inducing fear and silencing people is a form of epistemic violence that restricts ‘epistemic agency’ (Brunner 2020: 107), since ‘a person is violated in their capacity as a knower’ (Emerick 2019: 33). Knowing is also governed on a subtler level, as the philosopher Kristie Dotson argues. With the concept of ‘testimonial smothering’, she denotes suffocating elements set in motion by the affected themselves, leading to self-­censorship but enabling self-­protection (Dotson 2011: 244). Thus, the epistemic violence in the case of enforced disappearances intrudes on subjectivities and in many ways precludes any positive knowledge about the disappeared person’s whereabouts. The ‘anthropology of disappearance’, which we propose in this book, ties politics, intimate relations and knowledge production together. The relationships between them are complex and dynamic and need to be analysed in their specific ethnographic contexts. At the heart of the contestations over the fate of the disappeared is the struggle over knowledge. We argue that knowledge does not simply ­evaporate – ­rather, it is manipulated, silenced and made inaccessible to specific people and populations. We thus consider the epistemic agency of grass-­roots movements, especially the political demand for

Introduction  ◆  21

knowledge about missing persons and creative ways to invent new paths to knowledge, as an implicit attempt to shift epistemic power relations. Last but not least, we understand this book as a writing against the politics of letting disappear and as an effort to further inscribe the disappeared in academic discourse. As anthropologists who have engaged for many years with questions of dying and disappearing in violent contexts, we see it as our responsibility to not let the experiences disappear; thus, dedicating an edited volume to the terror of disappearance is our way of remembering that the disappeared and their families are a fundamental part of our world history. Laura Huttunen is Professor of Social Anthropology at Tampere University, Finland. She has worked extensively on issues of migration and transnational communities, and has conducted ethnographic research among the Bosnian diaspora since 2001. More recently, she has worked on the anthropology of human disappearances. In 2013–14 she ran a project that focused on the question of missing and disappeared persons in Bosnia–Herzegovina; in 2018–22 she led a research project with a focus on disappearances in migratory contexts. Currently, she is working on a monograph on human disappearances and reappearances. Gerhild Perl is an Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Trier, Germany. She works on death, disappearance and survival during migration; border and deportation regimes; colonial legacies and postcolonial border formations; affect and emotions; and political anthropology. Her work has been published in the Journal of Intercultural Studies, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, Migration and Society, and the Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology, among others. Her PhD thesis on death during migration across the Spanish–Moroccan sea was awarded the Maria Ioannis Baganha Award and the Dissertation Prize of the German Anthropological Association.

Notes 1. E.g. the ICMP initiative in 2018; see ICMP (2018). 2. The only way to successfully identify a body is when a relative of the dead person resides legally in the Schengen space and thus can travel in order to identify the body through visual recognition and DNA cross-­matching.

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Introduction  ◆  23

Drotbohm, Heike, and Ines Hasselberg. 2015. ‘Deportation, Anxiety, Justice: New Ethnographic Perspectives’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 41(4): 551–62. Duhaime, Bernard, and Andreanne Thibault. 2017. ‘Protection of Migrants from Enforced Disappearance: A Human Rights Perspective’, International Review of the Red Cross 99(2): 569–87. Dziuban, Zuzanna. 2020. ‘Disappearance as a Travelling Concept: The Politics and Aesthetics of a Transregional Exchange’, in Estela Schindel and Gabriel Gatti (eds), Social Disappearance: Explorations between Latin America and Eastern Europe. Berlin: Forum Transregionale Studien, pp. 60–78. Edkins, Jenny. 2011. Missing: Persons and Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Emerick, Barrett. 2019. ‘The Violence of Silencing’, in Jennifer Kling (ed.), Pacifism, Politics, and Feminism: Intersections and Innovations. Leiden: Brill, pp. 28–50. Feldman, Allen. 2019. ‘War under Erasure: Contretemps, Disappearance, Anthropophagy, Survivance’, Theory & Event 22(1): 175–203. Ferrándiz, Francisco, and Antonius C.G.M. Robben. 2015. ‘Introduction: The Ethnography of Exhumations’, in Francisco Ferrándiz and Antonius C.G.M. Robben (eds), Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 1–38. Follis, Karolina S. 2015. ‘Responsibility, Emergency, Blame: Reporting on Migrant Deaths on the Mediterranean in the Council of Europe’, Journal of Human Rights 14(1): 41–62. Fondebrider, Luis. 2005. ‘Notas para una historia de la antropología forense en Latinoamérica’, Eres: Arqueología/Bioantropología 13: 127–36. Frey, Barbara A. 2009. ‘Los Desaparecidos: The Latin American Experience as a Narrative Framework for the International Norm Against Enforced Disappearances’, Hispanic Issues On Line 5(1): 52–71. Gammeltoft-­Hansen, Thomas, and Ninna Nyberg Sørensen. 2013. The Migration Industry and the Commercialization of International Migration. Abingdon: Routledge. Gatti, Gabriel. 2011. ‘De un continente al otro: El desaparecido transnacional, la cultura humanitaria y las víctimas totales en tiempos de guerra global’, Política y Sociedad 48(3): 519–36. —-—-—. 2014. Surviving Forced Disappearance in Argentina and Uruguay: Identity and Meaning. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. —-—-—. 2020. ‘The Social Disappeared: Genealogy, Global Circulations, and (Possible) Uses of a Category for the Bad Life’, Public Culture 32(1): 25–43. González Villarreal, Roberto. 2012. Historia de la desaparición. Mexico: Terracota. Guest, Ian. 1990. Behind the Disappearances: Argentina’s Dirty War

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Against Human Rights and the United Nations. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Heller, Charles, and Lorenzo Pezzani. 2017. ‘Liquid Traces: Investigating Deaths of Migrants at the EU’s Maritime Frontier’, in Nicholas de Genova (ed.), The Borders of ‘Europe’: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 95–119. Huttunen, Laura. 2016. ‘Liminality and Contested Communitas: The Missing Persons in Bosnia-­Herzegovina’, Conflict and Society: Advances in Research 2: 201–18. —-—-—. Forthcoming. Missing Persons, Political Landscapes and Cultural Practices: Violent Absences, Haunting Presences. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Iliná, Nadejda. 2020. ‘“¡Tu madre está en la lucha!” La dimensión de género en la búsqueda de desaparecidos en Nuevo León, México’, Íconos: Revista de Ciencias Sociales 67: 119–36. International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP). 2018. ‘Developing a Joint Process on the Issue of Missing Migrants in the Mediterranean Region’. Retrieved 25 January 2023 from https://www.icmp.int/press-­ re​leases/developing-­a-joint-­process-­on-­the-­issue-­of-­missing-­migrants-­in​ -­the-­mediterranean-­region/. International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). 2013. Accompanying the Families of Missing Persons: A Practical Handbook. Geneva. Kalir, Barak. 2017. ‘State Desertion and “Out-­of-­Procedure” Asylum Seekers in the Netherlands’, Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 77: 63–75. Kalir, Barak, and Lieke Wissink. 2016. ‘The Deportation Continuum: Convergences between State Agents and NGO Workers in the Dutch Deportation Field’, Citizenship Studies 20(1): 34–49. Laakkonen, Ville. 2022. ‘Death, Disappearances, Borders: Migrant Disappearability as a Technology of Deterrence’, Political Geography 99: 1–9. Lucht, Hans. 2011. Darkness before Daybreak: African Migrants Living on the Margins in Southern Italy Today. Berkeley: University of California Press. Matyska, Anna. 2020. ‘Keeping the Transnational Search Alive: The Missing, Social Presences and Disappearances’, in Estela Schindel and Gabriel Gatti (eds), Social Disappearance: Explorations between Latin America and Eastern Europe. Berlin: Forum Transregionale Studien, pp. 204–20. Moon, Claire. 2013. ‘Interpreters of the Dead: Forensic Knowledge, Human Remains and the Politics of the Past’, Social and Legal Studies 22(2): 149–69. —-—-—. 2020. ‘Extraordinary Deathwork: New Developments in, and the Social Significance of, Forensic Humanitarian Action’, in Roberto C. Parra, Sara C. Zapico and Douglas H. Ubelaker (eds), Forensic Science

Introduction  ◆  25

and Humanitarian Action: Interacting with the Dead and the Living. Chichester: Wiley, pp. 37–48. Navaro, Yael. 2020. ‘The Aftermath of Mass Violence: A Negative Methodology’, Annual Review of Anthropology 49: 161–73. Nyberg, Sørensen Ninna, and Laura Huttunen. 2020. ‘Missing Migrants and the Politics of Disappearance in Armed Conflicts and Migratory Contexts’, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 87(2): 321–37. Oufkir, Malika, and Michele Fitoussi. 2002. Stolen Lives. New York: Hyperion. Perl, Gerhild. 2018. ‘Lethal Borders and the Translocal Politics of “Ordinary People”’, Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 27(2): 85–104. —-—-—. 2019. ‘Traces of Death: Exploring Affective Responsiveness across the Spanish-­Moroccan Sea’, PhD thesis. Bern: University of Bern. —-—-—. 2020. ‘The Production of Illicit Lives: Racial Governmentality and Colonial Legacies across the Strait of Gibraltar’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 145: 81–100. Perl, Gerhild, and Sabine Strasser. 2018. ‘Transnational Moralities: The Politics of Ir/Responsibility of and Against the EU Border Regime’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 25(5): 507–23. Petrović-­Šteger, Maja. 2009. ‘Anatomizing ­Conflict – ­Accommodating Human Remains’, in Maryon McDonald and Helen Lambert (eds), Social Bodies. New York: Berghahn, pp. 47–76. Renshaw, Layla. 2011. Exhuming Loss: Memory, Materiality and Mass Graves of the Spanish Civil War. London: Routledge. Robben, Antonius C.G.M. 2000. ‘The Assault on Basic Trust: Disappearance, Protest, and Reburial in Argentina’, in Antonius C.G.M. Robben and Marcelo M. Súarez-­Orozco (eds), Cultures under Siege: Collective Violence and Trauma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 70–101. —-—-— (ed.). 2004a. Death, Mourning and Burial: A Cross-Cultural Reader. London: Blackwell. —-—-—. 2004b. ‘Death and Anthropology: An Introduction’, in Antonius C.G.M. Robben (ed.), Death, Mourning and Burial: A Cross-Cultural Reader. London: Blackwell, pp. 1–16. —-—-—. 2004c. ‘State Terror in the Netherworld: Disappearance and Reburial in Argentina’, in Antonius C.G.M. Robben (ed.), Death, Mourning and Burial: A Cross-Cultural Reader. London: Blackwell, pp. 134–48. —-—-—. 2005. Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. —-—-—. 2014. ‘Governing the Disappeared-­Living and the Disappeared-­ Dead: The Violent Pursuit of Cultural Sovereignty during Authoritarian Rule in Argentina’, in Finn Stepputat (ed.), Governing the Dead: Sovereignty and the Politics of Dead Bodies. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 143–62.

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—-—-—. 2018. A Companion to the Anthropology of Death. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Rosenblatt, Adam. 2015. Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science after Atrocity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rubin, Jonah S. 2015. ‘Aproximación al concepto de desaparecido: Reflexiones sobre El Salvador y España’, Alteridades 25(49): 9–24. Sanford, Victoria. 2003. Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sant Cassia, Paul. 2005. Bodies of Evidence: Burial, Memory and the Recovery of Missing Persons in Cyprus. Oxford: Berghahn. Schindel, Estela. 2020a. ‘Death and Disappearances in Migration to Europe: Exploring the Uses of a Transnational Category’, American Behavioral Scientists 64(4): 389–407. —-—-—. 2020b. ‘Mobility and Disappearance: Transregional Threads, Historical Resonances’, in Estela Schindel and Gabriel Gatti (eds), Social Disappearance: Explorations between Latin America and Eastern Europe. Berlin: Forum Transregionale Studien, pp. 14–44. Schindel, Estela, and Gabriel Gatti (eds). 2020. Social Disappearance: Explorations between Latin America and Eastern Europe. Berlin: Forum Transregionale Studien. Schwartz-­Marin, Ernesto, and Arely Cruz-­Santiago. 2016. ‘Pure Corpses, Dangerous Citizens: Transgressing the Boundaries between Experts and Mourners in the Search for the Disappeared in Mexico’, Social Research 83(2): 483–510. Slyomovics, Susan. 2005. The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Smith, Lindsay. 2016. ‘The Missing, the Martyred and the Disappeared: Global Networks, Technical Intensification and the End of Human Rights Genetics’, Social Studies of Science 47(3): 398–416. Stover, Eric, and Gilles Peress. 1998. Graves: Srebrenica and Vukovar. Zurich: Scalo. Strasser, Sabine, and Luisa Piart. 2018. ‘Intimate Uncertainties: Ethnographic Explorations of Moral Economies across Europe’, Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 27(2): v–xv. United Nations. 2010. ‘International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance’. Retrieved 25 January 2023 from https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-­mechanisms/instruments/intern​ ational-­convention-­protection-­all-­persons-­enforced. UN Human Rights Council. 2017. Report of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances on Enforced Disappearances in the Context of Migration. 28 July. A/HRC/36/39/Add.2. Retrieved 25 January 2023 from https://www.refworld.org/docid/59bfb3aa4.html. Verdery, Katherine. 1999. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press. Wagner, Sarah. 2008. To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for Srebrenica’s Missing. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Willis, Graham D. 2021. ‘Mundane Disappearance: The Politics of Letting Disappear in Brazil’, Economy and Society 50(2): 1–25. Zagaria, Valentina. 2020. ‘“Burning” Borders: Migration, Death and Dignity in a Tunisia Coastal Town’, unpublished PhD thesis. London: London School of Economics. Zia, Ather. 2016. ‘The Spectacle of a Good Half-­Widow: Women in Search of Their Disappeared Men in the Kashmir Valley’, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 39(2): 164–75.

Part I Voicing Disappearances Violence, Intimacies and Afterlives

1 ‘Who Has Taken My Son (Amar Cheleke Ke Nilo)?’ Pervasive Missingness, Custodial Disappearances and Revolutionary Violence in Urban India Atreyee Sen

Introduction ‘Didi [elder sister], go home.’ It wasn’t even the peak of the movement, things had quietened down, I was told. There was not much violence around even though our area was still tense. The police came. They said my son was involved in the movement. He said he was innocent, we also said he was not involved in any way. So, the police said if he was really innocent they would let him go. They dragged him away, he stumbled along with the policeman. Such a thin boy and all those policemen. He didn’t come home that day, or the next. I went to the police station. They said they had released my son after questioning and he had headed home. I asked people around the police station if they had seen my son leave. No one gave me an answer, they avoided making eye contact with me. The man who sold tea next to the police station said, ‘Didi, go home, your son will not be coming home. I see many young boys go in and not come out.’ I didn’t believe him. I went to my neighbourhood and asked everyone whether they had met my son, my neighbours said the same thing. ‘Didi, go home’, they begged me, in a desperate voice. And closed their doors. Some people would only open a window shutter to say the same thing. A few days passed. I went to the homes of his friends, went to the park where he often played football. I didn’t eat, bathe or change my sari. And then I went back to the police station and wanted to file a missing person’s

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report. The constable whispered to me, ‘Didi, go home. This is not a safe place.’ But I stayed to file a complaint, there was no home without my boy. The officer-­in-­charge reluctantly filed a report, and gave me a copy of the papers. I even stopped at the local stationery shop and bought a light pink folder in which I put the papers. ‘Give me a good envelope’, I told the shopkeeper. ‘Didi, go home’, he said softly. ‘I am going, I am going’, I said to him abruptly. The pink file came home with me. I wrote my son’s name on it. ‘Mahesh Roychowdhury’ in Bengali, in big handwriting. I sat on my bed and looked at the folder and thought: one day there was my son, flesh and blood, the next day he is a file, papers in a folder. And thus began my long journey with my missing son …

This tragic introductory vignette offers an ethnographic pathway into this chapter, which traces the affective life of a police fi ­ le – ­a missing person’s complaint registered by 85-­year-­old Shanta, whose 14-­year-­old son disappeared in Calcutta, a city in eastern India, in 1974. The young son, Mahesh, was at that time a sympathizer of a raging Maoist revolutionary uprising in the region, and was dragged away from his neighbourhood for ‘questioning’ by the city police. Even though the local officers claimed that Mahesh was released after interrogation, he did not return home. During the peak of the violent conflict, Shanta, then a housewife in her thirties in a low-­income household, carried the file to dangerous police outposts and to the homes of influential families in order to gather scattered information or political gossip, which enabled her to create a mental scenario of her son’s brutal death in police custody. Once convinced that her son was dead, she used the file as a form of post-­conflict social protest: she demanded a legitimate response from state authorities who had once captured and tortured Maoists, and sought explanations from former Maoist revolutionaries who had mobilized vulnerable young students into an armed struggle. In recent times, chased away from various quarters as a traumatized woman who ‘wouldn’t let go of the past’, the widowed Shanta has spent her fading years grieving for her son with the file clutched to her chest. ‘Who has taken my son (amar cheleke ke nilo)?’ remains her question to a mainstream urban society gradually erasing its history of violence. No one visits Shanta any more. This chapter attempts to analyse the afflicted engagements, dynamics of absence and extraordinary memories of ordinary women who encounter the fallout of state kidnappings, custodial deaths, disappearances and the sudden absence of politicized youth, all of which often characterize regions marked by anti-­state guerrilla movements.

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It shows how the expressive nature of Shanta’s loss was moulded (over the next forty years) by her agonizing relationship with a tattered missing person’s file, a mere copy of the complaint that was handed to her as legal protocol when she filed her disappearance report. The anthropology of conflict that highlights ‘maternal frames of war’ (Orozco Mendoza 2019; Miller 2018) underlines the role of collective action taken by mothers who have lost their children to state atrocities, especially in South Asia. For example, de Alwis (2009) highlights the authenticity in maternal grief through the lens of the Mothers’ Front, which comprised large numbers of women protesting the abduction and disappearance of young men during the decades-­ long civil war in Sri Lanka. Emerging scholarship on historical state violence underscores the vital role of public protests in visibilizing the ongoing grief of mothers’ justice groups whose members have lost their children to state-­sponsored abductions. For example, Partnoy (2007: 2), in her study of written testimonials about missing children by Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, suggests ‘that the process of their [the testimonials’] production and dissemination helps explain how they are positioned within discourses of solidarity that emphasize community over individuality’. Instead of exploring the experiences of women through more established frameworks of collective resistance and suffering (which I will nevertheless weave into the following discussion), I narrativize the invisible, individual and private journey of a woman whose complex relationship with a material inheritance related to her loss enlivened her crusade for justice. According to the editors of this collected anthology, [t]he inexplicable disappearance of a person leaves a void, and if the unaccounted-­for absence continues for a long time, not only emotional but also practical issues arise, such as the statuses of family members left ­behind … a­ nd access to the property of the missing person. At the same time, the missing are often culturally liminal figures between life and death, who create a disturbing absence in the larger community …, and such voids generate what we call ‘disturbed intimacies’. (See introduction of this book)

In my text, I will return to the vernacular (Bengali) use of the word ‘khali’ that is repeated in Shanta’s retelling of her life without her son. A literal translation of the concept would be ‘empty’, but ‘khali’ also refers to the hollowing out of joy, disappearance, lonely absence, haunting loss and a vacant existence in its many conversational references, and this remains in alignment with this critical notion of disturbed intimacies. In the final analytical section in this chapter, I will

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offer the concept of ‘pervasive missingness’. I show how this concept coalesces multiple accounts of disappearance, especially embedded in the experience of ‘khali’ or chronic emptiness that determines the intimacies of Shanta’s everyday life. The missing person’s file remains central to Shanta’s life story. Her narratives suggest a certain individualization and internalization of grief, which had an outward manifestation in the form of a search. Her queries about her missing son and her decades of wandering around the city asking these questions were a form of political protest, not just to keep the memories of injustice alive to herself, but to battle against the eradication of memories of the revolutionary movement that frames a time when her son was alive. Shanta’s son is missing, his dead body is missing, a sense of closure is missing, the revolutionary period is missing, people associated with the movement and the policemen dealing with interrogations at that time are increasingly missing, the neighbourhood that was alive and radical during the movement is missing, the neighbours, family and friends are missing, the mother in Shanta is missing. All that remains is the file containing Mahesh’s disappearance report. It is the sole material object that is physically present as a reminder and reservoir of the memories of the missing son and his missing body. Many Naxal activists from the 1960s and 1970s are ageing, and the generation, like Shanta, is slowly fading out. Police archives and other scattered written documents (like the file carried around by Shanta) will lose vitality as markers and carriers of a time when youth death and disappearance haunted the lives and streets of an entire city. For Shanta, a file of documents on her captured son becomes her refuge, and embodies her commitment to the pursuit of justice for her missing child. Her obsession with the past becomes a thorn in the side of state authorities and politicians, whose political standing depends on denying the human suffering rooted in the city’s violent political history. According to Boym (2001), who explores melancholic mourning for a lost time and space, restorative nostalgia attempts to recover the past in order to ‘rebuild the mythical place called home’ (ibid.: 50). In the following sections, which trace how ‘women’s testimony across the board is often located in the temporal and spatial detail of the quotidian’ (Coombes 2011: S94), I elucidate Shanta’s journeys with the file. I illustrate how her encounters with the denialism of the state, and experiences of public amnesia about youth disappearances, framed a ‘pervasive missingness’ related to her loss of a utopic home. In their discussions on negative epistemologies of disappearance, the editors of this volume also remind us that ‘unanswered questions

‘Who Has Taken My Son (Amar Cheleke Ke Nilo)?’  ◆  35

regarding the whereabouts and the conditions of the missing person, and about the causes and circumstances of the disappearance, haunt the bereaved, who are left to wonder [emphasis mine] what the person thought, felt, suffered, and maybe said during and after the event of disappearing’ (see introduction of this book). It is this wondering about Shanta’s son’s disappearance that I also want to capture in the following text, which I have composed by selecting snippets from my regular conversations with her (since we met in 2010). In this context, I suggest that the role of accuracy in her words and the importance of truth in her narratives become redundant. By attempting to make a creative re-­enactment of her stories through my text, I have highlighted what Hale (2012) describes as the contradictions, the limitations and the work of resistance in memory, which by extension allows us to raise important issues about the relationship between history and representation. It also encourages us to draw from the genre of ‘writing memories’ to develop political, essayistic discourses about the violence of state regimes and its legacy of abductions, illegal arrests and torture.

The Naxal Movement and Youth Disappearance in Calcutta Shanta’s telling of her son’s disappearance takes us to the afterlife of urban political violence. Historically, the rise of revolutionary movements in urban centres, where long-­term marginalization and class-­ based feuds coalesce into collective political struggles, has often been described as an ideological madness (Kujur 2006). The Naxal uprising in Bengal started with a peasant revolt in 1967, when tribal populations in a village called Naxalbari collaborated with the radical Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) to overthrow the landed gentry and reclaim peasant land (Scanlon 2018). The success of this uprising prompted the communist leadership to launch a decade-­long, protracted people’s war. The state retaliated with extreme violence. As the rural movement became crippled, communist leaders envisioned Calcutta as a new locus of revolutionary activity. Educational institutions, public spaces and urban neighbourhoods became sites of Naxal mobilization (Banerjee 2008). Since the centrally located police force in Calcutta had a more efficient communication network than that of its rural counterparts, the state clampdown in the city was particularly brutal. This involved the capture, torture and killing of Naxals and their sympathizers,

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informants, family members, friends and teachers, and even ordinary citizens reading about Mao, Marx and the Naxal movement. During the course of my fieldwork, I analysed the narratives of both former political prisoners and their support network. I undertook this study in order to comprehend the myriad ways in which the Naxal movement in the 1970s engendered and impacted everyday understandings of custodial violence, state torture and ‘the political prison’ in postcolonial urban India. While doing intermittent ethnographic research (2009–19) on these prison legacies of the violent Naxal movement in Calcutta, I set out to find Shanta as part of my own quest to locate the families of those who had disappeared or faced carceral punishment during the movement. While talking to family members of young Naxals who had been imprisoned and eventually killed by a police force confronted with an urban anti-­ state guerrilla movement in the 1970s, I was informed about both the madness and location of Shanta, and was told that she had been relentlessly searching for her son who went missing forty years ago after a police raid on her house (Sur and Sen 2020). When I arrived in their neighbourhood, I paused at a street corner to ask a man about her address: AS: Can you tell me where to find the home of Shanta? I was told everyone knows her in this neighbourhood. Neighbour: Why? AS: I need to speak to her about her lost son, I am doing some research … [I was urged by other interlocuters who knew Shanta that I should be upfront about my research interests in her neighbourhood, since old inhabitants of the locality still maintained surveillance on strangers entering an urban area once ravaged by insurgent activities].

Another angry neighbour retorted: Who are you looking for? That mad Didi? Why are you encouraging her? We just want to bury the past in this neighbourhood and get on with our lives. She has been depressed for years and she is making everyone around her depressed. There have been no ‘missing’ for so many years. The missing are dead. DEAD TO US [shouts] whether they are alive somewhere or not. Why don’t you let it go? Then she will let go before she dies …

Other neighbours gathered: Buri pagol, buri pagli [old woman is mad, the old woman is mad] … Leave it. We want development in this neighbourhood and it won’t happen properly till people stop seeing this place as a hub of Naxal p ­ olitics … i­t

‘Who Has Taken My Son (Amar Cheleke Ke Nilo)?’  ◆  37

was a long time ­ago … ­leave ­it … ­we don’t talk to her any ­more … ­you will get no life, only file [this sentence was said in English, referring to Shanta’s obsession with the missing person’s file] …

While walking away from this group of agitated men I pondered how Calcutta, with its emerging commercial status and growing centrality of right-­wing activism, had only a few pockets of left-­wing politics, and some select spaces that marked the existence of its Naxal past. Even these small spaces might have scattered degradable graffiti and handmade posters on the walls and in some coffee houses. There are barely any permanent tributes at key road and traffic junctions to mark the revolutionary struggle. The large-­scale disappearance of youth remains memorized mainly in the nostalgia of those who adhered to the movement’s ideology during the active years of the struggle. The sociopolitical topography of the Naxal movement also remains sparsely alive in the works of poets, writers and film-­makers who have represented a variety of topics that are embedded in post-­ revolutionary cultures, including exile, return, lost utopias, trauma and reconciliation. The audiovisual realm continues to be an avenue for the public dissemination of memories of violence, yet it remains elusive to ordinary people like Shanta who are at the margins of artistic, aesthetic and abstract expressions and cultures. Unlike the gendered frames of war mobilized by women collectively in the contexts of Chile and Argentina, in the following sections I will show how Shanta’s experience of social, spatial and cultural marginality, and the ensuing experience of ‘pervasive missingness’ and maternal desolation, encases her solitary search missions beyond the home and into the public sphere.

Ethnographic Snippets from Shanta’s Story: The Home and the State I eventually found Shanta’s address after dodging her neighbours on the street. Entering the lobby of her ground-­floor apartment, I was surprised to see that an old, wooden letterbox with her name on it was kept shining clean. The other boxes in that cluster were dusty, broken and abandoned, as Shanta’s neighbours had evidently moved on to digital post and communication. But Shanta was still waiting for a postcard or a letter from someone who could give her news about her son, she said, while stepping out into the lobby to let me in. Looking around her crumbling apartment, with its chipped walls

38  ◆  Atreyee Sen

and cobwebs across the windows, I noticed she had a relatively clean kitchen, with washed steel utensils and a plastic sheet over a small table. Just in case anyone comes over with some news, she added. One day, we sat at this same table and, with a frail smile, Shanta started to tell me the story of her son and her journey with a file containing the ‘missing person’s report’. Jumping around in time and space while combing through the recesses of her mind, she started out by discussing her husband. He was her initial ally in the search for her son. But he left her a bereft widow and broken mother when he died of a shattered heart. Shanta said: The first day of the file at home was strange to say the least. My husband and I sat on the floor in the kitchen. ‘What will we do?’ he asked me. I said, ‘I have to find a bag big enough to carry around the file. I think I have to go to many places with you.’ Looking back, I think I couldn’t protect my son and all I wanted to do was protect the file. The fact that I knew at that point I had to go to many places with the file seeking answers, perhaps in just a week’s time, I was aware that my son was gone, all that was left with his name was this file. Every morning I would wake up to this emptiness [khali] and hope that the knock on the door was that of my son. If the neighbours dropped by, I hoped that they would bring news. But they usually came to find out how I was holding up. I lost interest in their questions about my well-­being after a while, so they all stopped coming over the years. My husband died five years after my son went missing. When he was very ill, he said, ‘Shanta, burn the file, cremate both of us together. Let go of us.’ I took the file to the cremation ground, but I could only leave my husband behind. I returned home with the file.

After her husband’s death, Shanta began her profound public journey with the file, alone and with no companions. The home that was lost to the revolution could no longer hold the vastness of ­loss – ­an emotion that adds depth and intensity to the notion of ‘pervasive missingness’ – as the maternal and marital loss poured out of her home and spilled into the nooks and crannies of a city that she would discover anew through her grief. Discussing ‘the disappearance’ with friends and family within the confines of her living room appeared hollow. Commiserations and condolences for her various losses left her grieving further, and she experienced a debilitating frustration at her lack of knowledge about Mahesh’s disappearance. Her excursions outside the remit of her home to uncover the truth about her son’s disappearance almost invariably ended up in the police station. Even though she was not a woman who went into the world on a regular

‘Who Has Taken My Son (Amar Cheleke Ke Nilo)?’  ◆  39

basis, let alone to police stations, her determination to seek answers compelled her to spend hours of her day at various police outlets all over the city, especially in those neighbourhoods that were notorious for Naxal activity and hence suffered police backlash. Shanta emphasized how the standard response she received over the years was ‘kono khobor nei, amader kacheo file ache’ (there is no news, we also have a copy of the file). Shanta said: The first few months after my son’s disappearance I used to go to the police station with my file, and wait on a bench. Everyone knew my face yet walked past me, as if no one was aware why I was waiting for hours on that bench. At first the officer-­in-­charge would allow me to get to his desk, I could bring my file out and show it to him. After that I didn’t make it to his desk at all. They would say ‘kono khobor nei, amader kacheo file ache’ even before I got a chance to talk to the officers. For weeks, months and years after my first visits they were polite enough to offer me some water, since the station was so hot. Then they started to call me ‘the mad mother’ and say, ‘she has come again file in hand’. They would often say that I shouldn’t bother coming to the station, if there was any news or updates they would contact me. But since my file and I turned up almost every day, they even stopped talking to me after a while. If someone gave me water or stopped to ask me why I was there, I knew that chap was a new face. I used to tell the police officers and constables, ‘Tell me the truth, I will go to the morgue and collect his body, I will forgive you’. They would constantly say ‘kono khobor nei’ (there is no news). I always came back empty-­handed [khali haathe].

Many former insurgents told me about how they were captured and tortured by the police, and served prison sentences at various correctional facilities in and around Calcutta. These were particularly upfront, brutal encounters with the ­police – ­the lowest rung of the state machinery. While talking to Shanta about her meetings with the police both during and many decades after the revolutionary period, I uncovered how these encounters were slow, tortuous and painful, and became juxtaposed with a historical (yet rumour-­based) understanding about the final fate of Naxal detainees who suffered and died from custodial violence. Over many years, while documenting the ethno-­histories of a community of ageing political prisoners and the families of the disappeared, I collected many such stories of individuals and families holding on to objects, memoirs and artefacts that reminded them of their loss, grief and even political passions related to the revolutionary movement. This act of ‘holding on’ showed how political histories of mass urban disappearances can be mapped not

40  ◆  Atreyee Sen

only through dramatic memories of confinement, but also through ordinary people’s micro-­encounters with the apathy of a hostile state; in Shanta’s case it was average policemen covering up their extra-­legal activities of the past. In one of my conversations with Shanta, I was intrigued as to how she also experienced the concerns and counselling of neighbours and extended kin as apathy. Shanta said: My neighbours were very supportive, I have to admit that. They also had sons who were harassed by the police, I know that some of them had sons and daughters involved in the movement. So many of them were sent away to faraway places for safety, so many children from the neighbourhood went off to serve in the village movement. I was so simple then, I didn’t understand what was going on around me. I thought I knew my son, and I still don’t know whether he was involved in the movement. My neighbours knew that it was unpleasant to come to me, yet they still came. I was so caught up with my file, I chased them all away. There were times I just wanted to be at home alone and empty [khali] with my file. They used to tell me, ‘Chere din, file akre thakben na, jibon beche neen’ [choose life, let go of the file, just let it go]. It was only then I realized that my son was really gone [khali], perhaps he was dead. The more people said ‘choose life’, the more I realized I was carrying a dead person’s file. When new people came to my house, I used to offer them a glimpse of my file instead of tea. Just in case they ever came across some information about my son. It was several years after that fateful night that it hit me that my son might be dead and not missing. Have you seen Pather Panchali [‘Song of the Little Road’, directed by Satyajit Ray]? My son didn’t look like a pink file, he looked like Apu [the young protagonist of the film]’.

At no point in her discussions with me did Shanta suggest that this pink file was a mirror of or a replacement for her son, or that the file had a life of its own, untethered from a co-­dependent relationship with Shanta. She attributed character and agency to the file, as a humanized non-­human entity that played an integral part in her journey. She felt that the file was an extension of her body, a friend she found comfort in, an enemy that was the source of her pain, an object that was a reminder of her loss and also a leader she followed around (instead of being a submissive agent that went along with her to many destinations). At all times, the file remained central to her personal universe and her political journey. It was the main legal document that contained evidence that her son had gone missing, and such records had been given significant validity during the long history of colonial bureaucracy in India. In her imagination of the abstract world of human rights and citizens’ demands, she could not

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be branded as a mad woman by either the police or her family and friends. She did not illegitimately and unjustifiably blame people and the state for the disappearance of her child. The file was proof of her loss. Maternal framing of this kind of loss, with attendant cultural notions of pacifism and self-­abnegation, is emotionally evocative and thus effective at eliciting sympathy. According to de Volo (2004), who explores the mobilization of political innocence as a framework for comprehending the intimate relationship between war and maternal resistance, mothers of combatants and potential war draftees become channels through which post-­conflict societies can address their grief about lives lost to violence. These mobilized mothers ‘can be effectively framed as “apolitical” and expressive of some transcendent, moral-­laden truth, making the political messages attributed to them difficult for others to dispute’ (ibid.: 24). In Nicaragua, for example, the Sandinistas and the anti-­ Sandinista Catholic hierarchy posed ‘mother’ as synonymous with ‘woman’ and framed the ideal woman within the same parameters as the Virgin Mary, a woman motivated by maternal love, not politics, and selflessly committed to saving her children. The slices of testimony discussed above show how Shanta’s use of maternal symbolism becomes less effective in the face of state denialism. Her presence, and her file, were awkward, unique reminders and testimonies of a violent past. Despite being undauntingly committed to her son, she was not a passive icon of humility and of resignation to her son’s death, like Mother Mary. She did not take part in a collective consensus to participate in anti-­state oppositional politics, and she actively resisted succumbing to public and marital pressures to move on from the position of being an angry mother. She evoked less and less sympathy from others as she used multiple informal pathways to facilitate her pursuit of the truth, which I will illustrate further in the following section. I will show how Shanta did stake a claim to justice from an apolitical standpoint, but that her political agency lay in her sharply critical and long-­term engagement with actors and agents on both sides of the revolution, in her small war of words with those who potentially manipulated the political ideologies of the youth and those who orchestrated the death and disappearance of many revolutionaries.

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Ethnographic Snippets from Shanta’s Story: The Politician and the Revolutionary While wandering around Calcutta and entering the homes of many elderly women who had children who were captured and tortured by the state, I often met female family members of former Naxals who did not want to discuss ‘those days’ of the revolution. Some of them would vigorously shake their heads and others would say they did not want to talk about it. I left them alone. Sometimes they would get in touch with me at a later date and were willing to share some experiences, some of them discussing events that were painfully central to those days, and others eventually talking at great length about the horrors of the past. Shanta always stood out in the midst of everyone because she would get straight to the heart of her stories about the file, without ever discussing her own childhood, her educational and family background or any other life or social events that were peripheral to the loss of her son. While others moved between remembering, forgetting and moving on, Shanta remained firmly rooted in the telling of her life as a mother still seeking justice. In my earlier writing I had discussed the ethical aspects of rememorizing, and how time and patience during fieldwork would create a safe space for my interlocutors to carry out difficult conversations (Sen 2018). Shanta needed no time. She evidently looked forward to sharing her story with me, and tried to organize her experiences of the past according to her encounters with the multiple actors she identified as key players in events surrounding her son’s disappearance. This organization of her narrative, a process during which I was mainly a silent and avid listener, became the main component of my relationship with Shanta. In this section, I will draw out snippets of conversation about the role of politicians and former Naxal revolutionaries in Shanta’s telling of her past. The file, of course, threaded together these encounters with prominent public personalities who dodged her questions as she sought to hold them accountable for her loss. Shanta said: This file has visited the homes, rallies, lectures and offices of so many politicians. It was only after I realized that the police were not going to help me that I started to visit the politicians. I used to keep track of people through newspapers. For many years, I went to meet politicians who were associated with the government during the Naxal movement. I could not get near some of them. Some others were polite enough to give me a chair, take the file from my hand, and flip through the pages. I don’t

‘Who Has Taken My Son (Amar Cheleke Ke Nilo)?’  ◆  43

want to divulge any names. But one politician was very shocked because I directly asked him for the transcript of my son’s interrogation. I said if my son was taken to the police station for an interrogation, someone must have a record of it. He said that was a different time, nothing was recorded. Nothing was recorded? That week they recorded a missing person’s report! I asked him again. I said perhaps there will be a clue in the interrogation report, but I got a shake of the head. He told me, ‘Apnar kono dosh nei’ [this is not your fault], and returned the file to me. But it was my fault! I don’t know if my son was involved in the movement, I don’t know why the police took my son away, I don’t know whether he is dead or alive, and I don’t have any information about him. But I always came back with my file and nothing else [khali]. I used to sit on the bus holding onto the file for dear life as if it would get hurt or damaged if I dropped it.

While it was the police and the political parties who were more obviously associated with the state, I became curious about Shanta’s drive to also meet former revolutionaries who survived the days of the uprising. Some of them had gained leading positions in a range of professions, including academia and social activism. Many of them had become allies of the left-­wing government that eventually came to power at the end of the revolutionary period, and retained important roles in society as political critics. Shanta claimed she was not daunted by their current status. To her, these revolutionaries also owed a poor mother some answers. Shanta said: The file went to meet the Naxals as well. About ten years had passed since the disappearance of my son. Many former revolutionaries resurfaced in my neighbourhood and returned to the wider locality. They still carried on doing good work, I am not going to criticize anyone. I used to meet them as well. Knock on their doors with my file. I would ask them if they knew my son. Whether my son was really involved in the movement. Whether my son was alive and in hiding. I would ask them whether it was possible that my son got frightened after questioning and torture in custody and ran away from the city to escape the police. They would always say they didn’t know my son. ‘Amra shobai ke chinina’, we don’t know everyone, they said. Some of them told me that there were many Naxal supporters and sympathizers who were also questioned by the police, they didn’t necessarily have to be intimately involved in the movement. There were others that were secret informers and their identities were always hidden. So, my son was probably an unknown martyr. Unknown-­unknown, empty-­empty [ojana, ojana, khali, khali]. These young and vulnerable men were sent to their deaths by Naxal leaders! I used to cry on my way home, with large drops of tears falling on the file. The file cover became crinkly over time.

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This degeneration of the file could be a metaphor for the degeneration of Shanta’s relationships with people who refused to offer her a glimpse of hope. Yet her particularly salient anecdotes highlight the emotional yet persuasive strategies she deployed to bring forth the semiotic value and impact of producing a missing person’s file to actors who might have had an association with the disappearance of Mahesh. Unlike a range of writers who focus on discourses of solidarity (see other contributions in this volume), Shanta’s journey highlights the production and dissemination of a peculiar political life of remembrance that is both individualized and interventionist. Her solo journey through the city becomes a critical nostalgic reflection on the multiple legacies of state brutalities, and on how the complex intersections of loss and revolution shape the meanings of post-­conflict motherhood. Shanta foregrounds not just her longing for her lost child, but also her disenchantment with the state, with leftist militancy and with family, friends and kinship networks that depict a political ethos of dismissal around fraught human memories. While the city continuously morphs and transitions towards modernity, the small cultures of remembrance and justice appear ‘crinkly’ in the face of socio-­economic reforms and urban development. In the following section I show how Shanta’s stories bring out the complexities of personal loss entrenched in long historical processes in the city, and this nuanced reading of Shanta’s emotional landscape is what I describe as ‘pervasive missingness’.

Pervasive Missingness Shanta traces her journey with the file, often referring to the file as her son, and often as an object that travels with her in her search for her son. Despite these references, she remained conscious of the fact that a mere file could not be her son in flesh and blood. Her process of making sense of her ­loss – ­sometimes acknowledging that her son might be dead, and sometimes keeping hope a­ live – d ­ eveloped in a relationship with a file that acted as an actor and an agent, a friend and a foe, and contained the last evidence of her son’s disappearance. The file was very tattered and fragile, and I did not have the courage to touch it lest it crumble in my hands. When I asked Shanta what it said, she clearly stated that it was a legal and formal document with a registration number for the complaint, the details of the complaint and the date and time of its registration, among other information. Her emphasis on the legal status of the file made it deeply politicized,

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since she rarely talked about having this same relationship with her son’s books or clothes. Her narrative suggests that she harnessed the power of her tragedy through the impact of encounters with a mother carrying around a file on her missing son. For example, she did not turn up at the door of the police or the politicians with her son’s shirt, but tried to use the official nature of the document as her instrument to challenge the system into a response. Nor did Shanta seek out the support of other mothers who were going through a similar journey, coping with the loss of their children to police brutality or the movement. She did not compromise on the intensity of her individual loss by allowing her son to be lost among numerous young people killed and declared missing during the peak of the movement. Thus, Shanta’s relationship with her file remained one of both love and hate, as she moved between anger and resentment regarding her son being reduced to a file and treating the file as her companion while negotiating the city. Her story paints with broad brushstrokes this notion of ‘pervasive missingness’, which is highlighted in her quest to know who took her son. Shanta said: The file went to the police station, met with politicians, passed through the hands of my neighbours, was touched by the revolutionaries. Yet no one could tell me ‘amar cheleke ke nilo’ [who took my son]. That was the only answer that my file and I wanted in this life. I was told so many stories of young boys being killed in police custody at that time, and being thrown into the river or secretly disposed of. I heard stories that Mahesh may have run away from the police station, and was killed somewhere else where his body was buried quickly to avoid police detection. I was told that maybe he was so committed to the movement that he does not want to return home; the police interrogation hardened his faith in the movement to such an extent that he decided not to return home at all. All I know is that someone somewhere took my son, and left me to lead my life with a file. And now I have nothing left, khali. No son, no husband, no friends or family, a reputation as a mad mother, no money, no resources and I have to die with this file. It is only with my death, the file will die with me.

Shanta’s state of social death was precipitated when her affective status changed over time: she started out as an aggrieved mother searching for the missing body of her son, and eventually became the mad woman in the neighbourhood. She alienated herself from ‘normal’ social life and was eventually abandoned by her friends, family and neighbours. The response of her peers on observing her relationship with the missing file suggests that there is a

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temporal limitation to the search for the ­missing – ­one must know when to accept the missing as dead, and when to ‘let go’. Shanta’s search became mental trauma, obsession, selfishness, irritation and annoyance to her family and friends, especially since she refused to visibly suppress her unhappiness and ‘pretend’ in front of people. Her honest and direct expression of disenchantment with all that was lost and missing created discomfort among an urban population keen to eradicate the shadow of the movement in the city, and to embrace a modernity unchallenged by violent political unrest and the huge legacy of imprisonment and torture. Shanta’s modest and now ramshackle house had a small corner in which there was a short platform with a variety of Hindu gods and goddesses. There was water and food on the plate in front of the statues, and the remains of an incense stick, which suggested that she looked after that corner with love. What I found significant in Shanta’s narrative was the deep political content of her quest and questioning. She did not turn to God and religion, and even though I interjected to ask her about religious practices, she insisted that her relationship with her God was not part of her search for the missing. What she felt towards her God was ‘obhiman’, a small amount of resentment for being made to suffer even though she had not caused anyone harm. She said that she did withhold a part of her prayers and her ritual to remind God that she was still suffering and that s/he should not forget her. ‘Ami phool di na’, ‘I don’t give any flowers’, she said to me. Even though the withholding of an object of domestic ritual around everyday prayer could potentially be representative of wider absences in human life (see Bille, Hastrup and Sørensen 2010), the assertion that Shanta as a Hindu woman did not seek answers from her God piqued my interest. She said she did not ask ‘who took my son’ while doing her prayers, because she was aware that only men and mortals could offer answers about ‘the missing’. The path of religion is usually one of solace, acceptance, release and healing. Shanta’s resistance to seeking help from religious philosophy, temples and other modes of Hindu religious practice underlined her desire to retain her anger. It ensured that the ‘pervasive missingness’ inflicted on her life did not lose its strong political accoutrements. She did not use her Hindu status to seek sympathy or solidarity from those she sought answers from, but continued to occupy the status of a mother in distress. While this sense of anger might have parallels with the rage of mothers’ movements across the world, Shanta’s anger was mostly private, and publicly and sporadically displayed in front of people she blamed and shamed for the disappearance of her son. This

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relates further to the notion of ‘pervasive missingness’: as an ageing and now partly disabled mother, the energy of her youth, when she could run around the city with her file, is also missing. I argue that the act of recollecting the past is situated in a continuous presence of absence. Shanta’s negotiation of personal memories, and her attempts to narrativize a coherent past (to me and to herself), allow for the historical and the personal to become mixed and juxtaposed, and the missing person’s file weaves this ‘pervasive missingness’ into a single cord. Her dissidence from social normativity does not create a space for the resolution of and reconciliation with the past. Khali stands for emptiness, the fragmentation of memory and Shanta’s incompleteness as a mother with no answers. I argue that the prolonged sense of missingness that is embodied in this particular form of disappearance, which becomes intimately tied to decades of searching and seeking explanations for a son’s disappearance, flows out of the private life of a grieving mother and gushes into the changing social, political and economic milieu of a commercial city denying and supressing its violent history. This conceptual framework of ‘pervasive missingness’ not only opens up a dialogue about the extent to which mothers of disappeared children struggle to move past the gendered structures of a patriarchal society, but also highlights the clash between the temporalities and affective structures of urban revolutionary movements, and the post-­conflict retelling of traumatic and extraordinary events. In my estimation, this temporal disjuncture engenders a political genealogy that animates histories of violence with the low-­end, small-­scale political agencies of marginal women. These agentive moments can be uncovered through what Smith and Watson (2001: 8) refer to as ‘memorial relationality’ and women’s careful curation of their own lives in autobiographical narratives.

Conclusion State repression of rebellious political organizations usually fosters cultures of fear and suspicion (Sen and Jasani 2021; Davenport 2007; Gowrinathan 2017; Bourgois 2001). An important part of the state strategy is to kidnap and imprison the youth in afflicted regions, with the central assumption that the interrogation and killing of young people will destroy the core of these movements. The culture of suspicion often expands radically, and autocratic states rarely hesitate to forcibly and illegally capture and torture sympathizers,

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and family members and friends of anti-­national insurgents. A significant amount of literature on war, violence and missing youth shows how these conditions of conflict often mobilize the mothers of lost and missing children to form networks of suffering and shared grievances. These networks create critical forms of social protest (Lieberfeld 2009; Berkin 2006; Shor 2014) and these protests take on forms ranging from demonstrations and other democratic resistances to instigating more war and violence as revenge for martyred and missing children. In the context of South Asia, the mothers of children missing during the civil war in Sri Lanka, the mothers of youth in ‘terror’ movements in Pakistan and Kashmir and the mothers of children forcibly kidnapped and executed during the war of independence in Bangladesh have formed networks of grief. They have used the double-­edged sword of the innocence and militancy of motherhood in distress to make their agitation visible and attract the sympathy of wider communities concerned with maternal justice (Bandarage 2010; Haq 2007, Werbner 1999). In this chapter I have shown how a mother’s journey towards seeking justice for a missing child can also be deeply individualized. Shanta’s search for her son did not become diffused with the regional rights debates that were put forward by populations of women who lost their children during the peak of the Naxal movement in Calcutta. However, the latter women were silenced, by both their families and the state, in order to allow the remaining family members an opportunity to engage with the emerging post-­ conflict economy, as well as retain respectability among the urban middle and lower classes. The stigma of prison, custodial violence and torture at the hands of policemen was considered to have a devastating effect on the futures of young people who had survived the movement. Shanta slowly alienated herself from her social life, which in turn allowed her to alienate herself from this collective silence and amnesia. Shanta’s experience shows how death has a community language, how expressions of mourning have definitive cultural markers and how rituals of mourning have temporal and symbolic significance in people’s lives. ‘The disappeared’, especially in the context of war and violence, when meanings relating to life, loss and death are dislodged from convention, do not offer a ‘shared’ language of loss. Until they are politically mobilized into a collective, people follow their own paths of grieving and making sense of their loss. The missing is not a recurring experience of everyday life, and it intensifies only in the context of conflict. While large-­ scale

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disappearances can be brought about by disasters, the unfairness of sections of a population going missing is felt more dramatically during war. Notions of half-­widow and half-­mother arise in the context of anti-­national activism, since state representatives, such as the army, the police and other paramilitary troops, arrest and remove male members of communities to denigrate and debilitate these movements. In Shanta’s case, she stopped being a wife, a friend, an aunt and a neighbour in order to retain a semblance of her half-­ motherhood through her relationship with the file. She did not dilute her grief by collectivizing it, and did not let her own perceptibly painful emotion of missing her son get in the way of keeping alive memories of him as ‘the missing’. This flow between the possession and fragmentation of hope, justice and emptiness conveys the truth of my interlocutor, in an affective landscape that I call ‘pervasive missingness’. I want to argue that isolated and isolating processes of searching for the disappeared, haunted by this missingness, also allow women to emerge as political subjects, even though they do not necessarily identify themselves as such. I often wondered whether Shanta would have acted differently if she had had any other children. A missing child creates a vacuum in maternal frames of war and violence. Shanta’s narratives illustrate that the quotidian emotions, routines and rituals associated with motherhood were obviously and immensely missing in her life. She gave up hope a few years after her son’s disappearance (until which time she would have been waiting for him to return), and then there was no hope of returning to the mundane maternal normality that once informed her everyday existence. Over time, her domestic motherhood turned into a protest motherhood through a quest for answers. It involved a journey outside the domains of her house. Waiting at home, and waiting for information to arrive at home, became intimately knitted together with waiting in public offices and bureaucratic spaces while demanding respect for herself and recognition for Mahesh. Atreyee Sen is Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. She is author of Shiv Sena Women (2007), and co-­ editor of Global Vigilantes (2008) and Who’s Cashing In? (2020). Her recent publications (in 2022) are ‘An Economy of Lies: Informal Income, Phone-­Banking and Female Migrant Workers in Kolkata, India’ in the Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies; ‘Clear and Present Danger: Dodging and Dealing with Risk and Uncertainty in Everyday Life’, in Extraordinary Risks, Ordinary Lives, edited by

50  ◆  Atreyee Sen

Beata Świtek, Allen Abramson and Hannah Swee; and ‘No City for Lovers: Anti-­Romeo Squads, Resistance, and the Micro-­Politics of Moral Policing in an Indian City’ in Critical Asian Studies.

Note Sections of the ethnographic material presented in this chapter have been published in an article titled ‘Prahlad and Shanta: The City’s Madness’, co-­ authored by Malini Sur and Atreyee Sen and published in Contemporary South Asia 28(4) (2020): 498–510.

References Bandarage, Asoka. 2010. ‘Women, Armed Conflict, and Peacemaking in Sri Lanka: Toward a Political Economy Perspective’, Asian Politics & Policy 2(4): 653–67. Banerjee, Sumanta. 2008. ‘On the Naxalite Movement: A Report with a Difference’, Economic and Political Weekly 43(21): 10–12. Berkin, Carol. 2006. ‘“It Was I Who Did It”: Women’s Role in the Founding of the Nation’, Phi Kappa Phi Forum 86(3): 15–18. Bille, Mikkel, Frida Hastrup and Tim Flohr Sørensen. 2010. ‘Introduction: An Anthropology of Absence’, in Mikkel Bille, Frida Hastrup and Tim Flohr Sørensen (eds), An Anthropology of Absence: Materializations of Transcendence and Loss. New York: Springer, pp. 3–22. Bourgois, Philippe. 2001. ‘The Power of Violence in War and Peace: Post-­ Cold War Lessons from El Salvador’, Ethnography 2(1): 5–34. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Coombes, Annie. 2011. ‘Witnessing History/Embodying Testimony: Gender and Memory in Post-­Apartheid South Africa’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17: S92–112. Davenport, Christian. 2007. ‘State Repression and the Tyrannical Peace’, Journal of Peace Research 44(4): 485–504. De Alwis, Malathi. 2009. ‘“Disappearance” and “Displacement” in Sri Lanka’, Journal of Refugee Studies 22(3): 378–91. De Volo, Lorraine Bayard. 2004. ‘Mobilizing Mothers for War: Cross-­ National Framing Strategies in Nicaragua’s Contra War’, Gender & Society 18(6): 715–34. Gowrinathan, Nimmi. 2017. ‘The Committed Female Fighter: The Political Identities of Tamil Women in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 19(3): 327–41. Hale, Sondra. 2012. ‘Memory Work as Resistance: Eritrean and Sudanese Women in Conflict Zones’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 32(2): 429–36.

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Haq, Farhat. 2007. ‘Militarism and Motherhood: The Women of the Lashkar-­i-Tayyabia in Pakistan’, Signs 32(4): 1023–46. Kujur, Rajat. 2006. ‘Underdevelopment and Naxal Movement’, Economic and Political Weekly 41(7): 557–59. Lieberfeld, Daniel. 2009. ‘Parental Protest, Public Opinion, and War Termination: Israel’s “Four Mothers” Movement’, Social Movement Studies 8(4): 375–92. Miller, Alyssa. 2018. ‘Kin-­Work in a Time of Jihad: Sustaining Bonds of Filiation and Care for Tunisian Foreign Combatants’, Cultural Anthropology 33(4): 596–620. Orozco Mendoza, Elva. 2019. ‘Las Madres De Chihuahua: Maternal Activism, Public Disclosure, and the Politics of Visibility’, New Political Science 41(2): 211–33. Partnoy, Alicia. 2007. ‘Textual Strategies to Resist Disappearance and the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo’, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 9(1). Scanlon, Eric. 2018. ‘Fifty-­One Years of Naxalite-­Maoist Insurgency in India: Examining the Factors That Have Influenced the Longevity of the Conflict’, Asian Journal of Peacebuilding 6(2): 335–51. Sen, Atreyee. 2018. ‘Torture and Laughter: Naxal Insurgency, Custodial Violence, and Inmate Resistance in a Women’s Correctional Facility in 1970s Calcutta’, Modern Asian Studies 52(3): 917–41. Sen, Atreyee, and Rubina Jasani. 2021. ‘Urban Hopes, Sexual Horrors: Communal Riots and the Narratives of Violent and Victimized Women in India’, Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies 39(1): 28–47. Shor, Francis. 2014. ‘Grieving US Mothers and the Political Representations of Protest during the Iraq War and Beyond’, in Dana Cooper and Claire Phelan (eds), Motherhood and War. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, pp. 241–62. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. 2001. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sur, Malini, and Atreyee Sen. 2020. ‘Prahlad and Shanta: The City’s Madness’, Contemporary South Asia 28(4): 498–510. Werbner, Pnina. 1999. ‘Political Motherhood and the Feminisation of Citizenship: Women’s Activisms and the Transformation of the Public Sphere’, in Nira Yuval-­Davis and Pnina Werbner (eds), Women, Citizenship and Difference. London: Zed, pp. 221–45.

2 On the Slow Silencing of Absences Sensing Social Disappearances in Cape Verde Heike Drotbohm

Introduction I left the party much earlier than I had planned because something unexpected caused me to feel a deep sense of unease. The mood was relaxed at the Cape Verdean-­run pub in South Dorchester, a neighbourhood in Boston, USA. The Cape Verdean community had come together, accompanied by a generous quantity of national dishes and live music, and I was introduced to people from the islands who I had not met before. When I asked the small, conservatively dressed Fatinha1 where she was from, I could hardly believe her response. A few months earlier, when I was conducting fieldwork some 5,000 km across the Atlantic on the West African archipelago, I had heard about Fatinha and about how painfully she was missed. As she shook my hand, seemingly feeling just as uncomfortable, I vividly remembered the terrible sound of her young daughter Líria’s nightly wailing, which made everyone aware of the void her mother had left her with. Unable to confidently manage my awkward feelings about this unexpected reappearance, I said a hasty goodbye. This chapter considers ‘social disappearances’, in which the absent person is the agent, and the consequences of this type of absence for cross-­ border social ties. My contribution explores the vast intermediary space that expands, alongside dis- and reappearances, between absence, remembrance, detachment, denial and abandonment. It builds upon earlier scholarly positions that have argued that the momentum of the absent, the void or the non-­being cannot be

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examined solely by tracing a given s­ ubstance – ­a thing, a relationship, a ­person – o ­ r its changes over time (Bille, Hastrup and Sørensen 2010; Hockey, Komaromy and Woodthorpe 2010; Candea et al. 2015; Petersen 2013; Schindel and Gatti 2020). Drawing upon empirical data obtained via multisited anthropo­ logical research in Cape Verde and the Cape Verdean diaspora, the chapter traces how the ab/normality of absences is sensorily grasped when the not-­there and the elsewhere are accompanied by silences and – ­under certain temporal, social and political ­conditions – t­ransform, or are transformed, into disappearances. I suggest approaching the difference between there and not-­there, existence and absence, and available and disappeared through the lens of perception and perspectivity. According to Julien Deonna (2006: 32), [t]here are essentially two dimensions to perception: a factual dimension and a perspectival ­dimension … ­The perspectival dimension of perception specifies how things look from one’s perspective. Perception not only alerts a creature to how things are in the world, but it informs her of how things are in the world from the standpoint where she stands. Objects are represented to perceivers as liftable, places as within reach or to the left, shapes as graspable, ditches as leapable and so forth.

To this, one might add relatives as reachable and socially present. In transnational families, absences are both a normalized element of the everyday and a troubling void indicating the risks and uncertainties of maintaining contact across spatial distances. As an element of the ordinary everyday, they are evaluated through mutual perception, knowledge and judgement; under certain conditions, they can turn, or be turned, into disappearances. To understand perceptions of these processes and the different consequent kinds of intersubjective implication, it seems appropriate to trace the complex sensuous collective engagements towards the ab/normal of absences from different angles. Not only individuals, but also collectivities such as families, friends, neighbours and colleagues, as well as representatives of institutions and many others, are involved in making sense of the ab/normal of absences, by eventually contributing to consolation, pacification and justification, or, in the opposite case, sharing the pain of loss, guilt and even shame. This chapter concentrates on ‘social disappearances’, that is, the fact that individuals can eventually disappear from certain sites, networks and relationships through their own choice. It will make use of these circumstances in exploring how the ambiguities of not-­knowing disturb the legibility and reliability of social ties, how they alter the status and social relations of those

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waiting and how this contributes to what Huttunen and Perl have called ‘disturbed intimacies’ in the introduction to this volume. To make this argument, I will rely mainly on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2006 and 2008 on Fogo and Brava, two small islands in the south-­west of the Cape Verde archipelago. I travelled to Fogo with my husband and daughter, and we integrated our family into the community of São Filipe, the island’s main town. I also became familiar with extended family networks across Fogo and occasionally travelled both to the island’s interior and to Brava, the neighbouring island. During the twelve months (in total) of fieldwork, I combined participant observation with semi-­structured and narrative interviews, as well as ego-­centred network techniques, focusing on households with key members living abroad. I subsequently visited family members residing in Lisbon and Boston, acquiring the complementary insights that I use here to illuminate absences from different perspectives. Although my research initially concentrated on the dynamics between mobility and immobility within cross-­border family networks, collective doubts about transnational connectedness and fear of abandonment constantly appeared in my daily encounters.

The Historical Conditions Surrounding a Culture of Absences The Cape Verdean islands emerged historically through the painful experience of economic s­ carcity – d ­ ue to both dependence on global flows of goods and political i­solation – a­ nd thus, life there is built upon different forms (internal, cross-­island, cross-­border and transcontinental) of mobility. Since the mid-­fifteenth century, Portuguese traders have used these ten islands, located approximately 650 km west of the coast of Senegal, as trading posts for slaves, sugar and cotton. As a constitutive element of transatlantic economies (Guyer 2004), Cape Verde gained an international reputation and accumulated wealth by creating ties with other Atlantic trading populations, including Portugal, the countries of the Upper Guinea Coast and Brazil (Batalha 2004). However, the decline of slavery in the mid-­ nineteenth century signalled drastic changes, requiring new economies to be developed. Cape Verde is a desert country, and its local agriculture provides only small harvests. There is limited national industry, meaning that 90 per cent of all food and consumer goods need to be imported. Alongside this, population growth led to severe

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famines during years of drought, with frequent food crises marking life on the islands until the 1960s (Bigman 1993). These conditions converted spatial mobility and global networking from a privilege into an essential means of survival (Halter 1993). Over the course of history, however, migration destinations have changed. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Cape Verdeans regularly crossed the Atlantic to build new lives in North America, particularly in Massachusetts, but political independence from Portugal in 1975 saw the emergence of strong labour migration flows to not only Portugal but also the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France and, more recently, Italy. A considerable number of Cape Verdeans can also be found in other ex-­Portuguese African colonies, including Guinea Bissau, São Tomé and Principe, Angola and Mozambique (Batalha 2004; Carling and Batalha 2008; Drotbohm 2009). These places and the linkages between them constitute the Cape Verdean diaspora, which is numerically larger than the current-­day population of the islands themselves. This long-­established transnational history testifies to not only the normality of mobility but also the deep uncertainties that can accompany a person’s departure. Whether in melancholy songs (such as those of the famous singer Cesária Évora), in films or in literature, the dangers of travel, the pressure of maintaining contact, and techniques for remembering and mourning when contact is broken and only uncertainty remains are strong topoi in Cape Verde’s cultural history. However, at the same time, numerous techniques serve to normalize absences and integrate those living abroad into the islands’ everyday life. Kin and friends who have left the islands are not forgotten: there are regular phone calls, remittances and communication surrounding the way that they are spent, gifts that arrive on the islands on certain occasions and daily gossip about the fates of the absent. All of this serves to foster a collective sense of connectivity and transcend the physical distances required to sustain a joint social structure (Drotbohm 2009). Indeed, ‘[l]onging becomes the symptom of absence’ (Bille, Hastrup and Sørensen 2010: 4) and even when these signs and symbols of connectivity cease, those who are physically absent maintain a considerable presence because the lack of care, attention or recognition can deepen or amplify perceptions and understandings of absences. Nonetheless, the awareness that a regular form of making-­present can be a chimaera also constitutes part of the Cape Verdean experience. As an irony of global history (Rozema 2011), even in the twenty-­ first century, migration remains a highly contingent and,

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for many, extremely risky endeavour, despite constant improvements in transportation, registration, control and communication. The contemporary moment, characterized by the closing of borders, the criminalization of undocumented entry or residency, the delays in or denials of family reunification, and involuntary returns (i.e. deportations), renders people more aware than ever of the uncertainties of transnational mobility and connectedness (Drotbohm 2011, Menjivar, Ruiz and Ness 2019; De Genova 2021). Anyone who maintains a significant relationship across national borders is usually painfully aware that absences do not necessarily signal a loved one simply being temporarily elsewhere; they know that absences can transform into a person disappearing and being gone.

Researching Processes and Layers of Discreetness As an outsider trying to make sense of social and kin ties by tracing different types and intensities of relatedness across space and time (Drotbohm 2009, 2010, 2015), I found it challenging to identify not only the normality but also the irregularities of absences. Scholars researching gaps in the social fabric depend on access to longer temporal continuity because they need to know who, or what, was once ‘there’, and which kinds of absence are considered normal. That is, how can ­we – ­who are usually only temporarily part of a given research s­ite – ­identify absences if a particular absence is not articulated and the corresponding voids are covered or hidden? How should we proceed ­if – ­as will become clearer in the following ­pages – a­ cknowledging a person’s absence does not feel appropriate? When people are struggling with an absence and managing feelings of anxiety, mourning, shame or guilt, probing can often be inappropriate. In the most concerning instances, notions of asking the right person about the individual who is missing, choosing the most suitable terminology and phrasing and ascertaining the right conditions for inquiring are all subject to normative expectations, if not taboos. Therefore, recognizing absences is both, an ethical and a methodological problem. During my time in Cape Verde, however, the main difficulty was not that irregular and unaccounted for absences were not clearly articulated. On the contrary, complaints about the apparent unreliability of migrants who maintained little or no contact with the relatives left behind were constant. ‘It was clear that this one would evaporate quickly’, was a bitter comment made by Miriam,

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a 20-­year-­old with a newborn child who was still living in her own mother’s house in the centre of São Filipe. ­Miriam – ­and everyone ­else – k ­ new that the child’s father had maintained an ambivalent attitude towards her pregnancy and then to the newborn. After a short period of public demonstration of fatherly pride, his visits became rare. Finally, he informed Miriam that he had been issued a Portuguese visa. Miriam had no illusions about his departure and knew that his emigration would not transform him into a caring father. Young men like Miriam’s boyfriend, who leave the islands when the pressure of responsibility becomes unbearable, are often (and sometimes unjustly) suspected, soon after their departure, of failing to be accountable. In everyday life, this s­ cepticism – ­especially towards male m ­ igrants – i­s exemplified by the omnipresent greeting, ‘Did he call?’ This frequently replaces ‘How are you?’ and is often perceived as a form of social control of those whose partners live abroad. In the context of Cameroon, Tazanu and Frei (2017) have reported heightened awareness of absences, especially during the first few months after a migrant’s departure, a period often characterized by a ‘slippery attitude’ and increased difficulty in reaching the migrant by phone. In contrast to these simultaneously anticipated and scandalized variants of absence, which eventually turn into disappearances and are often the subject of disapproving gossip (Drotbohm 2010), other variants are substantially less easily observed, determined or even discussed. This especially applies to those absences that will come to be perceived as irregular only over time, triggering existential uncertainty or fear on the part of those waiting. A good example of this kind of unexpected rupture and the subtle social framing of the process is Claudio, who had left Fogo about five years earlier, in his mid-­forties. Claudio held a central position in the village and came from an influential family that was well connected within the region through trade and other activities. He was also particularly popular, being known as a friendly, jovial man who was also a good husband and a loving father to his two children, who were 10 and 12 years old at the time of his departure. His wife, Teresa, never imagined that the years after his departure would produce so much grief. In contrast, she was certain he would use his time in Porto to obtain a good job, look for a nice apartment in a good part of town and get everything in order so that he could bring his family back together as soon as possible. In the first year after his departure, everything had been fine. He called at least once a week, and sometimes more often, he talked about the conditions he had found in Portugal and he sent his family at least five

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hundred euros every month, which enabled them to live much more comfortably than before. When migrants act ‘appropriately’ – that is, as ­expected – ­and remain present despite their physical absence, this usually enters the Cape Verde gossip mill, enhancing the reputation of the relatives who remain behind (Abeje 2021). This kind of ‘news coverage’ also serves as a good seismograph for signs of irregularity and uncertainty. Nenezinha, a good friend of Teresa’s who lived in the same village, clearly remembered the summer two years after Claudio’s departure: Well, at the time, we already had the impression that not everything was going quite smoothly. But Teresa didn’t say anything, so we expected Claudio to come at least for the Banderona [an annual festival that brings thousands of migrants back to the island from different parts of the diaspora]. Everyone was certain that he would come. But then Toni, one of his friends, said that it was strange that he hadn’t called. Then, when he didn’t come, it was very difficult. For some, it was difficult to even celebrate [because] we were so worried and, also, disappointed. Others, OK, yes, but not Claudio.

The distressing atmosphere that slowly emerges when the informal public commentaries begin to fade is clearly sensed by those who are aware of the power of talk in bringing those absent into the everyday life of the islands. Although Claudio’s absence from the festival was discussed with dismay and regret behind Teresa’s back for several weeks, inquiries regarding his phone calls gradually diminished before stopping completely after a few more months. Later, it was only intimate female friends who felt close enough to ask about Claudio and share Teresa’s pain in the case of a negative response. At the time of my fieldwork, it had been almost five years since Claudio’s departure. Not only had his calls and money transfers stopped, so had the collective commentary on his absence. Whenever I met Teresa, she wore black, following the custom of Cape Verdean widows. Regardless of whether Claudio might still be alive, this signalled her loss of hope. For her own life, the way in which he had disappeared could almost be considered a social death. Meanwhile, this physical marking unmistakably reminded her social environment of her loss and demanded that friends and acquaintances respect the particularity of her (self-­perceived) changed social status. I found Teresa to be a very reserved and also suspicious woman whom it was not easy to engage in conversation. During this uncomfortable process, Teresa turned, or was turned, into an ‘intermediate figure’;

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her previously achieved upward social mobility was revoked, her fate undecided due to the lack of information. Many Cape Verdean women live with a similarly unclear social status because their husbands living abroad have fallen from sight. This impacts not only their relationships but also their position within their communities, their position as care providers, their sexuality and their potential to form new partnerships, as well as their access to state and other kinds of assistance, all of which contribute to the ‘disturbed intimacies’ that Huttunen and Perl problematize in the introduction to this volume. Nonetheless, according to Teresa’s friend, Nenezinha, friends and acquaintances had been working discreetly but vigorously over the previous few years to locate Claudio in Porto. Painfully, after almost several years of waiting, Teresa was subtly led to understand that she should not worry any more: Claudio could be traced. He was not gone but instead had changed his life and future orientation. The results of this search, which had been not only driven by the informal networks within the Cape Verdean diaspora but also state actors, including the police, were hidden from the curious public behind a curtain of insinuations, with the gradual collective silence around Claudio’s disappearance considered necessary for life to go on. Most of the time, Teresa seemed to accept her altered social position, living in the village not as a wife but as a (kind of) widow. However, in moments of despair, cracks in her self-­imposed discipline appeared: at night, the street completely dark, the frightening sounds of Teresa yelling and banging against her furniture could be distinctly heard all over the village.

Social Disappearance and the Complicity of the State Especially in precarious migration contexts, which often do not proceed in a well-­organized manner, phases of protracted absence are both common and commonly accompanied by doubt and fear. A person’s c­ lassification – a­ s elsewhere, formally missing or d ­ isappeared – i­ s usually a question of the time elapsed and the information transmitted. Given that travelling to and staying in an unfamiliar place can always entail difficulties and risks, the interpretation of silences depends on the personal characteristics of the absentee: their age, gender, level of education, income situation, communication skills and family duties, as well as their expected reliability. In terms of assessing whether an official search should be launched, these factors differentiate Miriam’s unreachable boyfriend from Teresa’s normally

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reliable husband, and from young mothers such as Fatinha, whose trajectory will be discussed in the following section. When people disappear in unexplained circumstances, it is always possible that the disappeared person is actually the ‘disappearing agent’, a term aptly employed by Huttunen and Perl in this volume’s introduction. Elsewhere, Schindel (2020: 20) has used the term ‘social disappearance’ to describe those forms of existence that ‘are fundamentally deprived of all inscription and civil protection’. When migrants travel undocumented and work illegally, they fear exposure; however, it is also possible that they opt for a clandestine life when they want to escape controlling, exploitative or violent relationships. Although not gone, such persons have disappeared from a certain gaze. This is the case in the work of Martínez (2020), who considers women in Spain who have been victims of sex trafficking, and that of Lewicki (2020) on HIV-­positive Polish migrants living in Berlin. In both cases, migrants protect their lives, which they perceive as ‘failed’ or even ‘unworthy’, from both public attention and the pressures of transnational social control. Morally, the situation differs in cases involving those who use access to international mobility via flexible citizenship possibilities to expand their opportunities (Ong 1999), thereby finding themselves in new positions of power. Disappearances can be intentional in such constellations, with uncertainty and a lack of information forming part of damaging social practices. Transnational marriage arrangements, in which intimate and institutional asymmetries intersect, constitute one example of these ‘gendered geographies of power’ (Mahler and Pessar 2001). Numerous studies have shown that unexpected extended phases of family separation often end in new partnerships, including marriages, and that contact with the families left behind can fade over time. Parallel relationships can be tolerated and even appreciated under certain conditions, so long as the migrated partner fulfils their responsibilities (Drotbohm 2013; Lauser 2006). However, a migrating relative breaking off contact can produce not only feelings of neglect and abandonment in the country of origin but usually also social and financial difficulties. In the Indian context, Anitha, Roy and Yalamarty (2018) have reported that sociocultural norms make it difficult for wives to defend themselves against this type of abuse and to claim their rights: [By] strategically abandoning their wives in the home country and then filing for divorce in foreign courts, transnationally mobile South Asian migrant men make it almost impossible for their wives to secure justice.

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These actions deprive women of their financial rights[,] such as an equitable settlement upon divorce, maintenance of their children, and recovery of dowry. (Ibid.: 767)

As these insights make clear, the state has a special responsibility in balancing power within cross-­border family constellations. A ‘chosen’ disappearance occurring in the context of a conflictive transnational relationship should not be understood as a ‘simple’ continuation of disputes that can occur inside a country. Rather, state migration regimes intersect with both gendered asymmetries and additional axes of inequality, including class, age and immigration status (Menjivar and Salcido 2002). If those left behind want to search for those who are missing, they are disadvantaged in many ways. Applying for a visa to travel to Europe or other parts of the world from the Global South is already complicated; without a migrant sponsor (which could be the person who is missing), access to cross-­border mobility becomes even more difficult. Contacting the police abroad and obtaining information can be almost impossible. The same applies to accessing financial benefits such as orphan and widow pensions (Fitzpatrick and Orloff 2016). For many of those waiting, already overwhelmed by the worrying opacity of their situation, cumbersome international bureaucracies constitute a breaking point. Abeje (2021) has studied the social effects of transnational marriage arrangements in the Amhara region of Ethiopia, focusing on the position of the wives who remain behind and identifying the moral dimensions of neglect and abandonment. Her findings reveal that abandoned Ethiopian women are considered ‘spoiled’ and ‘unsuited to life’ (ibid.: 168) and risk being subsequently abandoned by their own families too. Elsewhere, Anitha, Roy and Yalamarty (2018: 767), with the aim of dismantling the ‘myth of flexible citizenship in transnational migration’, have suggested conceptualizing transnational abandonment as a form of violence. In Cape Verde, given the long-­established constant of cross-­border relationships, the experience of losing contact is very common. Authorities often use the ‘ordinariness’ of social disappearances as a convenient interpretation in order to escape the obligation to take action. As if it were self-­evident, a young Cape Verdean police officer explained why initiating an international search would, in many cases, make little sense: If things happen in another place, such as in another country, access is complicated. We have to speculate: is it an abusive husband who wants to escape the financial consequences of a divorce? Is it a migrant who is

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fleeing from a violent family? Is the missing person the victim of a crime? Often, we have to say that if a person wants to come back, they will come back. Those who remain gone may have their reasons. It’s better not to foster too many illusions.

Feelings of doubt and ignorance, cultivated by differently situated actors, can be interpreted as an unwillingness to know. Although this better-­not-­knowing is eventually considered ‘good’ and appropriate by some, it certainly complicates the efforts of others to foster hope and endurance. Indeed, by many of those waiting on the islands, confronted with the opacity of the situation and the inaccessibility of international travel through which to gain information, the state and its representatives are seen as accomplices in the processes of disappearance.

Caring through Opacity Normally, waiting or hoping relatives invest substantial energy in articulating the pain of loss and, at least during certain phases of these unaccounted-­for absences, in mobilizing official searches. At the same time, informal approaches to searching, organized through private networks, also produce significant momentum for handling experiences of loss (Parr, Stevenson and Woolnough 2016). However, this raises questions about cases in which these searches do not take place, such as that of Rosana and Tom, both over the age of 50 and with three sons, a daughter and a 4-­year-­old grandchild living in their household, that brings us back to this chapter’s opening vignette. Before I even got to know this family, the sound of the grandchild’s crying might have led me to realize that something was different. Every evening, around sunset, little Líria’s wailing began; it could be heard throughout the neighbourhood. I noticed both this nerve-­ racking noise and the fact that no one seemed to care. One evening, I was standing in front of Rosana and Tom’s house with a neighbour, and I commented on the girl’s crying. The neighbour said that it was only a matter of time before it would stop. Then, voice lowered, he continued, ‘It’s the age, the age of the child. Maybe it would be better if the child could just forget about Fatinha.’ It was only then that I realized that Líria’s birth mother Fatinha was absent and that the woman taking care of her was actually her aunt, her mother’s sister. Until about a year earlier, Fatinha had done everything she could to be a good mother. When the opportunity arose, she went to

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Boston to study law and at first checked in with her family whenever possible. However, she slowly stopped calling so regularly, and then contact ceased. Here, it is important to note that various studies have considered the differently gendered norms within transnational parenthood, especially the differential normative framing and practice of transnational motherhood and fatherhood (Fog Olwig 1999; Poeze and Mazzucato 2013; Lam and Yeoh 2019). As explained in the historical overview earlier in this chapter, material provisions are interpreted as signs of cultivated contact in Cape Verdean transnational fields. However, the collective expectations in relation to migrant mothers are particularly high and precise. For instance, I have previously demonstrated that remittances from mothers are not deemed sufficient and that sending personal gifts, such as clothing, toiletries, school materials and toys, is considered critical to signalling ‘good motherhood’ (Drotbohm 2013). Notably, in research on Ghanaian transnational families, Coe (2011) avoids assumptions that emotional and material dimensions of love can be differentiated, arguing that ‘the materiality of care is important in and of itself as well as its signal of emotional depth and closeness’ (ibid.: 20). Against the emotional background of these material testimonies, it is clear that children need these signs of affection to measure the ‘normality’ of their mother’s absence against normative standards. Furthermore, whether a migrant’s child perceives a parent’s absence as right and normal or as worrying depends on the effort or the success of their foster parents. Together with Lisa Åkesson and Jørgen Carling, I have elaborated on the Cape Verdean foster triangle, which comprises the foster parent, the child left behind and the migrant, and which, under ideal circumstances, compensates for the absence of the parent(s) through social and embodied practices (Åkesson, Carling and Drotbohm 2012). Central to this are the everyday techniques of ­remembering – ­including mentioning and telling stories about the a­bsentee – ­and the everyday rituals that the caregiver conducts to bridge extended periods of unexpected separation. When children sense their mothers’ (or fathers’ or parents’) presence through these objects, ideas and intimate practices, they are able to understand absences as not only normal but expected, appropriate and appreciated. After Fatinha’s calls stopped, Rosana and Tom chose an unusual route. They tried (for example, in conversations with me) to trivialize the missing information about Fatinha’s whereabouts. Student life in Boston is exhausting, Rosana told me at one point. Fatinha needs rest in order to study, she said in another conversation. Another time: she

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has probably got a new lover. There were certainly reasonable explanations for the lack of vital signs, and it was still possible that everything would be fine. Yet, at the same time, the family urged everyone to avoid mentioning Fatinha, especially in Líria’s presence. They also emphasized the importance of not involving the police under any circumstances. It was not yet time, according to one neighbour; they trusted in God. Rosana and Tom chose opacity over transparency, which they apparently perceived as an adequate way of handling this ambiguous phase of not-­knowing. Although their choice of concealment was not approved of by everyone in their social environment, to categorize the behaviour as lying, suppressing the truth or manipulating the situation would be to fail to acknowledge the complexity of the temporal condition of waiting for a missing person. The act of reconfiguring social ties and the attempt to refrain from knowing reveal uncertain interpretations of inexplicable silences. In some ways, Fatinha’s parents tried to imagine several futures simultaneously. On the one hand, they relied on the fact that Líria was still young and would be able to build a strong and trusting relationship with her foster mother. Similar to that neighbour mentioned before, some members of the community thought that it would be good if Líria could forget her mother. For them, hiding the fear and pain of waiting constituted some kind of protective care for the child. On the other hand, Tom and Rosana did not know what had happened to Fatinha or whether she might eventually reappear. Thus, for both their own life and their position in the village, clinging to Fatinha’s existence was meaningful. Líria, with her insistent crying, seemed to have managed to resist these ambiguities, at least up to a certain point. During one of my visits to the house, I encountered an arrangement of objects on Líria’s bedside table. There was a photo of her as a baby in her mother’s arms, cuddly toys and a T-­shirt with her mother’s faint perfume; every evening, this shrine enabled Líria to sense her mother’s presence, which eased her off to sleep.

Disposability and Feelings of Guilt About six months later and a few days after the encounter in the Boston pub described in this chapter’s introduction, I tried, unsuccessfully, to contact Líria’s mother Fatinha through acquaintances. On several occasions, I went to the pub in the evenings, hoping she

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would turn up again. I confessed my frustration to a friend, who told me that it was better to let such matters rest. However, she also gave me the phone number of a friend of Fatinha’s, having agreed to notify her about my request beforehand. This friend and I had a rather short, elliptical conversation, during which I was made aware that Fatinha had not been able to continue her law studies after the first two semesters. Her personal situation had become complicated and, due to her failures and her financial difficulties, she had got into a serious conflict with her father. Her guilty feelings left her unable to do what was expected of her. My interlocutor ended by saying, in English, ‘You know, when you’re in real shit, there is a point of no return. You feel like waste, you behave like waste, maybe you are waste in the eyes of those you love?’ The link established here between an absent family member’s chosen withdrawal from her close relationships and a (self-)classification as ‘waste’ fuses perceptions of disappearance with ‘disposability’, a concept that has been introduced in research on the vulnerability of (racialized and gendered) workers in the context of global capitalism (Cock 1981; Stasiulis 2021). Some scholars have already detached this notion of disposability from the structural forces and abject material conditions that created and justified the hyper-­exploitation of (migrant) labour (Wright 2006; Squire 2018). The concept has also proven useful for considering the unbearable conditions that can arise in the context of state punishment, whether imprisonment, detention or deportation (De Genova 2021). Indeed, these punitive state practices exist alongside social and spatial confinement, p ­ otentially – a­ nd perhaps certainly in the eyes of loving ­relatives – ­rendering them a form of disappearance. Under such circumstances, people can find themselves outside of social and political practices of integration, recognition and care, leading them to be labelled or to perceive themselves as unworthy in the eyes of both the state and their relatives. Again, we can see how perspectivity and perception are intertwined. This ­devaluation – t­ he reclassification as waste and the relocation to the hidden, unseen places of ­sociality – ­disappears things and people from those dimensions of perception that are associated with a dignified and politically recognized form of social existence. Fatinha’s case indicates that the perception of disposability and of hiding in invisible social spheres can occur on both sides of the relationship. For those waiting in the country of origin, a relative’s disappearance, which is often accompanied by insecure and involuntary conditions of waiting, can be considered a social form of moral punishment, especially when those remaining suspect misunderstanding

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or conflict. That is, the reason or motive for the disappearance might not be found in or with the person who has disappeared, but instead in or with the apparently abandoned person(s), which is a particularly painful element of social disappearance. As the work of Povinelli (2011) on the structural weakening of Indigenous communities in Australia demonstrates, abandonment can, under certain circumstances, be understood as a form of ‘letting die’ (ibid.: Chapter 4). During the process of waiting and doubting, those who have been abandoned assess the positions of the different actors involved and the different forms of responsibility, which produces not only anger and frustration but also guilt and shame. Building on De Genova’s (2021) thoughts on the ‘disciplinary power’ of waiting, which is coupled with a sense of arbitrariness, it can be understood how the searching and hoping relatives might eventually assume that they did not live up to the values and expectations of their migrated relatives and were, ­therefore – ­and in their view, ­legitimately – ­abandoned or disposed of. Fatinha’s case is particularly revealing: it makes clear that many of these interpretations are matters of not only perception and interpretation, but also of access to unequally distributed information and knowledge. Without providing an understanding of the exact circumstances of Fatinha’s chosen disappearance and the conditions of the alleged conflict between father and daughter, this case demonstrates that a feeling of unworthiness and disposability can also occur on the part of the supposedly privileged, with Fatinha struggling with her perceptions of failure and unworthiness. Furthermore, this constellation of perceptions illuminates the burdensome position of those who, possibly involuntarily, become accomplices in an (attempted) concealment, myself included. Although immediately after Fatinha’s unexpected reappearance during the party in Dorchester I was full of indignation and intended to contribute to the restoration of transnational family justice, later on, especially following my conversation with Fatinha’s friend, the slippery connotations of knowing more than others preoccupied me. I realized that I would need to be aware of the enormous consequences of exposing Fatinha’s conflictive position to the whole family or her child. I also realized that I shared that painful burden with many others who knew both Fatinha and the relatives waiting on the islands. Awaiting external impulses and opportunities in the months that followed, I remained undecided, ultimately becoming part of the practice of silence that is so typical within the Cape Verdean transnational landscape and, thus, complicit in Fatinha’s disappearance.

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Conclusion This chapter explored disappearances from the angle of transnational social ties and made apparent that these are often not an individual procedure but form part of a web of relationships that evaluates the normal or abnormal of a given absence. In her work on economies of abandonment, Povinelli (2011) explores how hope, despair, endurance and exhaustion are distributed unequally in late liberalism. According to her, ‘the ordinary does not exist. The ordinary is a statistical projection of a variety of socially disturbed ­ordinaries – ­what the texture of the ordinary is for some is not for others’ (ibid.: 133). For transnational families constantly confronted by absences, silences and the uncertainties of physical distances, the texture of the ordinary pacifies the collective sensing of irregularities, which might be both banal and dramatic. Everyday social practices comprise stabilizing, memorizing social and material practices that fill gaps and provide psychological stability. Under these ambiguous conditions, not only must the normality of absences be continuously established, but their eventual abnormality and even their catastrophic dimensions need to be taken into account. The empirical examples presented here make clear that these are matters of knowing. When those who are waiting sense irregularities in the absences of their loved ones, a decision must be made to follow the path of doubt, to search for more information or to accept the collective agreement that missing can mean gone and disappeared. Examining social d ­ isappearances – ­that is, constellations in which the disappeared was the agent of their own ­disappearance – ­makes apparent that we can explore this type of ambiguous knowing by differentiating between perception and perspectivity. On the one hand, numerous actors are involved in the perception and interpretation of the void, for example by trivializing and weakening worrying if signs of normality are considered sufficient and satisfactory. The collective perception of Claudio’s absence began with banalizations before evolving into dramatization and outrage and later culminating in discretion and silence. In the case of Líria, central actors tried to simply ignore the constellation of worry, pushing Fatinha’s absence out of sight. In confronting a specific temporality of social constellations, members of these transnational communities were able to constantly sense and identify which kinds of silence were disturbing, which kinds of disturbance were allowable and which kinds of disturbance generated unbearable feelings of guilt and shame. Ultimately, silencing a person’s absence marked something like a collective agreement

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to account for the disappearance and, thus, to spare those waiting the painful fear of abandonment. On the other hand, the actors were also aware that the perception of disappearances depended on access to information, rendering disappearance a matter of perspectivity. In the case of Fatinha, we learned that rather than being gone, those missing have sometimes disappeared from a certain gaze, whether this is the family gaze, the bureaucratic gaze (of either the country of origin or the country of residence, or both) or the gaze of the anthropologist asking inappropriate questions. That is, a missing person can disappear from one gaze but simultaneously (re)appear in another, which can, as I have attempted to demonstrate, involve moral dilemmas. In the context of the constellations considered in this chapter, different collectivities assessed irregular absences and made decisions on the appropriate communal response. Whether transparency, the will to know, the right to know or opacity were understood as most appropriate in each case, variants of sociality-­in-­absence participated in the collective judgement. Not only relatives, friends and communities, but also state ­actors – ­such as the police and border control a­gents – ­contributed to either making absences matter or willing ignorance and fostering a preference for not knowing. For those waiting, but also for those who have d ­ isappeared – ­by choice, in these cases of ‘social disappearance’ – the openness of the situation disturbed their social ties, the interpretation of their past and their future prospects. Interwoven with feelings of guilt, fear and eventually shame, ‘disturbed intimacies’ became part of these fragile cross-­border constellations. At the same time, maintaining the status quo by refusing to lament, search and mourn in some cases can also be understood as a strategy that pushes disappearances out of the collective mind, allowing life to go on and collectively covering the pain of social death.

Acknowledgements The author thanks all participants encountered in the field, especially for allowing insights into such a sensitive topic of transnational livelihoods. Thanks also go to the anonymous reviewers and especially the two editors, Laura Huttunen and Gerhild Perl, for their extensive and precious comments on draft versions of this chapter. This research received generous funding from a number of sources. Extended research in Cape Verde and in the Cape Verdean diaspora was funded

Sensing Social Disappearances in Cape Verde  ◆  69

by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), subsequent phases of reflection, writing and academic exchange were made possible through fellowships at the International Research Centre ‘Work and the Lifecycle in Global History’ (Re:Work) at Humboldt University Berlin and through a Heisenberg Scholarship provided by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Heike Drotbohm is a Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. She has conducted fieldwork in transnational social fields across the Atlantic (Haiti, Cape Verde and Brazil, as well as Canada, Portugal and the USA) and concentrates on the anthropology of kinship and care, migration, transnationalism, humanitarianism and pro-­migrant activism. Her works have been published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Ethnography, Citizenship Studies, Humanity, Focaal, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology, and in the form of several edited volumes. She has been visiting researcher at the New School for Social Research (NYC) and at the international research centre Work and the Life Course in Global History (Re:Work) at HU Berlin.

Note 1. To protect the interests of my research participants, all personal names have been changed to common Cape Verdean names.

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Missing People: Families Living with Ambiguous Absence’, Emotion, Space and Society 19: 66–75. Petersen, Morten A. 2013. ‘The Fetish of Connectivity’, in Penny Harvey et al. (eds), Objects and Materials: A Routledge Companion. London: Routledge, pp. 197–207. Poeze, Miranda, and Valentina Mazzucato. 2013. ‘Ghanaian Children in Transnational Families: Understanding the Experiences of Left-­Behind Children through Local Parenting Norms’, in Loretta Baldassar and Laura Merla (eds), Transnational Families, Migration and the Circulation of Care: Understanding Mobility and Absence in Family Life. London: Routledge, pp. 149–69. Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2011. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Rozema, Ralph. 2011. ‘Forced Disappearance in an Era of Globalization: Biopolitics, Shadow Networks, and Imagined Worlds’, American Anthropologist 113(4): 582–93. Schindel, Estela. 2020. ‘Mobility and Disappearance: Transnational Threads, Historical Resonances’, in Estela Schindel and Gabriel Gatti (eds), Social Disappearances: Explorations between Latin America and Eastern Europe. Berlin: Forum Transregionale Studien, pp. 14–41. Schindel, Estela, and Gabriel Gatti. 2020. ‘Presentation’, in Estela Schindel and Gabriel Gatti (eds), Social Disappearances: Explorations between Latin America and Eastern Europe. Berlin: Forum Transregionale Studien, pp. 9–14. Squire, Vicki. 2018. ‘Mobile Solidarities and Precariousness at City Plaza: Beyond Vulnerable and Disposable Lives’, Studies in Social Justice 12(1): 111–32. Stasiulis, Daiva. 2021. ‘Elimi(Nation): Canada’s “Post-­Settler” Embrace of Disposable Migrant Labour’, Studies in Social Justice 14(1): 22–54. Tazanu, Primus M., and Bettina A. Frei. 2017. ‘Closeness, Distance and Disappearances in Cameroonian Mediated Transnational Social Ties: Uses of Mobile Phones and Narratives of Transformed Identities’, Journal of African Media Studies 9(1): 77–90. Wright, Melissa W. 2006. Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism. London: Routledge.

3 ‘What to Do?’ Searching for Missing Persons in Israel Ori Katz

Daniel Minivitzky, a 35-­year-­old man who lived with his parents, disappeared from his home in Tel Aviv in October 2014. Within a short time, Daniel’s case gained high visibility in the news media, largely due to his parents’ social and cultural status and the way in which he could be framed as an ‘ideal victim’ (Jeanis et al. 2021; Katz 2022; Slakoff and Fradella 2019). The search for information about his whereabouts was probably one of the most extensive searches for a missing civilian ever conducted in Israel. A few months after his disappearance, Daniel’s parents, Varda and Shuki, established the Bil’adeihem (‘Without Them’ in Hebrew) association of families of the missing. In doing so, they reconstructed the story of their ‘searches’, seeking to ignite a public discourse on an unrecognized social category, that of missing civilians in Israel. The Bil’adeihem association, together with the police, the volunteer units, the families of the missing, the media and other social actors, collectively form a relational social network wherein search practices are conducted and the meanings of ‘searching’ are negotiated. Searching is therefore an interpretive process, and this research study examines such processes. The focus of this chapter is not on the missing persons themselves but rather on those left behind, who face double uncertainty, concerning both their loved ones’ fate and the behaviour and actions expected of them. In the absence of cultural scripts, those left behind must negotiate everyday decisions, such as whether to continue to mark the birthdays of the missing (Scott 2018: 12). Reith (2004: 393)

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claims that uncertainty ‘erodes the basis for decision making, freezes action, and ultimately blocks the possibility of forward movement into the future’. Families of the missing are therefore often described as being in a state of stagnation and passivity, as living in ‘frozen grief’ (Boss 1999; Gair and Moloney 2013). However, Boss (2007) suggests that dynamic processes that emphasize movement and paradoxical possibilities for change are inherent in ambiguity and uncertainty. Such dynamic possibilities exist, I argue, in the meanings given to the search for missing persons. In this chapter, I conceptualize ‘searching’ as an organizing principle of all the social actions taken by those left behind. I argue that this concept can change its meaning over time and through different relational networks. Moreover, I argue that ‘searching’ is intertwined with the cultural negotiations about the condition of being missing – ‘missingness’ – and about recognizing missing persons as a social category. The chapter is largely based on thirty-­three in-­depth interviews I conducted between 2015 and 2019, twenty-­two of them with the close family of missing persons and eleven with other actors: three police officers, the commanders of three civilian volunteer units, a private investigator, an employee of Israel’s national forensic institute, a journalist, an activist with Bil’adeihem and a public relations professional advising the association. I also participated in physical searches for missing p ­ ersons – I­ was (and still am) active in the Bil’adeihem ­association – ­and analysed media coverage of missing person cases. The analysis process combined holistic and thematic readings, attending to both content and form (Chase 2008). In what follows, after a theoretical discussion on the concepts of ‘disappearance’, ‘missingness’ and ‘searches’, I explore three models of ‘searching’, the first of these being searches that aim to provide ontological answers to the question of the missing person’s fate. These practices rely on and replicate the binary distinction between life and death, adopting the assumption that ‘missingness’ is a temporary state. Second, other practices of search are conducted with the goal of managing missingness, such that these searches become an end in themselves. Third, the breakdown of the expectation of an ontological solution (which would entail the collapse of the life– death distinction) could lead those left behind to construct a different kind of knowledge, in which missing persons are constructed as a social, ontological and stable category in its own right.

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From ‘Disappearance’ to ‘Missingness’ in Israel Gatti (2020) shows how the category of ‘forced disappearance’ can be used to frame many cases within specific ideal types, providing explanations and cultural scripts for these stories. However, not all cases fall within these ready-­made scripts. Particularly when there is no single ‘disappearing agent’, the circumstances of disappearance become much more vague, and less scholarly and public attention is given to them as a result (ibid.: 32). In Israel, the public is largely familiar with the case details of the four soldiers currently recorded as missing (Kaplan 2008), and the Israeli army operates a well-­established unit that has a wide range of resources with which to trace them and support their families. In contrast, about four thousand civilians are reported missing to the Israel Police each year and, although over 99 per cent of them are traced during the first twelve months, between ten and twenty people annually join the nearly six hundred Israelis who have remained missing for more than a year. A small missing persons bureau operates out of the national headquarters of the Israel Police, with responsibility for advising and supervising missing person investigations. However, the searches and investigations themselves are the responsibility of the relevant local police stations, and thus are integrated into officers’ daily workload. This kind of disappearance, described in the introduction to this book as the ‘mundane missing’, is often perceived as an individual problem, remote from any conception of public interest. Even though the political dimensions of this category are hidden, it is a political category nonetheless, since the circumstances dictating the disappearances are largely related to issues of social and economic status, alongside those of gender, ethnicity and race (Slakoff and Brennan 2020). Moreover, politics organize our perceptions about life and death, about visibility and non-­visibility, about who is worth searching for and who is not (Gatti 2020). This chapter focuses on civilian disappearance cases, where those left behind do not claim circumstances pointing to a forced disappearance, and where the missing are civilians, rather than soldiers. Beyond the uncertainty regarding the fate of their loved ones, the families of the civilian missing persons find themselves lacking cultural scripts that would provide practical guidance for the actions expected of them (Katz 2021). Moreover, the invisibility of civilian disappearances in the public awareness and institutional regulations is often greater in cases of vulnerable people at the margins, cases that Gatti (2020) terms ‘social disappearance’.

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The term ‘disappearance’ refers to a changing state: the person was, but is no longer, here. It relates to an action that occurred, initiated either by someone else (forced disappearance) or by the person themselves. In this sense, disappearance relates to an event that occurred in the past. Slyomovics (2005: 43), for example, observes that stories of forcible disappearance (in this case, in Morocco) are ‘told about the past from the perspective of the present’. Missingness, however, concerns the current condition of the person, without referring directly to either the past or a presumed future. It describes the current state of the individual, and that of those left behind who are influenced by this state. Since it is an ongoing condition attributable to different persons, it warrants anthropological discussion. How does ‘missingness’ gain meaning within society in general, and within particular relational networks? Missingness is not a common word, in either English or Hebrew (Ne’edarut). Within ‘the war of words between victims and government authorities’ (Slyomovics 2005: 44) about the wording used to describe people who go missing, it seems that missingness, as an ongoing condition with implications for those left behind, is left out; it is, in fact, missing. Missingness, like disappearance, is a ‘travelling concept’ (Dziuban 2020), constantly in flux. It not only travels ‘between geographical places, historical periods, social and cultural contexts, political movements and different disciplines’ (ibid.: 63–64); it is also in constant movement with regard to specific cases of people who have gone missing. Uncertainty and reversibility provide space for changing narratives and negotiation over its ­meanings – ­all the more so in the absence of applicable cultural scripts. I argue that the meanings of missingness are changing, across time and different relations; moreover, I contend that social recognition of ‘missingness’ has the potential to construct ‘missing persons’ as a social category in the collective imagination in Israel, thus allowing the construction of cultural scripts. Missing person researchers (e.g. Biehal, Mitchell and Wade 2003) often seek to create typologies of circumstances to categorize the missing, reduce ambiguity and frame the stories within known scripts. In contrast, I intentionally avoid typologies, echoing Edkins’s (2011) claim that the only thing that the civilian disappeared have in common is that someone is looking for them.1 Hence, it is the search that produces the category of the disappeared (Parr, Stevenson and Woolnough 2016).

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The Social Actions of Those Left Behind: Searches Social actions within uncertainty often reflect an assertion of control and agency, when agency is perceived to be under threat (Parker and Stanworth 2005). Uncertainty often nudges people to ‘do something’ (Van Dongen 2008). The absence or avoidance of action may also be an outgrowth of uncertainty. ‘Doing nothing’ is a social action in the Weberian sense: it has meaning for the actor, and it affects other social actors as well (Scott 2018: 3). Following Van Dongen and Scott, I explore how different kinds of doing (including active non-­doing) among those left behind relate to the notion of ‘missingness’. Several studies conducted in recent years have discussed the diversity of ‘searches’ in the context of missing persons. Most of these, however, cling to the assumption that locating the missing is the goal of the search. Puerto et al. (2021: 2), for example, define search as ‘a process that combines sub-­processes conductive to determining the whereabouts and specific fate of a person’. Yarwood (2010) describes the wide variety encompassed by the concept of ‘searches’, including different practices (e.g. walking, search techniques), non-­human actors (e.g. search dogs), knowledge (of a particular environment, of navigation), technologies (e.g. communications, skimmers) and agencies (police and civilian volunteer units). All of these operate in a social network that drives the search process. A range and variety of practices for tracing missing persons are therefore conducted in searches wherein the missing person is their object: from constant scrutiny, over time, of the geographical areas where the missing person used to be to attempts to locate the missing person through dreams (Lenferink et al. 2017). However, ‘searches’ can also ‘be a more messy practice, characterized by confusions about categories, risk status, pre-­emptive calculus and appropriate response’ (Parr and Fyfe 2012: 617). The object of searches can therefore be changed, not necessarily placing the missing persons at their centre, but rather those left behind. Parr, Stevenson and Woolnough (2016) analyse searches as a central feature of the emotional management of those left behind, and as an important aspect of the active agency they operate to cope with missingness. The intensity of searches in the post-­disappearance period is critical to the emotional welfare of families, in creating the feeling that ‘no stone has been left unturned’, that everything has been done to locate the missing (ibid.: 69). Searches do not contain a single set of practices, then, but a series of modes of action and

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meanings. Changes in the essence of the search can be related to the understanding that the object of the search is a corpse, rather than a living person, or to conducting new forms of bond with the missing person. This process of change may also be described linguistically: from searching to looking to practices of remembering (ibid.: 72). These changing processes are the focus of this chapter. They are not necessarily linear changes, and they may occur in different directions depending on new information, new technologies, waves of optimism, renewed energy or the differing relationships characterizing different networks. For example, Parr and Stevenson (2014) show how investigations produce a large gap between police and family interpretations of the same set of events. While this is an incident with unique circumstances for the family, the police seek to classify its circumstances within a categorization that relies on generic knowledge. Thus, missing persons are sometimes perceived as ‘faceless types’, and the authorities act in accordance with ‘profiling techniques’ around ‘categories’ (Parr and Fyfe 2012: 616, 625). While this is an inevitable part of professional and scientific practices that seek to trace the missing, with this perception the voice of the missing as human beings in their own right is left out. In contrast, searches on the basis of personhood, and not just on a categorical-­generic basis, are possible through civil society action (Edkins 2011). Edkins demonstrates how meanings of ‘searching’ can be formed: after the 2001 bombing of the World Trade Center, the streets of Manhattan were filled with posters of missing people whose families were searching for news about their fate. These posters, as well as media coverage of the event, created a script activating and guiding the families of the missing. One such family member described how she learned from the television that she had to make similar posters and was convinced that thanks to these her cousin would be found. It took a while before ‘it hit’ her: there were too many posters of this kind, and the possibility that they would not be of help in locating her cousin became tangible (ibid.: 18). The images remained throughout Manhattan for a long time, but their goals and meanings were changed along with the ontological assumption about the subjects. They were no longer perceived as ‘missing’, but as dead. The images remained, as objects of search and in commemoration of the victims. Thus, ‘searches’ can change their face: moving along the timeline and within the space, between different ontological assumptions and different objects of search, and in light of evolving relationships between the various social actors, including families, authorities and the media.

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Doing ‘Searches’, Rejecting ‘Missingness’ What do those left behind do when they find out about the disappearance of a loved one? As suggested in a radio interview by Betty,2 whose brother had gone missing more than a year earlier, they are required to ‘think’: ‘When you have a missing brother, the head is constantly working, constantly thinking’ (Zohar 2014). This constant thinking of those left behind, as Betty describes it, relates to two major questions: what happened, and what should one do? Thus, the uncertainty in relation to the expected and required actions adds to that concerning the fate and location of the missing person; together, they produce a double uncertainty. How, then, do those left behind act in the face of this double uncertainty? Boaz, whose son has been missing for about three years, proposes a simple answer: ‘We were not familiar with the problem [of missing persons]. … Then we really started acting instinctively. What do we do? Search. When a person goes missing, you search.’ According to Boaz, the lack of knowledge requires ‘instinctive’ action. While this i­nstinct – t­o ­search – e­ merges quickly, the actual practices of searching are still ambiguous, and thus must drive themselves. ‘Searches’, first and foremost, are aimed at tracing the missing person. This kind of action is largely perceived as physical searches, in the area near the missing’s place of residence, where they were last seen, where there are certain indications of their presence, or all of these. Those left behind often describe the first days after the disappearance as being characterized by intensive searches, carried out independently and separately from police searches: ‘There are no days and nights. Every day my father went somewhere else’ (Shula, whose sister has been missing for over thirty years); ‘There were almost two hundred people who helped us on the first weekend, and we all had to be listed in a table, to indicate where everyone would go, and people would call and ask, it was a real operation’ (Orit, whose brother has been missing for almost three years); ‘I was searching all over the ­city … ­and did not stop searching for hours. I did not eat, I did not drink, I did not stop searching’ (Mira, whose father has been missing for about four years); ‘Oh, how many searches I did. Three consecutive weeks from morning until dark, alone, after everyone had stopped, the police, the dogs, the schoolchildren, and the family. … In the evenings I would return home disappointed and scorched by the sun’ (Gilad, whose son has been missing for about thirty years, taken from Bil’adeihem’s Facebook page).

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These intense searches are aimed at finding a solution to the mystery of missingness. The question that remains, then, is how to search. Mazal, whose sister has been missing for more than forty years, recounts the answer to this question: ‘The whole family gets organized and sits, and says what we did and what we did not and what we should do. Like a command post.’ In the network Mazal describes, which in this case includes ‘the whole family’, knowledge about the search process emerges. This process is similarly described by Aaron, whose father has been missing for about six years: We started thinking about all sorts of ideas about what to do. … We were [searching] alone, not through the police, because the police were not so helpful. … But we know how to think, so we thought what to do. We’ve made contact with everyone that has come to our mind. But once you have experience you should do these things on day one. … Not after a week, not after a month.

Aaron does not shy away from the lack of cultural scripts for the searches, nor from his sense of a lack of police assistance. ‘We know how to think’, he says, and to do so in order to establish the necessary knowledge. For Aaron, this knowledge is not particularly mysterious, nor does it require professional abilities. ‘Thinking’ is enough for finding out what to do, and thus the families of the missing can manage the searches by themselves. But the lack of orderly knowledge, the lack of cultural scripts and the need to think and drive this knowledge comes at a huge price: the week or month it requires may be the difference between life and death, and between life/death and missingness. Indeed, many of the families of the missing feel that they have had to ‘reinvent the wheel’ – to establish a new knowledge about searches and searching, rather than relying on existing knowledge. Naomi, whose grandfather has been missing for about five years, describes how they were forced to establish this knowledge from scratch: We started walking around all the soup kitchens in the area, [the police] could not give us a list of them. We had to google it. … We went to every hospital, asked them to publish his picture. Nursing homes. … Three or four days of searching, as if shooting in all directions. We said, it doesn’t work, we are too small a family to check all the places. And even if all our friends join us, we will still not be enough to reach everywhere. So, I had a friend whose grandmother also went missing, and they found her a week later at Tel Aviv Central Station living rough. So I called her and asked if I could consult her about what to do, they had gone through it all.

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Naomi was angry, not only because her family had to ‘reinvent the wheel’ and think about the search practices themselves, but also because she received no assistance from the police in putting her ideas into effect. At first, Naomi’s family wanted to ‘shoot in all directions’ with their search. But it quickly became clear that the ‘directions’ were so numerous that the family could not hope to achieve them all, even with the help of friends. Out of a sense of overwhelming helplessness, Naomi consulted with a friend who had already ‘reinvented the wheel’ – a friend who had searched, successfully, for her grandmother in the past. The process of knowledge production about ‘searches’ involves trial and error, and it takes place within a relational network that changes frequently. Thus, those left behind who have undertaken ‘searches’ in the past soon become ‘experts’ in missingness. At this point, searches focus on tracing the missing, and different methods are negotiated to this end. However, sometimes no solution is found, and searches take on a new meaning, becoming part of an attempt to cope with the ongoing uncertainty.

Doing Other ‘Searches’, Managing ‘Missingness’ Varda and Shuki Minivitzky have spent hundreds of thousands of shekels (Israel’s currency) searching for their son, Daniel, following his disappearance. And yet there is no end in sight. Varda referred to this in an interview with a journalist: ‘I really feel sorry for the families of the missing unable to carry out such extensive searches’ (Shir 2016). Currently, the outcomes of the search for Daniel are identical to the results of more limited searches conducted for other missing persons; he, like them, has not yet been traced. Even so, Daniel’s mother ‘feels sorry’ for those families who conduct limited searches or do not search at all. ‘Searches’, therefore, take on a greater and broader meaning than the direct outcome of locating or not locating the missing person. Searches become a means to an end in themselves, with a changing purpose: they are no longer just a question of tracing the missing, but also the pursuit of an action that produces, at least to some extent, a sense of control. Within the chaotic uncertainty experienced by those left behind, a certain sense of manageability emerges from the actions that constitute the search, rather than just from the outcome. Simon, whose father has been missing for about twenty years, described what the importance of active search was for him: ‘I am at sea on a leaf that

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can bring me to shore. I cling to everything I can.’ In Simon’s metaphor, searching is akin to surviving in the open sea. Every practice of ‘searching’, however small, resembles a single leaf in the sea. The size or thickness of the leaf does not matter, and so calculations of probability and risk are no longer relevant. The goal, for Simon, was and remains the solution: to reach the ‘shore’. However, as missingness omits the logic of probability calculations regarding the successful outcome of a search, the distinction between ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ practices is blurred. Those left behind describe a wide range of ‘search’ practices, some of them designed for doing more than simply finding the missing person. This doing, at times, flows from means to end, as Aaron, whose father has been missing for about six years, relates: I did not sleep. I would take the car and start driving. I was not hallucinating, but I wanted to see, maybe I’ll be lucky, the Lord will guide me, or I do not know what, I’ll look and find something. But not on a more excessive level, just on the level of having to leave the house and to feel like I’m doing something, that I’m not sitting and doing nothing.

Aaron is somewhat ambivalent about the purpose of his nocturnal travels. On the one hand, these are journeys within the framework of ‘searches’, and as such their purpose is to ‘find’. He hopes for the Lord’s guidance, or simply for ‘luck’, on his way to a solution. On the other hand, these hopes are not set at an ‘excessive’ level, to use his words; they mainly satisfy another need, the feeling of active doing. These two sides of Aaron’s experience reflect the changing nature of ‘searches’, moving beyond the aim of finding the missing and focusing on the seekers themselves. Due to the lack of cultural scripts for missingness, those left behind may become more creative in the kind of social actions they take within ‘searches’. One example of this is the description given to the press by ­Lilach – ­the sister of Alexandra Brandt, who suddenly disappeared in 1994, at the age of 1­ 0 – o ­ f the decision taken by the family after the disappearance: ‘We moved to live in front of the police station in Ramat Gan. To hear [news about Alexandra] first’ (Leibowitz-­Der 2011). Brandt’s family, recent immigrants to Israel at that time, are described in the article as being helpless in the face of missingness. However, despite their helplessness, the family attempted to manage the situation by constituting active waiting (cf. Katz and Shalev Greene 2021). Living near the police station would shorten the distance the news would need to travel when it arrived. And so, those waiting for the news actively designed

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their ­future – ­if not its content and timing, at least its path to them. The object of ‘searches’ may therefore move away from the missing persons to the seekers themselves. Orit, whose brother Dori has been missing for almost three years, talks about the Facebook page dedicated to searching for her brother: When I say searches, it’s not necessarily searches. For me, searches are also the Facebook page that I run. I go in all day to check, see how many likes there are, how many wrote, I answer people. It’s part of the searches for me. But yes, it does give some hope. … To know that you are doing something and not sitting and doing nothing. … Even if it’s just a Facebook page.

Searches, Orit says, are ‘not necessarily searches’, in that their direct purpose is not always related to locating the missing persons. Likes and comments on the Facebook page will not necessarily lead to finding Dori, yet for Orit they are ‘part of the search’. The page maintains her brother’s missingness as vibrant, as a state in motion. Moreover, this act is opposed to the threat of passivity (‘sitting and doing nothing’) and thus evokes hope. Sometimes, this hope is directed towards a solution to the state of missingness, but sometimes it is an end in itself, and as such puts those left behind, rather than the missing, at the centre of searches. Orit illustrates this point with another example, about ‘supernatural’ practices: We’re not such a family that really believes in these t­hings … b ­ ut when there’s nothing else, then you hold on to anything you can. … There was some communicator [who claimed to be able to communicate with human spirits] that said that [Dori] was in the desert and that he would come back in three days. So, we were really hoping for this, we had an expectation. And then it did not happen. We were really disappointed all of a sudden. On the other hand, it is sometimes serving as if giving hope. I don’t know, it has benefits and costs. … It gave us some hope, so it’s nice.

Many of those left behind refer to a variety of search practices that can be broadly referred to as ‘supernatural’ (‘these things’, as Orit says). Often, those left behind turn to these practices (or respond to suggestions of this kind) for the first time in their lives after the disappearance of a loved one. Yet since the ongoing missingness of their loved ones puts them in such an unfamiliar place (personally and culturally), the distinction between searches that rely on supernatural practices and ostensibly ‘rational’ searches is no longer relevant. If

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those left behind want to grasp any ‘leaf’ capable of bringing them to shore, then supernatural propositions should also be considered. Orit talks about the two sides of supernatural practices. They can shatter hope and create enormous disappointment, and yet, despite the likelihood of disappointment, the promise of such practices also presents ‘benefits’. Hope may have been shattered, but its very ­existence – e­ ven for a limited time –is a ‘nice’ thing, as Orit puts it. Thus, supernatural practices can play a double role in ‘searches’: they enable the left behind to be active, striving for a solution for missingness, and they help them cope with missingness even if the mystery remains unresolved. While the lack of cultural scripts pushes those left behind into asking epistemological questions about their knowledge production right from the moment of disappearance (‘how to search’), the double role fulfilled by supernatural practices shows that the purpose of knowledge is changeable. The goal of searching is changed, together with the missingness itself: as missingness becomes less temporary and its solution recedes, so the searches place those left behind, rather than the missing, at the centre. In other words, questions related to the fate of the missing are not limited to the ontological alone. Epistemological questions about searching and searches are now asked as part of the meaning-­making processes of missingness, as a means of finding a way to live with it. This process may reach the point at which those left behind decide to ‘stop searching’, a phase I call ‘doing non-­searches’.

Doing ‘Non-Searches’, Constructing ‘Missingness’ Naomi, whose grandfather Andy has been missing for about five years, describes a practice of ‘searching’ that she refers to as ‘the last hope’: We all travelled to a village in [Andy’s birth country]. We realized it was unlikely [that he would be there], he was without a passport and without anything. But Grandma had the idea that he had fled the country and returned to the village. … So we said, okay, we’ll fly to his homeland, that might close the circle. … We visited there, which was the last hope.

The trip to Andy’s birth country was, for his family, ‘the last hope’ of finding him. But the thought that he would not be there led them not to despair but rather to a feeling of ‘closing the circle’. As long as families of the missing continue to yearn for an ontological solution

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to their loved one’s disappearance, but the solution is yet to come, the ‘circle’ cannot be closed. Thus, the meaning of closing the circle, I argue, can lie in the construction of missing persons as a stable ontological category in and of itself, a category situated somewhere between life and death. The search process changes its nature, in different directions and depending on the different actors involved. The process shapes and is shaped by different perceptions in relation to missingness. According to one view, missingness is a temporary state, whose solution is constantly sought by those left behind. In this respect, ontological searches never end for those left behind, as ­David – ­an activist with Bil’­adeihem – ­sets out: ‘You should not stop searching for the missing, but perhaps lower the intensity, not invest the same energy and the same number of volunteers and assistance.’ According to David, those left behind can change the ‘intensity’ of their search, but they can never stop. In contrast to David’s script, however, some of those left behind perceive missingness differently, such that it is considered a stable and unresolved state of being. Given this perception, it is possible to stop searching altogether. A newspaper article on the story of Leonid Prazent’s absence stated that ‘the period of disappearance was very intense. … But as time went on the state of emergency changed into a routine state, and the mystery became a permanent fact’ (Vardi 2017). The article describes the disappearance of Leonid as a ‘period’. Such a period is characterized by the ‘intense’ activity of those left behind and is referred to here by the reporter as a ‘state of emergency’. This ended, however, ‘as time went on’ – not in a single moment but through a gradual process, at the end of which the ‘routine’ state returned. This does not mean that the missing person has been located; yet, there is a clear distinction between the ‘periods’. The new routine is not the same as that which existed before the disappearance; in this new routine the mystery became a ‘permanent fact’, here termed ‘missingness’. The formal end of a physical s­earch – e­ven when the missing person has not been f­ound – i­s declared (for example) by civilian volunteer units that initiate, manage and participate in searches, as in this letter written by the commander of such a unit to its volunteers: After almost thirty-­six hours of continuous work, we have closed the command post. … We may not have located [the missing person] but it can be said honestly that we did our best. The Lord knows, and so does the family. You all worked with dedication and professionalism and

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provided the only comfort for the poor family. … We have exhausted the tasks we took on. Thank you all!

Although the search for the missing person came to naught, the commander’s letter indicates that the searches also had other purposes: the feeling that ‘we did our best’ (and that whoever needs to know about ­it – ­the Lord and the ­family – ­knows); ‘dedication’ and ‘professionalism’; and providing comfort for the family. Thus, the unit has fulfilled the ‘tasks’ it took on and can end the search with its honour intact. Once searches have stopped, missing persons become a stable category. Vered, whose father has been missing for about four years, expresses her longing for a similar sense of ‘exhausting’ the searches: I want to see my dad’s [police] file. That’s what I most want. Really, to see if all the things the police told me really happened. And then I’ll say, ‘Well, it really happened, okay, they tried all their options.’ But I don’t know. And all the time this doubt permeates you, that maybe they did not?

Vered is waiting for her father’s missingness to become permanent, but the ‘doubt’ does not allow her to complete this process. It is not a doubt about her father’s fate, but about the exhaustive nature of the searches carried out by the police. Only if the doubt is removed will she be able to feel that ‘okay’ – her father is missing and there is no solution. Thus, the search for an ontological solution turned into a search for the search, for her father’s file, for the (relative) peace of mind that might lie in establishing missing persons as a stable category. Missingness is perceived as temporary for as long as there is the potential for a solution to the central ontological question facing those left behind: is the missing person alive or dead? Constructing missingness as a perpetual status means breaking the binary distinction between life and death, and through this recognizing missingness as a separate state of being and missing persons as a separate category in its own right. Thus, the ontological questions relating to searches (where are the missing persons, and what happened to them?) give way to the epistemological questions (how do we gain knowledge about the fate of the missing and about missingness in general? How does one ‘search’ for a missing person? What are ‘searches’, and what is being searched for? If, and when, do we stop searching?). In other words, while factual knowledge about the fate of the missing may remain ambiguous, social and cultural knowledge about missingness

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becomes central. The social construction of missing persons as a category, along with the accompanying recognition, is now at stake. Naomi provides a good example of this shift towards an epistemological search for knowledge: Then the question arose: ‘when do you stop? … How do we stop? What should we do?’ ­Then … ­a friend of mine at work, he has a grandfather who is missing, and it has been half a year since he went missing. We wanted to consult with a family that is also going through this. Maybe there’s a direction we didn’t think of. Maybe this family has done something that we did not think of. And also, in the sense of support, because, when do you stop searching? [The friend whose grandfather was missing] kind of gave us some reassurance, because he said, ‘We’re doing nothing’. And [when] we told him what we managed to do, he was shocked, he said, ‘We were not there at all. Like, we sat at home and cried.’ It calmed me down, reassuring me that we can stop.

Naomi describes the negotiations that took place between her family and other social ­actors – ­in relation to both the ontological questions of searches and their epistemological questions. She frames the consultation she carried out in two ways: as part of the search for a solution, since they could continue to think about further search operations and possibilities for tracing their loved ones; and to understand when it would become legitimate to ‘stop searching’. In the absence of cultural scripts, it was this consultation that helped them write the script regarding ‘searches’. It became clear to Naomi and her family that, relatively speaking, their searches were very extensive. And now, she says, ‘we can stop’. They now have legitimacy for the understanding that all the possibilities have been exhausted, and through this have received an answer to one of the basic questions of ­searches – ­if not the ontological questions, at least one of the epistemological ones. Naomi’s family were therefore able to stop searching as an act of commission rather than ­omission – ­to actively avoid action (Scott 2018), to do ‘non-­searches’. A different kind of justification for stopping the search is described by Levana, whose brother Zvi has been missing for more than thirty years: At the beginning I was thinking that he might come back. But as time goes on, you lose hope. And my other brother, he said such a thing: ‘If he went voluntarily and he does not want contact with us, then we should respect that. If that’s what he wants, then we have nothing to search for because that’s what he wants. And if he is not alive, what can we do? What can we change? It can no longer be changed.’

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Many years after Zvi’s disappearance, one of his brothers reframed the searches for him. According to the new framing, there is no longer any point in searching, nor in fighting the question of whether Zvi is alive or dead, since this ‘can no longer be changed’. The construction of Zvi as ‘missing’ thus provides justification for the halting of ongoing ontological searches. The construction of missing persons as an ontological category makes physical searches so superfluous that even new evidence does not always return those left behind to the ontological question. For example, in a press interview, Yossi Ya’­akobi – ­whose daughter, Adi, has been missing since 1­ 996 – s­aid: ‘Someone called me some time ago, from the ultra-­Orthodox sector. She told me that she was traveling with Adi by bus. And she was sure. I did not even go to Jerusalem [to check it out]’ (Kotas-­Bar 2013). Missingness has become such a stable state of being for Ya’akobi that he no longer has faith in so-­ called new evidence about his daughter. His ontological certainty is constructed through the category of missing persons.

Discussion: Searching for the Missingness Category In this chapter, I have sought to illuminate the ways in which the condition of civilian missingness in Israel produces varied social actions. In the absence of cultural scripts, knowledge about what ‘searches’ mean is produced in relational networks made up of various social actors. The variety of answers to the question of ‘What to do?’ and the various actions taken by those left behind construct the concept of ‘searches’. These searches are intended to confront uncertainty, seeking not only to resolve it but also to manage it, reduce it, allow life alongside it. In this way, searches become an organizing principle in the lives of those left behind. Within this relational network, the relations between the missing persons and their families are particularly disturbed. The void that emerges in the ‘disturbed intimacies’, as discussed throughout this book, is managed by those left behind as part of their practices of ‘searches’. I argue that searches and missingness are interrelated; in this chapter, this relationship is described through a seemingly linear process, which begins with rejecting missingness as a stable condition, continues with managing missingness and ends with constructing missingness as a social category. The dynamic nature of the goals of searches is made possible precisely because the goals emerge from a situation that has no clear cultural script. Therefore, there is the

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potential for creative search practices on the part of those left behind. The efforts to defeat or manage uncertainty may be manifested in the pursuit of a solution to the mystery, which involves one of two familiar ontological ­states – ­life or death. The third option, the subversive one, involves the construction of a new category by those left behind, who fight for its social recognition. This is sometimes seen as the only option for living alongside missingness. However, as long as the missing person remains missing, this process does not attain closure; missingness is always reversible, and thus produces a constant, non-­ linear, multidirectional movement. This constant flux of searching and searches shows how missingness is a travelling concept, and in this sense it is similar to disappearance (Dziuban 2020). However, the concept of civilian missingness focuses on the present condition of people who have disappeared in a variety of circumstances and without a single unifying disappearing agent (Gatti 2020). As such, it has much less visibility and almost no cultural scripts, compared with forced disappearance, missing in action or the Israeli case of missing soldiers, which get more institutional and public attention, even if they are not completely scripted. I believe that both the condition of being missing and that of being left behind deserve more social, cultural and anthropological attention. By analysing the knowledge production processes of searches and ‘missingness’, this chapter joins this book’s political call to ‘inscribe the disappeared in academic discourse’ (see this book’s introduction). Moreover, this chapter seeks to show how social recognition of ‘missingness’ is required, as well as the construction of accepted cultural scripts for those left behind. The absence of cultural scripts about missingness in Israel limits the capacity of those left behind to act quickly in their searching. But, at the same time, it provides space for different kinds of social action. Therefore, missingness has the subversive potential to challenge both ontological and epistemological knowledge. First, it challenges knowledge about binary distinctions, such as life–death and rational–emotional. Search practices may, first and foremost, produce knowledge about ways out of missingness. For this to happen, those left behind need practices that are considered ‘rational’. Such searches reflect the assumption that missingness is a temporary condition, to be resolved through one of the two binary directions of life and death. Thus, the left behind reject the construction of missing persons as an ontological category in its own right. As uncertainty continues and the solution seems far away, the distinction between ‘rational’ and ‘supernatural’ practices diminishes,

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together with the distinction between life and death, and the searches themselves change. Second, the ability to manage uncertainty is also challenged. Efforts to manage missingness may be perceived as a means of operating risk calculations and probabilities. However, in the efforts of those left behind to maintain some degree of control over their experiences, and to cope with missingness, ‘doing’ itself becomes the object of the search. This process illustrates the paradox of agency within uncertainty: it aims for controllability but simultaneously reflects an acceptance of lack of control. As searches move away from the ontological questions regarding the fate of the missing and their location, the construction of missing persons as a category further deepens; searches, then, are designed to answer the epistemological questions about the actions of those left behind. In this situation, even non-­doing (Scott 2018), such as the decision to stop searching, is a meaningful social action. Practices of ‘searching’, therefore, confront the assumption of passivity that is sometimes attributed to those left behind (Boss 1999; Gair and Moloney 2013). Life is not ‘on hold’ within missingness (Hogben 2006); rather, it is composed of a variety of social actions, known as ‘searches’. Ori Katz is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath. His PhD examined the case of missing persons in Israel and how narratives of ‘missingness’ are constructed. The cultural space between life and death was also the focus of his research about posthumous reproduction. His previous papers have been published in Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Current Sociology, OMEGA – Journal of Death and Dying, New Genetics & Society and Journalism.

Notes 1. Some cases in Israel are excluded from this claim, and thus from this study, such as the case of the disappeared Yemenite children (cf. Molchadsky 2018). 2. Pseudonyms have been used throughout the text, except when excerpts that have already been published in the media are used, as in this case.

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References Biehal, Nina, Fiona Mitchell and Jim Wade. 2003. Lost from View: Missing Persons in the UK. Bristol: Policy Press. Boss, Pauline. 1999. Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —-—-—. 2007. ‘Ambiguous Loss Theory: Challenges for Scholars and Practitioners’, Family Relations 56(2): 105–11. Chase, Susan E. 2008. ‘Narrative Inquiry: Multiple Lenses, Approaches, Voices’, in Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (eds), Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 57–94. Dziuban, Zuzanna. 2020. ‘Disappearance as a Travelling Concept: The Politics and Aesthetics of a Transregional Exchange’, in Estela Schindel and Gabriel Gatti (eds), Social Disappearance: Explorations between Latin America and Eastern Europe. Berlin: Forum Transregionale Studien, pp. 60–78. Edkins, Jenny. 2011. Missing: Persons and Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gair, Susan, and Sharon Moloney. 2013. ‘Broadening Notions of “Missing Persons” to Increase Social Inclusion, Public Empathy and Healing: Considering the Case of Children Missing through Adoption’, Journal of Social Inclusion 4(1): 90–109. Gatti, Gabriel. 2020. ‘The Social Disappeared: Genealogy, Global Circulations, and (Possible) Uses of a Category for the Bad Life’, Public Culture 32(1): 25–43. Hogben, Susan. 2006. ‘Life’s on Hold: Missing People, Private Calendars and Waiting’, Time & Society 15(2): 327–42. Jeanis, Michelle N., et al. 2021. ‘The New Milk Carton Campaign: An Analysis of Social Media Engagement with Missing Persons’ Cases’, Social Forces 100(2): 454–76. Kaplan, Danny. 2008. ‘Commemorating a Suspended Death: Missing Soldiers and National Solidarity in Israel’, American Ethnologist 35(3): 413–27. Katz, Ori. 2021. ‘Everything Seems So Illogical: Constructing Missingness between Life and Death in Israel’, OMEGA – Journal of Death and Dying. https://doi.org/10.1177/00302228211054317. —-—-—. 2022. ‘“My Mother Is Not Newsworthy”: Framing Missingness in Israel’, Journalism. https://doi.org/10.1177/14648849211064081. Katz, Ori, and Karen Shalev Greene. 2021. ‘Constructing Time in Uncertainty: Temporal Regimes among Missing Persons’ Families’, Current Sociology 69(1): 59–76. Kotas-­Bar, Hen. 2013. ‘Adi Ya’akobi’s Father is Still Waiting for Her to Return’, NRG, 9 August. Retrieved 1 November 2020 from https://​ www.makorrishon.co.il/nrg/online/1/ART2/497/570.html.

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Leibowitz-­Der, Sarah. 2011. ‘Alexandra Brandt’s Sister: I Will Continue to Look for Her with All My Might’, NRG, 5 March. Retrieved 3 March 2021 from https://www.makorrishon.co.il/nrg/online/54/ART2/217/753​ .html. Lenferink, Lonneke I.M., et al. 2017. ‘I’ve Changed, but I’m Not Less Happy: Interview Study among Nonclinical Relatives of Long-­Term Missing Persons’, Death Studies 42(6): 346–55. Molchadsky, Nadav G. 2018. ‘From “Missing” to “Kidnapped” Israeli Commissions of Inquiry and the Framing of the “Missing Children Affair”’, The Public Historian 40(4): 64–90. Parker, John, and Hilary Stanworth. 2005. ‘“Go For It!” Towards a Critical Realist Approach to Voluntary Risk-­Taking’, Health, Risk & Society 7(4): 319–36. Parr, Hester, and Nicholas Fyfe. 2012. ‘Missing Geographies’, Progress in Human Geography 37(5): 615–38. Parr, Hester, and Olivia Stevenson. 2014. ‘“No News Today”: Talk of Witnessing with Families of Missing People’, Cultural Geographies 22(2): 297–315. Parr, Hester, Olivia Stevenson and Penny Woolnough. 2016. ‘Search/ing for Missing People: Families Living with Ambiguous Absence’, Emotion, Space and Society 19: 66–75. Puerto, Mercedes Salado, et al. 2021. ‘The Search Process: Integrating the Investigation and Identification of Missing and Unidentified Persons’, Forensic Science International: Synergy 3. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fsis​ yn.2021.100154. Reith, Gerda. 2004. ‘Uncertain Times: The Notion of “Risk” and the Development of Modernity’, Time & Society 13(2–3): 383–402. Scott, Susie. 2018. ‘A Sociology of Nothing: Understanding the Unmarked’, Sociology 52(1): 3–19. Shir, Smadar. 2016. ‘The Lost Son Mystery’, Yediot Ahronot, 29 September. Retrieved 27 December 2020 from https://www.yediot.co.il/articles/0,73​ 40,L-­4861637,00.html. Slakoff, Danielle C., and Pauline K. Brennan. 2020. ‘White, Black, and Latina Female Victims in US News: A Multivariate and Intersectional Analysis of Story Differences’, Race and Justice. https://doi.org/10.1177​ /2153368720961837. Slakoff, Danielle C., and Henry F. Fradella. 2019. ‘Media Messages Surrounding Missing Women and Girls: The Missing White Woman Syndrome and Other Factors That Influence Newsworthiness’, Criminology, Criminal Justice, Law & Society 20(3): 80–102. Slyomovics, Susan. 2005. The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Van Dongen, Els. 2008. ‘Keeping the Feet of the Gods and the Saints Warm: Mundane Pragmatics in Times of Suffering and Uncertainty’, Anthropology & Medicine 15(3): 263–69. Vardi, Sa’ar. 2017. ‘70 Years after His Father Did Not Come Back from

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the Battle, the Son Disappeared as Well’, Ma’ariv, 21 April. Retrieved 6 October 2020 from www.maariv.co.il/news/israel/Article-­581912. Yarwood, Richard. 2010. ‘Risk, Rescue and Emergency Services: The Changing Spatialities of Mountain Rescue Teams in England and Wales’, Geoforum 41(2): 257–70. Zohar, Guy. 2014. ‘Avi Shemi’s Sister Who Has Been Missing for More Than a Year: “For a Year Only Two Search Days Were Held”’, 103fm, 23 February. Retrieved 2 January 2021 from https://103fm.maariv.co.il​ /programs/Media.aspx?ZrqvnVq=FMKKGI&c41t4nzVQ=EIK.

4 A Right to Disappear? The State, Regulatory Politics and the Entitlements of Kinship Anna Matyska

We search for everybody.

—Police representative for the Missing Persons Centre, Polish Police Headquarters

When people disappear as a result of political repression or natural disasters, accidents or warfare, the question of the right to disappear is beyond consideration. These people clearly do not intend to disappear but are ‘forced to’. In such cases, the disappeared appear as victims of forces outside of their control, be it the state, nature or a particular group or person that wishes to harm them. Their families see them as victims as well, and the UN International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance grants families the ‘right to know’ what has happened to their missing kin. The missing cannot just ‘disappear’, as various authors argue (Edkins 2011; Dziuban 2020). Similarly, in the introduction to this volume, the editors posit that the book is written ‘against the politics of letting disappear’. To let people disappear would be to violate their humanity, which includes their right to exist and to die as singular and idiosyncratic human beings. This moral imperative also entails a claim on public institutions to help in the search for the missing, and thus to contribute to their reappearance as either living persons or identified dead. However, in (post)industrialized countries with relatively stable democracies, most disappearances have a more mundane, uncertain

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character and the death and victimhood of the missing cannot be straightforwardly presumed, as people often go missing because they want to disconnect from their families and communities, at least for a while. Is the dictum that people cannot just disappear still valid in such circumstances? Are people not allowed to disappear? And finally, how should the state react? Should it support families in their search efforts, taking ‘disturbed intimacies’ as sufficient reason to get involved, or should it search only for some missing and let others ‘disappear’, especially if they are legally independent adults? These questions stand at the heart of the ‘moral ambiguities’ (Fyfe et al. 2015) of the politics of reappearance in liberal democracies, which have liberty rights written into their constitutions. Liberty rights involve freedom from state interference (negative liberty) in order to empower people to take control of their lives and do as they wish (positive liberty) (Möller 2009; Fallon 1994).1 At the centre of such an understanding is an individualized ‘legal person’ (Strathern 2005) who stands in direct relationship to the state, in lieu of the kinship-­based organization of premodern times (Fox 1993; Pirie 2013). From this perspective, family claims should have no legal bearing on people’s individual choices and life projects. As Robin Fox argues, ‘the war between kinship and state, between kinship and contract, and between kinship and rampant individualism, is one of the great movers of history’ (Fox 1993: 183). Although Fox concludes that the state has won, state politics of disappearance are one of the indicators that the war is not over yet. It is a ‘war’ between the notion of the missing person who disappears in relation as a family member (Edkins 2011) and whose family feels entitled to know about their missing’s ontological status (and possibly their whereabouts), and that of the missing person who disappears as ‘an abstracted individual’ (ibid.) and whose kin have no say regarding their individual rights. An analysis of state regulations in seventeen countries conducted by the Polish legal scholar Ewa Gruza and her team (Gruza 2020; Gruza and Sołtyszewski 2021) indicates that many liberal democracies, including Germany (see also Melz 2021), the Netherlands and the UK (see also Shalev Greene and Alys 2017), resolve the moral ambiguity of disappearances that are presumed intentional by limiting police involvement in such cases. The police engage in the search only when the missing person’s life or health is presumed to be at risk (including when the search is for a vulnerable adult, a minor or a victim of criminal assault), and they withdraw when there is no evidence of risk and the disappearance appears to be voluntary. For instance, in the UK the category of an ‘absent’ person was introduced

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to denominate those who are not considered missing ‘enough’ to initiate a police investigation (Collie 2021; Holmes 2017). The British police also do not search for long-­lost relatives (Apps 2017; Biehal, Mitchell and Wade 2003). While this may create discontent among the families of the missing, it is justified as a way to protect the liberty rights of the missing themselves (Parr et al. 2015; see also Parr and Fyfe 2012; Apps 2017). This chapter focuses on the Polish politics of the search and sheds light on Poland as an example of a country that has taken a different regulatory approach: instead of curtailing police involvement in the search, it has expanded it and has made this transparent in the regulations. While a decade ago the Polish police still focused only on high-­risk disappearances, since 2018 a new decree2 obliges them to search for anybody who has been reported missing, even if their disappearance is hypothesized as intentional and voluntary and as bearing no imminent risk to the person’s life or health. Here, I ask why the Polish state has such an inclusive regulatory approach to the search for the missing, and how this relates to, and potentially balances out, the tensions between kinship claims regarding ‘their missing’ (Edkins 2011, my emphasis) and the individual’s right to disappear. While analysing the relationship between state prerogatives, kinship and the individual, I also pay attention to the role of market forces, private actors and voluntary organizations, which can all affect the politics of the search. I focus on the politics regarding missing adults, because minors are not granted the same legal competence of self-­constitution as adults (while also recognizing that age is a somewhat arbitrary legal threshold to adulthood; cf. Scoccia 2013). Although regulations are my analytical point of departure, as an anthropologist I am less interested in the minutiae of legislation and more so in the cultural underpinnings of the law, specifically in what the politics of response to disappearance convey about cultural understandings of kinship, person and the state, and their mutual constitution. I see law as a central element of modern state governance (Nugent 2007), which serves as a moral compass of what society should look like as well as reflecting societal norms and ideals (Geertz 1983; Goodale 2017; Pirie 2013). Through legislation, ­disappearance – i­n Polish, zaginięcie – becomes a category of law, but its understanding is rooted in the everyday experience of particular people, and the historical and political economy legacies of the moment. In Poland, a major role in this regard is played by the legacy of both the communist era and the Catholic tradition, which have strengthened the importance of kinship and the relational

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understanding of the self. While the post-­1989 capitalist transformation promoted the value of individualism and self-­sufficiency in disconnection from kinship and the state, it has not managed to thoroughly upend a more communal thinking. My analysis combines data from different sources. I draw on legal decrees, policy reports, narratives in mainstream (television, newspapers) and social media, popular and academic literature written by experts and practitioners and my own interviews and conversations with actors (including practitioners and police officers) participating in the search for Polish people missing in Poland and abroad, which I conducted in Poland, Belgium and the Netherlands during 2020 and 2021, both in person and online. Methodologically, I complement ethnographic content analysis (Altheide 1987) with observations from the field, looking for common themes and cultural tropes that would explain and give meaning to current regulations.

Anthropology, Law and Disappearances Anthropological work on disappearances is attentive both to major legal frameworks regulating state and international responses to enforced disappearances and to the state politics that underpin the disappearance of precarious migrants (see e.g. De León 2015; Gatti 2014; Rivera Hernández 2017). However, it is far less mindful of regulations surrounding individual disappearances. In this context, the debate is dominated by the Anglo-­Saxon criminologists, political scientists and geographers who look at the UK and US frameworks. Their discussion centres on the policing of the search for the missing in relation to the notions of intentionality and risk, and also on whose perspective, that of the missing person or that of the family, should be given priority, considering that the missing person is not there to speak (see e.g. Shalev Greene and Alys 2017; Parr et al. 2015; Parr and Fyfe 2012). Authors agree that those who are considered more vulnerable, namely children, elderly people and the mentally ill, should be searched for, but they also note that the right of legally independent adults to go missing should be given due consideration (Fyfe et al. 2015; Parr et al. 2015; Collie 2021; Apps 2017). A ‘liberty-­right’, as Hester Parr et al. (2015: 203–4) argue, is the basis of democracy, giving people the ‘right to be absent’ and ‘free from interference by others, free from search’ (original emphasis). My aim is to contribute to this discussion by considering how it is played out in Poland, where the perspective tilts more towards the

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family’s right to know and where the key to protecting an adult’s right to disappear lies temporally further away, in the regulations about when the search should be terminated (when the missing can decline family contact), rather than in the abandonment of the search. Accordingly, by right to disappear I do not mean a ‘right to remain unfound’, which is the term used by Joe Apps (2017) to describe British regulation on disappearance. My interpretation of Polish regulations suggests that families have a right to know whether their kin are alive or dead, and the missing have a right to be searched for, but once they are found alive they are granted the right to disappear. The state plays the role here of a wedge intermediary, navigating between the wishes of the family and the (purported or confirmed) wishes of their missing relative, and ensuring that contact with family is a choice3 and not an enforced obligation. My work is also a response to a Polish legal debate on the issue. The discussion on state regulations has grown in importance in recent years in Poland. One of its academic forerunners is the legal scholar Ewa Gruza, whose aforementioned project aimed to explore international regulations and suggest improvements in Polish legislation.4 As a former socialist country, Poland has, in the last three decades, looked internationally, and especially to the West, for potentially ‘better’ institutional solutions, and Gruza’s project could be viewed in these terms. Gruza is critical of current Polish regulations on the policing of disappearance. She argues that they are irrational, too broad and go against the individual right to autonomous self-­ constitution that is granted by the country’s constitution, and also that Polish police officers are forced to look for people who are, in the end, not really missing, but ‘intentionally hiding’ (uciekinierzy), or ‘bogus missing’ (pozornie zaginieni) as she calls them (Gruza 2020; Gruza and Sołtyszewski 2021). I find Gruza’s argument significant because it shows that the issue of individual rights gets to the heart of what it means to be missing, and who is being searched for, in modern democracies. At the same time, her argument goes against the grain of major cultural and moral perceptions of how the state should react to disappearances in Poland; a discord that she also recognizes, saying that ‘perhaps’ Poland is not ‘mentally, socially and culturally ready’ for such changes (Gruza 2020: 84). Yet she does not elaborate what this means. In this chapter, I investigate the cultural and political rationales that Gruza leaves implicit, without going into teleological thinking about the proper direction of change. But before I enter into the analysis itself, an

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introduction to the Polish landscape of disappearance and policing regulations is needed.

Disappearances and the Development of Policing Regulations in Poland Although disappearance has been a long-­ standing part of Polish reality, its public recognition as a social issue came only in the 1990s. The seminal milestone was the television programme ‘Has Anybody Seen, Does Anybody Know’ (Ktokolwiek widział, ktokolwiek wie), which has been broadcast ever since 1996 and has helped Polish families to find their missing. The programme introduced the topic of disappearances into the Polish mediascape and contributed to the establishment of ITAKA, the first, and currently the largest, Polish NGO dealing with disappearance. Multiple online and search-­and-­ rescue groups have also mushroomed in the last five years. When the issue of disappearances entered the public debate, the annual figure for registered missing incidents was ten thousand, and the number then gradually increased, exceeding twenty thousand in 2018.5 The nature of Polish disappearances reflects the major structural struggles of Polish society after the capitalist transformation, including the growing socio-­economic disparities, labour migration and the deteriorating mental health of the population (see e.g. Stojer-­Polańska 2016, 2018; Gruza and Sołtyszewski 2021). At least half of missing adults are found alive (Stojer-­Polańska 2016). Their disappearance is attributed to the deliberate cessation of contact, whether shortor long-­term, due to alcohol and drug abuse, mental health problems, family conflict and financial debt. A significant number also comprise teenage runaways and elderly individuals with dementia and Alzheimer’s, while children constitute a minority. The missing who are found dead die mostly because of accidents or suicide. Disappearances caused by crime (zaginięcia kryminalne) make up between 5 and 10 per cent of the total number. Most of the missing are found (dead or alive) within one month. Poland also has nearly four thousand unidentified bodies buried in unnamed graves at the state’s expense, and around 80 per cent of these are thought to be missing persons who remained unfound. Even though there are various non-­governmental bodies that deal with the search for the missing in Poland, the principal ownership of the search remains in the hands of the police, acting as the proxy of the state. This police ownership of disappearance has undergone

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incremental regulatory changes, most recently with a decree issued in 2018. Initially, the Polish police were obliged to search only for the so-­called high-­risk missing, that is those whose life, health or freedom was suspected to be at risk, while the no-­risk missing were registered but not actively searched for. In a 2003 decree, disappearance was defined as ‘a sudden event that makes it impossible to locate the person and to protect their life, health or freedom, and which necessitates finding the person or providing them with help’.6 This then gradually changed. In 2012, a new decree was introduced7 that dropped the term ‘sudden’ from the definition, thus implicitly expanding the scope of the search and somewhat expanding search obligations towards the second category of missing. Finally, the 2018 decree removed the categories themselves in favour of search levels that oblige the police to search for all the reported missing, albeit with varied intensity. The first search level concerns persons whose disappearance is related to a presumed ‘real and immediate’ risk to their health, life or freedom. This level calls for an immediate implementation of search-­and-­rescue groups, the checking of surveillance camera and phone records, the interviewing of witnesses and so on. The second level relates to a ‘justified suspicion of risk’, for instance regarding a person who takes medication or who has gone missing abroad and for whom there is a justified need to provide them with help. The search activities here are similar to those for the first level. The third level concerns persons whose disappearance does not suggest a justified suspicion of risk to their lives, including those who have expressed a desire to leave their family and those who have gone abroad or declared that they are going to do so and with whom there is no contact. Here the search is less extensive, and only includes search-­and-­rescue groups or the checking of telephone records if they are deemed relevant. In all cases, the police should start the search for the missing person immediately after receiving information about their disappearance and, if necessary, change the search level as they proceed. From the perspective of the individual–kinship–state relationship, two ambiguities stand out in the regulations. First of all, there is a conceptual discord between the definition of disappearance as a life-­threating event and the third level of search, for the missing who are not considered at risk (and thus, according to Gruza, are not really ‘missing’). Secondly, the definition of disappearance implies that the missing person’s absence is not problematic for anybody in particular; rather, the state appears as the main concerned party aiming to protect the missing. Thus, the de jure position of the family as an important stakeholder in the search is not as explicit as

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in, for instance, the UN Convention on enforced disappearances. Nevertheless, family members are present in the regulations in other ways, as persons ‘entitled’ (upoważnione) to report disappearances and to receive information about the search’s progress. In addition, they are entitled to withdraw the report and halt the search (although the police can disagree on that matter). I interpret these ambiguities as a way to reconcile the individual-­ centred rhetoric of modern state law with the relational nature of disappearance, namely the fact that if a family does not care about a person’s absence and does not report it the police, most likely the state will fail to notice the absence as well. The extensive nature of a search is a further consequence of family involvement, since in everyday life families worry about the missing person’s safety even if external circumstances or the police reaction suggest they should not. As I will show below, this is also one of the reasons that the current regulations make sense for many people, even though they may be problematic for the missing who are found alive. I will start with an empirical example of the most mediatized Polish disappearance to date, that of 19-­year-­old student Iwona Wieczorek, who went missing in the coastal city of Sopot in 2010 and whose disappearance threw into relief the basic tenets of the previous search politics, contributing to their being changed.

The Right to Know and the Entitlement of Kinship – Because You Never Know Across the world, public debate about the systemic shortcomings of the reaction to disappearance is often steered by young women’s disappearances. In Belgium, the Missing Persons Unit was established after the mismanagement of the search for five missing girls who were murdered by Marc Dutroux. In the UK, the disappearance of Suzy Lamplugh stirred the development of new resources to support the families of the missing (Edkins 2011: 178). In the United States, the phenomenon has been dubbed a ‘missing white woman syndrome’ (Slakoff and Fradella 2019), recently accentuated by the mediatization of the disappearance of the young white woman Gabby Petito. In Poland, such a case was the disappearance of Iwona Wieczorek. When Iwona did not return home after a night out with friends, her mother went to the police. In an interview with a Polish investigative journalist, who devoted two books to Iwona’s disappearance, Iwona’s mother recalls:

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When I went to report that Iwona had gone missing, I heard from the policeman that surely she is gallivanting about and she will return when she ‘parties out’. I asked him, ‘What is that supposed to mean?’ And he asked me like three more times whether I really wanted to report her disappearance. I practically screamed at him, yes, and tears ran down my cheeks. Condescendingly, he finally accepted [my report] … For the first three days, [the police] did nothing. I was asking them what was going on. They said that they were searching but they did nothing. They woke up only after Rutkowski came. (Cited in Szostak 2018: 43, my translation)

Rutkowski, a private detective, helped to publicize Iwona’s disappearance and pressured the police to engage in the search. Yet because the first twenty-­four hours are crucial (Stojer-­Polańska 2018; Szostak 2018), many traces that could have explained her disappearance, including comprehensive surveillance footage, had already been lost. Iwona’s disappearance soon found its way into the media mainstream, parliamentary interpellations and state reports (including the oft-­quoted Supreme Audit Office report of 2015), which criticized the police involvement in her case. Because Iwona remains missing, her disappearance casts a long shadow over the Polish politics of the search. It evokes key arguments for why the police should not disregard any disappearance: firstly, because disappearance is an elusive and difficult-­to-­categorize event and secondly, because it is not only about the missing person but also about the families who are left behind and suffer or, to use one of my interlocutors’ evocative phrase, ‘go mad’ (dostają szału) due to the uncertainty of their loved ones’ fate. Iwona’s disappearance was (and continues to be) easy for the public to empathize with. She was young and good-­looking, and had a bright future. She had a loving family and her mother, visibly grief-­stricken, became relentless in the search for her. Maternal pain has served as a source of demands for the recognition and return of the missing in other contexts as well, including those of the famous Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina and the Caravan of Mothers in Latin America (Rivera Hernández 2017). Iwona was 19 years old but to her mother she was still a child. Nevertheless, because Iwona was a missing ‘adult’ child, the police could dismiss her mother’s anxiety and her desire to know what had ­happened – a­ fact that in itself also testifies to the arbitrariness of a legal division between missing adults and missing children. When Iwona disappeared, there were only two categories of missing adult, high-­risk and low-­risk. This meant that, when a disappearance was reported, a police officer had to make an instantaneous

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division between intensive, active search and little or no search at all, and accordingly between a presumption that the missing had left voluntarily and was alive and the hypothesis that the missing’s life was in immediate danger or that they were already dead. In doing this, the Polish police of course presumed and hypothesized, and sometimes this was done with accuracy, but the practice of the past had shown that such categorization was difficult to carry out. Furthermore, what might have seemed like a reliable categorization of a given incident to police officers did not necessarily look so reliable to the families, who had their own interpretations. There have been many more missing people like Iwona and many more families desperately looking for their missing, just like Iwona’s mother. Examples in the Polish media of discovered-­too-­late bodies and bodies never discovered at all run into the hundreds. Although many of the missing have failed to gain similar media attention, and have not always been such ‘proper’ citizens as Iwona and her mother (for instance, due to alcohol or drug abuse), their families have asked similar fundamental questions: Is my missing loved one alive or dead? What happened? And how do we get to find out about it? In the 2018 decree, their quest for knowledge finally found legal recognition and support through the immediate and comprehensive search. In kinship studies the ‘right to know’ debate relates to people’s desire to know about their biological origin when it has become obscured by adoption or assisted reproduction, and to their claims on the state to secure such knowledge (Carsten 2004; Strathern 2005). The value of this knowledge is considered central to a person’s identity: ‘Knowing about one’s kin is also knowing about oneself’, writes Marilyn Strathern (2005: 69). I argue that Polish families’ claim to have the ‘right to know’ about their loved ones’ disappearances is built upon a similar sociocultural premise, namely that to know about the missing kin’s ontological status is important to their own sense of completeness. As Stefan Nowak (2011: 262) argues, the Polish family is ‘a kind of extended personal self of the individual’. Thus, when a person goes missing, the ‘personal self’ of the family members is affected as w ­ ell – ­it is as if part of them were also ‘missing’. However, the aim of knowing in disappearances is also more transcendental. If the missing person is dead, finding the body ensures that death rituals can be performed. In the Polish Catholic tradition the burial of the body and a grave to visit and hold vigils at are essential in moving the kinship relations on to the next stage; they seem indispensable for closure.

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The importance of the search for the missing in view of their possible death was also reiterated to me by my ITAKA interlocutors. ‘Why are disappearances [zaginięcia] so important? Why do the police deal with disappearances?’, one of the ITAKA founders, a former police officer herself, asked me rhetorically. She immediately offered an answer: ‘The Red Cross looks for victims of the war, so [for them] it is about the war. Here, in Poland [u nas], it is very important to know, to have a grave. In Poland, it is very important to know where this person is and at least to have a grave.’ ‘Families often say “so as to be able to light a candle”’, another ITAKA worker sitting next to me concurred emphatically. They continued: ‘According to us, when somebody goes missing, the whole family gets sick. Everybody has their own vision of disappearances, and mostly they are ­afraid – ­afraid of what could have happened.’ To return to Iwona’s disappearance, her case is particularly emblematic because her body was not found, but nowadays her death is considered almost certain. By all accounts, this is the worst of deaths because it is an unresolved death, without material completion, haunted by the image of a desecrated body that after so many years has probably disappeared in the most literal sense of the term, leaving only bones. In light of the new regulations, the completion of the death ritual, for the sake of both the dead missing person and the mourning family, is more likely to happen.

Why the Police? The Economics of Disappearance and Political Enfranchisement The above narratives, while supporting the family’s ‘right to know’, do not clearly set out why the state and the police as its proxy should support families in their quest for knowledge. Why not leave the search solely to private actors or NGOs? The answer lies, I argue, in the imagining of the state as the supporter of its citizens and the perception that the families of the missing (as much as the missing themselves) are political subjects with a right to be granted support from the state (cf. Edkins 2011). It became clear that even if the police dismissed a disappearance, the family would still search for the missing person. They would turn to the voluntary sector and to for-­profit search agents including clairvoyants, fortune-­tellers and private detectives if they could afford it. And while the services of the voluntary sector are deemed fairly non-­controversial (even though their legal capacities are limited), more problematic are those services provided by for-­profit actors. The problem with such services, as

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many of my interlocutors working pro bono pointed out, is not only that they are very expensive (with bills amounting to thousands of euros) but also that their costly work often brings no tangible results. Thus, they directly benefit from the information void left by the police. Again, Iwona’s case threw the combined facts of economics and politics into relief. As mentioned in the previous section, having no response from the police, Iwona’s family hired a private detective who soon became a celebrity in his own right. Nowadays, many experts see him as the emblem of overblown and overpriced detective services. The problem was explicated by a Polish member of parliament who made an interpellation to the Minister of Internal Affairs in response to Iwona Wieczorek’s disappearance.8 The interpellation mentioned that the ‘desperate parents [of Iwona Wieczorek]9 called on the help of a private detective, Krzysztof Rutkowski, who immediately started to work and who accused the police of professional incompetence’, and it concluded with several rhetorical questions: ‘Why don’t the police, after the registration of a disappearance, act immediately, instead of only performing the role of an institution that registers disappearances? Why can the families of missing persons not count on the fast reaction of the police, aimed at finding the missing, and instead have to hire private detectives, often paying a lot of money for their services, so that they start the actual search?’ These questions tacitly suggest that the families’ deprivation of state support is tantamount to their political disenfranchisement. The delegation of search efforts exclusively to non-­ state actors could suggest that citizens’ rights are not being upheld, that they are politically disenfranchised and that the state is not fulfilling its supportive and protective role. A similar sentiment, which additionally foregrounds the issue of economic inequalities, is expressed by Andrzej Minko, the producer of the aforementioned TV programme ‘Has Anybody Seen, Does Anybody Know’. In a 2010 newspaper interview (Halcewicz-­Pleskaczewski 2010) tellingly entitled ‘He Will Return When He Parties Out’ (‘Jak się wyhasa to do Pani wróci’ – a phrase families often heard from police officers), Minko said: The poorer the person and the more remote the place they come from, the more difficult it is for them to break through with their problems, pain and poverty. When one hits the wall, one needs institutional help. If somebody works and pays taxes, they have a right to count on state support. Most often people who are affected by disappearance do not have money for a lawyer who will write a letter to the prosecution and don’t have money for an ­attorney … M ­ any cannot afford to hire a private

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detective who anyhow, after two or three weeks, will often come and say that ‘no starting point for the search can be found’. (My translation)

These arguments bear traces of the socialist legacy of the relationship between people and the state, whereby the state was both distrusted and sought out as a source of protection and care (Frances Pine shows, however, that this expectation varied geographically; see Pine 2018). In the postsocialist period the state has withdrawn from many areas of life (Buchowski 2016), but this neoliberalization has not been as fully accepted as people might have initially thought. Parr et al. (2015), talking about the search that potentially limits the missing people’s right to be absent, associate urban surveillance, and its role in the search for the missing, with neoliberalism. But neoliberalism is a multifaceted term and in the context of Polish capitalist transformation and rising inequalities, it is the withdrawal of the state rather than its expansion that can be seen in neoliberal terms (Buchowski 2016). Thus, I read the 2018 decree on the search for the missing as representing friction in the neoliberalization of the state rather than as neoliberal expansion through expanded surveillance. In the context of Polish disappearance, neoliberalism means leaving people to their own ­devices – ­both the family members who search for their loved ones and the people who go missing and are ‘allowed’ to ‘disappear’, in the most extreme cases through anonymous death. Finally, there is the question of whether the rhetoric of a right to disappear (or a right to ‘remain unfound’; Apps 2017), which would preclude any sort of search, can be used to legitimize certain economically driven and neoliberal politics. Andrzej Minko, in calling for increased state support for families of the missing in the aforementioned interview, suggested that not to provide such support through ‘recourse to the law on personal data protection and people’s right to do whatever they want when they turn eighteen’ would be like ‘washing one’s hands of’ the matter (Halcewicz-­Pleskaczewski 2010). After all, the lack of state support for the search based on liberty rights in countries such as the UK and Germany does not mean that families are not allowed to search for the missing on their own. It means only that their desire to search is not recognized as meaningful by the state; it is their private affair, relegated to the charity sphere at best. This leads one to wonder whether the need to protect the missing person’s right to autonomy drives the regulations, or whether this serves to justify limited resources and ‘the economics’ of the search.

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Similarly, British researchers acknowledge the issue of budget concerns and understaffing in the policing of disappearance. For instance, Carol Hayden and Karen Shalev Greene (2018: 48–49) calculate that the cost of a medium-­risk case in the UK is between GBP 1,325 and GBP 2,415 and note that, considering the existing budget cuts, there is ‘pressure for a more efficient use of police time’. This question is also taken up by Craig Collie (2021: 2138–2141), who criticizes situations in which some missing are not missing ‘enough’ to be granted the attention of the British police and, in effect, the private sector takes over, with private entities ‘not act[ing] in the public interest but in the fiscal interest’. This perspective suggests that the refusal to search may in fact be a way to protect a state’s budgets from the encroachments of its citizens, using the notion of liberty rights as a legal and moral tool.

Termination of the Search and the Right to Disconnect The previous sections discussed cultural and political arguments that frame the extensive search. Nevertheless, the search for the missing in Poland is not without its moral challenges. Some people who go missing may not want to be searched for or may dislike the fact that their name is in the police database. Even though disappearance is not a crime (unless a person is trying to avoid prosecution), being searched for by the police may imply to some missing that they have broken the law. Still, Polish regulations give adult missing persons certain control over their missing status through the legal power to terminate the search and disconnect from kinship. According to Polish regulations, the search for the missing person (if the person is found alive) ends in one of two ways: either the family (as an ‘entitled’ party) cancels the search because they have re-­established contact with the missing person on their own, or the missing person ‘cancels’ their legal status as ‘missing’ by meeting with a police officer or a diplomatic officer face-­to-­face and stating that they are not missing. In the latter case they can also state, preferably in writing, that they do not wish to disclose their whereabouts to their family. The family will only be notified that the person has been found. Thus, unless the missing person decides otherwise, the prescribed result of the search is the resolution of the fundamental ontological question prompted by the family, and not a forced family reunification. Furthermore, somebody who has been reported missing and has subsequently declared that they do not want to see

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their family cannot be reported missing again. This is the realization of the family’s right to know in its most basic form, which gives the missing person a degree of agentic power over their disappearance, albeit only at the end. From the perspective of the protective policies of the state, this can be interpreted as a temporary ‘checking in’ on the person to see whether they indeed want to disappear. The fact that, in the face of all the regulatory changes, this aspect of the regulations in Poland has remained relatively stable throughout the years suggests that it is relatively non-­contentious. According to my observations and interviews too, it seems to be a largely acceptable way to resolve the tension between family expectations and individual desires, with the state as an intermediary. However, the fact that missing persons, if they do not want to contact their family, must face a state institution to cancel their ‘missing’ status may be seen as unwelcome interference in people’s liberty rights, that is the right to do what one wants (within legal limits) without the need to explain oneself to the state. The practical and moral problem with the above is exemplified in the following quotation. It is an excerpt from an interview I carried out with a Polish police officer who specializes in the search for the missing and it regards a young man whose family reported him missing in Poland and who was eventually located abroad: Recently, I investigated a case of a young man who dropped out of university and went abroad to one of the European Union countries. The local police officer [in Poland] told me that he had established where the man was residing. The man called the police unit and said that he was alive and that he would return when he had earned some money. But we cannot terminate the search based on a phone call. Throughout the next year I tried to contact him [so as to convince him] to either call his family or to go to the local police station [abroad] where a police officer could verify his identity and where the man could write a statement that he did not wish to maintain any family contact. Because we have strict regulations: either direct contact with the family who cancels the s­ earch … ­or direct contact [by the missing person] with a police officer. He can also go to a consulate who can officially identify him. But he didn’t want to do it. I managed to contact his employer and gave him my phone number. Eventually, the [missing] man called me but he didn’t have the courage to call his family. I gave up. I got an email from his employer that he had quit his job and I thought to myself, ‘Damn, now I will have to look for him all over Europe’. However, after two days I got a phone call from the policeman, who told me, ‘You are tenacious. He returned home.’

The above quotation shows the moral and practical ambiguity involved in the search and its termination from the perspectives of

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the missing person, the police and the family. On the one hand, the man clearly did not consider himself missing, but to change his status he had to go to the police, which gave him the power of autonomous self-­constitution and simultaneously took it away from him (because the family had decided, and the police confirmed, that he had gone ‘missing’). At this moment he could only react to what his family had initiated. On the other hand, the knowledge that he was being searched for might have given him a sign that people cared about him, and hence the option to return. My interviews with Polish social workers helping homeless Polish migrants in Belgium and the Netherlands tell similar stories. Social workers are often asked about a particular missing person by the Polish police and Polish organizations. If they happen to know the whereabouts of a given missing person, they never convey such information to the family without the missing person’s consent. Instead, they tell the homeless missing person that their family is looking for them and that, if they want to, they can contact them. Social workers generally treat such family interest as a positive sign. It is a signal to the homeless person that there is somebody waiting for them and that their return, to Poland and their home, is possible. Furthermore, families are not a monolith. People may have problems returning to certain family members but not to others, and, knowing that they are being searched for, they also have a choice regarding with whom and how to communicate. This also shows that non-­governmental groups have the difficult role of being an additional intermediary between the state, the family and the found missing person, whereby the latter’s ‘interest’ often becomes crucial. Volunteers recognize that the families have a right to worry and thus a right to search, but they also recognize that the missing have a right to remain disappeared. Still, because they often have contact with the families, they cannot afford to see the missing person merely as an abstracted individual, and thus their role is practical, affective and fraught with difficulties. Finally, even when families are notified that their missing kin is alive, this gained knowledge can be considered ephemeral and highly unsatisfactory. It conveys information about the person being alive at one point in time. But what about later? It could be considered that regulations obliging the police to search for everybody excessively cater to the family’s desire to know at the expense of the missing’s desire to disconnect, but this is often just the bare ­minimum – ­or the b ­ eginning – ­of what the family wants, which is a desire for more permanent and less ephemeral knowledge about the person’s aliveness, so to speak. Although people are found,

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their reappearance is transient and incomplete. It is a glimpse of the missing person. Families often want more, but as the search terminates, regulations cease to cater to their desires. On another occasion, I was involved in the search for a young man who went missing in the Netherlands after he had left his workplace and never returned. He was seen in different places and the family claimed he had mental health problems. His status as alive or dead was unknown. I went to a town in Germany (on the border with the Netherlands) where somebody claimed to have seen him. Several days later this proved to be untrue, as the Dutch police asserted that they had identified him and that he was not ‘missing’ any more. He did not contact his family. When a woman from a search organization told me about this, thanking me for my efforts (which I thought had been futile), I asked her, ‘Will they continue to search for him?’ She concluded with chagrin, ‘Unfortunately, no. The case is closed.’ Unfortunately, though, it was not ‘closed’ for the family, who wanted to have direct contact with their kin, not merely by proxy through the police who had located him. For the same reason, families are not always fully convinced that somebody who has been seen by the police is really the missing person in question. This is partially why the police officer I interviewed wanted the missing man to go to the p ­ olice – t­o close down the investigations but also as proof for the family that their missing person wanted to disappear and had a right to do so. But all my interlocutors who are involved in the search for the missing say that explaining this to the families is very difficult. Families want to know that the person is alive but, ideally, they also want the ‘full’ person back (even a virtual co-­presence would do). The state-­supported search, even if it is effective in finding the person, cannot guarantee that.

Conclusion Regulatory politics provide an important insight into how the state constructs what it means to be missing in relation to, but also in opposition to, the everyday realities of disappearance as experienced by the families and the missing themselves. In liberal democracies, many people go missing because they want to leave their families and communities, at least for a while. They are not always victims in the way that the forcibly disappeared unequivocally are. Nevertheless,

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families want to search for their loved ones even if there is a possibility that they left voluntarily, and they often insist upon the police as a proxy of the state in providing support. Should the state help in the search and to what degree? What about its commitment to the liberty rights of an individual who has the right to do what they want without state interference? Fox (1993) argues that the modern state ‘abhors’ kinship. The state does not have a problem with individual nuclear families, but it detests relationships as a source and basis of law. Similarly, it takes issue with the notion of a relational person as the basis for legislation (Strathern 2005). When people go missing and have their families speak for them and about them, these ideas are put to the test. Individual–state relations are no longer at the centre of the politics of the reaction to disappearance; they have been replaced by the triad of individual–state–kinship. In this chapter I examined the Polish politics of the search for the missing. I showed that these Polish politics, after a series of hits and misses and the concomitant public outcry, evolved to become relatively embracive of the relational constitution of the missing person and the kinship claims upon their missing, even though in the end kinship ties are constructed as a choice and not a coercive obligation, and state regulations also ensure that people can disappear, if they want to. The state plays the role here of a wedge intermediary, navigating between the wishes of the family and the (purported or confirmed) wishes of their missing kin, between the right to know and the right to disappear. The search leading to the reappearance of the missing person, either dead or alive, is a process. I started my account with the reporting of disappearance, the stage at which the voice of the family is the most salient. When missing persons are found alive, they regain explicit agency, a legal power to make choices. But it is still a somewhat constrained agency, not fully free from state interference. Nevertheless, after an adult person makes an official statement that they are not missing, they can no longer be considered missing in a legal sense. This suggests that kinship is important in Poland but not important enough to be allowed to determine people’s individual choices, including the choice to disappear. The state commits to the idea of the relational individual as composed of their relationship to others, but only takes it so far. Consequently, even if people are found alive, anxious uncertainty regarding their disappearance can persist among family members left behind.

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Acknowledgements This research was conducted within the framework of the ‘Governance and Grieving: Disappearing Migrants and Emergent Politics’ project (grants 315979 and 326570), funded by the Academy of Finland. Anna Matyska is a visiting researcher in anthropology at KU Leuven, Belgium, and was affiliated as a doctoral and postdoctoral researcher with Tampere University, Finland, for over a decade. She has researched and published on Polish transnational families and labour mobilities.

Notes 1. However, the acceptable level of liberal state interference in people’s autonomous lives is a matter of heated philosophical and legal dispute (see Feinberg 1986; Fallon 1994; Möller 2009; Scoccia 2013). 2. Decree 48/2018, Zarządzenie 48 Komendanta Głównego Policji z dnia 28 czerwca 2018 w sprawie prowadzenia przez Policję poszukiwania osoby zaginionej oraz postę powania w przypadku ujawnienia osoby o nieustalonej tożsamości lub znalezienia nieznanych zwłok oraz szczątków ludzkich. 3. Family as a choice is an important leitmotif of new anthropology of kinship (Weston 1991; Carsten 2004; Strathern 2005). 4. At the same time as Gruza’s monograph was published, legal scholar Patrycja Mencel was defending her dissertation on a similar topic. 5. Because minors often disappear multiple times, the actual number of missing is smaller than the number of registered incidents. 6. Decree 352/2003, Zarządzenie 352 Komendanta Głównego Policji z dnia 16 lipca 2003 w sprawie prowadzenia przez Policję  poszukiwania osób ­zaginionych oraz postę powania w przypadku ujawnienia osoby o nieustalonej tożsamości lub znalezienia nieznanych zwłok. 7. Decree 124/2012, Zarządzenie 124 Komendanta Głównego Policji z dnia 4 czerwca 2012 w sprawie prowadzenia przez Policję  poszukiwania osoby zaginionej oraz postę powania w przypadku ujawnienia osoby o nieustalonej tożsamości lub znalezienia nieznanych zwłok oraz szczątków ludzkich. 8. Interpellation number 7721: Zapytanie w sprawie działań policji dotyczących osób zaginionych i ich rodzin w Polsce na przykładzie zaginięcia 19-letniej kobiety w Sopocie. 9. Initially, Iwona’s stepfather was engaged in the search, but after he divorced Iwona’s mother his role became less salient.

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References Altheide, David L. 1987. ‘Ethnographic Content Analysis’, Qualitative Sociology 10(1): 65–77. Apps, Joe. 2017. ‘Missing Abroad’, in Karen Shalev Greene and Llian Alys (eds), Missing Persons: Handbook of Research. New York: Routledge, pp. 181–87. Biehal, Nina, Fiona Mitchell and Jim Wade. 2003. Lost from View: Missing Persons in the UK. Bristol: Policy Press. Buchowski, Michał. 2016. Czyściec: Antropologia Neoliberalnego Postsocjalizmu. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM. Carsten, Janet. 2004. After Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collie, Craig. 2021. ‘Exploring the Boundaries of Missing Persons: Hidden Interplay between Policing and Private Entities in Relation to Cases on the Periphery’, Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice 15(4): 2133–47. De León, Jason. 2015. The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dziuban, Zuzanna. 2020. ‘Disappearance as a Traveling Concept: The Politics and Aesthetics of a Transregional Exchange’, in Estela Schindel and Gabriel Gatti (eds), Social Disappearance: Explorations between Latin America and Eastern Europe. Berlin: Forum Transregionale Studien, pp. 63–78. Edkins, Jenny. 2011. Missing: Persons and Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Fallon, Richard H. 1994. ‘Two Senses of Autonomy’, Stanford Law Review 46(4): 875–905. Feinberg, Joel. 1986. Harm to Self: The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law. New York: Oxford University Press. Fox, Robin. 1993. Reproduction and Succession: Studies in Anthropology, Law and Society. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Fyfe, Nicholas, et al. 2015. ‘“To the End of the World”: Space, Place, and Missing Persons Investigations’, Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice 9(3): 275–83. Gatti, Gabriel. 2014. Surviving Forced Disappearance in Argentina and Uruguay. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Geertz, Clifford. 1983. Local Knowledge. London: Fontana Press. Goodale, Mark. 2017. Anthropology and Law: A Critical Introduction. New York: NYU Press. Gruza, Ewa. 2020. ‘Zaginieni czy ­Zagubieni – ­Kilka Uwag o Prawnych Aspektach Poszukiwań Osób Zaginionych w Polsce’, Nowa kodyfikacja prawa karnego: Tom LVI: 73–88. Gruza, Ewa, and Ireneusz Sołtyszewski (eds). 2021. Poszukiwania Osób Zaginionych. Warsaw: Wolters Kluwer. Halcewicz-­Pleskaczewski, Jakub. 2010. ‘Jak sie wyhasa, to do Pani wróci. Rozmowa z Andrzejem Minko’, Gazeta Wyborcza, 22 March. Retrieved

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29 February 2020 from https://wyborcza.pl/7,75968,7685156,jak-­sie-­wy​ hasa-­to-­do-­pani-­wroci.html?disableRedirects=true. Hayden, Carol, and Karen Shalev Greene. 2018. ‘The Blue Light Social Services? Responding to Repeat Reports to the Police of People Missing from Institutional Locations’, Policing and Society 28(1): 45–61. Holmes, Lucy. 2017. ‘Resolution of Missing Incidents’, in Karen Shalev Greene and Llian Alys (eds), Missing Persons: Handbook of Research. New York: Routledge, pp. 105–26. Melz, Joanna. 2021. ‘System Poszukiwań Osób Zaginionych w Niemczech’, Konferencja Współczesne Metody Identyfikacji Osób Zaginionych, 15–16 September. Warsaw. Möller, Kai. 2009. ‘Two Conceptions of Positive Liberty: Towards an Autonomy-­Based Theory of Constitutional Rights’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 29(4): 757–86. Nowak, Stefan. [1979] 2011. ‘System wartości społeczeństwa polskiego’, Studia Socjologiczne 1(200): 261–78. Nugent, David. 2007. ‘Governing States’, in David Nugent and Joan Vincent (eds), A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics. Malden, MA: Wiley-­Blackwell, pp. 198–215. Parr, Hester, and Nicholas Fyfe. 2012. ‘Missing Geographies’, Progress in Human Geography 37(5): 615–38. Parr, Hester, et al. 2015. ‘Living Absence: The Strange Geographies of Missing People’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33: 191–208. Pine, Frances. 2018. ‘Inside and Outside the Language of Kinship: Public and Private Conceptions of Sociality’, in Tatjana Thelen and Erdmute Alber (eds), Reconnecting State and Kinship: Temporalities, Scales, Classifications. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 87–107. Pirie, Fernanda. 2013. The Anthropology of Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rivera Hernández, Raúl Diego. 2017. ‘Making Absence Visible: The Caravan of Central American Mothers in the Search of Disappeared Migrants’, Latin American Perspectives 44(5): 108–26. Scoccia, Danny. 2013. ‘The Right to Autonomy and the Justification of Hard Paternalism’, in Christian Coons and Michael Weber (eds), Paternalism: Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 74–92. Shalev Greene, Karen, and Llian Alys (eds). 2017. Missing Persons: A Handbook of Research. New York: Routledge. Slakoff, Danielle C., and Henry F. Fradella. 2019. ‘Media Message Surrounding Missing Woman and Girls: The “Missing White Woman Syndrome” and Other Factors That Influence Worthiness’, Criminology, Criminal Justice, Law & Society 20(3): 80–102. Stojer-­Polańska, Joanna (ed.). 2016. Przypadki Kryminalne: Rola

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Współpracy w Badaniu Ciemnej Liczby Przestępstw. Poznań: Silva Rerum. —-—-—. (ed.). 2018. Przypadki Kryminalne: Poszukiwania Zaginionych jako Problem Interdyscyplinarny. Poznań: Silva Rerum. Strathern, Marilyn. 2005. Kinship, Law and the Unexpected. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Supreme Audit Office. 2015. Informacja o Wynikach Kontroli: Poszukiwanie Osób Zaginionych. Warsaw: NIK. Szostak, Janusz. 2018. Co się Stało z Iwoną Wieczorek. Warsaw: Harde. Weston, Kath. 1991. Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press.

Part II Politics of Disappearances (State) Violence and Its Aftermath

5 Disappearance via Adoption On Missing Children in Spain (1936–96) Diana Marre and Jessaca Leinaweaver

Introduction In 1958 a seven-­month-­old child, born in Madrid, was ‘kidnapped by the Spanish state’ and was adopted the following year in Chile, where he became the son of one of Pinochet’s colonels and his wife (Esteso Poves 2011). In 1962, a baby boy was born in Madrid to a woman who already had a 4-­year-­old. The infant was adopted by an American couple and now lives in Oklahoma; his remaining biological relatives are now trying to determine if he was placed voluntarily for adoption, or was stolen (EFE 2018). In 1968, Diana Ortiz was born in Madrid, and with the help of the Catholic church, a wealthy Mexican couple visiting Madrid adopted her; ‘her Mexican papers indicate she was never Spanish at all’ (Ferri 2017). In 1977, a young woman of Roma ethnicity, whose family had just moved from the La Mancha region to Catalonia, gave birth to a baby boy, who through religious, private networks was placed with a couple, just returned from exile in France, who were unable to have children (Ventura Busquets 2020). These four stories, taken from the last decade of news coverage in Spain, hint at the secrecy and spotty paper trails that obscure an accurate retelling of the child thefts and irregular adoptions that took place during the second half of the twentieth century in Spain. The historical trauma of Spain’s Civil War (1936–39) and Franco’s dictatorship (1939–75), in many ways, are still dealt with following principles of ‘forgetfulness, amnesia and forgiveness’ as the only path to reconciliation (UNHRC 2014b: 3). These principles took

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legal form in amnesty laws passed shortly after Franco’s death, also called the ‘laws of oblivion’, which have been described as ‘a grand forgive-­and-­forget …, a total amnesty as a means of reconciliation’ (Juliá 2010). These actions, or inactions, are part of a broader ‘pact of silence’, ‘a deliberate, but largely tacit, agreement to “forget” the past’ (Davis 2005: 863–64; see also Ferrándiz 2013; Leinaweaver 2017). This ‘pact’ is not just at the policy level but also the everyday one. Some years ago, a colleague of Marre’s in her fifties told Marre, with tears in her eyes, that she could not get her ­mother – ­a noted ­scientist – ­to talk to her about her life during the civil war and the post-­war period. ‘What for?’ asked her mother. ‘It’s better to ­forget … ­it’s better not to know, it’s better for you not to know.’ Through everyday silences that extend across a range of social spheres (Frekko et al. 2015), people in Spain worked to achieve the aim of ‘remembering to forget’ (Mookherjee 2006). In Connerton’s (1989: 12) terms, laws like this are a key that ‘legitimate a present social order’ (see also Taussig 1999; Emerick 2019), in this case, the acceptance of the displacement and theft of children. In February 2020, the first vice president of Spain’s new left coalition government announced ­that – ­after seven years of conservative government during which historical memory policies were set aside – ‘Spain and Spanish democracy cannot have disappeared persons. So we must keep opening the graves of our compatriots’ (EFE 2020). She referred to the fact that the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), post-­ war period and dictatorship (1939–75) produced at least 114,226 unidentified bodies in more than 2,591 mass graves (Ferrándiz 2013; Sánchez 2015; Ceasar 2016; Fernández 2021). Reports by UN staff and victims’ associations consider the disappearances of this period to include not only those in mass graves still awaiting exhumation, but also the children and babies who were adopted, or what we frame as disappeared via adoption. The Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances of the United Nations General Assembly conducted missions to Spain in 2013 and 2014, finding both that state authorities had been complicit in the initial abductions of children (UNHRC 2014a) and that the state persistently declined to investigate (UNHRC 2014a: 1–2).1 In September 2017, their follow-­up report to the United Nations Human Rights Council lamented the fact that ‘the majority of the fundamental ­recommendations … h ­ ave not been fully implemented, ­and … t­ he families [of the disappeared] have been left to their own ­devices … ­contrary to the principles stemming from Spain’s international obligations’ (UNHRC 2017: 1; UNHRC 2014a, 2014b).2

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Children disappeared during this time period through a variety of avenues. To begin with, there are already the simple and brutal effects of war: ‘War’s consequences on a country’s geography are not reflected solely in violent d ­ eaths … H ­ unger, lack of health care, illness, are plagues that affect children disproportionately’ (Alted Vigil 1996: 211). Those are the children missing because of poor treatment; Alted Vigil notes the Francoist demographer R. Salas Larrazabal’s (contested) figures, suggesting that 138,030 more children were deemed to have died than in peacetime, and 557,185 fewer births took place (ibid.: 211). Then there are children taken from their parents whose whereabouts were unknown; these include over 30,000 children of killed or imprisoned Republican mothers (Vinyes, Armengou and Belis 2002: 259; Alted Vigil 2003: 52–53; Council of Europe 2005; Garzón 2008; Anderson 2022) and over 20,000 children who were sent away by their Republican families during the war, and upon ‘repatriation’ not returned to their families (Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS 1949; Vinyes, Armengou and Belis 2002: 259; Garzón 2008). Some 14,000 children were also ‘counted’ while in state care (Vinyes, Armengou and Belis 2002: 259; Cenarro 2009). In addition, this reshuffling or recirculation of c­hildren – ­while not easily visible in ­statistics – ­also had an impact on children’s youths during and after the war. Post-­war, recent estimates suggest we are also missing between 200,000 and 300,000 ‘stolen babies’: the children of single, poor or illiterate women who were declared to be stillborn or to have died immediately after birth, but who were actually placed in adoption (Adler 2011; Fopiani 2011; Ventura Busquets 2020). The difficult histories and enforced secrecies of child transfer within Spain continue to shape present-­day adoption, which, during the first decade of the twenty-­first century, was a familiar practice in Spain. In 2004, Spain was second only to Norway in international adoption, proportionate to population size and births (Selman 2009: 35–36).3 Decades earlier, Spain had been a ‘child exporter’ in a far less regulated form of international adoption (see Junquera and Duva 2011), as the stories in our opening paragraph also illustrate. Victims’ associations, families and journalists continue to push to uncover the extent of the child thefts during the twentieth century, but the challenge is immense, as neither wartime nor post-­war child displacements were recorded. Jordi Perales, the son born in 1977 to a Roma woman mentioned above, discovered only as an adult that he was adopted; he shared a figure that Catalan government officials repeat often: ‘there are 300,000 people in the Spanish state who

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are in a similar situation to mine, and the worst thing is that “90% of them don’t know”’ (Ventura Busquets 2020). In this chapter we explore the processes through which those children were displaced and disappeared, and how, more recently, they are coming to light and exposing the gaps in our knowledge and data on adoptions. In offering this anthropologically informed history, we make a broader argument about adoptive disappearance, which sheds light on the dynamics of both disappearance and adoption. The history of stolen children in Spain, and its intersection with adoption, provides an important case study of disappearance. The native term is ‘bebés robados’ or stolen b ­ abies – t­ he well-­known term ‘desaparecidos’ is rarely used. This linguistic work puts a more accusatory spin on the disappearance of the children, arguing that there is an author of the theft, that the disappearance was produced by one or more agents. These claims resonate with Allen Feldman’s (2019: 183) concept, borrowing from Derrida, of ‘accidentalized disappearances’, highlighting the violence of their theft and the complicity of the state and Church. By contrast, the term ‘adoption’ is only rarely aligned with disappearance. Many of the stolen babies were ­adopted – ­in many cases, neither they nor their adoptive parents are aware of the presence of theft in their early biographies. We argue that adoptive disappearance productively characterizes the absence of these children in their birth families’ lives, for they were taken in order to be adopted. These children too are missing, disappeared, but they are not gone. What is also missing is the knowledge about ­them – ­that they did not die, that they live elsewhere. Feldman (2019: 186) points out that historically, public operations of genocide are often supported by propaganda and sheer scale, while disappearance is subject to a double silencing: both the disappeared and the act of disappearing them are ‘placed under erasure’. The phenomenon of stolen babies in Spain suggests that infants are typically more ‘disappearable’ than other age ­groups – f­or in many cases only the mother, or some other kin, can testify to their absence. The span of their life prior to their disappearance may be so brief that they may have left no documentary trace, and few strands of social connections, unlike the older disappeared that haunt so many conflicts. And yet they left some echo, however faint, whence comes their powerful significance: ‘to be missing means that something or someone was once visible and is now lost … “missing” is a kind of ­invisibility … ­characterized by a high degree of emotion’ (Casper and Moore 2009: 3, see also Gordon 1997, Huttunen 2016). The

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missingness of these infants, now adults, heightens the significance of their absence. They are not just gone, but unaccounted for. Our analysis shows how disappearance is integral to adoption’s functioning. Adoption has been a collateral result of war, political oppression and dictatorship in Spain, with echoes in today’s policies around child welfare and ongoing social stigmas. Disappearance via adoption was for decades used in Spain as a paramilitary strategy to extract children from leftist parents; as a eugenic practice of ‘child laundering’ (Smolin 2006) through removing children from poor or politically unsavoury parents; and as a business tactic, stealing children for profitable placement through private networks (Roig 2018). In the next two sections, we divide sixty years of adoptive disappearance into two general periods, each characterized by the primary ideological and instrumental motivations used to justify the disappearances: from punitive, tactical and eugenic in the earlier period to moral, reproductive and commercial in the latter. Our critical analysis draws on historical laws, regulations and lawsuits; United Nations reports; demographic data; and media ­reports – ­all read with the ethnographic sensibilities that we have developed through many years of collecting ethnographic data on adoption in Spain through participant observation, interviews and textual analysis.

Tactical Disappearance: Punitive and Eugenic Times (1936–59) During the Civil War (1936–39), children were disappeared as part of a strategy relating to conflict, in which Republicans and prisoners were punished with the loss of their children, who in turn were ‘saved’ from their ‘red’ parents. The horrors of the war required new legal resources to determine the placement of a vast increase in children who were ‘orphaned’, ‘abandoned’, ‘repatriated’ and the responsibility of the state (Anderson 2022). Franco’s government first formalized private foster care (1937), then in 1941 issued a law facilitating adoption of children by ‘suitable people [who possessed] morality and honour’ (Law 26  October 1941: 8336).4 There are broader implications here regarding adoption’s relation to disappearance, for the children did not simply v­ anish – t­hey were relocated into new families. In 2008, Baltasar Garzón, at that time a judge of Spain’s National High Court, followed a recommendation by the Council of Europe (2005) that proposed an investigation into disappearances in Spain,

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writing that ‘it appears that a system of disappearing of underage children of Republican mothers (dead, prisoner, executed, exiled or simply disappeared) took place under cover of apparent legality between 1937 and 1950’ (Garzón 2008: 73). As Garzón observed, these disappearances were distinctive because of how they were formally authorized, a feature that made their ‘­effects … ­more long-­ lasting and harder to detect and stop’ (ibid.). It was, Garzón said, a ‘peculiar Spanish form of “legal” disappearance of people during the war and through the 1950s, through a pseudo-­juridical system that gave “legal” coverage to the systematic abduction of children’ (ibid.: 51). For example, ‘several thousand children of workers were sent to State institutions because the regime considered their Republican families “inadequate” for their ­upbringing … ­The Francoist regime invoked the “best interest of the child”, a protection that was simultaneously a punishment, where children had to pay for “their parents’ sins”, which they could never overcome’ (ibid.: 50–51; Council of Europe 2005, 2006). Garzón’s biblical allusion to generational sin (Exodus 20:5) aligned well with Spain’s politico-­religious orientation during the historical period he was analysing. In 1953, National Catholicism was reaffirmed as the official ideology of the Spanish state, an agreement previously made in 1851 (Juliá 1999). Moral behaviour would continue to be regulated through both legal norms and religious practices. The formalization of children’s adoptive disappearance through identity erasure and replacement is an example of how legal norms and religious practices operated together. Once children were interned, a key legal strategy for concretizing their disappearance was to transform their i­dentities – ­disappearing a former child and producing a new one. The 1941 law highlighted the shame of illegitimacy: if a child’s birth dates or surnames (or both) were unknown (including having been forgotten by the child), ‘common last names would be used and it would state that the filiation is unknown, without this implying a presumption of illegitimacy’ (Law 4 December 1941: 9820).5 Children’s identities were transformed using tools such as the Civil Register, baptism, and naming practices. Ferreira Iñarra (2017: 54–55) writes that ‘children were baptized in [women’s] prisons without their mothers’ consent, becoming the godchildren of prison officials or local ­authorities … ­in these baptisms it was common to change the child’s first and last names, giving them a new identity and erasing the traces of their past’ (see also Garzón 2008: 52–56). Cenarro (2009: 73) offers the example of Julia Antón, the daughter of a communist father who was detained just after the war, and of

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a mother imprisoned in the Las Ventas prison; Antón, like many others in the Auxilio Social centres, was baptized with a new name, ‘Carmen’, after her baptismal godmother, Franco’s wife, Carmen Polo. This name-­changing is an element of what Smolin (2006) calls ‘child laundering’. Once their identities had been changed in the Civil Register, the abducted children of detained ­Republicans – ­some 30,960 of ­them – ­were allegedly given in adoption to families who supported the Franco regime (UNHRC 2014a). Another route for disappearing children was to make permanent a separation that had been intended as temporary. Some leftist parents had their children evacuated, to destinations like France, Belgium and England, to ensure they were far from the violence of the conflict (Alted Vigil 2003: 57). The 1941 law’s text emphasized that violence, mentioning those ‘children whom the “Reds” forced to leave Spain and who have been or will be repatriated [and] those children whose parents and other relatives died or disappeared during the Glorious National Movement’ (Law 4  December 1941: 9819). But after the Franco government forcibly compelled these children’s repatriation, many were sent to Auxilio Social centres, and the state claimed parental rights, declining to notify the biological families of the child’s return. In some cases, the children were ­adopted – ­without the knowledge or consent of their biological families (Alted Vigil 2003: 57; see also Marre 2011: 896). These tactics resemble more recent actions that produce or penalize unaccompanied children, such as Operation Peter Pan following the Cuban revolution (Torres 2003), and the contemporary US policies that separate immigrant families (Briggs 2020).6 While the motivations of these families who accepted children require further study, we believe that families may have been able to conceptualize the ‘laundered’ children as malleable and adaptable, and themselves as doing good by removing the children from poverty, while also in at least some cases wanting to have larger families. Our analysis recognizes that eugenic theories in Europe and the Americas in the early and mid-­twentieth century were presented as strategies for improving public health, of children and of the public (Stepan 1991; Stern 2002; Porter 2018; Rosental 2019). As Nancy Leys Stepan (1991: 78) notes, ‘Children especially were thought of as biological-­ political resources of the nation, and the state was regarded as having an obligation to regulate their health’ through paediatrics, childcare and other measures. Spain was no exception to this general trend, following eugenic theories in the 1920s and 1930s (Cleminson 2017).7 Women supporters of Franco are on record in favour of the notion

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that ‘each child on being born has the same possibilities that other children have, without his birth having been privileged’, in the words of one female leader (Enders 1999: 383). Relocating children into new families would, it was felt, produce in those children a better ‘ideological preparation and affection for the regime’ (Garzón 2008: 21). The laundering of children through adoptive disappearance and a regime of silence reinscribes them as innocent of their parents’ sins: ‘innocent bodies may also be missing bodies, in part because the production of innocence requires silence’ (Casper and Moore 2009: 23).

Assisted Reproductive Disappearance: Moral and Commercial Means (1960–95) A significant legal transition point came in 1958, when an extensive modification of the Civil Code introduced, in its words, ‘some innovations with regard to adoption’ (Law 24  April 1958: 730). Birth parents’ roles were further diminished, on the assumption that their consideration ‘placed adopted children between two parental circles, without any clear ascription to either’. The revised Code introduced the novelty of plenary adoption (also known as full adoption, i.e. cutting off all legal ties to a birth family), which is described in the introduction to the Law as ‘a radical solution that was the only way to root out the fear of the natural family’s abusive interference within the circle of the adoptive family’.8 Plenary adoption was restricted to those children whose parentage was unknown and who had been abandoned for three years or longer. In contrast to nineteenth-­ century civil codes that emphasized issues of inheritance, these 1958 changes emphasizing personal aspects ‘fit with the post-­war ethos in terms of human rights and children’s rights agreements’, such as the 1946 founding of UNICEF and the 1959 Declaration of the Rights of the Child (Marre 2011: 904). From 1960 onwards is considered the beginning of the tourist boom in Spain and a return to better times, even as Franco’s rule continued; salaries increased, work hours diminished, international relations improved (Juliá et al. 2007) and the numbers of children born to unmarried women, or abandoned, fell. Overt conflict had ended, which let moralistic reasons for child transfer take precedence: a lack of health, ‘culture’ or economic standing was seen as a justification for abandonment in hospitals, and children born outside of marriage were marginalized. The UN working group found that hundreds of newborn infants were taken from hospitals, often involving the lie

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that the child had died, and illegally placed in adoption, with authorities aware of the practice but convinced that it was a kindness to the children and mothers of large families (UNHRC 2014a: 5). This practice ‘took advantage of established pathways for distributing the children of poor, uneducated families a­ nd … ­sometimes occurred in close alliance with members of the Catholic Church’ (Frekko et al. 2015: 706; see Villalta 2012 on a parallel experience in Argentina). The extent of (forced or structurally promoted) abandonments and abductions during this period is not yet known. Cultural values linked with Franco and the Catholic Church persisted, and child displacements in this period were related to Catholic m ­ orality – i­n the sense of accepting all the children God sent, within marriage. The ­thousands – p ­ erhaps hundreds of t­ housands – o ­ f missing children not yet enumerated include most notably the so-­called ‘stolen babies’ of Spain. Most of these children were born via ‘twilight birth’  – that is, ‘sedating the mother in the moment of delivery’ (Servini de Cubría 2014: 212) – in hospitals and clinics, as home births became less common beginning in the 1940s. Marre interviewed a person seeking their brother in 2012 who explained that the biological families of these children were ‘simple people, without resources or education. Because of that, until now they could be intimidated.’ Medical or religious personnel informed the parents that the infants had been stillborn or died shortly after birth, then arranged the child’s adoption. An example of a child displacement during this period that was framed as beneficial is that mentioned in the narrative of Jordi Peralta, the child of a Roma woman mentioned in the introduction. Born in 1977 and placed through religious networks with new parents, he, as an adult, saw his birth certificate for the first time and discovered that he was adopted. His adoptive parents explained his history, and he later learned that his birth mother would have preferred to give him to her own sister. But the religious organization that oversaw the transfer felt, he stated in a newspaper interview, that ‘it was all to my advantage if I got new parents: I wouldn’t grow up in a hovel, my mother and her relatives would be free of responsibility. But they didn’t think about how it was wrong’ (Ventura Busquets 2020). The late 1970s and early 1980s are characterized by observers of Spain as the ‘transition to democracy’. A number of relatively rapid political and demographic changes followed Franco’s death in 1975. Contraception (1978), divorce (1981), voluntary sterilization (1983), some forms of abortion (1985) and assisted reproduction (1988) were all legalized (see Marre 2011; Frekko et al. 2015; Marre et al. 2018).

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Discrimination against illegitimate children was outlawed (1981). In 1987, a revision of the Civil Code produced a new, ‘modern’ adoption law that explicitly criticized previous legislation for loopholes permitting ‘the odious practice of child trafficking’ and for at times insufficiently regulating the selection of adoptive parents (Law 21 1987: 34158; see also Marre 2011: 705). The law, however, maintained a moralistic concern about the tainted origins of adopted children, noting that public employees ‘are obliged to keep secret the ancestry of adopted children, avoiding especially any possibility that the family of origin could identify the adoptive family’ (see also Leinaweaver 2019).9 Indeed, it was not until 1999 that anonymous birth, which prevented children from learning their family background, was declared unconstitutional (Blanco-­ Morales Limones 2015). This 1987 Civil Code revision, then, retained the conditions of possibility for adoptive disappearance. More recent changes in adoption law and context can be considered in light of falling birth ­rates – ­from a crude birth rate of around 20 births per 1,000 population during the entire Franco period (Zarraga Sangroniz and Pareja Alonso 2014: 115) to 9 in 2018.10 Spanish people had begun to adopt internationally, likely in the early 1990s; statistics were not systematically collected prior to 1997, in another form of erasure or disappearance of children.11 Spain signed on to United Nations, Hague and European conventions that govern the transfers of children across borders.12 International adoption to Spain (and globally) peaked in 2004.13 Domestic adoption was relatively rare at this point in ­Spain – ­18 per cent of total adoptions were domestic in 2003, which would have included step-­parent and other kin adoptions, as compared to domestic adoptions comprising 85 per cent of adoptions in the US, 90 per cent in Mexico and 97 per cent in Brazil (United Nations 2009: 69). In 1996 a new child protection law framed adoption as a child protection measure, incorporating international adoption and private agencies explicitly into Spanish legislation (Law 1 1996).14 Adoption in Spain, as elsewhere, continues to include elements of the transfer of children to morally suitable ­parents – ­currently, adoption professionals must assess prospective adopters’ ‘personal, family, relational, and social situation, and their capacity to form stable, secure links, their educational ability and their aptitude to care for a minor’ (Article 176; see also Frekko et al. 2015; Leinaweaver et al. 2017; Marre and Leinaweaver 2022). Today’s adoptive disappearances are motivated by understandings of child welfare, making them appear ‘accidentalized’ rather than a more sinister alternative. But the echoes of a previous moral regime subtly

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persist; for example, international adoptees and ‘stolen babies’ alike often state that they are seeking siblings rather than parents, a leaning explicable not only through the passage of time meaning a parent may have passed away, but also through a moral lens in which doubts persist about stigmatized reasons that a child may have disappeared through adoption. Recent work by the UN and journalists illustrates that the thefts of infants occurred even until the 1990s (Roig 2018: 26), with the recent iterations motivated more by economics than a political or moral ethos (ibid.: 202). These disappearances, unlike their immediate Civil War-­era antecedents, have received substantial press coverage in recent years in Spain, aligning with the general prescription of amnesia about the Civil War itself.15 For example, in 2008, El País reported on birth mother searches made by women in their twenties and thirties who had been born at the San Ramón Clinic in Madrid (Duva 2008). The obstetrician Eduardo Vela and Sister María Gómez Valbuena were implicated in the irregular adoptions. Further, during the last decade, multiple legal complaints about stolen babies have been filed. The growing resistance to the silences and amnesties of the past fifteen years, accompanying a notable decrease in international adoptions, have together made the calling out of adoptive disappearance more possible.16 Yet justice is elusive, as many of the perpetrators have since died.17 Similar allegations had been made decades earlier, by journalists in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Gómez Mardones 1985) who had documented child thefts and sales around the country. For example, in 1977, about a year after Franco’s death, Interviú published a piece by a journalist named Miró and a photographer named Terrassa, ‘Baby Market in Mallorca’ (Adrover 2018). Five years later, Interviú again published three articles by the journalist Iglesias and the photojournalist Gallego (Iglesias 1982a, 1982b, 1982c). One included a dramatic, two-­page photograph of an infant’s corpse, which the journalists reported was shown to families who were told that their babies had been stillborn or had died shortly after birth. Searches for, and by, the adoptive disappeared are now gaining new visibility and strength (Marre and Clemente-­Martínez 2022), impelled by the conjunction of a global emphasis on a right to one’s cultural and community identity and a long-­deferred confrontation in Spain with the Franco period. The former is visible in searches for ancestry (see e.g. Lee 2013), as well as in adoption politics more widely, as in Mariner’s (2019: 59) observation that ‘the desire for adoption knowledge, a particular knowledge of a birth family, is

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reflected in the recent shift toward practices of open a­doption … ­knowledge is viewed as curative’ (see e.g. Yngvesson 2005). It is visible in Spain with the generation of international adoptees, many born at the turn of the twenty-­first century, who are now coming of age and demanding knowledge about their origins, a demand ratified by European policy around children’s rights. The latter is reflected in Garzón’s writings, discussed above, themselves inspired in part by a recent European statement about the ‘need for international condemnation of the Franco regime’ (Council of Europe 2005). We see it as well in the ongoing debates about and modifications to monuments of that period (Ferrándiz 2013). Both t­endencies – t­he drive for personal knowledge and the acknowledgement of a painful ­past – ­unite in the visible, vocal protests against the thefts of infants at the San Ramón Clinic that began in 2008 (Duva 2008; cf. Gandsman 2009).

Conclusions As we have argued elsewhere, when it emerged in the 1990s, ‘transnational adoption in Spain filled a slot formerly occupied by a form of child appropriation that was shrouded in silence’ (Frekko et al. 2015: 706, see also Marre 2014). International adoption in Spain followed some of the same pathways as these illicit a­ doptions – ­for example, using private and religious networks to circulate children and emphasizing the moral qualities of adopters, the poverty of families of origin and the sense of ‘rescue’ tying them together unequally (Marre and Gaggiotti 2021). Many of the professionals and organizations supporting modern transnational adoption were the same as those promoting domestic placements in the circumstances we have described. Our ongoing research into contemporary family formations and child removals has shaped and indeed demanded our anthropological engagement with the historical antecedents of today’s international adoption wait lists and birth parent searches. The silences we have identified have crucial implications for demographers working to document and analyse the dimensions of adoptions, which for so long have been under-­regulated and under-­recorded. Adoptive disappearance operates in multiple ways beyond this case study in Spain. Perhaps most compellingly, birth mothers have long been ‘disappeared’ for their adopted children who become aware of their adoption, and adoptees have been ‘disappeared’ for

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their birth mothers, over at least a hundred-­ year period during which closed adoptions and secrecy have been normalized throughout North America and Europe (Díez 2020; Rachidi 2021).18 While scholars tend to refer to these phenomena through ‘native terms’ like birth parent searches or ‘the girls who went away’ (Fessler 2006; Mandell 2007), our meditation on the intersections of disappearance with adoption suggest that a more powerful analytic may instead be ‘adoptive disappearance’: that the operations of adoption frequently, and historically, entail strategic disappearances of birth mother, ‘surrendered’ child and the social workers and brokers that facilitate the child transfer (Mariner 2019). Adoptive disappearance is generally experienced as a personal, family-­based grievance (but see Leinaweaver and Forrester 2022). This is part of what gives family-­ based protest its power, from the Madres of the Plaza de Mayo to their contemporary heirs in Argentina (Gandsman 2009), and including the Clínica San Ramón protests in Spain. Family members as political actors hold a particular kind of claim on a missing child, who may not even know that they are ‘missing’ for someone. Adoptive disappearance, then, uproots and breaks apart families. The other side of this coin is that the adoptions we have described ­here – ­illicit, irregular, unethical, ­violent – ­also formed families. As one advocacy group notes, ‘many families “benefiting from” the appropriations were also victims. Many thought they were legally adopting a child who had been voluntarily placed for adoption’ (Luque 2013). Jordi Perales, the son of the Roma woman mentioned above, adds that he does not blame his adoptive family: ‘They didn’t do anything illegal. Back then, that’s how things were. They just wanted to give someone a better life. They didn’t tell me because they were afraid of what might happen if they did.’ More work is needed to better understand the befores and afters of these adoptive disappearances: both the desires and beliefs that motivated the stealing of babies, and the experiences of those who, decades later, learned they had been stolen. A broader question that scholars of adoption can contribute to, then, is how to think and act on these ­findings – ­when an illegal adoption, motivated by notions of the ‘best interests of the child’ and of the birth mother that were wrong but often good-­hearted, brings together victims in a family formation that is not undoable. And it bears reflection that in Spain, the common r­ esponse – r­ ather than a formal apology, as was offered in 2015 to the Australian victims of forced adoptions by Prime Minister Julia Gillard (BBC 2013) – is to reiterate the line that ‘only through forgetfulness, amnesia and

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forgiveness [is] r­econciliation … p ­ ossible’ (Spanish ambassador to the UN Ana Menéndez, cited in UNHRC 2014c: 3). Diana Marre is Full Professor of Anthropology and Director of the AFIN Research Group and Outreach Centre at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She is the co-­ editor of International Adoption: Global Inequalities and the Circulation of Children (New York University Press, 2009), La adopción y el acogimiento: Presente y perspectives (Ediciones de la Universidad de Barcelona, 2004) and Maternidades, Procreación y Crianza en Transformación (Bellaterra, 2013) and co-­author of Infancia y Adopción: una perspectiva sociocultural (Síntesis, 2022). Jessaca Leinaweaver is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Brown University. She is the author of The Circulation of Children: Adoption, Kinship, and Morality in Andean Peru (Duke University Press, 2008), which won the Margaret Mead Award. Her most recent book is Adoptive Migration: Raising Latinos in Spain (Duke University Press, 2013).

Notes   1. Under the Socialist Party a Historical Memory Law was passed in 2007, but the right-­wing Popular Party proceeded after elections in 2011 to stymie research by not funding the implementation of that law, citing the 1976 Amnesty Law as justification for failing to investigate enforced disappearances (UNHRC 2014c), and declining to produce ‘official censuses of victims, or data or official estimates of the total number of victims of the Civil War and the dictatorship’ (UNHRC 2014b: 10–12). A new Historical Memory Law, Law 20/2022, was passed in October 2022, again under a government of a left-­wing political coalition led by the Socialist Party.   2. In summer 2020, the Spanish Parliament agreed to discuss a proposed ‘Law regarding stolen babies in the Spanish state,’ which would remedy a number of these lacunae by providing free DNA tests and exhumations, a national DNA bank, open archives, free legal and mental supports, and a special prosecutor. At the time of writing, however, the promised discussion has not yet happened.   3. For more on the history of transnational adoption in Spain, see Briggs and Marre (2009); Marre (2009, 2011); Leinaweaver (2011, 2013, 2015a, 2015b, 2019); Leinaweaver et al. (2017); Marre et al. (2018); Leinaweaver and Marre (2021); Marre and Leinaweaver (2022). ​  4. Foster care is described in Order 1 Abril (1937). Adoption is discussed

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in Law 26 October (1941); the law permits ‘natural parents’ to cancel the adoption.  5. Civil Registry law in Spain ‘has been evaluated as consistently more conservative than child protection legislation’ (Leinaweaver 2019: 9).   6. The ‘Peter Pan’ children were sent by their Cuban parents, who feared the CIA; they were not adoptable, but rather fostered in the US. Ultimately, many of them were joined by their parents, but ‘exactly how many reunions took ­place – ­or failed to take ­place – ­is unknown’ (Dubinsky 2010: 41). Meanwhile, US immigration policy appears to force at least some parents to relinquish their children, who may be adopted; see Associated Press (2018).   7. A key figure in eugenic thinking in Spain was Vallejo Nájera, a medical military psychiatrist, who after touring German asylums, hospitals and concentration camps published his principal work (1937; see Marre and Gaggiotti 2021).   8. This law retained menos plena or ‘less plenary’ adoption as well, later renamed simple adoption, which allowed birth parent involvement. Law 7 (1970) permitted a simple adoption to subsequently transition to a plenary adoption, for the purpose of ‘facilitating and strengthening the adoptive link’ (Marre 2011: 704). Simple adoption was eliminated by Law 21 (1987). Plenary adoption contains within it a risky centre: the idea that a remembering family member makes the cleanness of the adoption precarious.  9. The law used the term ‘natural’ (naturaleza) for biological parents and called adoptive parents ‘adoptants’. This law’s other revisions included eliminating simple adoption (see note above), replacing the word ‘abandonment’ with ‘lack of support’ (desamparo) and establishing foster care overseen by government as a new institution of child protection. 10. Like other dictatorships (see Kligman 1992: 405 for Romania and Pine 1997 for Germany), the pronatalist Franco government passed policies like financial support pegged to each child (Zarraga Sangroniz and Pareja Alonso 2014: 117). 11. See, for example, Boletín 18 (Observatorio de la Infancia 2017: 11), which indicates that statistics have been kept since approximately 1997. Other evidence can be found in a comparative demographic analysis of intercountry adoption by Saralee Kane (1993) that comprises the 1980s; Table 4 (ibid.: 331) shows that the figures she received from Spain only begin in 1988, and the evidence she presents in Table 1 (ibid.: 326) indicates that Spain’s figures seem to have been undercounted in this period. A United Nations report states that 61 per cent of Spain’s adoptions were domestic in 1990 (United Nations 2009: 73). 12. Spain signed and ratified the 1989 United Nations Convention on Children’s Rights in 1990; the European Parliament approved the European Letter of Children’s Rights in 1992; and, in 1995, Spain signed and ratified the 1993 Hague Convention.

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13. Following 2004, international adoption decreased ­worldwide – ­due to the fall in supply of, not demand for, children; see Mignot (2015: 3). 14. This child protection law would govern international adoption until 2007, when the ­phenomenon – ­already post-­boom – ­finally received its own specific legislation: Law 54 2007. 15. On 3 March 2014 Interviú published an issue on the subject, edited by Ana María Pascual. Pascual’s blog (n.d.) includes more information. 16. As Gatti (2020: 26) observes, until about a decade ago, the word ‘disappeared’ ‘was reserved for individuals who had been disappeared as part of a deliberate plan to wipe out political opponents’. 17. In 2012 Sister Gómez Valbuena was charged with the crime of illegal detention for the appropriation of three babies born in 1981 and 1982 in the Santa Cristina Clinic of Madrid. She refused to testify, although she denied all the allegations in an open letter. In January 2013 her congregation announced that she had died, ending the legal cases against her; irregularities in the documentation surrounding her death caused concern among victims (Balín 2015). In 2018, Vela, the head of the San Ramón clinic, was formally charged. He also vigorously claimed innocence, stating earlier that everything had been done ‘in accordance with the law, under the supervision of the Juvenile Court and the Provincial Board for Minors. It will be very difficult [to find any information because] all of the documentation was destroyed by order of the Juvenile Court’ (Duva 2008). The courts ultimately found that the statute of limitations had long expired, and the muddiness and complexity of the specific case being tried ultimately led to Vela’s absolution (El Independiente 2018). Vela died in 2019. 18. Adoptive disappearance also operates in cases where a planned adoption falls ­through – ­the birth mother is a ‘no-­show,’ such that ‘the child-­ to-­be [is] simply gone’, in a way sometimes compared to a miscarriage (Mariner 2019: 44).

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6 Enforced Disappearances, Colonial Legacies and Political Affect in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya Stefan Millar

On answering my phone, I heard Deng’s voice: ‘Look to your right.’ Standing and waving to me along the small, narrow passageway off one of Kakuma Refugee Camp’s many humanitarian roads was Deng. ‘Come here and meet me inside’, he instructed, before ending the call. I was meeting him for the second time, and I thought it odd to be invited to such a public place as a café. I had become accustomed to visiting informants in private localities where we could talk freely and without disturbance. I had met Deng before at a church committee meeting, which was held in someone’s home within a residential compound. Walking along the dusty, narrow path, I noticed a group of men by the entrance to the café with notably Nuer scarification, sitting drinking tea and coffee. Inside the café I found Deng sitting alone in a secluded room. He pulled up a plastic chair for me and encouraged me to sit. ‘You know, being here is not easy’, Deng explained as I sat down next to him. ‘If you make yourself a known person or a politician then it is very likely they will get you.’ Pausing, he offered me tea, which I politely drank despite the searing midday heat. ‘Myself’, he continued, ‘I walk together with my friends as they look like my protection.’ He indicated the men sitting out front. I asked whether he was continuing his political work in the camp, to which Deng replied, ‘It doesn’t continue because we are in Kenya, because the UNHCR [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] says it is not allowed in the camp, and if the Kenyan government knows

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then you might be in danger. Some of us were captured and returned back to the enemy.’ Deng was referring to the enforced disappearance of Marko Lokidor Lochapio, a prominent commander in the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-­ in-­ Opposition. Marko Lokidor was kidnapped in Kakuma Refugee Camp by Kenyan security personnel on 29 December 2017 before being handed over to the South Sudanese authorities. He would later be released on 25 October 2018 in accordance with the 2018 peace agreement. Kakuma Refugee Camp was formed in 1991 by the UNHCR, following the exodus of Sudanese refugees (Verdirame and Harrell-­ Bond 2005: 51). Since its foundation, Kakuma has served as a base of operation for members of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) (Jansen 2018). Article 3 of the African Union’s refugee convention prohibits refugees from participating in ‘home’ politics (OAU 1969); despite this, the camp is a key political site for SPLM actors in Kenya. In 2013, a civil war broke out in South Sudan, dividing the country primarily into two warring factions supporting either the current president Salva Kiir or the former vice president Riek Machar. Riek Machar would come to lead the breakaway Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-­in-­Opposition (SPLM-­IO), of which Marko and Deng were members. Enforced disappearances produce a powerful impact not only on individuals directly related to the disappeared, but also on the wider communities to which they belong. I build upon the concept of ‘extended disappearance’ (see Huttunen and Perl in this volume) to examine the affective discharge that enforced disappearances have on individual actors and their wider communities. By paying particular attention to how social life is reorganized by individuals and communities that are impacted, I demonstrate how these practices are shaped by imaginaries of and interactions with institutions associated with the disappearance. These actors mediate the threat of disappearance through adopting or utilizing spaces, practices and roles, which not only demonstrates the different survival mechanisms they employ, but also reflects the way that an enforced disappearance comes to govern whole communities. Enforced disappearances disrupt the intimacies of the lives not only of individuals but of those they socialize with. The extended disappearance here went beyond impacting those close to Marko, such as Deng, and in turn transformed the entire community. The immediate consequence of the disappearance was a reorganization of social life. Institutions, and their objects, actors and practices, can ‘discharge’ an affect (Navaro-­ Yashin 2012: 33). Uncertainty over the exact institution responsible

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for the disappearance can enable a whole array of different actors, organizations and states to become associated with the affect (Stoler 2004; Bozzini 2015; Laszczkowski and Reeves 2017). To mediate the affective discharge caused by enforced disappearances, actors can turn to formulating alternative political communities (Huttunen 2016) and altering piety practices (Mahmood 2011) and identities (Schlee 2004; Gatti 2014). To understand the prevalence of enforced disappearance, I initially turn to the colonial origin of the tactic and the institutions that facilitated its practice. Tracing and kidnapping political dissidents, and ultimately making them disappear, was one of the many tactics utilized by the British colony in Kenya to control strategic populations. Frank Kitson, a British military officer, came to prominence through his adoption of this tactic, which was facilitated and affectively amplified through the adoption of draconian policies and subsequent infrastructures, such as the extensive use of villagization. This is reflected in the current use of enforced disappearances in Kenya, which is facilitated by the contemporary application of refugee registration and encampment policies. Although the tactic of enforced disappearances has evolved over time with the multiplication of surveillance technologies and the changing of targets from colonial subjects to citizens and refugees, its potent affects are still used to control populations. The temporal dimension of extended disappearances demonstrates how the tactic of enforced disappearances extends over time and in different political regimes. Not only is it anchored in certain political contexts, but it repeatedly appears across time. Therefore, tracing the origin of the tactic and its transformations is necessary to understand how certain political contexts and social infrastructures might not only facilitate enforced disappearances in contemporary Kenya, but also amplify their affect on particular subjects. Using the concept of extended disappearance, I explore how the act of making people disappear not only disrupts the intimate lives of individuals left behind but also affects the social organization of entire communities and populations. Extended disappearance is most vivid in the changing practices and coping strategies of those affected by the enforced disappearance. Marko Lokidor’s disappearance created a powerful affect for members of the SPLM-­IO, shaping their means of conducting politics and daily practices. This disappearance was associated with the Kenyan Criminal Investigation Department (CID), an undercover police agency. The CID’s presence in Kakuma had a potent effect upon Deng and many other political actors,

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shaping their daily practices and governing how they engaged in political activities. To mediate the threat of disappearance encoded within the presence of CID agents, SPLM-­IO actors and sympathizers turned to operating within the relative safety of a church and its committee roles. In doing so, they disguised their activities as apolitical in the face of the refugee camp’s governing institutions. This use of certain civic roles and spaces, such as a church, demonstrated their capacity to circumvent the affect of the disappearance. However, despite their attempts to remain undetected, public displays or bouts of politicized violence often made South Sudanese political actors targets of Kenyan state controls and of the looming threat and fear of disappearance.

In the Footsteps of Kitson: The Colonial Legacy of Extended Disappearance The use of enforced disappearances in Kenya originated in the British colonial period (1920–63). The method used to make political dissidents disappear was one of many coercive tactics deployed by the colonial state. Containment, villagization, registration, collective punishment and enforced disappearances all featured within the colonial state’s arsenal of tactics with which to control strategic populations and political dissidents. Here I trace the use of enforced disappearances in combination with some of these tactics, exploring how they were originally devised to govern colonial subjects, evolved to be applied to dissident citizens and are now utilized on refugees. This illustrates the temporal dimension of extended disappearance, as the practice of enforced disappearance stretches over time and across different political regimes and subjects. Enforced disappearances within Kenya can be traced to the military theories developed by the British Army officer Frank Kitson. Kitson was given a district military intelligence posting in 1953 during the Mau Mau Uprising (1952–60). Within the Special Branch, a subsection of the CID, Kitson developed and practised various counter-­ insurgency tactics to quell political dissidents (Africa and Kwadjo 2009). He employed so-­called ‘counter-­gangs’ or ‘pseudo-­gangs’, units made up of army counter-­insurgents who were employed to create intensive intelligence networks among enemy combatants (Kitson 1960). The tactic was for these ‘counter-­ gangs’ to infiltrate guerrilla movements, gather information for military databases and then use that information to capture or kill

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enemy combatants or recruit them into the ‘counter-­gang’. In his influential book Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency, Peace-Keeping, Kitson describes how the state must ‘win hearts and minds’ of the population while utilizing ‘counter-­insurgent’ agents to infiltrate ‘subversive’ organizations (Kitson 1971: 102–29). Here the ‘counter-­insurgent’ is to extract a vast amount of information before ‘contact’, or an attack, is made (ibid.: 106–8). Kitson notes that for interrogation to be useful, a central computer or registry system with all the relevant information on the suspect is necessary (ibid.: 142). In practice, Kitson’s tactics were highly brutal. In Kenya, he allowed for the torture, execution and disappearance of approximately a thousand individuals for simply ‘consorting with terrorists’ or ‘illegal possession of firearms’ (Ramsey 2019). Despite these atrocities, Kitson is considered one of the foundational thinkers of counter-­ insurgency tactics in military studies (Kilcullen 2006; Strachan 2007; Bennett and Cormac 2013; Cline and Shemella 2015). He influenced and was actively involved in counter-­insurgency operations not only in Kenya but across the British Empire, from Malaya, Cyprus and Aden to the troubles in Northern Ireland (1968–98), and was most notably involved in the Ballymurphy Massacre (1971). During the Mau Mau Uprising, a conflict in the forested highlands of central Kenya, the colonial government utilized exceptional powers to forcefully place whole populations into government-­ approved villages or ‘gulags’ (Elkins 2005: 131). The conditions of the conflict became the testing grounds for Kitson’s approach, which utilized the contained and monitored populations. The extensive use of state-­sanctioned villages or camps allowed colonial officials to monitor native populations with the kipande system, a fingerprinted identity card that enabled the tracing of African labour across native reserves (M’Inoti 1997). Encampment and registration were the foundation for facilitating enforced disappearances. They granted Kitson the capacity to track and trace individuals directly through registers, finding out where they officially resided within the encamped villages. Shortly after Kenya gained independence in 1963, Kitson’s techniques continued during the so-­called Shifta War (1963–67). This secessionist conflict saw the Kenyan state utilize tactics that mimicked those of the British colony. From the onset of the conflict, the Kenyan government introduced a state of emergency followed by a policy of forced villagization in 1966 to win over ‘hearts and minds’ through so-­called ‘development’ (Whittaker 2014: 107). In addition, seconded British officers served as battalion, bridge, police

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and intelligence commanders (ibid.: 109–10), among them Derek Franklin, a former Special Branch officer under Frank Kitson. In Franklin’s memoirs of the conflict, he remarks on the use of ‘pseudo-­ gangs’ to infiltrate and gather information on the Northern Frontiers Districts Liberation Army (Franklin 1996). Under the dictatorship of President Moi (1978–2002), the oppression of political opposition intensified after the failed coup of 1982. Most notable of his legacy was Nyayo1 House, which Moi claimed was following in the footsteps of the country’s first president, Kenyatta (Widner 1993). Nyayo House was designed in consultation with the Special Branch and was utilized to make political opponents disappear. Some reforms would later be introduced in 1998, after the Al-­Qaeda attack on the US embassy, granting CID agents great power to arrest (Shaffer 2019). Since 2011, Al-­Shabaab has claimed responsibility for a series of attacks across Kenya (Anderson and McKnight 2015; Lind, Mutahi and Oosterom 2017; Onguny 2020).2 In response, Kenyan security initially assassinated religious leaders sympathetic to Al-­Shabaab, such as the Muslim cleric Aboud Rogo and Sheik Ibrahim Ismael. In 2014, the Kenyan government enacted Operation Usalama Watch,3 a mass round-­up in the predominately Somali district of Eastleigh. Over one thousand individuals, many of whom were refugees, were detained and held in overcrowded makeshift cells at a nearby football stadium, without food or sanitation. During the round-­up, excessive violence was used by security personnel (Balakian 2016; Wairuri 2020). In the aftermath of the operation, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights reported twenty-­five extrajudicial killings and eighty-­one enforced disappearances (KNCHR 2015). Since 2014, the enforced disappearance, at the behest of neighbouring states, of refugees, asylum seekers and non-­Kenyan nationals residing legally within Kenya has become an increasingly reported occurrence.4 In January 2017, Aggrey Ezbon Idri, an SPLM-­IO official, and Dong Samuel Luak, a human rights activist and registered refugee, were kidnapped in separate instances in Nairobi. Aggrey Ezbon Idri and Dong Samuel Luak were both considered missing until 2019 when, according to Human Rights Watch, sources revealed they had been executed in Juba on 30  January 2017. In December 2017, Marko Lokidor was kidnapped in Kakuma Refugee Camp (Human Rights Watch 2019). Both the Kenyan and South Sudanese authorities claim that they did not sanction these actions, while each placing responsibility on the other (ibid.). The UNHCR was asked to support human rights groups in pressuring the Kenyan and South

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Sudanese governments to release those who had been kidnapped, but allegedly it did not make any official request. Enforced disappearances within Kenya emerged out of colonial rule and its attempts to subvert political dissidents. The temporal dimension of extended disappearance spans across political landscapes and illustrates its effectiveness in maintaining coercive control of specific subjects. The transformative capacity of the tactic is demonstrated in the way it has moved on from its origins as a means to repress colonial subjects to now being used on citizens, refugees and exiled political dissidents at the behest of neighbouring states. However, certain settings appear to correlate with its use, namely encampment and registration. The use of camps and identity cards, be it forced villagization and the kipande system during the colonial period or the contemporary use of refugee camps and registration, illustrates how state actors’ ability to track and trace political dissidents can be facilitated. This was unintentionally explained to me by a Refugee Affairs Secretariat (RAS)5 agent at the Nairobi Field Office: We have high profile people who were fighting in [South] Sudan, we normally send their case and for them to be interviewed by CIDs [Criminal Investigation Department agents]. The high-­profile applicants, it is CID that decides if they should be registered as refugees, those working in government, or involved in the war. If they are accepted as refugees, they are registered.

Although it is common for states to use intelligence agencies to determine whether someone is eligible for refugee status, many refugees in Kakuma attributed the disappearance of political dissidents within the camp to the CID’s work within refugee registration. As John, a young South Sudanese national residing in Kakuma’s reception centre, explained: ‘When the Kenyans took over refugee ­registration … ­they know exactly the block they put you in. So, in the night they can just come and kidnap you without any warning.’ John was referring to former residents of the reception centre whom he knew personally and either were threatened with their lives or had gone missing after being located in a residential block within the camp. For John and others, registration and the camp residential grid resonated or discharged an affect that linked their infrastructure to the enforced disappearances. Containment and encampment did not cause enforced disappearances, nor are they necessary for them to happen, but they do have the capacity to facilitate a state agency’s ability to make political

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dissidents disappear by tracing their whereabouts. When discussing the influence of Frank Kitson, Sakai (2013: 36) argues: ‘Intelligence-­ gathering doesn’t quietly precede repression as its own stage of well-­behaved activity, rather it itself is the product of constant intervention and repression in peoples lives.’ Sakai argues that Kitson’s actual tactic during the colonial period was not a simple infiltration of certain movements, but a combination of this kind of pseudo-­gang and the mass incarceration of people in guarded settlements. The containment of people in vast encamped structures built the foundations for a better capacity to track and trace. The refugee camp, which Deng and other members and affiliates of the SPLM-­IO were in, mirrored or mimicked the institutions and infrastructures used during the colonial and early postcolonial period. As I demonstrate below, the presence of CID agents within the refugee camp helped amplify the affective impact of Marko’s disappearance, making the extended disappearance radiate through particular infrastructures.

Deng and the Disappearance In June 2018, talks between the South Sudanese government and the SPLA-­IO resulted in a ceasefire. By September 2018, Riek Machar and Salva Kiir had signed a peace agreement. On 31 October 2019, the agreement was ratified, but Riek Machar did not take up office until 22 February 2020 due to security concerns. It was within this political setting that I came to know Deng and other members of the SPLM-­IO in Kakuma, between May 2018 and August 2019. Deng is a member of the SPLM-­IO Kakuma branch, a representative of the Luk6 and a senior church committee member. Prior to living in the camp, he was a political advisor for the SPLM and managed a logistics company in South Sudan. He claimed that after South Sudan gained independence from Sudan in 2011 he was employed as an advisor for Riek Machar and other prominent South Sudanese political figures. When the civil war broke out in South Sudan, he fled to a UNMISS (United Nations Mission in South Sudan) camp before making his way to Kakuma, Kenya. In Kakuma, Deng claimed that he was nearly abducted alongside Marko Lokidor, and he considered the perpetrators to have been both Kenyan and South Sudanese state agents. This threat to his life shaped not only how Deng came to understand both states, but also his daily practices. Inside the secluded room mentioned in the opening vignette, separated from the rest of the café, Deng expanded upon how he

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was lucky not to have been at home at the time of Marko Lokidor’s abduction: So, they came first to my house, and fortunately I was lucky to not be ­home … T ­ hen they took Marko. That is the life we have here, if you are lucky it will stay as it is, if you are not one day you may be caught by the government agents. Sometimes I don’t show up in public places, very rarely I only come to this end of the camp to play chess with people I know, after that I go back to my house only for a few hours.

The impact of Marko Lokidor’s disappearance came to shape Deng’s life and social practices within the camp. Deng claimed that the men had come for him and his neighbour Marko Lokidor, but had found only Marko at their residential compound. Although he did not express fear openly, possibly due to his status, the impact of Marko’s disappearance notably altered his daily practices and movements within the camp. The reason I had met Deng in a marketplace café and not at his family’s home was, as he described it, for ‘protection’. Deng described how, due to the attempted enforced disappearance, his daily practices had changed and he now avoided public events and open public spaces such as marketplaces. While I was with him, he often referred to the way that he dressed modestly for a man of his apparent social status, noting, ‘I don’t make myself look expensive’. Unlike other public representatives such as religious or block leaders, he never wore anything remarkable, such as a fine shirt or jewellery. In the public spaces, such as small cafés, where we often met, Deng was remarkably cautious. In Kakuma cafés, I had become accustomed to South Sudanese men openly discussing ongoing events in their home country. Deng, in contrast, never spoke openly about politics. Despite his perceived status, he never engaged in any such activity, preferring to spend time with a select few, either playing chess or watching news broadcasts. When I met with Deng we were never alone, as he was always accompanied by someone. He also never answered his phone in public. However, he always opted to direct me to his location via phone call. Deng never invited me to move with him through the camp, as I could have drawn unwanted attention towards him. Instead, he remarked that he used the small alleyways for protection and never took any form of public transport. ‘When I walk’, he reflected, ‘it is with my friends, with ordinary people who are not politicians’. He often commented on how his friends looked like his ‘bodyguards’, a common reference among those South Sudanese

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who felt threatened or vulnerable in the camp due to their political ideals. Despite their appearance as his bodyguards, Deng expressed uncertainty over his friends’ capacity to keep him safe: If [assumed perpetrators] come during the daytime, [my bodyguards] will try to protect me, but we don’t know how good it will ­be … B ­ ecause one day they came with two motorbikes, so I left and went inside the ­community … ­I know them and they know me, so they were just trying to talk to me saying, please let me ask you a question. I would not listen to them and just went into the community, because they are afraid of going ­there … I­ t is difficult here. It is difficult for so many reasons, if you make yourself a known person it is very likely one day they will get you. You should make yourself as simple as you can.

Deng limited his movement and trusted only the inhabitants of his ‘community’. The community Deng was referring to was the Nuer, the ethnic group to which he belonged. Being within his community granted him a sense of immediate protection, witnesses who knew him and the threat of disappearance that he faced. Despite the security of being within his own community, he never felt truly safe. Deng never told me who the two individuals on motorbikes were, but his description of the interaction illustrated a constant sense of being watched and followed. He reacted to the interaction by immediately going into his ‘community’. The threat to Deng’s life also impacted the social life of his acting ‘bodyguards’ and his ‘community’. Marko’s disappearance disrupted the intimacies not only of Deng’s life but of the lives of those he socialized with. The seemingly all-­encompassing threat of disappearance caused Deng to adjust his movement, appearance and relations. The state organization from which Deng was under threat of disappearance was not specified, but it came to be represented by both the South Sudanese and Kenyan states. Deng noted that the two men who took Marko spoke with his children in Arabic,7 and their car apparently had a South Sudanese number plate. However, according to Deng, the driver ‘was Kenyan, maybe CID, but I don’t know’. With neither the Kenyan nor South Sudanese government claiming responsibility for the abduction and subsequent disappearance, there was a sense of uncertainty surrounding the perpetrator. Despite this, Deng was certain that Kenyan CID agents were partly involved in and responsible for Marko’s disappearance. When discussing with Deng the disappearance of Aggrey Ezbon Idri and Dong Samuel Luak in Nairobi, I asked if he believed the Kenyan state to be involved in their abduction too:

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You mean the Kenyans? Of course, if you are in a different country, you know the regulations, no one can come from outside as a foreign authority to take someone from your country without your c­ onsent … ­Dong Samuel was captured and our secretary for humanitarian affairs, Aggrey Idri, he was also c­ aptured … T ­ hese are big politicians, there is no way the foreign agents can take them without the government knowing. Meanwhile, life is not easy for politicians here, another MP [Member of Parliament], he is called [anonymized], he escaped from here and went to Uganda because of this threat we face here.

For Deng, none of this could have occurred without the Kenyan state’s knowledge. Despite the enforced disappearances being linked to the ongoing conflict in South Sudan, he considered the Kenyan state to be directly involved. The conflict moved beyond the borders of South Sudan and into Kenya. Even in sites such as Nairobi, the enforced disappearances of SPLM-­IO activists reinforced the universality of the threat of disappearances. The idea of an abduction occurring without Kenyan consent was impossible, and only reaffirmed Kenyan involvement. As in Deng’s description of the South Sudanese car being driven by a Kenyan CID agent, the two had become interconnected. All of this maintained the confusing conglomeration of Kenyan and South Sudanese state cooperation, which masked both states’ involvement. Deng’s consideration of why the Kenyan state was involved was financial, but the exact process of how they tracked, traced and ultimately kidnapped someone was convoluted for him. He commonly remarked on how difficult it was to identify a CID agent, as due to their civilian clothing they could be anyone. Deng even noted that if the CID wanted to make you disappear ‘they could arrest you with any small thing’. When reflecting on the current political situation in South Sudan, he expanded upon this: When the peace process starts, I don’t know if the Kenyan government will continue killing, but you know this is because people rely on money. Some were Kenyan, and some South Sudanese are doing this. I was very close to being captured with Marko. It was a narrow escape. They were wearing ordinary clothes, but they had their guns in their cars. These are CIDs, you cannot identify them.

The phantom-­like presence of Kenyan CID agents and South Sudanese agents discharged the threat of disappearance. The CID agents, through their disguises in civilian clothing, maintained an all-­encompassing presence. It was their possible involvement in the enforced disappearances in both Kakuma and Nairobi that helped

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constitute both the Kenyan and South Sudanese states simultaneously. I argue that this is in part a consequence of the contemporary adaptation of Kitson’s so-­called ‘counter-’ or ‘pseudo-­gangs’ (Kitson 1960); their tactic of secrecy through mimicking or copying the practices and appearances of those they targeted inhibited the possibility of deciphering to which state actors they belonged. The possible presence of CID agents, the enforced disappearance of Deng’s comrade and the constant threat to his own life illustrate the affective potency of such a transformative colonial tactic. By targeting displaced peoples, the tactic of enforced disappearances has blurred both the boundary between states and the responsibility for conducting the disappearance, making the potency of the disappearance more lethal, not just for individuals but for entire communities.

Mediating Disappearance The SPLM-­ IO organization in Kakuma was actively embedded within the church committee of which Deng was a member. Initially, I was ignorant of the church’s connection to the SPLM-­IO. Although Deng himself admitted his connection to the organization, the rest of the committee did not reveal their association at first. I had been introduced to the committee initially through Abraham, and I then met Mary, Mark, Mathew and finally Steven. Abraham was a pastor for the church and Mary was a member of the committee and also of the Luk. Mark was a block leader and Mathew a zonal community leader. Steven was later revealed to be a prominent member of the church committee because of his SPLM-­ IO membership. Their secrecy illustrated the extent to which Marko’s disappearance had come to govern their lives and their political organization. The extended disappearance went beyond those who knew Marko personally and came to impact the political organization of the SPLM-­ IO within the church committee. As a result, members mediated the affective impact of the threat of disappearance by disguising their political intent. When I first met the members of the committee, they were helping secure the land for the church. However, they lacked the funds for its construction, and when I visited for the first time only the walls were complete. Over several months, the roof frame was constructed with timber poles and was gradually filled with corrugated iron sheets. Mary explained that it was her responsibility to collect and keep safe the money for building the church, while Abraham kept a record of

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the donations. The labour and building materials were paid for with ‘a cup’ of food rations from each household belonging to the church. Obtaining the space for the church grounds required the assistance of Mark and Mathew. The process involved applying for land from RAS, followed by an assessment by the NCCK (National Council of Churches of Kenya) to approve the church, and lastly a site inspection by a UNHCR field monitor. Mark explained: ‘because of our vulnerability they accepted.’ He was referring to the distance people would have to walk to find a church of the same denomination, making them vulnerable to attack or robbery. Church committee members, including elders, religious actors and zonal and block leaders who negotiated with camp managerial bodies, carried out their work under the guise of being non-­political, or unaligned with the politics of their home countries, enabling them to mediate any risk of being associated with the SPLM-­IO and the disappearance of Marko. Therefore, by adopting an apolitical role they could circumvent the impact of the extended disappearance upon their daily lives. Over the months of getting to know the members of the church committee, I gradually became aware of their support for the SPLM-­ IO. On 25  December 2018, I agreed to attend the church’s first Christmas mass. I was informed by Abraham that the night-­time Christmas Eve mass had been cancelled for fear of violence, so an extended service was planned for the following morning. The next day we met near Abraham’s home just after sunrise and travelled together to the church. I was given a seat at the side with some high-­ ranking men, including Mark, Mathew, Steve and Deng, facing the left side of the altar. Opposite us on the far side sat the elder women including Mary, and in the middle behind the altar were esteemed members of the clergy, among them Abraham and the reverend. Between the songs, speeches were conducted over a megaphone. Each speech was read by a pastor, an elder or another high-­ranking man. The initial speeches by the various pastors were primarily concerned with readings from the New and Old Testaments, but later in the sermon political messages began to emerge, revealing the political function of the church. Initially, I was unaware of the political addresses taking place in the room, until Mark went to the altar and read from his phone the Christmas message of Riek Machar, leader of the SPLM-­IO. He initially read it aloud in English, as it was written, and then translated it into Nuer for the audience. Deng then took to the altar and spoke about the peace negotiations in South Sudan and the need for unity within the SPLM-­IO. Abraham then spoke and called for retaliation

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against those who committed atrocities upon Nuer living in Juba. Several others continued to mention the attacks against Nuer within South Sudan and the work of the SPLM-­IO in the ongoing attempted peace process. Although Deng and Abraham both spoke in Nuer, a language of which I have limited understanding, Steven was able to partly translate what was being said. Despite my inability to understand the entirety of the speeches, I did recognize their political tone. They revealed that this religious space served as a political vehicle for the SPLM-­IO in Kakuma, offering a sense of sanctuary. Within the church, political actors could advocate for the SPLM-­ IO without fear of retaliation. The church had required a combination of seemingly apolitical actors to organize its construction, so as to enable political actors to relay information. Zonal and block leaders were able to negotiate with camp managerial bodies using the linguistic codes of the managerial elites, pointing out their vulnerability and the need for access to such a space. The use of the religious space and piety practices, and the choice of language, granted SPLM-­ IO activists a space apparently void of surveillance in which to enact their political messages. The affect from the threat of enforced disappearance reorganized and altered the material organization of South Sudanese political actors, shaping the ways that politics was done and where. The extended disappearance shaped not only the practices of Deng, but those of the entire SPLM-­IO organization and its affiliated church committee.

Extended Disappearance and Governance Early in my fieldwork in Kakuma, I was informed by a Jesuit Refugee Service staff member that I should stay away from a particular part of the camp because of ongoing fighting within the ‘Nuer community’. According to various sources, the cause of the ongoing violence was a disagreement during a football match. The teams involved represented two different clans of the Nuer. One team was declared the winner by the referee, a member of a third Nuer clan, yet this was disputed. A small fight ensued but did not escalate. Later in the same week, the referee was attacked in the marketplace, apparently by members of the losing team. What arose was a series of escalating revenge attacks between members of the referee’s clan and the clan members of the losing team. The escalating violence quickly became essentialized with the ongoing political tensions within South Sudan.

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The Kenyan capacity to end the violence between the two clans relied on the cooperation of Nuer elites. Approximately two weeks after the first escalating revenge attack, the Camp Manager, a representative of the Kenyan state, ordered the rounding up of elders from the two conflicting clans. Mary, as a Luk member and an elder, was instructed to identify eligible clan elders to attend a reconciliation meeting. Elders from other Nuer clans in Kakuma (among them Deng and Mary) were also commanded to attend and act as arbitrators in the ongoing conflict. However, this initial attempt to end the conflict failed. As a result, all clan elders representing the conflicting groups were rounded up and arrested. Some claimed that they were targeted by the Kenyan security forces and falsely arrested because the forces had been bribed by the South Sudanese government, an accusation resembling those made by Deng against the South Sudanese government in relation to Marko’s disappearance. The second round of negotiations occurred several weeks later. Again, members from the two clans attended, accompanied by members of non-­conflicting clans. Those attendees with whom I spoke all noted that the Camp Manager had stated that the Kenyan president knew of the violence, and that the Camp Manager and the Kenyan president had been discussing the situation with the government in South Sudan. The Camp Manager had then threatened the clan elders with further imprisonment if the violence did not cease. One clan elder noted that they were all rounded up and brought to the office of the Deputy County Commissioner in a police convoy. ‘Maybe they expect us to fight again, but they can kill us’, he reflected. When I spoke with a Kenyan official about the incident, he explained things somewhat differently: Because you see now our role is to ensure the sub-­county is secure. Even when you are here as a foreigner, you feel free, you can move without any intimidation. That’s why now even when we are dealing with the refugees, we make sure that the refugees are ­safe … ­We have even our own people who do the groundwork there, to find and give intelligence and information. We have CID for this.

The means by which the conflict was resolved mimicked colonial tactics. The Kenyan government relied on the ‘groundwork’ of CID agents and Nuer elites such as Mary to identify particular clan elders. The selected elders were systematically rounded up and arrested when hostilities did not cease, which in turn affectively evoked the threat of forced disappearance. The use of Mary, and others, to identify those clan elders who could be held responsible illustrates a

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transformed continuity of Frank Kitson’s ‘pseudo-­gang’ tactic. Mary and other members of the Luk were conscripted by the state to identify those who could be made responsible for ending the conflict. The threat of d ­ isappearance – ­evoked through the presence of CID ­agents – ­and of imprisonment and round-­ups loomed over the participants at the meeting. This was alluded to by one elder I spoke with, who stated: ‘Money talks and money kills, that is a good example, I think. We don’t want to go deeply into that, you know what had happened. When you have a problem, but you have money, your problem will be solved easily.’ Again, there was a reference to Kenya conducting enforced disappearances for monetary gain. Despite there being no direct threat of kidnapping and disappearance, the round-­ups and convoys discharged an affect associated with the disappearances of other South Sudanese political actors. The extended disappearance associated with the enforced disappearance of Marko enabled the Kenyan ­state – ­intentionally or ­otherwise – ­to govern the Nuer elites. The enforced disappearances had an affective potency that enabled the Kenyan state to enact control and govern the camp.

Conclusion The enforced disappearance of Marko Lokidor in Kakuma Refugee Camp on 29  December 2017 has had a profound affect upon members and affiliates of the SPLM-­IO in Kakuma. The extended disappearance went beyond impacting those close to Marko, such as Deng, and in turn transformed the entire community. The immediate consequence of the disappearance was a reorganization of social life. For Deng, the threat of disappearance altered his social practices, movement, appearance and relations. The ­disappearance – ­to some ­extent – s­ ilenced him, forcing him to hide from public life and seek out protection. Within the wider SPLM-­IO, members took to using a church and its committee roles to safeguard the organization. The use of this religious space helped mediate the threat of disappearance, allowing SPLM-­IO members to continue their political practices. However, the political mobilization within such spaces could also provoke political acts beyond the secure confines of the church. The breakout of violence between the two clans brought the activities of Nuer elders to the attention of the Kenyan state. Their round-­up and imprisonment discharged an affect connecting to the disappearance, which contributed to the end of hostilities. The Kenyan state, its

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institutions such as the CID, its practices of registration and its infrastructure of containment became charged with the disappearance. The affective potency caused by the disappearance was a catalyst for organizational adaptation among SPLM-­IO members and also acted as a means of governing their political organization. The continued use of enforced disappearance and its affective potency, as I have argued, is indicative of Kenya’s colonial legacy within the British Empire. The capacity to track and trace political dissidents is facilitated by the registration and encampment of refugees. The lineage of Kenyan CID agents can be traced back to the colonial period, but they also show the remarkable adaptability of these tactics. Although their targets and techniques have changed, the affective consequence of enforced disappearances is still a powerful tool for control and governance. The institutionalizing of the tactics under Frank Kitson formed an important framework for understanding how disappearance creates governance. Thus, the means by which actors adapt their practices towards the threat of disappearances is a consequence of such colonial institutional continuity and a demonstration of the temporal dimension of extended disappearance. Stefan Millar is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre of Excellence in Research on Ageing and Care at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He completed his PhD defence in July 2022 at Martin Luther University Halle-­Wittenberg, Germany. His PhD research, funded by the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, examines the role of states within the encamped context of Kakuma Refugee Camp and Kalobeyei Integrated Settlement in Turkana County, Kenya.

Notes 1. Nyayo means footsteps in Kiswahili. 2. In October 2011, under the guise of the war against terror (Lind, Mutahi and Oosterom 2017), the Kenyan Defence Force invaded Somalia with the purpose of capturing the port city of Kismayo and defeating Al-­Shabaab (Anderson and McKnight 2015). 3. Usalama means security in Kiswahili. 4. According to Human Rights Watch, in January 2014, Kenyan and Ethiopian security forces kidnapped Sulub Ahmed and Ali Hussein in Nairobi. Both were members of the Ogaden National Liberation Front, and one of them was registered as a refugee with the UNHCR in Kenya. Both were kidnapped in Nairobi and later held in Addis Ababa

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for approximately sixteen months before being released (Human Rights Watch 2017). 5. The Refugee Affairs Secretariat (RAS) is a department under the Kenyan Ministry of Interior that manages refugee status determination, registration and camp management. 6. The Luk is a traditional court system for Nuer affairs that resolves internal ethnic matters such as bride price. In Kakuma, the courts serve as one of many intermediate governing bodies between camp managerial institutions, such as the UNHCR, and the Nuer refugee population. 7. Arabic is the lingua franca of South Sudan.

References Africa, Sandy, and Johnny Kwadjo. 2009. Changing Intelligence Dynamics in Africa: Technical Report. Birmingham: GFN-­SSR. Anderson, David, and Jacob McKnight. 2015. ‘Kenya at War: Al-­Shabaab and Its Enemies in Eastern Africa’, African Affairs 114(454): 1–27. Balakian, Sophia. 2016. ‘Money is Your Government: Refugees, Mobility, and Unstable Documents in Kenya’s Operation Usalama Watch’, African Studies Review 59(2): 87–111. Bennett, Huw, and Rory Cormac. 2013. ‘Low Intensity Operations in Theory and Practice: General Sir Frank Kitson as Warrior-­Scholar’, in Huw Bennett and Rory Cormac (eds), The Theory and Practice of Irregular Warfare. London: Routledge, pp. 105–24. Bozzini, David. 2015. ‘The Fines and the Spies: Fears of State Surveillance in Eritrea and in the Diaspora’, Social Analysis 59(4): 32–49. Cline, Lawrence, and Paul Shemella. 2015. The Future of Counterinsurgency: Contemporary Debates in Internal Security Strategy. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-­CLIO. Elkins, Caroline. 2005. Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya. New York: Macmillan. Franklin, Derek Peter. 1996. A Pied Cloak: Memoirs of a Colonial Police Officer (Special Branch), Kenya, 1953–66, Bahrain, 1967–71, Lesotho, 1971–75, Botswana, 1976–81. Cambridge: Janus. Gatti, Gabriel. 2014. Surviving Forced Disappearance in Argentina and Uruguay: Identity and Meaning. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Human Rights Watch. 2017. Human Rights Watch Letter to Inspector General of Police of Kenya. Nairobi. —-—-—. 2019. Kenya, South Sudan: Investigate Critics’ Disappearance; Kenyan Court Drops Oversight. Nairobi. Huttunen, Laura. 2016. ‘Liminality and Missing Persons: Encountering the Missing in Postwar Bosnia-­Herzegovina’, Conflict and Society 2(1): 201–18. Jansen, Bram. 2018. Kakuma Refugee Camp: Humanitarian Urbanism in Kenya’s Accidental City. London: Zed.

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Kilcullen, David. 2006. ‘Counter-­Insurgency Redux’, Survival 48(4): 111–30. Kitson, Frank. 1960. Gangs and Counter-Gangs. London: Barrie and Rockliff. —-—-—. 1971. Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency, PeaceKeeping. London: Faber and Faber. KNCHR. 2015. The Error of Fighting Terror with Terror: Preliminary Report of KNCHR Investigations on Human Rights Abuses in the Ongoing Crackdown against Terrorism. Nairobi. Laszczkowski, Mateusz, and Madeleine Reeves. 2017. Affective States: Entanglements, Suspensions, Suspicions. London: Berghahn. Lind, Jeremy, Patrick Mutahi and Marjoke Oosterom. 2017. ‘“Killing a Mosquito with a Hammer”: Al-­Shabaab Violence and State Security Responses in Kenya’, Peacebuilding 5(2): 118–35. Mahmood, Saba. 2011. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. M’Inoti, Kathurima. 1997. ‘The Kipande: A Colonial Debate Revisited’, Economic Review 218: 19–20. Navaro-­Yashin, Yael. 2012. The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Post-War Space. London: Duke University Press. Onguny, Philip. 2020. ‘Framing the Fight Against Terrorism in Kenya: Perspectives on the Attacks at Westgate Mall and Garissa University’, African Journal of Terrorism and Insurgency Research 1(1): 77–101. OAU (Organization of African Unity). 1969. Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa. 10 September. Retrieved 19 July 2021 from https://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b36018.html. Ramsey, Adam. 2019. Bloody Sunday and How the British Empire Came Home. London: Open Democracy United Kingdom. Sakai, J. 2013. A Talk on Security. Oakland, CA: AK Press. Schlee, Günther. 2004. ‘Taking Sides and Constructing Identities: Reflections on Conflict Theory’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10(1): 135–56. Shaffer, Ryan. 2019. ‘Following in Footsteps: The Transformation of Kenya’s Intelligence Services since the Colonial Era’, Studies in Intelligence 63(1): 23–40. Stoler, Ann. 2004. ‘Affective States’, in David Nugent and Joan Vincent (eds), A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics. Malden: Blackwell, pp. 4–20. Strachan, Hew. 2007. ‘British Counter-­Insurgency from Malaya to Iraq’, RUSI Journal 152(6): 8–11. Verdirame, Guglielmo, and Barbara Harrell-­Bond. 2005. Rights in Exile: Janus-Faced Humanitarianism. London: Berghahn. Wairuri, Kamau. 2020. ‘“Operation Sanitize Eastleigh”: Rethinking Interventions to Counter Violent Extremism’, in Mutuma Ruteere and Patrick Mutahi (eds), Confronting Violent Extremism in Kenya: Debates, Ideas, Challenges. Nairobi: CHRIPS, pp. 35–150.

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Whittaker, Hannah. 2014. Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Kenya: A Social History of the Shifta Conflict, c. 1963–1968. Leiden: Brill. Widner, Jennifer. 1993. The Rise of a Party-State in Kenya: From Harambee! to Nyayo! Berkeley: University of California Press.

7 Chroniclers of Violence in Contemporary Mexico Feminist Reflections on Memory and Disappearance Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo

Introduction This chapter explores the ways in which the families of the disappeared work with their memories and experiences and make them politically relevant. At the same time, it maps the political struggles around disappearances in present-­day Mexico and contributes to debates around decolonizing memory studies. I focus on the processes that gave rise to the collectively authored book Nadie Detiene al Amor: Historias de Vida de Personas Desaparecidas en el Norte de Sinaloa (Nobody Stops Love: Life Stories of Victims of Enforced Disappearances in Northern Sinaloa). My colleague Carolina Robledo and I coordinated the edited volume and brought together the accounts of Las Rastreadoras de El Fuerte (the Trackers), along with the poems and letters they shared with the feminist publishing collective Colectiva Editorial Hermanas en la Sombra (Sisters in the Shadow Editorial Collective), a group of imprisoned women.1 The stories told in Nadie Detiene al Amor not only bear witness to one of the most violent periods of contemporary Mexico, they also reveal the complicity between the state and the perpetrators of enforced disappearances, as well as the indifference of a society that has grown accustomed to violence. This project has been developed in the context of one of the worst human rights crises in Mexico’s history, which seems to be

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continuing under Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s ‘centre-­ left’ administration (2018–23).2 The government’s human rights organizations have reported that around 350,000 people were murdered between 2006 and 2021 (CNB 2021); more than 100,000 were forcibly disappeared; 3,000 clandestine burial pits were found; and there are 55,000 unidentified bodies under the custody of the state; and 70,000 migrants disappeared.3 These, however, are merely the official statistics, and independent human rights organizations consider them to be under-­reported. Enforced disappearances and the mutilation of ­bodies – s­ubsequently concealed in clandestine burial p ­ its – a­ re part of a ‘pedagogy of terror’ that instrumentalizes bodies to mark territories and enforce control over the population (see Segato 2013). In this context, collectives formed by the relatives of missing ­persons – p ­ redominantly by w ­ omen – h ­ ave mobilized throughout the country in search of their loved ones. Through these campaigns, relatives have become chroniclers of violence in Mexico, using public spaces and the written word to denounce the multiple forms of violence that afflict them. Since the year 2007, I have lived in Ocotepec, a Nahua community in the state of Morelos that has been marked by the violence and impunity of organized crime. In my own street, three neighbours have been murdered, one has disappeared and another, after being kidnapped, paid the ransom and fled the country. The Latin American feminist genealogy on decolonization has significantly inspired my work on the impact of extreme forms of violence both in the lives of poor and racialized women and in my own community. I have taken the path of critical thought, which documents, analyses and denounces the violence and impunity endured by imprisoned women, as well as the extreme violence that surrounds enforced disappearances. Besides academic writings (Hernández Castillo 2013, 2016a, 2016b, 2019a, 2019b, 2021), this engagement has also resulted in my political participation as a public intellectual in national debates on punitivism and militarization in the form of a newspaper column. I also use documentaries and radio programmes to share the testimonies of the women I work with.4 I have also embarked on a political-­pedagogical-­artistic project with feminist colleagues. We are looking to dignify the prison space by carving out nooks for the exchange of knowledge. In this way, a form of sisterhood has emerged, as well as a sense of community inside institutions that usually promote mistrust, violence and individualism.5 In recent years I have been doing collaborative research with organizations of families of missing persons in the states of Sinaloa, Morelos and

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Guerrero, first as a member of an interdisciplinary research team of the ‘Social and Forensic Anthropology Research Group’ called GIASF, and in the last two years as an individual activist scholar.6 On an analytical level, this chapter stems from the need to decolonize memory studies, which forms an intrinsic part of my reflections on enforced disappearances. This approach implies acknowledging the multiple intellectual and political genealogies that have contributed to the decolonizing of memory studies, as well as holding these debates outside of the Global North’s exclusive intellectual spheres. On a methodological level, the challenge lies in being willing to destabilize one’s own epistemic certainties to address other ways of understanding justice and ­emancipation – o ­ ther modes of reconstructing history and memory that do not necessarily share a linear perspective of time. The decolonization of Latin American feminisms entails an effort to acknowledge epistemic arrogance, especially when engaging in dialogue with women who do not share dominant perspectives on patriarchal forms of violence and the potential allyships that could dismantle them. I have divided this chapter into four sections, in which I interweave analytical arguments on memory and enforced disappearances with voices documented in memory workshops and dialogues with authors who have dealt with the epistemic and political possibilities of memory. In the first section, I reassemble my main intellectual genealogies with regard to memory studies and disappearances from a background in Latin American critical studies and various strands of feminism. In the second section, I introduce the activist group Las Rastreadoras de El Fuerte and the processes of knowledge exchange that I engaged in with them in the context of the extreme violence of enforced disappearances. In the third section, I reflect on the political usage of testimonies and its possibilities and limitations, addressing some of the textual strategies that were used in the collectively authored volume Nadie Detiene al Amor as counter-­hegemonic forms of rebuilding memory. The last section takes a deep plunge into the stories of these activists, establishing a dialogue about the multiple forms of violence that have marked their lives, and introduces the concept of ‘indignant love’. Instead of offering a clear conclusion, the chapter ends with new questions about the possibilities and limitations of memory projects as a means by which social agents are able to develop alternative justice and indemnification projects.

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Latin American Feminist Genealogies in Memory Studies During recent decades, memory projects have experienced a newfound popularity, with the use of public testimonies as a strategy of sensibilization within the current paradigm of transitional justice in countries all over the world. The institutionalization of memory politics has been heavily questioned; its critics point out that victims tend to be homogenized, which silences their experiences of resistance and, in many cases, focuses on a single violent event while ignoring the context of multiple forms of violence that gave rise to it (see Castillejo Cuéllar 2017; Fassin and Rechtman 2009). Nevertheless, there is a different political genealogy that considers memory workshops as part of the inner-­strengthening strategies of collectives in resistance. In Latin America, memory workshops have been an essential part of social movements’ fight to systematize counter-­hegemonic perspectives on history, including the continent’s long history of enforced disappearances. Contemporary memory studies can be traced back to the work of French-­ German sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, whose text Les Cadres Sociaux de la Mémoire (1925) kickstarted a school of thought that conceived memory as an object of study (see Erll 2011; Leone 2013). However, this intellectual trajectory bears little relationship to Latin American academic production. In my previous work, I have shown the need to decolonize memory studies, reclaiming experiences through collaborative research such as the oral history workshops that have been developed across Latin America and in the violent contexts of detention and disappearances. In order for such decolonization to happen, there have to be epistemic dialogues that take into account other ways of rebuilding the past and connecting it to the present (Hernández Castillo 2020; see also Rivera Cusicanqui 2010; Rus, Rus and Bakbolom 2016). Various projects on decolonizing memory of violent pasts ask not only ‘How do we remember?’ but ‘Which memories are considered valid and how are they disseminated to construct a hegemonic consciousness of the past?’ Similar questions have been asked by various strands of feminism to confront the exclusion of women from patriarchal historiography. Memory workshops have been an essential methodological tool for the construction of a feminist collective memory, also in regard to state-­sponsored disappearances. The project of historicizing women and their fights has been an important task for female historians, including female reflections on the specific modes of remembering

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and the importance of conceptualizing memories beyond isolated events and instead as conditions that underlie the ‘great events’ documented by official forms of history (see Duby and Perrot 1993). In Latin America, feminist contributions to memory studies have been an essential tool in understanding the impact of violence on communities, as well as the strategies used to reconstruct the social fabric, commonly spearheaded by women. The pioneering work of Elizabeth Jelin in Argentina (2002, 2007, 2010, 2017), Pilar Riaño Alcalá in Colombia (2005, 2020) and Actoras de Cambio (Agents of Change) in Guatemala (2011) bears witness to the political relevance of memory workshops in the battles for justice and against impunity. Such questions as ‘How is the past represented?’, ‘Who represents it?’ and ‘How are these representations institutionalized?’ are more than academic enquiries: they are political and methodological tools in feminist fights for memory and epistemic decolonization. The naturalization of sisterhood and essentialist perspectives on feminine identities have been called into question in the last decade by poststructuralist feminism. These critical voices point out that ‘feminizing memory’ – drawing attention to women in memory ­studies – ­is not enough. There must be a reflection on how these forms of generating memories are constructing gender and, in many contexts, how they reinforce the official discourses and practices that surround the notions of femininity and masculinity (see Troncoso Pérez and Shafir 2015). I thus focus on the memory workshops with mothers of disappeared persons as spaces where hegemonic representations of violence and justice are destabilized. Although these spaces are marked by contradictions and resonate with conservative discourses about women, I also observed processes of deconstructing women as gendered subjects that destabilize traditional perspectives on motherhood and family.

Las Rastreadoras: Chroniclers of Enforced Disappearance and Extreme Violence I started to work with women in memory workshops in 2016, when I participated in an interdisciplinary research team following a civilian-­led search for clandestine burial pits. While working with this team, I returned to the land of my grandparents, a territory of the Mayo-­Yoreme people in the state of Sinaloa in northern Mexico, and I got to know Las Rastreadoras de El Fuerte and started working with them. This organization, like many others across the country,

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predominantly comprises the wives, sisters and mothers of missing persons and, due to the Mexican state’s unwillingness and incompetence regarding searching for, exhuming and identifying the disappeared, they have taken the search for their relatives’ remains into their own hands. In the state of Sinaloa, these women have, since 2014, been going out with picks and shovels to look for their disappeared relatives. As of July 2021, they had found 243 bodies, 173 of which had been returned to their families. This group documented more than five hundred cases of enforced disappearance between 2010 and 2021 in just a handful of municipalities in Northern Sinaloa: El Fuerte, Choix, Guasave and Ahome.7 Ever since my first meeting with Las Rastreadoras, back in February 2017, I have identified with their cultural style, their open way of speaking, their loud voices and their sense of ­humour – ­filled with slang and double entendres. After working with Mayan peoples in southern Mexico for two decades, I was returning to my roots. After my grandparents left El Fuerte during the 1930s they denied their Yoreme identity, due to the racism that permeates Mexican society to this day. When I heard Las Rastreadoras speak, I recognized the local idioms that my mother used. I could not help but feel surrounded by my aunts, my grandmothers, my matriarchs. Among Las Rastreadoras, there are both Yoreme and Mestizo women, women of rural and urban backgrounds, illiterate women and schoolteachers, housewives and street vendors. The majority come from low-­income households, with little formal education. For most of them, this collective is the first organization they have participated in. Their learning has taken giant steps: not only have they assimilated human rights discourses, they have also become self-­taught forensic researchers. They have learned a new language, filled with technical terms: genetic testing, DNA, exhumations, ante mortem, post-­mortem and so on. Ever since my first visit to Sinaloa, I have felt welcomed by these women’s affection, and we have built bonds that go beyond blood kinship. Inviting me to participate in their field searches was a way of including me in their loving rituals of exhumation, in which ‘forensic evidence’ or ‘carcasses’ are turned into humans: brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, husbands or wives who are sorely missed. Tracking the territory with their picks and shovels, they document Mexico’s history of extreme violence and impunity. These weekly searches, with or without findings, usually finish with a collective cooking session, a sisterhood ritual that solidifies their bond as a family united by both pain and hope.

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On one of my visits, to my surprise, this culinary ritual was dedicated to my mother, a great cook of Sinaloense food. This happened during Holy Week. I had mentioned that my mother used to cook and sell a local dessert known as capirotada, made out of stale bread and dried fruit, and typically consumed during Lent. Without notifying me, the women agreed to bring the necessary ingredients to the office so they could surprise me and, after the search, cook what was the best capirotada I have ever eaten. This unforgettable evening ended with us dancing in the alleyways of a marketplace, to music played by a brass band, which charged us by the song. The apparent contradiction between the pain of interrupted mourning and the energy and joie de vivre the women radiated shook my epistemic certainties about victims and their resistance strategies. These experiences, in which collective bonds were reaffirmed by everyday actions, made me think about the phenomenon that Veena Das (2008) describes as a ‘descent into the ordinary’, that is, the routines and everyday practices used by people to face social suffering. In contrast to the masculine models of heroicness and resistance, these women develop quotidian ways of dignifying life and death, which allow them to keep searching, or in their words: ‘to keep fighting’. Through experiencing this everyday lovingness, as well as participating in the field searches and memory workshops, I gradually became part of the extended family built up by Las Rastreadoras and their allies. The book Nadie Detiene al Amor is a result of this shared path. It collates the stories of nineteen women and one man who embarked on the search for twenty-­three individuals who had disappeared between 2011 and 2017 in the municipalities of El Fuerte, Ahome, Choix and Guasave, in northern Sinaloa. Each story has an epistolary or poetic response written by one of the members of the Colectiva Editorial Hermanas en la Sombra. It could be said that this book is as important as the roads travelled to transform the memories into words. One of the participants, Manqui Lugo, describes the importance of telling their own stories to confront the discourses criminalizing their children: I have given our book to several relatives, so that they know the true story of our children. So that they know that what the government says is a lie: that they themselves sought their death or disappearance, because they were involved in bad things.

The collective reading of each of these stories in an intimate setting allowed Las Rastreadoras to share their reflections on violence not as a personal grievance but as a consequence of structural contexts.

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These workshops were also an opportunity to discuss their experiences of facing impunity and bureaucratic v­ iolence – t­ he racism and misogyny that influenced the way they were treated before, during and after the search for their missing relatives.

Destabilizing Official Narratives through the Building of New Communities and the Articulation of Political Testimonies In the spaces of collective reflection inside the Las Rastreadoras offices in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, women not only shared their memories about previous violent ­experiences – ­before, during and after the ‘critical event’ (Das 2015), namely the disappearance of their ­relative – b ­ ut also strengthened their solidarity bonds as members of emotional and political communities. Inspired by the concept of ‘emotional communities’, developed by the Colombian anthropologist Myriam Jimeno (2010), I highlight the importance of sharing emotions in the construction of political communities. I consider the sharing of different emotions such as indignation, pain and m ­ ourning – ­but also hope and faith in the possibility of building fairer ­societies – a­ s crucial for Las Rastreadoras to develop a sense of collective belonging. They have, in their own words, built ‘new families’. When reconstructing the context of their critical event, they shared their stories as well as their experiences of patriarchal and racist forms of violence that marked their lives (and those of their children). During this sharing process, they began to question the internalized racism and misogyny that led them to accept and normalize violence. Among the topics discussed was the importance of writing their own versions of the grievances that fractured their lives. These testimonies were a strategy to confront ‘official truths’ about them and their families, as one woman noted in a creative writing workshop organized by the ‘Sisters in the Shadow’ in 2022: We want to be the ones who tell the stories of our sons and daughters, to tell the world that they are not just numbers in the missing persons reports. Let everybody know that they were working men and women, with dreams and hopes, not criminals, nor ‘collateral damage’ of the ‘war on drugs’.

In their testimonies, they also acknowledged their own qualities, including their resistance and fighting spirit, thus confronting the

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victimizing effect that testimonies can have in the context of transitional justice (see Fassin 2008). The members of Las Rastreadoras and other collectives have seen their lives and communities shattered by patriarchal forms of violence that use the ‘pedagogy of terror’ as a means of territorial control (Segato 2013). Sharing their experiences and engaging in collective reflections has allowed them to represent violence not as ‘personal grievances’ or as a consequence of ‘bad luck’ or ‘bad parenting’, but as a common experience of structural violence that marks their lives and territories. The political force of testimonies in the fight for justice, their importance in the construction of emotional communities and their linkage to memory are topics that have been widely addressed in feminist anthropology and decolonial feminism (Jimeno, Castillo and Varela 2019; De Marinis and Macleod 2019; Stephen 2017; Stephen and Speed 2021). Their importance lies in the recognition of other ways of relating to the past and narrating one’s place in history, through diverse and discontinuous textual strategies that include both orality and silence, memory and oblivion (see Das 2008). Alongside this political revindication of testimonies, there has been a process of institutionalization as part of the memory-­related strategies of transitional justice. The top-­down imposition of the ‘truth, justice and reconciliation’ mantra has entailed the appropriation of the voices and experiences of survivors of armed conflicts. Constructed as victims, they are expected to behave apolitically and publicly represent the pain and afflictions produced by violence in order to gain access to the benefits afforded by reparation policies (see Castillejo Cuéllar 2017; Gómez Correal 2022). The productive force of the transitional justice discourse has led to a homogenized representation of victims, silencing them and denying political agency. The objective seems to be to mould a ‘suffering subject’ that can be appropriated and represented by transitional justice policies, as well as by the ‘industry of testimony extraction’ in academia (Robbins 2013). Nevertheless, outside these institutionalized contexts, many political organizations involved in various fights for justice have used memory workshops as spaces in which to write their own stories and oppose official discourses on the multiple forms of violence that have affected them. In Latin America, a sector of academia has joined these projects, drawing on the research and participative action of the 1980s and applying these methodologies to memory workshops with victims of extreme violence, enforced disappearance and displacement

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(Hernández Castillo and Terven 2017; Riaño Alcalá 2008). Although there have been tensions in the alliances between academics and social collectives, a new tradition of feminist research has been developed, which acknowledges the need for a dialogue between different forms of knowledge. Academics are no longer only ‘analysts’ but political agents who share spaces of vulnerability with the people they work with (see Berry et al. 2017; Hernández Castillo 2021). Claudia Andrea Bacci, for instance, points out that the victims’ testimonies are not only public demands for justice but also contributions to ‘the reconstruction of bonds of trust and a symbolic form of reparation through the rewriting of memories that lend legitimacy to this suffering. Talking with neighbors, health professionals, relatives, friends and fellow militants is as important as obtaining justice’ (Bacci 2020: 3). On a similar note, Pilar Riaño Alcalá (2008) argues that testimonies shared in collective spaces contribute to the reconstruction of the social fabric, legitimizing the voices of those who are most affected by violence. Her political involvement in memory workshops consists of threading her own voice with those of the most affected, while taking part in a collective reflection on the possibilities of resistance and social transformation. In the case of Las Rastreadoras de El Fuerte, the underlying objective of systematizing their stories was to legitimize their grievances and confront the hegemonic discourse that criminalizes missing persons by linking them to organized crime, implying that their disappearance was their own doing. With the aim of telling the families’ side of history in northern Sinaloa, the memory workshops started in February 2017. A stall in a public market in Los Mochis became the organization’s headquarters and our meeting site. The stall’s sliding glass doors were covered with pictures of the disappeared sons, daughters, brothers and sisters, claiming the attention of passers­by. Due to the stall’s small size, we used the market’s alleyways to conduct our discussion groups, thus occupying this public space with our bodies and memories. Taking inspiration from the methodologies of critical geography, we drew maps with marks that signalled the locations of the clandestine burial pits found by Las Rastreadoras. We also sketched figures that represented the armed agents who participated in the crimes or in the state bureaucracy that has stymied the exhumation processes. ‘Mapping violence’ allowed the women to collectivize their knowledge and develop a shared reflection on their grievances and the systematic nature of the disappearances. In this reconstruction of the regional history of violence, the prevalent linear perspective on history was challenged by a polyphonic

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discourse that prioritized the links between political a­ gents – b ­ oth armed and non-­armed – ­and their spatial location over date-­heavy, fact-­based chronologies. While these women do remember the exact date of their relative’s disappearance, and turn it into a day of collective commemoration, their sense of history is not only a chronology of political events but also includes dreams, premonitions and memories. In their shared narratives, the line that separates the living and the dead is blurred. Some testimonies mention a visit by a deceased child or grandchild, which reveals that their body will be found soon or that they are no longer alive. Taking these accounts seriously implies an exercise in epistemic decolonization, an acknowledgement of the importance of other ontologies in the search for disappeared relatives.8 The systematization of the women’s knowledge and experience is a way for them to recognize themselves as producers of expert knowledge who have been unfairly rejected by the government’s forensic teams and the judicial system’s bureaucracy. These institutions have routinely worked behind such collectives’ backs (see Hernández Castillo 2019a). Unlike post-­ conflict memory workshops conducted in other regions of Latin America, the information documented by Las Rastreadoras is not meant to contribute to legal proceedings. The search for state justice is not among the collective’s objectives. Their testimonies are not meant to be used as evidence in a trial. When, during a protest, Las Rastreadoras scream ‘we do not want justice, we want truth’, they are rejecting a security and justice apparatus that they do not believe i­ n – a­ system that has criminalized their sons and daughters, militarized their communities and collaborated in the disappearance of their relatives. Unlike other collectives in Latin America that demand ‘neither forgiveness nor oblivion, but punishment for the murderers’ (Jelin 2007), Las Rastreadoras are focused on finding the bodies of their loved ones. Besides the fact that asking for the punishment and imprisonment of the perpetrators would only put them and their families at risk, their real demands for justice seek to build safer spaces and communities, where their children do not have to become disposable bodies: victims or collaborators of organized crime. In the workshops organized with Las Rastreadoras, the participants acknowledged that the recurrence of violence is a problem that must be faced by an entire community. This is not a situation that exclusively affects women; while it is true that most of the perpetrators of extreme violence are men, so were the majority of victims

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that lay in clandestine burial p ­ its – p ­ oor, racialized young men. Some authors use terms such as juvenicidio, which can be roughly translated as youthicide (Valenzuela Arce 2019). The poorest, most marginalized young men, who inhabit racialized geographies, are victims of both violent masculinities (both their own and those of others) and patriarchal violence. The stories shared by Las Rastreadoras speak of sons and daughters who disappeared after a traffic accident with the wrong person, or after refusing to dance with a powerful man. There are also stories about addicted youngsters who, one day, did not come home. In a context defined by impunity and impoverishment, in which masculine violence becomes a form of currency, enforced disappearances are a danger that routinely lurks in communities. In this region of the country, the mothers of missing persons reject state justice and, through various avenues, build political communities to reimagine justice in a broader sense. In this regard, S­ orayma – ­the wife of Guillermo Pacheco, whose body was retrieved by Las ­Rastreadoras – d ­ escribes her stance on state justice as follows: I do not expect anything from the state, I do not believe in its justice. For me, true justice would be for all of this to end. I have children, which means that one day I will have grandchildren, and I do not want them to experience the same world that I am living in. That is the sort of justice I would ask for. Not the punishment of those who are found guilty, but for violence to stop, for all of this to stop. That when my children have their own families, they are able to live peacefully, without fearing that their kids won’t come back home, that someone else is going to take them. That would be justice for me. (Colectiva Editorial Hermanas en la Sombra and Rastreadoras de El Fuerte 2020: 86; translated from the Spanish original)

This rejection of state justice is reflected in Las Rastreadoras’ decision not to judicialize their cases. Even those who have found their relatives’ bodies prefer to invest their political energy in the search for other collective members’ relatives, rather than in finding those responsible for their own relative’s death. Both impunity and the context of violence influence this decision, as looking for the perpetrators would entail risks for the women and their families, as noted above. The next section deals with stories of police violence prior to the disappearances, or of bureaucratic violence suffered during the search process, both of which have also influenced this rejection of state institutions.

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Nadie Detiene al Amor: Chronicles of an Indignant Love As I listened to the stories narrated by Las Rastreadoras in their memory workshops, during in-­depth interviews or in informal conversations, I could not help but think about the way in which German society during the Nazi regime was complicit through silence: while a genocide was happening in their backyard, they kept on attending mass, celebrating birthdays and marching in patriotic parades. I listened to detailed narrations of the immeasurable cruelty with which the bodies that were found had been treated, and I became ashamed of my own silence, the silence of my sisters and friends, the silence of all Mexicans who have become used to the daily count of deceased, disappeared and massacred victims. Listening to these women, I became witness to a story they needed to tell. Their narrations were not only a denunciation of disappearances and premature deaths, but also an expression of their will to live. Even if the disappearance of a loved one was the ‘critical event’ that deepened these women’s social suffering, this event was preceded by decades of structural forms of violence. Elsewhere, I have written about racialized territories in order to highlight the way in which racial hierarchies place certain bodies in certain spaces, and the distribution of resources and public policies to different territories depends on the bodies that inhabit them (Hernández Castillo 2019b). In contexts of extreme violence, like the one currently affecting Mexico, certain bodies are deemed to be disposable and situated in specific territories, in contrast with places that become the locus of ‘valuable life’ (see Butler 2006; Cacho 2012). In other words, racism dehumanizes and distorts the value of bodies located in racialized territories. This is why the bodies found in clandestine burial pits by Las Rastreadoras do not seem to inspire an emotional reaction from Sinaloense society; these lives were already deemed worthless. Their physical death was preceded by their social death. These are brown, impoverished and criminalized bodies that carry the stigma of being guilty of their own disappearance. Several of the testimonies contained in the book deal with experiences of police violence that preceded the disappearances. Rosario Trigueros, a woman of Raramuri ancestry, describes the run-­ins her son Jasiel had with the police before his disappearance: Before he disappeared, he was detained once. On 4  November 2015, he was stopped at a police checkpoint. The officers found a gun in his car. Luckily, a cousin witnessed the detention. Otherwise, he could have

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disappeared there and then. After this cousin told me what happened, I went to the municipal police station, where they had no information on him. I went three times to the public prosecutor’s office, and there was no news either. He was detained at noon, but did not arrive at the public prosecutor’s office until 8 p.m. Afterwards, I found out that municipal officers handed him over to the federal ministerial police,9 who tortured him. At first, he did not tell me he was tortured, as he did not want to worry me even more. When he finally told me, he mentioned that he had recognized criminal hitmen among the police officers who tortured him. (Colectiva Editorial Hermanas en la Sombra and Rastreadoras de El Fuerte 2020: 118, 86; translated from the Spanish original)

A report presented in 2017 by the United Nations’ Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment alleged that in Mexico, torture is commonly applied during the arrest, transportation, imprisonment and interrogation of suspects ‘so that victims make self-­incriminatory declarations, or even to force them to sign blank pages’ (UN 2017: 45). In this report, public servants in several institutions are identified as being responsible for torture: police officers at federal, state and municipal levels, migration officers and members of the armed forces (ibid.). The stories narrated by Las Rastreadoras, as well as the stories inscribed in the bones they retrieve from clandestine burial pits, bear witness to the violence documented in the UN report. An essential element of Las Rastreadoras’ political fight is redignifying the deceased whose bodies have been treated with disdain. They have adopted each and every man and woman they have found as sons and daughters. As such, they take care of them from the moment of their exhumation throughout the bureaucratic process the bodies undergo before returning to their families. Their denunciations speak out against not only the extreme violence that took these lives but the bureaucratic violence endured by the families who search for their relatives, as well as the forensic violence these ­bodies – ­treasured by the ­families – a­ re subjected to. The testimony of B ­ erthila – t­he mother of Alejandra Peña, a young woman who, along with a friend, disappeared after verbally confronting a soldier who owned the apartment where she ­lived – ­narrates the violence she faced in order to get her daughter’s body back, after months of searching for her. She describes her experience as a ‘bureaucratic nightmare’: The day I received a call informing me that the bodies of two young ­women – ­possibly Alejandra and ­Carla – ­were found, I felt like I was dying. They asked me if my daughter had had dental work done, and

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she had, as she had broken some teeth after falling while changing a light bulb. Mirna [the leader of Las Rastreadoras] kept me company as I took a DNA test. I tried to find Alejandra’s father, but his phone was turned off, so I finally went with one of my daughters. In the toughest moment, when we needed him the most, he was not there. My son came from Mexico City to be with me during the entire process, which was extremely difficult. In the end, the DNA tests turned out positive. The body was my daughter’s. However, they offered me no explanation as to how they found her. They assumed I knew everything. Thank God I am a knowledgeable person; I didn’t finish my degree, but I read a lot, I keep myself informed and whenever I don’t know something, I ask questions. Nevertheless, it was a bureaucratic nightmare: paperwork and more paperwork. Then, new interrogations: ‘What’s your name?’, ‘Where do you live and who do you live with?’ I just wanted everything to end so they could give me my daughter’s remains. Afterwards, they came up with another excuse: they could not give me the body until the father showed up and took a DNA test. I spoke to Mirna, and she made some phone calls. While listening to her discussions over the phone, I noticed the strength she shows whenever she wants to achieve something. She helped me to get out of that labyrinth and get my daughter back. (Colectiva Editorial Hermanas en la Sombra and Rastreadoras de El Fuerte 2020: 32; translated from the Spanish original)

The experiences that relatives of missing persons have had with forensic services are an example of what some social scientists have called bureaucratic violence or desk crimes. The violence and trauma of the disappearance of a loved one are deepened by what Ariadana Estévez López (2015) describes as the administration of suffering through institutional forms of violence. The relatives face a bureaucratic apparatus that kidnaps their sons, daughters, spouses and siblings to treat them as disposable bodies that end up in a mass grave. Bureaucratic violence starts during the search process, when the relatives are treated with contempt by the authorities. Those who come from Indigenous or rural backgrounds have to face judicial racism, multiplied in their everyday interactions with public servants. To face these forms of violence, activists have taken advantage of recently created legal tools. Pressured by the protesting relatives of missing persons, the Mexican government published the Ley General en Materia de Desaparición Forzada de Personas y Desaparición Cometida por Particulares (General Law on the Enforced Disappearance of Persons and Disappearances Committed by Individuals) and the Ley General de Víctimas (General Law on Victims).10 Through their experience of searching for their relatives, these women have become empirical forensic examiners and experts

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in context analysis. Las Rastreadoras have destabilized the epistemic hierarchies of forensic science, legitimizing their own knowledge. Memory workshops were also a vehicle for the self-­acknowledgement of their expertise, which enables them not only to recognize human bones, but to graphically reconstruct the geography of violence or to elaborate a context analysis that helps them to decide when and where to search with sufficient safety conditions. Through their searches, the women have blurred the boundary between the living and the dead, building affective communities that include them all. These practices have confronted what Isaias Rojas-­ Perez (2017: 87) has called the state’s necro-­governmentality: ‘through the localization, examination, individualization and eventual return of the bodies to their families, so that they are properly buried, a distinction between family and community is re-­established, which is essential for the State’s modern politics.’ As previously stated, Las Rastreadoras look for their relatives and for every disappeared person. Mothers whose children have already been ­found – l­ike Mirna Medina, the group’s c­ oordinator – c­ ontinue to participate in the searches. By treating the bodies they find as human beings, rather than as mere remains, and adopting them as if they were their own kin, they contravene the ‘privatization of the deceased’ (ibid.: 89) and reinforce a sense of community. Mirna describes the importance of citizen-­led searches for relatives as a practice that shines a light on the ineptitude or complicity of the Mexican state with regard to disappearances: Our purpose was always to search for and find them, as we knew that the government would not do it, no matter how much we asked for it. So, instead of waiting for something that was not going to happen, I decided to search for them and, by doing so, show the government its own ineptitude. Each body we find is a way of telling the government that the very thing it denies and refuses to acknowledge exists. The proof is there: all the remains that we have found in clandestine burial pits, which belonged to our disappeared sons and daughters. (Colectiva Editorial Hermanas en la Sombra and Rastreadoras de El Fuerte 2020; translated from the Spanish original)

Nadie Detiene al Amor is a denunciation of multiple forms of violence. It also documents the different ways in which these women build communities not only around the pain of mourning but also around love for their sons and daughters, as well as the sons and daughters of the organization’s fellow members, who they have come to know and love through shared memories. The title of the volume is taken from one of the poems written by the members of

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Colectiva Editorial Hermanas en la Sombra for Las Rastreadoras. It underlines the force of love (hooks 2001), an indignant love that becomes the main strategy with which to face the ‘pedagogies of terror’ that use the bodies of daughters and sons as mere inscriptions of territorial control. Love also enables them to keep on searching despite the paralysing fear they feel when threatened by or directly faced with the perpetrators in territories controlled by organized crime. This is not the typical form of ‘motherly love’ idealized in pop culture and mass media: it is an indignant love that goes beyond blood ties. An indignant love that confronts authorities and unveils complicities. A form of love that overpowers any hatred towards the perpetrators.

Final Remarks The Las Rastreadoras’ memory project and the book Nadie Detiene al Amor serve as a chronicle both of disappearance and of the extreme, structural forms of violence suffered by poor and racialized communities in Mexico, and as an example of the ways in which communities are knit together in a world shattered by violence. I do not intend to argue that these initiatives truly destabilize the de facto powers that rely on terror to control lives and territories. Nevertheless, I consider that these life-­defending strategies, which entail the documentation of stories of violence and resistance, show some of the ways in which the social f­abric – r­ avaged by extreme and structural forms of v­ iolence – c­ an be rebuilt. The women’s writings, along with their voices on the streets and in the media, are destabilizing the common representations of ‘suffering subjects’ that endure multiple forms of violence. Their appropriation of forensic knowledge, as well as their self-­representation strategies, disrupt the epistemic hierarchies usually imposed in contexts of ‘transitional justice’. In Mexico, we have not transitioned from a period of armed conflict to a peaceful situation: we remain immersed in an unrecognized neoliberal war. However, state institutions have embraced the rhetoric of transitional justice. The collectives formed by relatives of victims of enforced disappearance, such as Las Rastreadoras, have confronted the official discourses with their own analyses and representations. Thus, they have countered the usual representations of ‘victims’ with their work as social activists; they have subverted what is expected of suffering mothers by acting as indignant mothers who look for everyone who has disappeared, not only their own kin;

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and they have widened the conceptions of family and community, beyond blood and locality respectively. From the perspective of memory studies, the book Nadie Detiene al Amor is only one part of a wider process in which history is routinely shared and shaped in spaces for collective reflection. By shaping history, these women are also deconstructing traditional gender roles. They have become political agents in public spaces, lending new meaning to their roles as mothers or caregivers as they look for every victim, not only their loved ones. Their history of grievance and resistance, threaded through with the inmates’ poetic voice, confronts hegemonic narratives of ‘criminal violence’ in Mexico and unveils the complicity between the government and organized crime. This complicity not only enabled but, in some cases, was directly responsible for the disappearance of their daughters and sons. What impact can these projects have in a context in which fear is disguised as indifference and most of Mexican society refuses to listen to and be moved by these narratives? What role can we play as academics to echo these voices and embrace their theorizations on violence and justice in our own theoretical debates? What can these fights for self-­representation contribute to the decolonization of memory studies? To answer these questions, we have to keep walking alongside these collectives, listening to them with openness and solidarity in order to learn about other forms of knowledge. In academia, said forms of knowledge are usually conceptualized as ‘testimonies’; however, these are theorizations that can show us how to rebuild our communities. Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo earned her doctorate in Anthropology from Stanford University in 1996. She is Professor and Senior Researcher at the Centre for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS) in Mexico City. Since she was an undergraduate she has combined her academic work with feminist activism and media projects in radio, video and journalism. For the last eight years she has been doing activist research with forensic teams and families of missing people in Mexico and Central America. She has published twenty-­two books and her academic work has been translated into English, Portuguese, French and Japanese.

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Notes This is a shortened and slightly modified version of the original article ‘Cronistas del Oprobio: Reflexiones Feministas sobre Memoria, Desaparición y Violencias Contemporáneas en México’, Revista de Antropología Social 31(2) (2022). It has been translated by Luis Muñoz.   1. The book can be downloaded for free at https://www.giasf.org/uploa​ ds/9/8/4/7/98474654/25.pdf (accessed 3 February 2023). Due to length limitations, I have omitted the details about the epistolary exchange between Las Rastreadoras de El Fuerte and the Colectiva Editorial Hermanas en la Sombra. In the previously published Spanish version of this article, there is an ethnographic analysis of this dialogue about forms of knowledge and resistance. Hermanas en la Sombra is a prison editorial project that I founded in 2009 together with the feminist poet Elena de Hoyos and a group of inmates who attended our creative writing workshops (De Hoyos, Ruiz and Hernández Castillo 2021). To date, the editorial collective has published twenty-­two books, written, designed and edited by women in prisons; see https://hermanasenlasombra.org/ (accessed 3 February 2023).  2. The annual report presented by the Comisión Nacional de Búsqueda (National Search Commission) revealed in January 2021 that there was a decrease in enforced disappearances, from the 8,964 reported in 2019 to 6,957 in 2020. However, it failed to mention that 2019 was the year with the greatest number of disappearances since the start of the so-­called ‘war on drug-­trafficking’ back in 2006. In spite of this decrease, 2020 was the year with the fourth highest number of disappearances in the previous two decades (CNB 2021).  3. See Registro Nacional de Personas Desaparecidas o No Localizadas (National Registry of Disappeared or Not Located Persons) 2022.   4. My newspaper articles are available at: www.rosalvaaidahernandez.com​ /es/publicaciones/articulos-­periodisticos/ (accessed 3 February 2023).  5. This project has entailed an appropriation of the means of self-­ representation through the founding of a prison-­ based publishing house in which the inmates write, design and publish their own books. Humanitarian intermediaries working as spokespeople for those who have lived these particular experiences at first hand are no longer necessary when the means of self-­representation are appropriated. In this regard, the publishing house’s editorial output has become a tool for spreading the inmates’ theorizations in print and through social media; see https://her​manasenlasombra.org (accessed 3 February 2023).   6. I worked with the GIASF team from 2016 to 2019. I am still part of GIASF’s Academic Counselling Committee: see https://www.giasf.org/ (accessed 3 February 2023).   7. A more in-­depth analysis of my research with this collective can be found in Hernández Castillo (2019b). The data on the found and returned

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bodies was provided on 21 July 2021 by Mirna Medina, coordinator of Las Rastreadoras de El Fuerte.  8. The work of Isaias Rojas-­Perez (2017) deals with the importance of Indigenous epistemologies in understanding the boundaries between the living and the dead. It was conducted in the Quechua region of Peru with the relatives of victims of enforced disappearance who were found in clandestine burial pits.  9. The Federal Ministerial Police (Policía Federal Ministerial, PFM) is a Mexican federal agency tasked with fighting corruption and organized crime, but it has been infiltrated by the cartels. The agency is directed by the Attorney General’s Office (FGR) and may have been partly modelled on the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the United States. 10. For an analysis of these two laws see Leyva Morelos Zaragoza (2019).

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Universidad Nacional de Colombia (translation of the work of Veena Das coordinated by Francisco Ortega). —-—-—. 2015. Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. De Hoyos, Elena, Marina Ruiz and Rosalva A. Hernández Castillo. 2021. Renacer en la Escritura: Manual de Intervención Feminista en Espacios donde se viven violencias. Mexico City: Colectiva Hermanas en la Sombra; CIESAS. De Marinis, Natalia, and Morna Macleod (eds). 2019. Resistiendo a la violencia: Comunidades emocionales en América Latina. Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana. Duby, Georges, and Michelle Perrot. 1993. Historia de las mujeres. Madrid: Taurus. Erll, Astrid. 2011. Memory in Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Estévez López, Ariadana. 2015. ‘La crisis de derechos humanos y el dispositivo de administración del sufrimiento: Necropolítica pública de víctimas, defensores y periodistas’, El Cotidiano 194: 7–17. Fassin, Didier. 2008. ‘The Humanitarian Politics of Testimony: Subjectification through Trauma in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict’, Cultural Anthropology 23: 531–58. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-­1360​ .2008.00017.x. Fassin, Didier, and Richard Rechtman. 2009. The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gómez Correal, Diana. 2022. ‘Memoria profunda: Expresiones y trayectorias del sufrimiento social en Colombia’, Revista de Antropología Social 31(2): 185–200. Halbwachs, Maurice. [1925] 2004. Les Cadres Sociaux de la Mémoire. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Hernández Castillo, Rosalva A. 2013. ‘¿Del Estado multicultural al Estado penal? Mujeres indígenas presas y criminalización de la pobreza en México’, in María Teresa Sierra Camacho et al. (eds), Justicias indígenas y estado: Violencias contemporáneas. Mexico City: Flacos/CIESAS, pp. 299–338. —-—-—. 2016a. Multiple Injustices: Indigenous Women, Law, and Political Struggle in Latin America. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. —-—-—. 2016b. ‘Feminist Activist Research and Intercultural Dialogs’, in H.C. Buechler and J.C. Nash (eds), Ethnographic Collaborations in Latin America: The Effects of Globalization. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 25–49. —-—-—. 2019a. ‘La antropología jurídica feminista y sus aportes al trabajo forense con familiares de desaparecidos alianzas y colaboraciones con Las Rastreadoras de El Fuerte’, Abya-yala: Revista sobre Acesso à Justiça e Direitos nas Américas 3(2): 94–119. —-—-—. 2019b. ‘Racialized Geographies and the “War on Drugs”: Gender Violence, Militarization, and Criminalization of Indigenous Peoples’,

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Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 24(3): 635–52. —-—-—. 2020. ‘“Putting Heart” into History and Memory: Dialogues with Tseltal-­Maya Scholar, Xuno López Intzin’, in Johanna Vollmeyer, Francisco Ferrándiz and Marije Hristova (eds), ‘Memory Worlds: Reframing Time and the Past’, special issue, Memory Studies 13(5): 777–91. —-—-—. 2021. ‘Etnografías feministas en contextos de múltiples violencias’, Alteridades 31(62): 41–55. Hernández Castillo, Rosalva A., and Adriana Terven. 2017. ‘Rutas metodológicas: Hacia una antropología jurídica crítica y colaborativa’, in Rachel Sieder (ed.), Exigiendo justicia y seguridad: Mujeres indígenas y pluralidades legales en América Latina. Mexico City: Casa Chata CIESAS, pp. 294–308. hooks, bell. 2001. All About Love: New Visions. New York: Harper Perennial. Jelin, Elizabeth. 2002. Los trabajos de la memoria. Madrid: Editorial Siglo XXI. —-—-—. 2007. ‘Víctimas, familiares y ciudadanos/as: Las luchas por la legitimidad de la palabra’, Cadernos Pagu 29: 37–60. —-—-—. 2010. Fotografía e identidad: Captura por la cámara, devolución por la memoria. Montevideo: Nueva Trilce. —-—-—. 2017. La lucha por el pasado: Cómo construimos la memoria social. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores. Jimeno, Myriam. 2010. ‘Emociones y política: La “víctima” y la construcción de comunidades emocionales’, Mana: Estudios de Antropología Social 16: 99–121. Jimeno, Myriam, Ángela Castillo and Daniel Varela. 2019. ‘Violencia, comunidades emocionales y acción política en Colombia’, in Natalia de Marinis and Morna Macleod (eds), Resistiendo a la violencia: Comunidades emocionales en América Latina. Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, pp. 33–65. Leone, Miguel. 2013. ‘Memoria y pueblos indígenas: Posibilidades y limitaciones de un enfoque’, Prácticas de oficio: Investigación y reflexión en Ciencias Sociales 11(12): 20–31. Leyva Morelos Zaragoza, Salvador. 2019. ‘The Mexican General Law on the Forced Disappearance of Persons, Disappearances Committed by Individuals and the National Missing Persons System: How Many Steps Forward’, Mexican Law Review 12(1): 126–52. Registro Nacional de Personas Desaparecidas y No Localizadas (RNPDNO). 2022. Informe Anual de la Comisión Nacional de Búsqueda. Mexico City: CNB-­SG. Riaño Alcalá, Pilar. 2005. ‘Encuentros artísticos con el dolor, las memorias y las violencias’, Iconos: Revista de Ciencias Sociales 21: 91–104. —-—-—. 2008. ‘Journeys and Landscapes of Forced Migration: Memorializing Fear among Refugees and Internally Displaced

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Colombians’, Social Anthropology 16(1): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1111​ /j.1469-­8676.2008.00036.x. —-—-—. 2020. ‘Cantando el sufrimiento del rio: Memoria, poética y acción política de las cantadoras del Medio Atrato chocoano’, Revista Colombiana de Antropología 56(2): 79–110. https://doi.org/10.22380/25​ 39472X.793. Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. 2010. Ch’ixinakak utxiwa: Una reflexión sobre prácticas y discursos descolonizadores. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón Ediciones. Robbins, Joel. 2013. ‘Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19(3): 447–62. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-­9655.12044. Rojas-­Perez, Isaias. 2017. Mourning Remains: State Atrocity, Exhumations, and Governing the Disappeared in Peru’s Postwar Andes. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rus, Jan, Diane Rus and Salvador Guzmán Bakbolom (coordinators). 2016. El Taller Tzotzil 1985–2002: Un proyecto colaborativo de investigación y publicación en los Altos de Chiapas. San Cristóbal de las Casas: CESMECA; UNICACH; CELALI; INAREMAC. Segato, Rita L. 2013. La escritura en el cuerpo de las mujeres asesinadas en Ciudad Juárez: Territorio, soberanía y crímenes de segundo estado. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón Ediciones. Stephen, Lynn. 2017. ‘Bearing Witness: Testimony in Latin American Anthropology and Related Fields’, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 22: 85–109. https://doi.org/10.1111/jlca.12262. Stephen, Lynn, and Shannon Speed (eds). 2021. Indigenous Women and Violence: Feminist Activist Research in Heightened States of Injustice. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Troncoso Pérez, Lelya E., and Isabel P. Shafir. 2015. ‘Género y Memoria: Articulaciones Críticas y Feministas’, Athenea Digital 15(1): 65–90. United Nations. 2017. Report of the Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (SPT). Geneva: ONU. Valenzuela Arce, José M. 2019. Trazos de sangre y fuego, bionecropolítica y juvenicidio en América Latina. Bielefeld: CALAS.

Part III Alternative Ways of Knowing Mediating Absences, Negotiating Disappearances

8 Murky Disappearances How Competing Narratives Obscure Structures of Power along the France–UK Border Victoria Tecca

In the summer of 2019, a rumour spread around a makeshift settlement built by Kurdish migrants in Dunkirk, France that a woman named Nima had fallen from a boat in the Channel. Like all others living in the informal camp, she had been attempting to clandestinely cross the border from France into the United Kingdom due to a lack of legal routes for asylum seekers to the UK. This chapter examines the aftermath of her disappearance, focusing on the various and conflicting responses to and explanations of what occurred. In doing so, it analyses the resulting insecurities, disturbances and terror that emerged in the migrant settlement to show how competing narratives about her fate obscured the structures of violence and power that led to the conditions in which her disappearance was made possible. During my doctoral fieldwork from July 2018 to November 2019 among Kurdish migrants living in an informal camp on the France–UK border called Dankix (the data from which informs this chapter), fifty-­one people are known to have died as they attempted to clandestinely cross the border into the United Kingdom (Calais Migrant Solidarity 2021). Border deaths in northern France are almost always preceded by disappearance. The two are, therefore, intimately intwined, as the editors of this volume point out in the introduction by relating the politics of letting die to the ‘politics of letting disappear’. The disappeared, despite their absence, occupy space as ‘non-­lives’, straddling a boundary between life and death that is revealed to be fragile and ambiguous by the disappearance

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itself. As stated above, this chapter examines the aftermath of one such d ­ isappearance – t­hat of Nima. It does so by first focusing on how disappearances are used to legitimize certain narratives and to undermine others. Immediately after a disappearance, smugglers and state actors scramble to manufacture and disseminate a narrative that protects them and serves their aims. Onlookers and friends and family of the disappeared are drawn into these narratives, which produce in them an affective economy1 of doubt and fear (Ahmed 2004). These competing narratives are comparable to what is contemporarily termed ‘fake news’ or disinformation. Put simply, disinformation (here deliberately distinguished from ‘misinformation’) refers to false information that is presented as truth and is disseminated with the intention to mislead certain groups. The prefix ‘dis-’ reverses the meaning of the word’s root, while ‘mis-’ refers to that which is incorrect. Disinformation, therefore, aims not only to inject falsities into a discussion but, in doing so, explicitly seeks to remove evidence or transform epistemologies. This chapter aims to show how disinformation is used as a means to obfuscate, blur and muddy disappearances by relating it to Michael Taussig’s (1984) concept of ‘epistemic murk’ and ‘the fiction of the real’, which will be explored in further detail below.

Field Site and Methodology The makeshift settlement, or informal camp, in which the research was conducted is referred to in Sorani Kurdish as ‘Dankix’. Dankix is a phonetic adaptation of the French pronunciation of Dunkerque (Dunkirk in English), the closest city to the small town of Grande-­ Synthe in which the settlement is located. The Kurdish name refers to a particular spatial relationship to the region and its various embedded mobilities that are specific to undocumented Kurdish migrants who spend time there as they attempt to cross the border into the UK. Dankix unites geographically disparate areas such as the nature reserve in which tents are erected, a gymnasium opened as a migrant shelter by city hall, a bridge under which unaccompanied minors sleep, a Halal shop in a neighbouring suburb and a migrant-­friendly bar in Dunkirk’s town centre, among others. The name Dankix encompasses these small islands of meaningful spaces and places in a way that the names Dunkirk, Grande-­Synthe or ‘the camp’ do not. Dankix changes location and form seasonally and according to

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the current border enforcement landscape, but has existed in various forms since 2006, when a group of Kurdish migrants settled in a forested area in Grande-­Synthe called Basroch. Before this time, Kurds stayed either further to the west in settlements in Sangatte and Calais or in small settlements sporadically dotted throughout the region. By 2018, when I began my fieldwork, there was an ever-­changing population of between four hundred and eighteen hundred, dependent, again, on factors influencing Channel crossing rates such as the weather and intensity of border security. The existence of these informal camps is a direct result of the introduction of juxtaposed controls between France, the UK, Belgium and the Netherlands. Due to this agreement, which has been developed over the years through further agreements and policies since its original inception as the Sangatte Protocol (1991; Le Touquet Treaty 2003; Sangatte Additional Protocol 2000), the British border has effectively been externalized, whereby border controls take place before embarking on a journey to the UK, rather than upon arrival as is customary. People seeking asylum therefore cannot board a train, bus or ferry to travel to the UK and claim asylum at a port of entry. They must instead reach the UK through irregular means. The data upon which I rely throughout this chapter was generated during seventeen months of fieldwork in Dankix in 2018 and 2019. I conducted semi-­structured interviews, unstructured interviews and extensive participant observation. The majority of my research participants are young men in their twenties, excepting several women and some men between the ages of 30 and 70. All participants are from either Bashur (southern Kurdistan, or the region of Kurdistan that currently lies within Iraq’s borders) or Rojhelat (eastern Kurdistan, or the region of Kurdistan controlled by the Iranian state). To protect the anonymity of my participants, most of whom have yet to receive a decision on their asylum applications in the UK or elsewhere, some characters presented as research participants in this chapter are amalgamations of several different participants. All interactions outlined below occurred in Kurdish, except where noted.

Framing the Case: Undocumented Migration and the Smuggling Business Undocumented migration is widely understood to be a social process whereby people who cross borders do so by drawing upon a well of human and social capital (Singer and Massey 1998). Members

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of communities with long histories of out-­migration are ‘[socialized] into the rules of undocumented border crossing’ before even beginning their journeys (ibid.: 562). Kurdish migrants who wish to reach the UK know that they must do so by travelling to northern France and either hiding in the back of a lorry headed for the ferry and Eurotunnel ports or boarding a small boat and attempting to cross the Channel. Much of this process is fundamentally shaped by necropolitics, or a strategy of governance through exposure to death (Mbembe 2019). Drawing from and developing Foucauldian notions of biopower and Giorgio Agamben’s state of exception, Achille Mbembe (2003: 11) argues that ‘[t]he ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die’ (see Agamben 1998; Foucault 2003). The ability to determine who must die in the context of seeking asylum is not only exemplified by cases of direct execution, such as, for instance, that of Reza Barati, who died after being assaulted by Australian and Manusian guards while detained in Manus Prison; Anastasio Hernández Rojas, who was poisoned and beaten to death by United States border agents; or Mawda, a 2-­year-­old Kurdish girl who was shot and killed by a Belgian police officer while her family attempted to cross into the United Kingdom (ACLU 2016; Boochani 2018; Timberlake 2021). It is also possible to let certain groups or individuals die indirectly through ‘deterrents’, such as by suspending or withdrawing all legal migration routes and increasing securitization and infrastructure that creates bottlenecks at the border (Andersson 2014). Sometimes referred to as the ‘funnel effect’ (Chambers et al. 2021), this strategy of deterrence forces migrants into the open ocean (in Australia), the desert (in the United States) and the Channel (in northern France). By placing ­migrants – ­through deterrence ­policy – ­in these unforgiving and dangerous environments, the state exposes them to harm while displacing responsibility for ensuing loss of life onto smugglers or those migrating themselves (the two categories are not mutually exclusive, as will be shown below). Death and disappearance in borderlands are, in turn, easily misrecognized (in the Bourdieusian sense of the term)2 as an inevitable risk taken when attempting to clandestinely cross a border (Bourdieu 2000). Jason De León (2015: 68) summarizes this notion well in the context of the Sonoran Desert: ‘Nature “civilizes” the way the government deals with migrants; it does the dirty work.’ In the late 1990s and early 2000s, crossing to the UK was relatively simple. Most people did not require assistance from

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smugglers, and often crossed rather quickly. Over the past two decades, however, increased securitization of the border by both the French and British states has complicated the journey and led to the development of professional smuggling services. Various smuggling groups began to stake claims to car parks, overnight lorry parks and petrol stations in and around Grande-­Synthe, Le Mans, Paris, Le Havre and Amiens, and in various locations in Belgium and the Netherlands. As smugglers claimed more land and expanded their network, there were fewer and fewer places from which one could try hopping onto a lorry or climbing into a car boot without payment. Today, due to hyper-­securitization of the border and the resultant demand for smuggling services, it is nearly impossible to cross the border undetected without smugglers’ skilled knowledge and assistance. Throughout this chapter, I consistently use the term ‘smugglers’. It is important to note that the categories of ‘smuggler’ and ‘smuggled person’ are separated by a porous and ambiguous boundary. Most of my young, male research participants3 have allegedly participated in one way or another in smuggling while attempting to reach the UK from Dankix. There are multiple smuggling factions operating in Dankix, all of which are hierarchically organized, whereby lower-­ level smugglers are usually themselves migrants without enough money to pay for passage to the UK. Because their presence in France is illegalized by the state, they are excluded from the right to work and therefore must find illicit means of raising the funds required to cross. Most of those working as smugglers, therefore, do so for the promise of eventual free passage, which is common in similar border zones across the globe (see e.g. Kyle and Koslowski 2011). Lower-­level smugglers’ responsibilities usually include transporting migrants to lorry parks or beaches, opening lorry doors, checking destination addresses, watching out for police, siphoning diesel and petrol from other vehicles and conducting reconnaissance missions on beaches to monitor and record police activity. Because they are the most visible to police, they are the most likely to be arrested and incarcerated. They work for mid-­level smugglers, who often have refugee status or humanitarian protection in the UK or an EU country. Some mid-­level smugglers live outdoors in Dankix while others live in apartments or hotels in the region. They organize money transfers, act as a main point of contact for those being smuggled, recruit new workers and delegate tasks. They answer to an upper tier of smugglers who often live in the UK, France, the Netherlands or other EU countries and are rarely involved in daily

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operations. These often have indefinite leave to remain (permanent residency) or citizenship in their countries of residence. The term ‘smugglers’ therefore encompasses this heterogeneity of role, circumstance and relationship to the wider community in Dankix. Most lower-­level smugglers are involved in smuggling because of the multiple forms of violence they experience as a result of their illegalization by French, EU and British policies. Because there are no legalized, state-­facilitated routes to asylum in the UK besides very limited resettlement schemes, they have little choice but to pay to be smuggled across the border. If they do not have the funds to do so, their illegalization also restricts their range of options for making money. Many, therefore, work as smugglers for several weeks or months. This chapter uses the term ‘smugglers’ not to reify it as a category, but rather as one that contains as much plurality as the terms ‘migrants’ or ‘Dankix residents’.

Competing Narratives Returning to Nima, I illustrate her disappearance through the juxtaposition of several short snapshots to emphasize how disinformation circulates, and its impact in Dankix. The sources of the news reports included here have been omitted and their wording changed, while maintaining their original content and connotations, in order to ensure Nima’s anonymity. UK digital news report: The search has been called off for a migrant who is understood to have fallen from a dinghy 21 miles from the Kent coast. Three people wearing life vests were reported missing, and two were later found.   Lifeboats from Ramsgate and Dover and Coastguard helicopters were used in the search. It was called off at 11 a.m. on ­Thursday – ­just over 24 hours after authorities were first alerted. A spokesman for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) said: ‘The search for a missing person in the Channel has ended as we await further information. A systematic search by air and sea was completed, involving coastguards on the British, French and Belgian sides, but nothing was found.’   Freight and passenger ships in the Channel have been asked to remain alert. The search mission was continued at dawn, before it ended again after several hours.   During the incident, it is understood that seventeen people, including six children, from Iraq and Iran were rescued. They were brought to the Dover Marina by Border Force and Kent Police.

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Home Office spokesperson: Our thoughts are with the loved ones of this woman at this tragic and horrible time. We will continue to work with other organizations as we continue to investigate this incident.   Crossing the Channel in an overcrowded boat is an enormous risk. We want to crack down on the ruthless criminal gangs who perpetuate this. They are callous and do not care about loss of life.   We thank all the agencies and organizations, including the Coastguard and RNLI, who coordinated the rescue attempt.

It is unusual that British journalists were interested in Nima’s disappearance. Disappearances at the border are seldom mediatized, but she was the first person known to the British and French authorities ever to have fallen overboard during a Channel boat crossing attempt. Her disappearance occurred roughly ten months after smugglers professionalized the water route4 and at this point boat crossings were cheaper and more successful than lorry crossings. That month, nearly all of those who made it to the UK had done so via the Channel. As will be ethnographically illustrated below, her disappearance worried ­smugglers – t­hey were likely concerned that people would lose faith in their services and choose lorry crossings, which had been made exceptionally difficult due to increased securitization funded by a recent influx of British cash (Joint Action Plan 2019; Sandhurst Treaty 2018). Yet those living in Dankix already knew the risks involved in boat crossings. Most who cross by boat do so because the risk of drowning is minimal compared to the dangers of staying in Dankix for months and making dozens of unsuccessful attempts by lorry. If Nima was dead, however, the risks of a boat crossing would feel more tangible to those weighing up the dangers of lorry and boat crossings. Were migrants to reassess the perils of Channel crossings and choose to cross only by lorry, smugglers would be unable to guarantee swift passage and their business would suffer. To mitigate this, two purported lower-­level smugglers named Bryar and Shkar (themselves also attempting to reach the UK to claim asylum), along with most other alleged smugglers in Dankix at the time, argued that Nima had never boarded the dinghy in the first place. Bryar: ‘Nima couldn’t have died on that boat. Those two men who claim to have seen her are lying [referencing the two men on the dinghy who alerted the British authorities to Nima’s fall]. They said there were three of them on that dinghy [according to rumours in Dankix] but that’s not how it works. It needs to be at least ten people to maintain

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the right weight, otherwise it capsizes. Since last week nobody has tried crossing by dinghy.’ Victoria: ‘What if they bought their own boat and tried?’ Shkar: ‘The smugglers would know. They didn’t buy their own boat.’ Victoria: ‘But look at this photo [I show them a photograph from an online news article about Nima’s disappearance showing the dinghy from which she fell].’ Shkar: ‘That’s obviously not their dinghy. It has two Jerry cans, and that type of motor only needs one. The journalist is lying.’ Bryar: ‘I agree.’ Shkar: ‘The two men probably crossed, and that woman is somewhere in France. Or they did something to her, they raped her or killed her, and they’re using this story to cover it up.’ Victoria: ‘But this article says that the men were arrested in the water on the British side, and the police went on a huge search mission for over 24 hours—’ Bryar: ‘So? The men could be lying, the journalist could be lying.’ Shkar: ‘Look, go to Karzan’s café tomorrow. Ask everyone there what happened. Everyone will say the same thing. Nima did not die. And if she did, it’s because those men who claim to have been on the dinghy with her killed her and left her body in France.’

By the time this conversation occurred, very little information about the events surrounding Nima’s disappearance had been disseminated by Kurdish news outlets and social media networks. At the time, all that was reported was that two men had attempted the crossing with Nima, that Nima had fallen overboard and that the men alerted the British authorities upon arrival on UK shores. Smugglers postulated that the two men had murdered Nima and left her body in France because it was impossible for a dinghy to cross the Channel with only three people aboard (though there was no explanation for how those two men had reached the UK). Smugglers used their professional knowledge and social capital to refute the story as a lie created through the collaboration of journalists and the state, a perception that was only reinforced by the Home Office’s reaction: that her disappearance was caused by the dangerous waters and the smugglers involved. Bryar and Shkar told me to go to Karzan’s café, which refers to a makeshift structure built reportedly by mid-­level smugglers in the middle of the tent settlement. Karzan sells food, tea and shisha, and also allegedly conducts smuggling business from his café. That Bryar and Shkar told me to go to his café and speak with ‘everyone there’ implies that this narrative was disseminated by mid-­level smugglers to their lower-­level employees, who then further spread it among others in Dankix.

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Lastly, considering that journalists in the region of Kurdistan controlled by Iraq are often affiliated with either of the two ruling political parties (the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan), and many journalists who do not support the state are reportedly detained or assassinated (see e.g. Reporters Without Borders 2019), it is logical for them to assume that British journalists publish narratives that support the British state’s aims. When I countered that the group could have bought their own boat and attempted the crossing without smugglers, Bryar and Shkar constructed smugglers as omniscient: ‘The smugglers would know’, emphasizing their power and reach. Through this narrative, smugglers displaced responsibility for Nima’s disappearance from themselves, the state or the water itself to the two men who alerted the British authorities of her fall. Fieldnotes: One of the security guards at the camp5 calls me over: ‘[In French] Hey! I haven’t seen you in a while. How are you?’ We make small talk, and just before I need to leave, he tells me, ‘By the way, just so you know, Nima is dead. Start spreading the word among the guys.’6   ‘How do you know?’   ‘I can’t tell you that. But she’s definitely dead.’

Fieldnotes: One of Nima’s friends, Abed, approaches me outside of the camp. He has a huge smile on his face.   ‘I wanted to give you an update’, he says, ‘A few friends of mine in the UK said that Nima’s alive. She’s in the hospital and has been there for a few days.’   ‘Really? How do they know?’   ‘I don’t know. I don’t have any more information than that.’

Kurdish diaspora Facebook page: It can now be revealed that Nima, the Rojhelati [Kurd from the region of Kurdistan controlled by Iran] woman missing from Dankix, was pushed into the water by another person on the boat. There is not much more information than this, so we will keep you updated as we uncover any new revelations.   Her family in Sine [a Kurdish city] are looking for her, may God look after her and save them from this terrible pain.

Fieldnotes: Most people [living in Dankix] seem to quietly believe that Nima fell overboard and drowned. Yet they do not openly discuss their beliefs.

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When we do discuss what happened, we do so in the privacy of my car or in hushed tones in a tent. Everyone is careful in considering with whom they speak about her. Several people have told me to avoid the topic. Everybody knows with which smugglers she tried to cross, but they want to keep their knowledge secret.   Smugglers continue to deny that she boarded the dinghy in the first place. The security guards at the camp continue to spread rumours that she has died. Nima’s friends are convinced that she is alive and recovering in a British hospital.

Excerpt from an interview with Banaz, a young woman from Hewler7 (the capital of the region of Kurdistan in Iraq) who had been living in Dankix for several months as she attempted to cross to the UK: It’s not just one woman [Nima] that’s died here. When I told my family that I was coming here [to Dankix] they told me what it’s like for women here. One thousand women have died here, not one. They say she fell from the dinghy, they say she was murdered in France, they say she’s alive in the UK, they say this and that but does it matter? I don’t trust any of them. The smugglers lie, and the security guards lie, and the government lies. What are we supposed to believe? Women have died in all of the ways that they are saying she might have died.

UK digital news report: A body was recovered from Belgian waters, police said, that is presumed to be that of the missing migrant who fell from a boat while crossing the Channel. The woman is known to have fallen a fortnight ago. Seventeen others on board, who were from Iran and Iraq, were intercepted and rescued by immigration officers, the Home Office said at the time.   Previously listed as missing, Kent Police now believe the body found in Belgian waters is that of the missing woman.

As the days pass and more information is shared, the smugglers’ story becomes unbelievable to many of those living in Dankix. Information about the circumstances surrounding Nima’s disappearance filtered through English-­language news sites, Kurdish diaspora pages on social media and word of mouth convinces most residents that Nima did indeed fall during a crossing attempt. Yet each of these outlets disseminates different and often contradictory information, including the number of passengers on the dinghy, where they were found and their nationalities and other demographic details. Further, the security guards and some of Abed’s acquaintances in the UK stake conflicting claims to knowledge that are incongruent with the already circulating stories espoused by smugglers and the Home Office. Fear spreads among those living in ­Dankix – a­ bout what fate

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has befallen Nima, certainly, but also about presenting themselves as not knowing which smugglers organized her crossing. To present oneself as knowledgeable is to make oneself a target for that particular smuggling group, who are invested in withholding their identities from the police and border agents. As the excerpt from Banaz’s interview demonstrates, these competing and confusing narratives mean that many do not know what to believe. Disinformation sows fear, uncertainty and mistrust within the community that leads to many, including Banaz, feeling that they cannot trust those around them, are acutely insecure and have little agency. As Banaz, who is a young, unmarried woman travelling alone, states, ‘Women have died in all of the ways that they are saying [Nima] might have died.’ The different stories espoused by various actors are not implausible; they are powerful precisely because they have happened to women in Dankix in the past. Disappearance, in this way, has a particular affective economy that envelops many of those living in the informal camp. Banaz’s doubt and fear are not simply emotions that reside within her, but merge with the emotions of those around her, circulate and coalesce into a shroud of profound distrust. She is disturbed by the reshaping and retelling of Nima’s story, from which emerges an epistemic murk that denies her the ability to know what happened to Nima.

Epistemic Murk In describing epistemic murkiness, I am referring to Michael Taussig’s (1987: xiii) concept of ‘epistemic murk and the fiction of the real’. As Taussig develops it, epistemic murk is produced by fictitious realities or magical realisms made powerful ‘in the coils of rumour, gossip, story, and chit-­chat’, and sustains ‘cultures of terror’ that enable violence against a culturally constructed Other, such as migrants living in Dankix (Taussig 1984: 464). Fictitious realities, or what I refer to throughout this chapter as disinformation and competing narratives, undermine the reality of those living with disappearance. To cite a well-­known example, during Argentina’s Dirty War the military dictatorship disappeared an estimated thirty thousand people while publicly declaring that they were struggling against subversion. The state’s official narrative was that many of those disappeared had in fact died in combat due to their involvement in guerrilla warfare (Burchianti 2004). Through an examination of military documents and reports, in addition to interviews with key actors of the time,

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Antonius Robben (2014) shows that those involved in the dictatorship discursively reproduced the perception that those targeted for disappearance and assassination had irreconcilably different values and morality systems to those of wider Argentine society. These disinforming stories of subversion created a culture of terror that compelled members of the military to ‘extirpate all evil’, in the words of one general (ibid.: 149). This culture of terror spread throughout Argentina, whereby ‘[n]obody was beyond suspicion, and life could not be taken for granted because the boundaries with death were permeable political constructions’ (ibid.: 148). In Dankix, upon Nima’s disappearance, stories that speculated about her fate circulated in hushed tones, in rumours of unknown origin and proposed by those with varying degrees of power. Because Nima had disappeared, to those in Dankix she was not alive but not yet dead. Instead, she occupied a space of non-­life until she reappeared in the form of human remains. As Robben (2014) puts it, the permeability of the boundary between life and death was thrown into sharp relief by her disappearance, and terror arises from the perception of one’s own closeness to death. Banaz, as she notes above, is afraid both of those around her and of becoming Nima; her anxiety stems from the threat of her own disappearance. Disappearance, operationalized as a ‘threat’ to those close to the disappeared, is conceptualized by many of the contributors to this book as ‘extended disappearance’. The affective economy generated by Nima’s disappearance is testament to this: her disappearance expands temporally and materially. As her story is repeated and rewritten through various narratives, she disappears again and again. Sometimes, she disappears after falling from a dinghy. At other times, she disappears when she is taken by two men. Others imagine what it would be like to themselves disappear in these same ways. Many do not have to stretch their imagination, because disappearance in Dankix is not an infrequent occurrence. In other contexts, many of those caught in extended disappearances are in danger of themselves being disappeared due to their close association and ties to the original disappeared person, particularly in situations where the state is the enforcer of the disappearance (Slyomovics 2005; Robben 2014). In Dankix, disappearance is somewhat slippery. Whoever is responsible for Nima vanishing is identified through these narratives as a multitude of actors, including the Channel, the state, smugglers and the blurry and frightening spectre of unknown men. Responsibility for her disappearance is passed between these groups with each new narrative that emerges, from which is produced an epistemic murk

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that renders unknowable what happened to Nima. The result is a terror that paralyses the entire community, because everyone living in Dankix has been rendered ‘disappearable’ by the necropolitical logic of border control (Laakkonen 2022), and anyone, therefore, can disappear.

Murky Ethnography The epistemic murk shrouding the circumstances behind Nima’s disappearances extends to myself as ethnographer. So, too, does the affective economy elucidated by Banaz’s testimony above. On several occasions, after Nima’s disappearance, I was threatened by the faction of smugglers who were rumoured to have organized her Channel crossing attempt. On one such instance, two men I had never before seen approached me in the tent settlement and asked whether I knew what had occurred. Cognizant of the dangers of presenting myself as knowledgeable, and truly unaware of with whom she had attempted to cross, I denied all understanding of the circumstances surrounding her disappearance. The men smirked at me with malice; ‘Of course you know who took her [to cross]’, they said. Before they walked away, they ended our conversation with a threat: ‘We’re listening to everything.’ At the same time, I was also threatened by the French border police, the Police aux Frontières. Several times an officer called my cell phone, telling me that he had retrieved my phone number via their Kurdish informants in Dankix. He told me that if I had information that I did not disclose I would expose myself to prosecution. I became afraid and untrusting, unwilling to discuss Nima’s disappearance in order to maintain my safety. While some narratives of her disappearance were deafening in their noise, such as that of the smugglers, other stories guessing at aspects of her disappearance were therefore muted, circulated only in disjointed whispers. These narratives stifle some voices and amplify others. The ­silenced – h ­ ere being those with lived experience that refutes the proposed versions of ­reality – ­are, as a consequence, constructed as unable to analyse their own experiences or produce knowledge (Emerick 2019). Nima’s disappearance lays bare the limits of a methodology that relies on what we see, do and hear. How does one study what is not there? Further, how does one study phenomena whose knowability carries acute danger? Anthropologists have engaged with this question by conducting what Yael Navaro (2020: 162) calls a ‘negative

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methodology’, examining for instance the material traces of absence (De León 2015), their convergence with memory, place and afterlife (Mandel and Lehr 2020) or the reproduction and transference of affect across generations (Navaro-­Yashin 2009). In such contexts, particularly in the aftermath of mass violence, the ethnographer is faced with the unknowability of what they are studying. Disappearance poses comparable epistemological challenges, whereby the d ­ isappeared – ­the key subject of v­ iolence – i­s not there to explain the ‘truth’ of what has occurred. We are left instead ‘among the debris of violence’, the pieces of which we are unable to fit back together (Navaro 2020: 163). The murkiness of Nima’s disappearance extends, therefore, to this ethnography of her absence. The latter does not attempt to establish a ‘master narrative’ from which the silences and gaps within these various competing narratives might be identified (Sultana 1992: 20). Nima’s disappearance remains murky, clouded and confused by disinformation. Rather than the events surrounding her disappearance, it is this murkiness ­itself – ­the unknowability of what has o ­ ccurred – ­that remains for the ethnographer to study.

Conclusion In conceptualizing absence, Mikkel Bille, Frida Hastrup and Tim Flohr Sørensen (2010: 4) argue that it is an ‘ambiguous interrelation between what is there and what is not’. An absence, here marked by a disappearance, is not only an erasure, but a transformation of that which remains. New intimacies and subjectivities are created while others are destroyed. The affective economy of disappearance, characterized by doubt, fear and uncertainty, circulates through the spaces created by Nima’s absence. They are evidence of the ‘disturbed intimacies’ – as several contributors to this book have put ­it – ­produced by Nima’s ambiguous status as neither dead nor alive. Indeed, disappearance and death are closely related. Yet disappearance constitutes a display of necropower (and a condition of necropolitics) that is distinct from death. Disappearance carries with it ambiguity as to the fate and whereabouts of the disappeared. It lacks both the finality of death and the epistemological certainty that facilitates grief and mourning. If the body is taken as evidence both of life history and of cause of death (Ferrándiz and Robben 2015), the politics of disappearance is marked by the ‘eradication of flesh and bone’ (De León 2015: 70). Disappearance, in this way, jarringly reveals a disturbing closeness between life and d ­ eath – w ­ hile escaping

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both ­categories – t­hat has considerable affective repercussions for those from whom the disappeared has vanished. As the editors of this volume discuss in the introduction, the disappearance of undocumented migrants while migrating leads us to question the perceptions of responsibility and intention that are implied in the oft-­used term ‘enforced’ disappearances. In response to these challenges, Allen Feldman (2019: 182) has developed the notion of ‘accidentalized disappearance’. State actors and popular media often characterize migrant disappearances and deaths as tragedies, inescapable and often accidental. In this way, structural ­violence – ­that which renders certain people ‘disappearable’ – is hidden through processes of symbolic violence that normalize the notion that some individuals and groups are more disappearable than others (Bourdieu 2000). And yet Nima’s disappearance is not accidentalized. No actor argues that there is nobody to blame for her disappearance, nor do they deny her disappearance, as states have historically claimed in other contexts (Slyomovics 2005: 45). Instead, they shift responsibility for her disappearance to one another until those living in Dankix, such as Banaz, become overwhelmed with uncertainty and fear. Migrant deaths and disappearances are characterized by state actors as the fault of migrants and smuggling groups, while smugglers place blame on shadowy actors who commit imagined horrors. Not only do these conflicting representations of a single event obscure the role of immigration policy in the closure and creation of particular migrant ­routes – n ­ amely that deterrent border policies in the UK create a bottleneck that sends migrants into the open sea (see also De León 2015; Feldman 2019) – they also produce a particular affective economy of uncertainty and fear. This constant shifting of blame and responsibility casts further doubt upon the circumstances surrounding Nima’s disappearance and contributes to a culture of terror, as those peripheral to Nima fear that they, too, will disappear. In response to this, I argue that Nima’s can be considered a ‘murky disappearance’. From the disappearance itself emerges an epistemic murkiness that is opaque and oppressive. Murk hides in its thickness that which lurks underneath and any attempt at navigation leaves one utterly lost in its depths. This murkiness, generated by the plural and diverging reconstructions of Nima’s disappearance, has the effect of blurring, abstracting and ultimately concealing structures of violence and power, particularly those that produce the conditions in which Nima was made disappearable in the first place. A murky disappearance is therefore a similar process to that of accidentalization. It is distinct, however, in that there is no denial of the enforced

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nature of the disappearance by any actor involved. While epistemologies are made murky and knowledge is denied, one fact remains clear: that there is somebody to blame. Just as those responsible are identified, however, they seemingly elude identification and vanish, leaving those who remain with only the acute awareness of their own disappearability. Victoria Tecca is a migrants’ rights advocate and anthropologist with expertise in cross-­Channel migration, border deaths, smuggling networks and exploitation. Her research examines the intersections between violence and affect in a makeshift tent settlement built by illegalized Kurdish migrants along the France–UK border. She specializes in maximizing the policy impact of academic research by translating findings into formats tailored for policymakers, the public and people affected by displacement. She currently works as a Policy Impact Manager for the Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre.

Notes 1. ‘Affective economies’, as developed by Sara Ahmed (2004), refer to a lens through which to examine affect and emotion not simply as psychological dispositions, but as phenomena that act in tangible ways. Affect can circulate throughout a social group, is unevenly distributed and mediates relations between individuals and a collective. 2. Misrecognition refers to one of many processes of symbolic violence, or the normalization and widespread acceptance of violence through particular discourse and practices (Bourdieu 2001). Misrecognition is a process through which power relations are perceived in a way that makes them legible and legitimate to the person who confronts them (Bourdieu 2000). 3. Smuggling in Dankix is a gendered profession in which women rarely work. Lower-­level smuggling roles also require considerable fitness and agility (for e.g. running from police, opening lorry doors, carrying dinghies, motors and petrol, etc), which is why mostly men in their twenties and thirties take on these roles. 4. It is well known among Kurds who have passed through Dankix that until late 2018, most people who arrived in the UK by dinghy or small boat had bought a craft and motor themselves and crossed without smuggling assistance. In response to the success of these crossings and restricted by increased securitization of the lorry route, smugglers began sporadically offering their services via the water route, leading to ninety-­four migrants being detained after or during maritime crossing attempts between 25 and 28 December 2018 (Mohdin 2018). In response, the UK Home Secretary

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and French Minister of the Interior developed the Joint Action Plan, which targeted these crossings by increasing securitization of the maritime border (Joint Action Plan 2019). This made it difficult to navigate the route undetected without smuggling assistance. In response, smuggling groups reportedly found ways around these new surveillance technologies and began to offer the water route as an option to migrants. In 2018, three hundred people were recorded by the British media and Home Office as having crossed via the Channel (Brown 2021). By 2021, however, this number had increased to 28,431 (BBC News 2022). 5. ‘The camp’ refers to a gymnasium opened by Grande-­Synthe city hall to shelter several hundred migrants from December 2018 to September 2019. The security guards working at the camp are employed by a company contracted by city hall. The company usually provides security for public events in Grande-­Synthe, such as outdoor concerts or festivals. 6. I was often approached to spread information because I speak Kurdish. Most security guards at the time spoke French and Arabic. 7. Hewler is called Erbil or Irbil in English.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-­Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ahmed, Sara. 2004. ‘Affective Economies’, Social Text 79(22/2): 117–39. Andersson, Ruben. 2014. Illegality, Inc. Oakland: University of California Press. Bille, Mikkel, Frida Hastrup, and Tim Flohr Sørensen (eds). 2010. An Anthropology of Absence: Materializations of Transcendence and Loss. New York: Springer. Boochani, Behrouz. 2018. No Friend but the Mountains, trans. Omid Tofighian. Sydney: Picador. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2000. Pascalian Meditations, trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Polity Press. —-—-—. 2001. Masculine Domination, trans. Richard Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Brown, Thomas. 2021. ‘Migrants Arriving in the UK by Boat’, House of Lords Library. Retrieved 14 January 2022 from https://lordslibrary.parli​ ament.uk/migrants-­arriving-­in-­the-­uk-­by-­boat/. Burchianti, Margaret E. 2004. ‘Building Bridges of Memory: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Cultural Politics of Maternal Memories’, History and Anthropology 15(2): 133–50. Chambers, Samuel N., et al. 2021. ‘Mortality, Surveillance and the Tertiary “Funnel Effect” on the U.S.-Mexico Border: A Geospatial Modeling of the Geography of Deterrence’, Journal of Borderlands Studies 36(3): 443–68.

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‘Channel Migrants: Crossing Numbers in 2021 Triple 2020’s Figure’. 2022. BBC News, 4 January. Retrieved 14 January 2022 from https://www.bbc​ .co.uk/news/uk-­england-­kent-­59861376. ‘Deaths at the Calais Border’. 2021. Calais Migrant Solidarity website. Retrieved 22 October 2021 from https://calaismigrantsolidarity.word​ press.com/deaths-­at-­the-­calais-­border/. De León, Jason. 2015. The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. Oakland: University of California Press. Emerick, Barrett. 2019. ‘The Violence of Silencing’, in Jennifer Kling (ed.), Pacifism, Politics, and Feminism: Intersections and Innovations. Leiden: Brill, pp. 28–50. Feldman, Allen. 2019. ‘War under Erasure: Contretemps, Disappearance, Anthropophagy, Survivance’, Theory & Event 22(1): 175–203. Ferrándiz, Francisco, and Antonius C.G.M. Robben (eds). 2015. Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Foucault, Michel. 2003. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontano, trans. David Macey. New York: Picador. Joint Action Plan. 2019. Joint Action Plan by the UK and France on Combating Illegal Migration Involving Small Boats in the English Channel. 24 January. London: HMSO. ‘Justice for Anastasio’. 2016. ACLU website. Retrieved 14 January 2022 from https://www.aclu.org/blog/justice-­anastasio. Kyle, David, and Rey Koslowski (eds). 2011. Global Human Smuggling: Comparative Perspectives. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Laakkonen, Ville. 2022. ‘Deaths, Disappearances, Borders: Migrant Disappearability as a Technology of Deterrence’, Political Geography 99: 102767. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2022.102767. Le Touquet Treaty. 2003. Treaty between the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Government of the French Republic Concerning the Implementation of Frontier Controls at the Sea Ports of Both Countries on the Channel and North Sea. Le Touquet, 4 February. Cm 5832 (entered into force 1 February 2004). London: HMSO. Mandel, Ruth, and Rachel Lehr. 2020. ‘Failing to Remember: Afterlives and Stolpersteine in the Nordic Region’, Journal of Jewish Studies 71(2): 365–96. Mbembe, Achille. 2003. ‘Necropolitics’, trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15(1): 11–40. —-—-—. 2019. Necropolitics, trans. Steven Corcoran. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mohdin, Aamna. 2018. ‘Sajid Javid: Channel Migrant Crossings “a Major Incident”’, Guardian, 28 December. Retrieved 14 January 2022 from

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https://www.theguardian.com/uk-­news/2018/dec/28/channel-­migrant​ -­crossings-­a-major-­incident-­says-­sajid-­javid. Navaro, Yael. 2020. ‘The Aftermath of Mass Violence: A Negative Methodology’, Annual Review of Anthropology 49: 161–73. Navaro-­Yashin, Yael. 2009. ‘Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects: Ruination and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15(1): 1–18. Robben, Antonius C.G.M. 2014. ‘Governing the Disappeared-­Living and the Disappeared-­Dead: The Violent Pursuit of Cultural Sovereignty during Authoritarian Rule in Argentina’, in Finn Stepputat (ed.), Governing the Dead: Sovereignty and the Politics of Dead Bodies. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 143–62. Sandhurst Treaty. 2018. Treaty between the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Government of the French Republic Concerning the Reinforcement of Cooperation for the Coordinated Management of Their Shared Border. Sandhurst, 1 February. Cm 9568 (entered into force 1 February 2018). London: HMSO. Sangatte Additional Protocol. 2000. Additional Protocol to the Sangatte Protocol between the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Government of the French Republic on the Establishment of Bureaux Responsible for Controls on Persons Travelling by Train between France and the United Kingdom. Brussels, 29 May. Cm 5015 (entered into force 25 May 2001). London: HMSO. Sangatte Protocol. 1991. Protocol between the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Government of the French Republic Concerning Frontier Controls and Policing, Co-operation in Criminal Justice, Public Safety and Mutual Assistance Relating to the Channel Fixed Link. Sangatte, 25 November. Cm 2366 (entered into force 2 August 1993). London: HMSO. Singer, Audrey, and Douglas S. Massey. 1998. ‘The Social Process of Undocumented Border Crossing among Mexican Migrants’, International Migration Review 32(3): 561–92. Slyomovics, Susan. 2005. The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Sultana, Ronald G. 1992. ‘Ethnography and the Politics of Absence’, Qualitative Studies in Education 5(1): 19–27. Taussig, Michael. 1984. ‘Culture of ­Terror – S­ pace of Death: Roger Casement’s Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 26(3): 467–97. —-—-—. 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Timberlake, Frances. 2021. ‘Mawda ­Shawri – ­When Truth, Justice and Humanity Are in Short Supply’, Institute of Race Relations.

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Retrieved 20 March 2023 from https://irr.org.uk/article/mawda-­ shawri/. ‘Well-­Known TV Host’s Death in Iraqi ­Kurdistan – ­Murder or Suicide?’ 2019. Reporters Without Borders website. Retrieved 14 January 2022 from https://rsf.org/en/news/well-­known-­tv-­hosts-­death-­iraqi-­kurdist​ an-­murder-­or-­suicide.

9 Being There in the Presence of Absence Researching the Remains of Migrant Disappearances Ville Laakkonen

I am with a group of volunteers from an NGO I have joined for the summer. We are cleaning the beaches on Lesvos’s northern shore to maintain good relations with the locals. This particular small stretch of beach is barely accessible on ­foot – w ­ e used ropes tied to a tree for safe ­climbing – a­ nd has no actual everyday use whatsoever outside of migrant landings, but it does not look very clean as it is. Furthermore, nobody wants all the plastic to be washed back into the sea. The atmosphere is remarkably easy-­going for what we are dealing with. Remains of wooden fishing boats, parts left from dinghies, plastic water bottles, shoes, torn life jackets, backpacks, ropes, more bottles, a children’s swimming ring with colourful fishes, discarded Turkish ID cards. After a few hours, they are all either piled up at the end of the beach or collected in rubbish bags, almost twenty of them. Once the NGO’s RHIB [a fast, agile and lightweight boat capable of manoeuvring in shallow waters] comes to collect them, very little is left to remind us of the numerous migrant landings, wrecked boats and torn life jackets this remote corner of the shore has ­seen – u ­ ntil new ones appear. —Fieldnotes, summer 2019

Where and how do we situate anthropological knowledge and the ethnographic account of such knowledge, when much of what we are looking to work with is inaccessible or present only in a residual or piecemeal form? Since 2018, I have been researching migrant1 disappearances in Greece, an important Mediterranean node in mobility bound for the Global North. During my research, sites such as the

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one described above have formed a crucial point of contact with this kind of cross-­border mobility, and I have been constantly faced with the limits of knowledge about what has taken place and the irretrievability of past experiences. Together with cemeteries, material remains, either washed ashore or left behind along the migration trails, make up a sizeable part of my research data. In this chapter, I take on a twofold task. I discuss how traces (Napolitano 2015), and even more importantly, auras, in Walter Benjamin’s (1999, 2002; Hansen 2008) sense of the term, become a key point in understanding what has taken place, and I argue that in situations like the one I found myself in, the task of ethnography is to construct a context wherein such traces and auras make sense. Mostly between the spring of 2019 and that of 2020, I carried out fieldwork on the island of Lesvos, in Athens and around the Evros region. During that time, I joined an NGO responding to new arrivals crossing from Turkey, followed the work of forensic professionals, mapped and documented cemeteries, interviewed migrants, activists and local residents, and tried my best to immerse myself in the everyday life of the various locations on the Greek side of the Greek–Turkish borderlands. I had set out to answer the question of what ­happens – ­socially, culturally and ­politically – ­before, during and after migrant disappearances. Yet the material remains of mobility described in the opening vignette highlight the limits of ‘being there’, perceived in the traditional anthropological sense: often I was observing not the emergence, but the aftermath, of an event. The chapter is based on that fieldwork, which involved participant observation and ‘deep hanging out’ (Geertz 1998), but in which I increasingly found myself dealing with social relations and material conditions that were altered by something I could not have witnessed. This involved staring at the debris, piecing together what may or may not have happened and trying to provide context to unnamed, silent graves. However, just as the silence of the unnamed graves did not indicate a dead end but rather a knot in my inquiry, the material remains were not where my observations ended: the rubbish, the crushed boats and the personal effects ­speak – ­of presences and histories, of mobility and tragedy. The questions to which I found myself looking for answers were, as I will elaborate, how to contextualize and account for the presences I encountered and what they could tell me about what was absent. In my research, I propose to engage with not just disappearances, but disappearability. While I will discuss disappearability in more detail below, it is useful to note here that with such a research

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orientation I seek to highlight how migrant disappearances do not simply happen by accident and in any possible situation, but instead arise from particular conditions under which undocumented mobility towards the Global North often takes place. It follows that knowledge of such disappearances is also produced under the same conditions. This configures ethnography’s possibilities in a very distinct way. Anthropological discussions on the nature of ‘evidence’ (e.g. Descola 2005; Engelke 2008; Lambert 2009) have noted that anthropological knowledge is relational, implicit, interpretative and acquired progressively through practice. That it has these qualities is certainly true, but it is important to note that the majority of such arguments are concerned with ‘positive’ knowledge and methodology, where ‘evidence’ is readily accessible. However, in my inquiry into disappearances I was constantly faced with what was not there (Huttunen and Perl, this volume). The clandestine nature of cross-­ border mobilities that causes disappearances and border deaths and the opacity and impenetrability of official responses to such tragedies meant that ‘evidence’ was always elusive (Kivilahti and Huttunen, this volume). The focus of much of my research, then, was forced to lie precisely in making sense of what was not there. I had to engage with the ‘negative’ (Fowles 2008; Navaro 2020). Yael Navaro (2020: 165) has charted ways around the absences, silences and misappropriations of knowledge in the context of mass violence and genocide, through ‘tarrying in the negative’. Both her analysis and Mikkel Bille, Frida Hastrup and Tim Flohr Sørensen’s (2010: 4) notion that ‘absences are cultural, physical and social phenomena’ greatly inform my argument. In what follows, I will proceed by outlining what I mean by disappearability and look into three different sets of problems encountered over the course of my fieldwork. They are all practical, but they are also methodological and epistemological. The first of these sets is related to research ethics and the second to encounters with gatekeeping and silences, while the third set deals with constructing a credible account of what has happened. To overcome these problems, I will then move on to material traces as sources of knowledge and elaborate on Walter Benjamin’s notion of an aura. In the final part of this chapter, I suggest that ethnography is a practice of building a context where absences, anomalies, rejections and uncertainties are data in themselves.

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Researching Migrant Disappearability By migrant disappearability I refer to situations conditioned by various cumulative precarities, such as unsafe routes and means of transport, pushbacks and detentions, and being forced to travel clandestinely, which then materialize into the disappearable subject. On the one hand, migrant disappearability is a c­ondition – o ­r a threat of a ­condition – ­inflicted on individuals while they are forced into undocumented mobility. On the other hand, it is a deliberate strategy of deterrence employed by states and border enforcement authorities (Laakkonen 2022). Disappearable migrants occupy an ambiguous space between enforced disappearances, as exemplified by Latin America (Gatti 2014; Robben 2005) and Bosnia (Huttunen 2016; Wagner 2008), and cases of the ‘ordinary missing’, which often engender a personal or familial rupture rather than a societal one (e.g. Parr, Stevenson and Woolnough 2016). Disappearability is the result of violence and deterrence that define and enforce the borderlands but are simultaneously masked as ‘accidentalized’ (Feldman 2019) by both authorities and most media accounts. Disappearability operates in a variety of often interrelated temporalities: as a historically layered phenomenon, it has developed over time as various new configurations of border enforcement, surveillance and anti-­migration strategies have been adopted. However, it can simultaneously materialize in an instant, such as in the case of a car crash or a drowning, leaving behind a body without a name or a family member holding onto a name without a body. The construction of an ethnographic account of disappearability comes with a number of problems that are at least partially present in participant observation and anthropological research in general, but also with others that are specific to disappearance and disappearability. While the rest of the chapter narrows its focus to the perspective of the anthropologist, it is worth noting that families of disappeared migrants experience similar kinds of absence, silence and erasure when dealing with the liminality (Huttunen 2016: 202) of their loved ones, and this is also part of what makes disappearability a specific condition.

The First Set of Problems: The Ethics of a Tragedy The most traditional line of inquiry, that is, the collection of ‘evidence’ via participant observation, interviews, fieldnotes and photographs, may well run into a fundamental problem: not every setting

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is there for the researcher to participate in. Not every experience can be tapped into. As much as we may hate to admit it, there are things that ­can – ­and sometimes ­should – ­be left unsaid. In the summer of 2019, I learned of a shipwreck that took place roughly two months before my arrival in Greece. A child’s life was lost. I could have interviewed people who were present on the shore at the time of the tragedy, including those who took part in the search and rescue, and could have supplemented my knowledge with news articles and a forensic assessment of the incident. What I was missing, however, was the consent of the surviving family members to publish an in-­ depth analysis of what was ultimately their tragedy. As Indigenous struggles for the repatriation of ancestors’ and family members’ remains taken away in the name of colonial science remind us (e.g. Smith and Wobst 2005; Thomas and Bijon 2018), there are ­matters – ­such as kinship, belief traditions, belonging and ­mourning – ­that take precedence over the need to transform death into a scholarly argument. In weighing others’ bereavement against my academic inquiry, I decided against writing anything more detailed about the case. The first set of problems when researching disappearability pertains to ethical considerations. As Megan Warin and Simon Dennis (2008) note in their research with Bahá’í women who have fled Iran, fieldwork methods such as tracing, interviewing, documenting and photo-­elicitation bear an uncanny resemblance to methods employed by authoritarian states. They point out that the word ‘informant’ itself was something their interlocutors questioned, as it held a very particular meaning for someone escaping an oppressive regime with an extensive state security and intelligence network (ibid.: 103). In migratory contexts, research interviews can replicate those done by aid workers and medical or legal professionals (Cabot 2016: 652). Furthermore, as Alejandro Castillejo Cuéllar (2005: 173) argues based on his work with trauma and memory in post-­1994 South Africa, there is something deeply problematic about the way in which other people’s traumas are turned into a commodity of sorts in the academic m ­ arket – a­ source of one’s own prestige. Equally, writing in the context of refugees in Greece, Heath Cabot (2016: 650) calls for the ‘re-­humbling’ of the ethnographer, urging us to recognize that anthropology’s knowledge production is ‘contaminated’ by and complicit in dominant forms of power. Academic inquiry should, then, be about building ­solidarity – ­making use of a platform, not people. In the context of victim support groups in post-­apartheid South Africa, Cuéllar (2005: 163) writes about the ‘violence of voicelessness’.

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Indeed, there is a crucial tension between such voicelessness and deliberate silence, as Cuéllar o ­ bserves – b ­ etween recognition and invisibility (ibid.). When I listened to ­migrants – i­ n camps, in Athens’ squares and so f­orth – ­recounting their journeys to me or discussing their current situation, a sense of unease was often present, as when one interlocutor asked Ruben Andersson (2014: 35), ‘What can you offer us?’ In research ethics, which are often drawn from disciplines such as medicine and psychology, questions of anonymity and consent frequently dominate, while questions of what we do to the people who choose to take part in our research and what can we give them seem to receive far less consideration.

The Second Set of Problems: Gatekeepers and Silences ‘You ask too much!’ Stratos,2 the refugee camp director, shook his head at me. He was a tall, imposing man, whose short-­cropped hair, wide shoulders and olive-­green attire gave away his military past. ‘What do you even do with all this information?’, Stratos sighed. He then smiled at me knowingly. ‘I have a title for your work: “Beginning.”’ As he continued, he became serious again: ‘They have such unrealistic expectations, if you ask me: reaching Germany, getting money for their ­mothers … B ­ ut this [reaching Greece] is not the end of their journey, it’s the beginning. This is where their dreams die.’ I had travelled to the Greek refugee camp because it hosted individuals categorized as vulnerable or traumatized, and also those who had lost a family member while on the move. Proceeding through formal channels, securing a letter of invitation and then getting a rubber-­stamped permission from the municipal authorities, I had managed to arrange a visit to the camp, but the results were somewhat disappointing. Stratos was the first gatekeeper I encountered. I had been given a tour during which my guide made sure I did not talk to any of the camp’s residents; I managed to interview a couple of staff members, but that was it. My interlocutors often avoided my questions or gave me the answer to a question they had hoped I would ask. When I asked Stratos about how they dealt with residents who were missing a disappeared loved one or a travel companion, he simply shrugged dismissively: ‘We don’t have those here. But we would have our channels to report them.’ It was the summer of 2018 and the region already had hundreds of migrant graves, most of them unnamed. Thus, the second set of problems relates to questions of access. Researching disappearability and disappearances in migratory

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contexts, and definitely so in Greece, can prove difficult for a number of reasons: the accounts of shipwrecks and the routes people travel have to be pieced together from a number of sources, such as news articles, various activist and NGO reports, and myriad forms of research data. The migrants are often pushed onto clandestine routes in order to avoid detection, and may simply vanish, at least for a long period of time, in the event of a tragedy such as drowning. Sometimes the authorities treat their bodies with contempt and disregard upon discovery. The material and bureaucratic trail may also be thin. Unlike the forcibly disappeared victims of dictatorships, whose status as nationals enables those left behind to make demands on the state, at least after the fall of the authoritarian regime, migrants are non-­nationals, and the authorities are rarely, if ever, held accountable (cf. Nyberg Sørensen and Huttunen 2022). And there were gatekeepers like camp commander Stratos. Such gatekeepers may be authorities, NGOs or local residents. Some act to cover up potentially e­mbarrassing – o ­ r even i­llegal – p ­ ractices they have engaged in as the competent authorities. Some act with the well-­being of others as their primary concern, protecting individuals from being retraumatized by the researcher. Some gatekeepers treat information as a commodity, the possession of which will, they believe, grant them an advantage when competing for jobs or funding. Others believe that matters such as disappearances are not worthy of investigation in any case. Some such motivations are commendable, such as concern for those who have survived tragedies or those who have lost someone in one. For instance, I was directly told by a coordinator with an NGO to not pursue inquiries into a certain shipwreck off the coast of Lesvos. This was a frank request I had no problem following for the reasons outlined above. Other motivations are less commendable, though, including cover-­ups of state violence. In heavily militarized border zones such as the land border along the Evros River, researchers are not welcomed by the authorities. Like journalists, anthropologists risk being followed, surveilled and even detained and interrogated: for example, I only learned after my visit that the police regularly check hotel registers for foreigners. The choice may very well be between ‘being there’ and not risking criminal investigation. Over the course of my fieldwork, I also encountered several types of silence. One kind of silence came from authorities and international organizations. Sometimes it seemed that my attempts at establishing contact were simply not welcome. Despite my dutifully including a research information sheet in my emails, my motives may have been

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unclear to the recipients. Why would a researcher from Finland want to know about burials? Why would he ask about search and rescue protocols? What does he really want from us? The more established the actor in question or the higher the position of authority, the more likely it was to never hear back from them. Sometimes I followed up with a phone call but was told to call back later or perhaps tomorrow. And later, or tomorrow, I was met with another excuse. Another type of silence, one that was common among locals, was engendered by resentment towards ‘foreign powers’ – or those perceived to represent them. Only after beginning my fieldwork did I come both to understand how the migrants folded into local imaginaries the experiences of the 2010 economic crash, from which Greece had still not recovered, and also to note the deep mistrust of foreign presence and ‘intrusion’ (see also Theodossopoulos 2014). The notion of ‘being eaten from within’, as expressed by Dimitris, a middle-­aged man living in a small fishing village on the north coast of Lesvos, is illustrative: It’s as if everyone wants to destroy us from the inside. We’re being eaten from within. There you have Europe, there you have ­Russia … ­The refugees keep coming, the state is doing nothing and Europe is doing nothing. In 2015, I was driving truckloads of rubbish from the beach every day. Every day the boats kept c­ oming – ­no matter where you looked, there was at least twenty of them at any given moment. Why did I have to clean the beach?

The way in which Dimitris read the situation was not uncommon and was the source of a very particular type of silence. Many living in Greece established a continuity from austerity imposed by the ‘European Troika’3 to Greece being made a zone of containment for migrants by the EU and to the presence of all the international organizations and NGOs in the country. Many people were interested in writing about Greece, but few were interested in what Greeks wanted to say. In this reading I was, in the end, just another foreigner coming to benefit from Greeks’ hardships, underlining the extractive relationship that the international community had often had with the country. Another kind of silence altogether was engendered by the fact that disappearances, and border deaths more generally, were tragedies. Human lives were lost. For example, people obviously have various reasons for not wanting to talk about what they have witnessed. For everyone in contact with such incidents as shipwrecks and drownings, from rescuers to translators, from hospital staff to

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fellow travellers, the effects can be deeply traumatizing. Sometimes there were attempts to make an event, or a story, disappear through silence, for example, when the situation was clearly considered to be potentially ­embarrassing – ­primarily for authorities or forensic professionals who had done a shoddy job. Again, no one was really interested in talking about what had happened. There are also complex political and ethical value judgements involved in telling or withholding a story. Silence, or intentional withholding, can be a means to retain ownership of a story (Perl 2019a), and in some ways this is a response to the moral dilemma that Cuéllar (2005) n ­ oted – ­the question of who gets to benefit from such recounting. But the fear of repercussions, personal or professional, was also a factor. Many professionals spoke to me on condition of anonymity and without their employers’ knowledge. Despite the informality and, I hope, confidentiality of our meetings, it was clear that there was often a point at which people withheld information they clearly had.

The Third Set of Problems: Evidence and Veracity ‘They move at night’, my interlocutor replied as he nodded towards the mountainous horizon before us. We were standing on a hilltop overlooking patches of farmland, close to the site of a migrant mass grave. Hüseyin had been a lifesaver, because in his youth, he had been a sailor travelling around the world and therefore knew English ­well – s­ omething not common in the rural Evros region I was visiting, where many spoke Turkish. We were discussing the journeys of migrants passing through his village and I had asked him where they would be walking to. During our conversation, it became obvious the villagers were accustomed to burying unknown dead. The local clergyman had for years received bodies from the authorities for Islamic burial and by the time the mass grave was discovered hundreds of migrants had found their final resting place on a small muddy hill a few minutes’ drive from the village. ‘The mufti has all the records’, the man assured me, a point city-­based forensic professionals would later loudly contest. The site itself had only two graves with gravestones, identified as a Syrian man and a Palestinian man, aged 31 and 22 respectively; the rest comprised criss-­crossing mounds holding hundreds of unknown bodies. An empty pit, perhaps one metre deep and gathering rainwater, caught my attention: ‘for the next one’, my companion nonchalantly explained. If such an arrangement had been a professional nightmare for Greek forensic specialists, who

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insisted that Islamic p ­ ractices – s­ uch as burial without a gravestone or a ­plaque – ­did not justify a mass grave, it definitely was intriguing for an anthropologist. This third set of problems comes with the requirement of producing an account of what has happened that is both broad and sufficiently detailed. In terms of what can be done to find them, there is often little to go on when a migrant disappears in the Greek borderlands. Bodies that disappear in the water, in the Aegean Sea or the Evros River for example, often drift far from where the person was last ­seen – i­ f they were seen at all. They may be found months later or damaged to the point of being unrecognizable (or both). Sometimes tattoos or personal belongings may help in identifying a body but, as forensic professionals told me in our discussions, such items may have been bought by migrants at any point on their journey, or may even have belonged to a travel companion until very recently. Writing an ethnography of disappearances and disappearability involved dealing with details that were invisible, inaccessible or only fleetingly present. While there may be other people to turn to in the social fabric in which the disappeared individual is embedded, you cannot talk with the one who is not there. You can write, for example, about identification procedures, about how shipwrecks happen and the border is enforced, and about the lives, up to the point of disappearance, of those who disappear, but there is always something about the phenomenon that is difficult to grasp. Writing about the aftermath of mass violence, Navaro (2020: 162) problematizes anthropology’s ‘professional imaginaries about “research methodologies”’ that ‘assume the availability, presence, and accessibility of “evidence”’. When researching disappearances in a migratory context, it is not only that various silences and gatekeepers come into play, as I have described above, but that there may be no one to interview and no site to ­photograph – ­no event to participate in and observe. In addition to ‘positive’ methodologies, such as interviewing survivors and working in an environment where testimonies and the identification of bodies are available (e.g. Robben 2005; Wagner 2008), Navaro calls for a ‘negative methodology’. While I certainly collected what can be analysed as ‘positive’ research material, such as knowledge of border crossings and forensic investigations, as well as photographs, statistics and personal accounts, none of them were enough to answer the questions I went to the Greek borderlands with. At this point, ‘the negative’ became one of my primary concerns.

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Negativity: Traces and Auras Disappeared migrants are, simultaneously, gone and very much present. As I have noted, they are gone for their families, loved ones and whoever might be searching for them or waiting for news of their fate. Equally, I have described how they are gone in the sense that unnamed bodies or names without bodies prove difficult to manage and account for. Yet they are also present as memories and dreams, as objects of affection, as the places they occupy in social networks and as the material objects left behind. The three sets of problems described above had practical implications: how to build rapport, how to navigate both personal and bureaucratic networks and how to work in ways that were not simply extractive by nature. But these problems were also very much methodological and epistemological. As I was trying to understand and analyse border disappearances and deaths after I had entered my ‘field’, as it were, how to account for someone who was not there turned out to be a far less important issue than how to make sense of the presences, material or ­otherwise – ­how to account for the violence at borders and its aftermath. What could I claim to know and how did I come to know what I knew? To respond to both the practical and the epistemological or methodological conundrums, I first turn to Valentina Napolitano’s (2015) examination of the ‘trace’. In her discussion of ‘anthropology of traces’, Napolitano (2015: 47) argues that ‘the trace is at once an analytical tool and an ethnographic site for inquiry’. For her, traces ‘emerge out of a condensation of stories/histories’ (ibid.: 57) and form material and processual knots that speak for not only a singular history, but all the social and material histories layered upon a situation, a place or a material object. This exposes the marginalized histories and the limits of official narratives. The focus on traces also evokes tracing as a fieldwork methodology, in works such as Jason De León and Michael Wells’s (2015) ethnography of border crossers in the Sonoran Desert between Arizona and Mexico. De León and Wells document a trail of material d ­ ebris – ­as well as ­bodies – ­lying where thousands have disappeared. In the context of Greece, my field site, Yannis Hamilakis (2018: 9) notes that artefacts such as ‘boats and dinghies, life vests, and discarded rucksacks’ form such material traces, and Gerhild Perl (2019b) has demonstrated the strength, and the necessity, of tracing in the event of migrant disappearances. For research, the meaning of a collection of traces is greater than the sum of its parts, allowing for connections to be made over the gaps and silences.

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But how do we tell a trace apart from mere rubbish? Where do we start our inquiry? Or, as Perl (2019b: 31) asks: ‘How can we trace the hollow sound of an effaced grave site?’ To account for how details, for example, among debris actually make sense, I will now turn to the concept of an aura. Making a distinction between trace and aura, Walter Benjamin (2002: 447) wrote that the ‘trace is the appearance of a nearness, however far removed the thing that left it behind may be. The aura is the appearance of a distance, however close the thing that calls it forth. In the trace, we gain possession of the thing; in the aura, it takes possession of us.’ Aura is, for Benjamin, the medium of perception rather than an inherent property of a person or an object, the ability of an object to return our gaze (Hansen 2008: 342; Napolitano 2015: 61). A medium refers here to that something in between that mediates and constitutes meaning and perception (Hansen 2008: 342–43), rather than, for example, a means of communication as such. Napolitano suggests that instead of being completely separate, a trace can have auratic qualities ‘connecting different parts of histories, “objects” and people. A trace grasped in its receding aftermath transforms and “looks back at us”’ (2015: 61). In this section, I look at traces and ­auras – ­and, indeed, their ­interconnectedness – ­and examine how they become research material. Benjamin’s theory of aura is far from being straightforward or uniform (see Hansen 2008). In his famous essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1999: 211–44), Benjamin perceived aura as something a work of art would lose in reproduction. Rather than lamenting the fact, he instead saw this historical c­ hange – ­mechanical reproduction and mass ­culture – ­as having democratizing, revolutionary qualities. Yet in other writings, such as ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ (ibid.: 152–96), Benjamin theorizes the qualities of an aura in more detail, as more than an aesthetic, as something processual and still easily perceivable. He argues that the experience of an aura ‘rests on the transposition of a response common in human relationships to the relationship between the inanimate or natural object and man’ (ibid.: 184). In his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Benjamin wrote: The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen a­ gain … F ­ or every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. (Ibid.: 247)

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Navaro (2020: 164) takes up this notion and argues that knowledge of the past, in the context of mass violence, can only come to us in a piecemeal, compromised way. The same is true for migrant disappearances and disappearability; if traces, ‘images of the past’, are not recognized as such, they, too, are under threat of irretrievability. This ‘Benjaminian’ history, of compiling fragments, is also exemplified by Michael Taussig’s (1986) account of colonial violence in Colombia. Approached in this way, material remains such as those I started this chapter with possess distinct auratic qualities and are also fragments that coalesce into an account of something that took place at the site of crossing. Such material traces as the ones I opened this chapter with, from rubbish to ID cards, wrecked vessels to clothing, form a crucial body of ‘evidence’, but, unlike seeing and ‘being there’, they speak of what is not present: the people who wore those shoes and were bruised during high-­speed boat rides, who hung on to that swimming ring or drank the bottled water to fight dehydration. I have noted the ‘positive’ methodologies for dealing with the aftermath of violence, such as analysing detailed and contextualized witness testimonies and engaging with DNA analyses, but I often had no such possibilities. Yet, following Navaro’s notion of a ‘negative methodology’, the material traces account for many things: they speak of mobility, risk, fear and violence. They speak of flight and of dinghies punctured either by sharp rocks, Greek authorities or panicked migrants trying to avoid being towed back to Turkish waters. They address the gaps, voids and silences in our accounts of disappearances. They make up for the absences and erasures, even if often only ­partially – ­or they allow not knowing to make sense. A water bottle brought from Turkey or a Shi’ite prayer book tell of a journey, a self-­made dinghy of the conditions and means of such a journey. I encountered similar sights elsewhere in Greece, with clothing, backpacks, dummies, food wrappings and so forth lying along railway tracks and in abandoned buildings. A local dog playing with an abandoned shoe. The personal items of unidentified migrants collected by forensic examiners also work in the same way, from phones to jewellery, medicine to babies’ d ­ ummies – D ­ e León and Wells’s (2015) ‘migrant trail’. Sometimes these material traces have been made into a monument, such as the ‘Life Jacket Graveyard’ that grew on a rubbish site in Molyvos, Lesvos, where massive mounds of life jackets and other related items were collected. However, they are often simply left lying around or are cleaned away, removed from sight. Some of the violence of disappearances come from the fact that all too often the

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whole story cannot be reconstructed, but an item, a residue, staring at us will bypass gatekeepers and allow access to something perhaps otherwise forgotten. The auratic qualities of material remains also transform our ethical considerations: they compel us to bear witness. In contrast to silence, they speak out loud. The qualities Benjamin gives to an aura, namely the ability to designate distance, the ability to return our gaze and the characteristic of transposing the relationship between two persons into a relationship between an object and a human, make aura a useful notion to think with. The baby’s dummy, the phone charger and the carbamazepine, used to treat epilepsy, certain nerve pains and bipolar disorder: all these objects project an aura, which to the sensitive observer offers a glimpse of who they belonged to, perhaps how they were acquired and to which point of the journey they pertain. Items I collected or photographed indeed fill a gap, tell a story: emergency blankets for staying warm or fighting the heat, life jackets for hopefully staying afloat, water bottles sold in Turkey that were packed for hydration, shoes that were worn out by long hikes over rough terrain. All these objects may be physically within the reach of the researcher, but what they designate is far away, at a distance. The objects provoke the individual to relate to them as to another human, who possibly now lies in refrigeration without a name or is buried in a cemetery as ágnostos, ‘unknown’. Unlike the daguerreotype, which never returned our gaze (Benjamin 1999: 184), these objects indeed do look back at us. And because of their particular aura, they become intelligible in a particular way. For the forensic examiner, personal effects link to a body, catalogued and stored; for the anthropologist, they link to a phenomenon. Benjamin gives the aura two further characteristics (1999: 154–55, 184–85), that of Proustian mémoire involontaire and the requirement to be perceived by whoever is looking at the object. With mémoire involontaire, he refers to a memory triggered by a sensation or an observation that activates something already f­ orgotten – l­ike a smell that reminds us of home. We do not know which object will trigger that memory; for Proust it was the madeleine cake. For my discussion of aura, this type of piecing together is exemplified by the dog playing with the shoe. A single shoe in the middle of a residential area where people do not leave clothes or rubbish on the street. We did not know the shoe was there, but it immediately reminds us of the railway tracks a short walk away, the railway tracks along which migrants travel at night. On the role of the observer, Benjamin (ibid.: 184) writes that to ‘perceive the aura of an object we look at

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means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return’. But not everyone will see the object in that way, or they may remain silent or decline to acknowledge ­it – ­perhaps because of one or many of the reasons I have explored. In the vignette I began this chapter with, it is noteworthy that my companions and I did not discuss the people to whom some of the objects had belonged. Crossings to Greece had become such a common event that it was almost as if it were perfectly normal for such items to end up on a remote, barely reachable stretch of coast. Perceiving an aura is an active attempt to glean it from the mere closeness of an object, such as a baby’s dummy or a packet of tablets: investing in it a sense of humanity, but also a sense of contextuality that makes perception possible in the first place. Providing this context is anthropology’s expertise (Huttunen 2017: 117), and this is a notion I will turn to next.

Ethnography as Context Napolitano (2015: 62) posits that the ‘methodology on traces brings anew into focus the forms that forces of lingering histories, attachments and marginalities, unmediated by conclusive structures of meaning, may take’ and points to the historically layered meanings that traces take on in her work. Her traces, much like the auras in the material remains I documented, only make sense if we appreciate the historical, political and social conditions under which they appear. Regarding Mustafa, a Bosnian interlocutor displaced by war, Huttunen (2017: 118) argues that it is the task of the anthropological project to contextualize such an individual ‘in time and place, and consequently to take [their] public voice, and public agency, seriously’, and the same was true for the non-­human subjects of my inquiry. Just as Mustafa’s personal suffering was inescapably intertwined with particular historical e­ vents – a­ s well as with circulating experiences, stories and imaginaries (Huttunen 2014, 2017) – the meanings of the residues of cross-­border mobility and tragedy I witnessed arise only when we understand their context, in the sense of both how they came to be where they were found and the circumstances in which they were encountered. Let me illustrate this point with an example. The city of Orestiada lies some mere six kilometres from the Evros River and the border with Turkey. It was founded by Orthodox Greeks displaced from the area around A ­ drianople – n ­ ow ­Edirne – b ­ y the League of Nations-­ mandated exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in

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1923. This is reflected not only in the original name of the city, Nea ­Orestiás – N ­ ew ­Orestias – b ­ ut in the intergenerational trauma that is present and the local configurations of social and political imaginaries. Does this directly, perceivably, relate to the unidentified bodies in the University Hospital of Alexandroupoli? Not immediately. But after a while it does. It is what makes the site of crossing, or the site of disappearance, what it is. The locals’ knowledge of the family home long gone and their present-­day resentment of Turkey while they at the same time acknowledge, and live, the continuous everyday cross-­border movement are ethnographically crucial. For the anthropologist, there is a degree of uneasy continuity, or continuities, to be established, in which the past is embodied, lived, repurposed and reactivated (see also Knight and Stewart 2016). Of course, there are first-­hand accounts of the massive displacement of 1923, during which over a million Orthodox Greeks were removed from Turkey, but most of what we now know about the events is history: recorded, selected, arranged, archived and presented. But this can, nevertheless, also become part of what makes a contextualized ethnography of migrant disappearances in Greece possible. The people who go about their lives, serving food in a taverna, cultivating garlic in the adjacent fields or selling tickets at the train station, are all part of the ecology, if you will, of the ­borderlands – a­ nd of the disappearances that take place there. As an anthropologist I was not merely cataloguing material remains or interrogating professional responses to disappearances, but also looking at how locals relate to such remains. Such contextualization also shows the various ways of conceptualizing the remains’ auratic qualities. For many of my Greek acquaintances in the borderlands, the migrants passing through represented disorder. For example, they interpreted completely differently the clothing, medicine and backpacks left along the railway tracks that I recorded as data. It was a special kind of rubbish, a reminder of how their everyday surroundings seemed to be beyond their control. The old Orestiada railway station is a case in point: a local amateur historian recounted to me how the wooden building burned down after migrants seeking shelter from the cold made a fire inside. He lamented the loss of a historical building, but instead of making a connection to the forced clandestinity of migrants’ journeys and their inability to rely on formal support structures, for him the incident folded into the injustice that locals, and by extension the entire Greek nation, were facing. Locals’ resentment and political imagination form one of the intersecting structures conditioning migrants’ m ­ obility – a­ nd,

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indeed, their d ­ isappearances – a­ long and across the borderlands. This is where understanding the historical contingencies at play becomes important: why the remains are treated as rubbish, on the one hand, and how they are linked, socially and politically, to the nearness of the border and the presence of neighbouring Turkey, on the other. This also helps in understanding the tension between solidarity and discontent, all without witnessing a single instance of border death or disappearance in the area first-­hand.

Conclusion Ethnography as a contextualizing endeavour draws from being there in the presence of absence. Names without bodies and bodies without names, as well as victims of state violence, can often be approached ‘positively’, for example, through witness accounts or DNA identification (e.g. Cuéllar 2005; Robben 2005; Wagner 2008). But this may not always be possible. Sometimes, as I have argued, a ‘negative’ methodology, as proposed by Navaro (2020), is necessary. In my research, it was seemingly impossible to account for disappearability and disappearances without also accounting for the discontinuities ­present – ­the gaping void in our ‘evidence’. However, when contextualized, material traces and the auras the observer can appreciate in them address the absences, silences and erasures in ways that, when meticulously documented, contribute towards a rich ethnographical account. In my Greek example, such context requires an understanding of the histories of forced mobility that are present, the border violence and surveillance that push migrants towards disappearability, the strategies migrants themselves employ, such as their choice of particular routes, and the lacklustre search, rescue and identification infrastructure. Building this context, making the interconnections present and displaying them, is an anthropological task. The reason a detail ‘pricks us’ (Barthes 2000: 26) by standing out, the thing that triggers a mémoire involontaire or otherwise contributes to our inquiry, is contingent on the interconnections we can make, either in the fleeting moment of seeing the dog playing with the shoe or later, as we begin to assemble what we have learned. Jean Paul Sartre (1966: 41–42) has described going into a café expecting to meet ‘Pierre’, who, nonetheless, is not there. In Sartre’s discussion of nihilation, by virtue of ‘Pierre’s’ absence from the café, all other faces and objects ‘decompose because they “are not” Pierre’ (ibid.). In other words, his absence fixates our attention on his

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absence alone, making the café itself disappear. However, in contrast to ‘Pierre’s’ absence, the absences I encountered precisely illuminated what was there (cf. Bille 2010). Crucially, then, it is the interconnections that we shed light on in our writing, between the dog, the shoe and the railway tracks, between the border police patrol, the Shi’ite prayer book and the mass grave. How such interconnections become tangible and how material objects fill the gaps is dependent on all other available information, from historical accounts to geographical details, from ­testimonies – ­or, indeed, the lack ­thereof – ­to forensics. This context not only fills in the gaps but may also show us where the silence is or help to make sense of an absence elsewhere and, crucially, make intelligible why an absence or silence is where it is in the first place. Ville Laakkonen is a doctoral candidate in social anthropology at Tampere University, Finland. His research focuses on migrant disappearances and border deaths at Greek borderlands, and he worked in 2018–21 on the project ‘Governance and Grieving: Disappearing Migrants and Emergent Politics’, funded by the Academy of Finland. He holds an MSocSc from Tampere University and an MSc from Oxford University.

Notes This chapter is part of a research project on migrant disappearances entitled ‘Governance and Grieving: Disappearing Migrants and Emergent Politics’, led by Laura Huttunen and funded by the Academy of Finland (grant numbers 315979 and 326570). 1. In contrast to the exclusive definition adopted by, for example, the UN refugee agency UNHCR, I use the term ‘migrant’ to refer also to refugees. This is to highlight how people can be forcibly displaced by capitalist accumulation, protracted low-­intensity conflict and colonial extraction in ways not always accounted for in the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention. 2. The interlocutors’ names in this chapter are pseudonyms. 3. The ‘Troika’ is a name commonly given to the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, who all played a central role in pushing for Greece’s austerity programme.

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References Andersson, Ruben. 2014. Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press. Barthes, Roland. [1980] 2000. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. London: Vintage. Benjamin, Walter. [1968] 1999. Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn. London: Pimlico. —-—-—. [1999] 2002. The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Rolf Tiedemann. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Bille, Mikkel. 2010. ‘Seeking Providence through Things: The Word of God versus Black Cumin’, in Mikkel Bille, Frida Hastrup and Tim Flohr Sørensen (eds), An Anthropology of Absence: Materializations of Transcendence and Loss. New York: Springer, pp. 167–84. Bille, Mikkel, Frida Hastrup and Tim Flohr Sørensen. 2010. ‘Introduction: An Anthropology of Absence’, in Mikkel Bille, Frida Hastrup and Tim Flohr Sørensen (eds), An Anthropology of Absence: Materializations of Transcendence and Loss. New York: Springer, pp. 3–22. Cabot, Heath. 2016. ‘Refugee Voices: Tragedy, Ghosts, and the Anthropology of Not Knowing’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 45(6): 645–72. Cuéllar, Alejandro Castillejo. 2005. ‘Unraveling Silence: Violence, Memory and the Limits of Anthropology’s Craft’, Dialectical Anthropology 29: 159–80. De León, Jason, and Michael Wells. 2015. The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. Oakland: University of California Press. Descola, Philippe. 2005. ‘On Anthropological Knowledge’, Social Anthropology 13(1): 65–73. Engelke, Matthew. 2008. ‘The Objects of Evidence’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14(s1): S1–S21. Feldman, Allen. 2019. ‘War under Erasure: Contretemps, Disappearance, Anthropophagy, Survivance’, Theory & Event 22(1): 175–203. Fowles, Severin M. 2008. ‘Steps toward an Archaeology of Taboo’, in Lars Fogelin (ed.), Religion, Archaeology and the Material World. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Centre for Archaeological Investigations, pp. 15–37. Gatti, Gabriel. 2014. Surviving Forced Disappearance in Argentina and Uruguay: Identity and Meaning. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Geertz, Clifford. 1998. ‘Deep Hanging Out’, New York Review, 22 October. Retrieved 9 February 2023 from https://www.nybooks.com​ /articles/1998/10/22/deep-­hanging-­out/. Hamilakis, Yannis. 2018. ‘Introduction: Archaeologies of Forced and Undocumented Migration’, in Yannis Hamilakis (ed.), The New Nomadic Age: Archaeologies of Forced and Undocumented Migration. London: Equinox, pp. 1–19.

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Hansen, Miriam Bratu. 2008. ‘Benjamin’s Aura’, Critical Inquiry 34(2): 336–75. Huttunen, Laura. 2014. ‘From Individual Grief to a Shared History of the Bosnian War: Voice, Audience and the Political Psychotherapeutic Practices with Refugees’, Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 68(1): 91–104. —-—-—. 2016. ‘Liminality and Missing Persons: Encountering the Missing in Postwar Bosnia-­Herzegovina’, Conflict and Society 2(1): 201–18. —-—-—. 2017. ‘Troubled Conjunctures: Ethnography, Psychotherapy and Transnational Social Fields’, in Lisette Josephides and Anne Sigfrid Grønseth (eds), The Ethics of Knowledge Creation: Transactions, Relations and Persons. Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 101–23. Laakkonen, Ville. 2022. ‘Deaths, Disappearances, Borders: Migrant Disappearability as a Technology of Deterrence’, Political Geography 99: 102767. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2022.102767. Lambert, Helen. 2009. ‘Evidentiary Truths: The Evidence of Anthropology through the Anthropology of Medical Evidence’, Anthropology Today 25(1): 16–20. Knight, Daniel M., and Charles Stewart. 2016. ‘Ethnographies of Austerity: Temporality, Crisis and Affect in Southern Europe’, History and Anthropology 27(1): 1–18. Napolitano, Valentina. 2015. ‘Anthropology and Traces’, Anthropological Theory 15(1): 47–67. Navaro, Yael. 2020. ‘The Aftermath of Mass Violence: A Negative Methodology’, Annual Review of Anthropology 49: 161–75. Nyberg Sørensen, Ninna, and Laura Huttunen. 2022. ‘Missing Migrants and the Politics of Disappearance in Armed Conflicts and Migratory Contexts’, Ethnos 87(2): 321–37. Parr, Hester, Olivia Stevenson and Penny Woolnough. 2016. ‘Search/ing for Missing People: Families Living with Ambiguous Absence’, Emotion, Space and Society 19: 66–75. Perl, Gerhild. 2019a. ‘Migration as Survival: Withheld Stories and the Limits of Ethnographic Knowability’, Migration and Society 2(1): 12–25. —-—-—. 2019b. ‘Traces of Death: Exploring Affective Responsiveness across the Spanish-­Moroccan Sea’, PhD thesis. Bern: University of Bern. Robben, Antonius C.G.M. 2005. Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Sartre, Jean-­Paul. [1943] 1966. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press. Smith, Claire, and H. Marin Wobst. 2005. Indigenous Archaeologies: Decolonizing Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. Taussig, Michael. 1986. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Theodossopoulos, Dimitrios. 2014. ‘The Ambivalence of Anti-­Austerity

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Indignation in Greece: Resistance, Hegemony and Complicity’, History and Anthropology 25(4): 488–506. Thomas, Martin (dir.), and Béatrice Bijon (prod.). 2018. Etched in Bone. Documentary film. Canberra: Ronin Films. Retrieved 11 March 2022 from https://www.roninfilms.com.au/feature/15602/etched-­in-­bone​ .html. Wagner, Sarah. 2008. To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for Srebrenica’s Missing. Berkeley: University of California Press. Warin, Megan, and Simone Dennis. 2008. ‘Telling Silences: Unspeakable Trauma and the Unremarkable Practices of Everyday Life’, Sociological Review 56(2_suppl): 100–16.

10 Negotiating Epistemic Uncertainties Coming to Terms with Migrant Disappearances in the Western Mediterranean Saila Kivilahti and Laura Huttunen

Introduction Since the turn of the millennium, the EU has increasingly militarized its external borders, pushing migrants and refugees onto irregular and extremely dangerous routes and forcing them to travel in undocumented modes. Consequently, the Mediterranean has become the deadliest border region in the world (Albahari 2016), and 23,568 migrants have been reported missing since 2014, with a significantly higher number of unreported cases (IOM 2022). The sea routes in the Western Mediterranean, especially those between Spain and Morocco, are among the most frequent channels of such undocumented migration, and death and disappearance are common tragedies among migrants on this route (Perl 2019). When a person disappears at sea, it is often extremely difficult to discover their fate if the body is not recovered and identified, and even if a body is found, transnational identification procedures rarely take place. Rather, unidentified bodies disappear in unmarked graves without families ever knowing about the death and final resting place of their loved ones. Death and disappearance get intertwined, creating haunting uncertainties among those left behind. The Mediterranean has become a landscape of death, disappearance and ever-­present uncertainty for migrants and their families, as well as for communities in the countries of origin and destination.

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Many countries around the world have established procedures for family members to make national and international search requests through police authorities, and to express their worries about the prolonged absence of their loved ones (Parr, Stevenson and Woolnough 2016; Shalev Greene and Alys 2017). However, most families of disappearing undocumented migrants do not use these routes for several reasons. Because of the undocumented status of the disappeared person (and sometimes of the family members as well), the families are often hesitant to contact the authorities, in countries of both origin and destination. In several countries from which undocumented migrants originate, the families are reluctant to contact the local authorities because they suspect that they themselves are involved in the disappearances. The state, in the countries of both origin and destination, often lacks the interest and political will to invest in searching for undocumented migrants (see this book’s introduction), and in the empirical material we analyse below, both the Spanish and Moroccan states are visibly absent from the production and sharing of information. As a result, the families of the disappeared mostly rely for information on informal social networks, such as engaged citizens (Perl 2018), co-­travellers, and family members and neighbours already living in the destination country (Dearden, Last and Spencer 2020: 56; IOM 2021: xii, 9, 11–12). Today, Spain is characterized by the presence of several sometimes overlapping actors that engage with migrant-­related issues, including deaths and disappearances. Spanish law enforcement1 is responsible for investigating the deaths of people whose bodies are found on Spanish territory, but it is not very efficient in this, and the identification of undocumented migrants is a rare occurrence (e.g. Perl 2016). This situation has created space for NGOs and other unofficial actors to come onto the scene. Even though several international organizations are currently working with migrant disappearances, including the ICRC,2 IOM3 and ICMP,4 they have not been successful in establishing efficient procedures that are widely known about and trusted among migrant communities. Sometimes families do contact one of these organizations, or one of the more locally operating ones, but in general the landscape of actors and procedures is scattered and unclear. Moreover, in many of the countries of northern and sub-­ Saharan Africa, searching via the police authorities or other organizations is not considered the most viable option in the first place, because of a widespread mistrust of authorities and an experience-­ based conviction regarding their ineffectuality. In these countries, many families have experience of migration over generations and,

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consequently, there is a lot of tacit knowledge about the ‘crossing’ (e.g. Zagaria 2020). For many people, informal social networks and personal connections have proven to be the best channels both for obtaining information and carrying out searches. Therefore, if the relatives do not know anyone in the supposed country of disappearance, they might not necessarily know where to start or how to proceed with the search. In this chapter we touch on the theme of ‘disturbed intimacies’ discussed in this volume’s introduction and focus on these informal social networks and the ways in which the families left behind negotiate the deep uncertainties they face when a loved one disappears en route. In the absence of evidence, families live for a long time with pressing questions: How to understand what has happened to the disappeared person? How to make sense of the blurred line between life, death and disappearance? When and how to become convinced of the death of the absent relative when there is no body to be buried? To explore these questions, we focus on the significance of witness accounts provided by co-­travellers and other eyewitnesses. Although people sometimes witness the deaths of their co-­travellers during their journey, in the accounts we analyse in this chapter they have, rather, witnessed events that suggest mortal danger, such as capsized or empty and damaged boats on the high seas. We investigate when and how this information becomes trustworthy evidence for those left behind. Moreover, we pay attention to the temporal aspect of disappearance, as the passing of time often changes the way in which relatives think about a disappearance. While the introduction to this book discusses the methodological challenges faced by those doing research on ‘what is not there’, in this chapter we engage with the epistemic uncertainties faced by families and other close ones when someone disappears. We follow the clues in the empirical material that enable us to analyse the significance of the evidence provided by witnesses, as well as the challenges presented by information concerning disappearances. The epistemic uncertainties in this context concern not only the production of knowledge but also its mediation and transmission, as we will argue below. Methodologically, this chapter relies on ethnographic fieldwork that Saila Kivilahti (hereafter SK) conducted in Spain and Morocco in 2019. Her fieldwork concentrated mainly on southern Spain, especially Andalusia, as this is the area to which many of the migrant boats trying to reach Spain are heading. SK’s other key area was the neighbourhood of El Besòs i el Maresme (hereafter Besòs) in Barcelona, where a variety of people with migrant backgrounds have

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settled, including a community of Senegalese migrants. She also followed the work of several NGOs5 focusing on disappearances, and interviewed relatives of disappeared persons, NGO workers, morticians and forensic scientists engaging with disappearances in Spain. Moreover, she participated in the First World Summit of the Mothers of Disappeared Migrants in Mexico and the annual caravan for open borders (Caravana Abriendo Fronteras), as well as other events concerning migrant disappearances in Spain. Since migratory disappearances are a global phenomenon, her attempt to understand the disappearances of undocumented migrants led SK to various places and sites, and to conversations with people diversely connected to disappearances. In this chapter, we analyse encounters with five young and middle-­ aged men6 who have all made it into Spain irregularly. They have experienced the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean, some of them witnessing serious distress encountered by their co-­travellers en route. Moreover, they have found themselves in a situation of having to decide what to do with the evidence they have. SK talked with them about their experiences of the crossing, and of the disappearances they witnessed or encountered. Some of these five research participants were also related to recently disappeared individuals, and were the ones expected to carry out the search for them because of their residence status in Spain.

Conceptual Frame: Witnessing, Time and Uncertainty The transition from life to death is culturally important and ritually marked in all cultural contexts (Metcalf and Huntington 1991; Robben 2004). A person’s disappearance disturbs this cultural frame, leaves the process of transition unfinished and begs for closure (Huttunen 2016). Disappearances in all contexts are marked by uncertainty and difficulties in gaining knowledge, but the difficulties are differently structured in each case. In the context of undocumented migration, the stories told by co-­travellers become particularly important, as access to official information and official routes of investigation is limited due to the irregular and illegalized position of the traveller, and sometimes also of the family member looking for them. To understand the significance of the accounts of co-­travellers and other actors in the informal networks that the families of migrants rely on, engagement with theoretical approaches to witnessing, testimony and evidence is particularly insightful.

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Witnessing and testimonies have been discussed in the context of the accountability of violent regimes, for example in Argentina and Cyprus (e.g. Crenzel 2011; Jelin 2003; Robben 2005a, 2005b; Sant Cassia 2007; Taylor 1997). In this chapter, however, witnessing takes place in informal networks, and evidence travels through these networks and is evaluated by families of the missing. We begin by considering the significance of witnessing in various contexts. Witnessing has a particular meaning in legal contexts, and its meaning in the legal process varies between systems (Rouland 1994). When applied to practices outside of the courtroom, witnessing still carries social connotations of conveying important information and of convincing others of the factuality or trustworthiness of one’s account. In the context of undocumented migration, the stories of co-­travellers become witness accounts for families left behind who are trying to understand what has happened to their disappeared loved one, and to come to terms with the possibility of death in the absence of a body to be buried. Co-­travellers as witnesses become the ‘surrogate sense organs of the absent’ (Durham Peters 2001: 709) for the families left behind. Inspired by Elizabeth Jelin’s (2003) work on witnessing and memory in repressive regimes, we suggest that co-­travellers use both their own experiences and their observations of what happened to others as material for their testimonies. According to Jelin, a witness is firstly someone who has ‘lived through an experience or event and can, at a later moment, narrate it or give testimony’ (witness-­as-­ participant). Secondly, the term refers to the person as an observer, ‘someone who was present at the moment of an event as an onlooker, who saw something but who did not participate directly or was not directly involved in the event’, whose testimony nevertheless can be used to confirm that the event actually happened (witness-­ as-­observer). The survivors of the event then ‘bear testimony as observers of what happened to the others and, at the same time, bear witness of their own experiences and of the events in which they participated’ (ibid.: 61–62). In the context of migrant disappearances, co-­travellers both experience the dangerous journeys at first hand and bear witness to moments when something drastic happens to the person who disappears. ‘Evidence’ as a concept is closely connected with witnessing and giving testimonies. In legal contexts, the credibility and trustworthiness of witness accounts and the witnesses themselves are evaluated and assessed (Pospíšil 1971: 236–37). However, outside of the legal realm, this trustworthiness is always also assessed. As Steward and

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Strathern (2004: 30) suggest, every society has its everyday way of evaluating e­ vidence – t­he truthfulness of a story or a given piece of evidence is always assessed in relation to the person who is talking. In the context of migrant disappearances, witness accounts given by co-­travellers become crucially important when there is no forensic evidence. However, narrative evidence is ambiguous and fragile, and the families of the missing need to assess both the trustworthiness of the account and the credibility of the witnessing person. In addition, and as we suggest below, temporality becomes an important ingredient in the evaluation of co-­travellers’ accounts (cf. Katz, this volume). When discussing the disappeared victims of the Srebrenica genocide, Sarah Wagner (2008) suggests that when a person goes missing and their fate is unknown, family members fill the void of knowledge with imagination. According to Wagner, the relatives ‘attempt to “take possession” of the missing person’s fate, wresting it from the vacuum of knowledge forced on them by his absence’. The relatives of the disappeared then complete the story of the disappeared person without their bodily presence (ibid.: 14, 173–74).

Witnesses at Sea: Empty Boats and Other Fragile Evidence An eyewitness with a first-­hand account of what has happened is important in many judicial processes. Sometimes migrants end up as eyewitnesses to dramatic events connected with the disappearance of somebody while travelling. This puts them in a position in which they not only need to assess what they have seen but also convince others and pass their account on further, to the friends and families. In some interviews during SK’s fieldwork, the interlocutors described how co-­travellers died on board while crossing the sea, or while crossing the desert on their way to Morocco (see also Lucht 2012). Such deaths may have been caused, for example, by dehydration, drowning, hypothermia or an accident,7 and if the identity of the dead person was known to them, their co-­travellers tried to find ways to communicate the news to the families. On other occasions, co-­travellers did not see the actual dying, but the dangerous circumstances at sea convinced them that the disappeared person must be dead. However, even though they believed this to be the case, in the absence of a body it was not always easy to convince the families. It is worth noting in this context that migrants move mostly in groups, and within such groups some people know each other while others

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travel with false identities, with nobody in the group knowing their ‘real’ identity (see Le Courant 2019). This affects the ability to inform families if something happens. Momar is a young man of Senegalese background living in Spain, who lost his friend Lamine while crossing the Mediterranean in 2019. Momar and Lamine had left Morocco for Spain with a large group that was divided into three boats for the crossing. The two friends were put on different boats, with Momar in the one that was leading the group. At some point during the crossing, he and the others in his boat looked back, and he saw that his friend’s boat was empty: ‘The boat was destroyed, everybody d ­ ied … ­The wind turned the boat over.’ Many of the crossers carry with them the telephone numbers of NGOs working at the border. One of these possible contacts is the Spanish human rights activist Helena Maleno, who uses her networks to raise alerts, search for boats at sea and facilitate sea rescue operations. Momar had been told that in order to make the passage safer they could send the location of the boat to Helena Maleno when they arrived in international waters: I was the one who sent the location to ­Helena … ­Then Helena called the Red Cross and two hours later they arrived. But the boat was ­empty … ­It is evidence when you find a boat and it is empty. [Later on the Spanish shore] I saw when the Red Cross came with the empty boat, they were dragging it [behind their boat].

The bodies of the travellers on the damaged boat were never found. Seeing an empty, capsized boat on the high seas was convincing evidence of deadly danger for Momar. Being an eyewitness often brings with it the obligation to tell others what has happened. Momar informed Lamine’s family: I called his family. It was really difficult, really difficult for the ­family … ­When I called the family, they did not believe me. The family of my friend thought that maybe they changed the boat, but after one year they knew it was the ­end … ­But they believed when they did not get any news from him in one year. Also another friend [of ours] told the family that he is dead.

When further asked how the family knew that Lamine was dead, Momar said: ‘If you arrive, you are happy and you call your family that “I am here!”, but if your son does not call …’ The theme of losing contact as evidence of death was repeated in most of the interviews. However, in a landscape where some disappeared people turn

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up a little ­later – a­ s we elaborate ­below – f­ amilies are often reluctant to give up hope. For Momar, who lived through the dangerous sea journey and saw the empty boat with his own eyes, the death of the disappeared traveller was more apparent. For the family, it was only the passage of time that convinced them that their disappeared loved one was dead. This difficulty of family members accepting the news of death is another repeated theme in the accounts, and is further elaborated in the last section of the chapter. After a year, Lamine’s family arranged a funeral even though they had not received his body. Momar also knew other families of disappeared persons who had arranged a funeral without a body after a certain time had p ­ assed – ­sometimes a year, sometimes ­two – ­in order to bring closure. Such substitute funerals are sometimes organized in the sending communities when the families become convinced of the death of the disappeared person (e.g. Lucht 2012: 217–23), but families often find it impossible to have a funeral without the body (e.g. Perl 2019). The question of ritual closure remains contested and agonized when there is no body or other tangible evidence of death. Momar became an eyewitness to his friend’s ordeal, and later, the messenger who conveyed the news to his family. For Momar himself, the overturned boat and his friend’s absence was evidence that was corroborated by the lack of contact and the passage of time. For Lamine’s family, Momar’s account was not enough; only the protracted silence of their absent son finally convinced them of the possibility of Lamine’s death, and they then came to accept Momar’s evidential story.

When to Get Worried: Alarming Loss of Connection As discussed above, the lack of contact and the length of the silence are evaluated by those left behind when trying to make sense of the absence of a migrant friend or family member. This theme is elaborated by Alain, who came from the Congo to Spain ten years ago. At the time of the interview, he was working at a migration NGO in southern Spain and had witnessed both successful and unsuccessful crossings over the Mediterranean. Building on his own experiences as an undocumented traveller, and on the experiences of other travellers he had encountered while living in Spain and working for the NGO, he depicted a landscape of constant uncertainty. He starts from the point of view of travel companions in Morocco waiting for news of a person who has departed for Spain:

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If you have travelled with someone, if he [the disappeared person] doesn’t call in one month, you start to think that he is dead. Often, if you know the family, you call them so that they would know that he is dead. Sometimes we are mistaken because people who get to Europe are not always in touch. [Sometimes it may happen that] when you have called the family that the missing person is dead, after months, [suddenly], he will call ‘I am alive’. When they arrive and they don’t c­ all … w ­ hen they don’t confirm [that they have arrived safely], they are thought to be dead. When I arrived in Ceuta, I was caught by the [Spanish] Civil Guard. So in four days I could not use my cell phone and I could not confirm that I had arrived. My friends in the forest outside Ceuta tried to call me and thought that I was dead. They did not know how to call my aunt. Luckily, I was released by the police in four days. There was a moment when nobody knew.

In Alain’s description, every irregular border crossing is marked by the possibility of death and disappearance. Because of that, it is of utmost importance for migrants to inform those left behind on arriving successfully in Spain. Sometimes it is the families who are waiting for a message, and at other times it is the travel companions who stayed behind in Morocco, waiting for their turn to take the boat. In the latter case, the travel companions often act as a link to the families, transmitting the news. However, as Alain pointed out, sometimes the person crossing the sea does not contact their travel companions even if they are successful, and there may be several reasons for that.8 What Alain describes is a condition marked by constant fear, anticipation and doubt; by criss-­crossing information and misinformation; by assumptions presented as news and later proved to be false; and by assumed deaths that later turn out to be disappearances, with the disappeared person turning up and re-­establishing contact. This is a social condition marked by ever-­present ­uncertainty – i­t is hard for those left behind to know which news to believe. Under these conditions, every loss of contact or delayed phone call may be interpreted as a sign of distress and potential death. James, a man of Senegalese background living in Barcelona’s Besòs neighbourhood, also talked about the crucial importance of keeping in touch, as well as of loss of contact as evidence of ­distress  – ­and in this case, death. He talked with SK about the drowning of his friend Oumar in 2018. At the time of Oumar’s crossing, James was already in Spain, but he emphasized that they were very close friends in Senegal. Once in Morocco, Oumar had started to prepare for the crossing with a group of nine young men from the same

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neighbourhood, including his own brother. They made preparations for a month, and then, when they thought that the weather was good, they departed. And after that, nothing was heard from them. They did not contact James or their families, nor did they answer any calls. In the present day, when almost everybody carries a mobile phone, keeping in touch more intensely than previously has become possible, and is also expected by those left behind. In these circumstances, loss of contact, especially if protracted, is interpreted as a sign of distress. James described how the families of all nine of the disappeared young men tried to contact their disappeared ones at the same time: ‘Just imagine when nine persons have their families trying to call them!’ he exclaimed. He created an image of desperate families left behind calling frantically, but in vain. In this case, the fact that there was not just one person who did not answer the calls, but a group of nine, confirmed the fear that something was seriously wrong. Despite their bodies never being found, James was convinced that they were d ­ ead – ­he used the words ‘drowned’ and ‘dead’, and not ‘disappeared’, throughout the interview. The fact that nine people from the same boat stopped answering their phones built up convincing evidence. This, together with both the ever-­present knowledge that crossing always means the possibility of death and the accumulating history of dead migrants, led to the conviction that Oumar is dead, not disappeared. Another depiction of disappearance, doubt and temporality was recounted by Ndeye, a Senegalese man living with his wife in a small town in Catalunya. He spoke about the violent disappearance of his younger brother Malik while heading from Senegal to Spain via Morocco in 2019. Malik had travelled with a friend to Morocco, where they waited for an opportunity to cross the sea. Ndeye had pleaded with his brother to wait until Ndeye had enough money to help him to cross safely, but Malik did not have the patience. Ndeye recounted: Malik and the friend had left at four in the morning to the boat. When they were preparing [at the beach] for the departure from the Moroccan coast, the police came with their dogs. Everybody started to run and Malik ran to the s­ ea … ­this is how his accident h ­ appened … ­He was so scared that he thought that it is better to go to the sea than to the police. Even if someone would shout and cry in the sea, nobody helps. Malik was in the water and called his friend’s name. The police only looked at him and laughed. The friend did not go to help him because he did not know how to swim. And if he would help, he could be returned to his country, this is why he ran.

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This scene of his younger brother escaping the police into the sea and never returning to the shore was recounted to Ndeye by Malik’s friend who witnessed what happened. Both Malik and the friend were trying to avoid the Moroccan authorities. This description embodies many of the elements of the structural violence that makes undocumented migrants vulnerable and disappearable (Laakkonen 2022). It also shows the violence of the Moroccan state and its compliance with the European border security project (see also Andersson 2014). The Moroccan state is thus present in Ndeye’s account as a violent actor pushing the disappeared young man to his death, as opposed to an actor that might help in sea rescue. Ndeye had difficulty believing that Malik had died and, like so many other family members, he needed to do his own search: Malik spoke to me every day [before his disappearance] but then he did not answer in one week. After three weeks I was already sure that he [was] dead, and I called our m ­ other … I­ called my friend who has lived for ten years in Tétouan, that he would investigate the thing. He went to Tangier to ask questions around. And he said to me that the body [of Malik] is there.

Disbelief regarding the news could in this instance be considered a mode of emotional resistance and a strategy of keeping up hope. In Malik’s case, finding the body became the conclusive evidence that forced Ndeye and the family to accept the death. In protracted cases of disappearance, hope and despair often follow one another, and become intertwined if there is no clear closure (Huttunen forthcoming). Both Momar’s and Ndeye’s stories show how observations by eyewitnesses are interpreted in relation to the circumstances. An empty boat on the high seas points to mortal danger, and the same boat being dragged empty to the shore is just further evidence. A scared youngster escaping angry police dogs for the sea, with ruthless police officers showing no signs of mercy, builds up another moment of deadly circumstances. In both disappearances, other pieces of evidence piled up and the protracted lack of contact became an important factor. One eyewitness account was apparently not enough in such volatile circumstances, and in both cases families searched for additional evidence before they became convinced of the deaths of their absent loved ones.

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Disbelief, Time and Acceptance In the stories of Momar, Alain, James and Ndeye above, the passage of time was a crucial factor in convincing those left behind of the death of the disappeared person. Temporality is important also in the account of Mbaye, a Senegalese middle-­aged man who has faced migrant deaths and disappearances both in his personal life and as an employee of an NGO working with migrant issues in southern Spain. Resonating with the stories discussed above, he argues that the most common evidence of death is the boat that does not arrive, or a person who does not arrive on a particular boat that other travellers on the Moroccan side knew they had ­boarded – o ­ r, as in the stories above, phone calls that do not arrive. Mbaye’s account of the disappearance of his nephew’s friend Amadou weaves together most of the themes discussed above, including uncertainty, competing possible explanations for the lack of communication, disbelief, difficulty in accepting the death, and the passage of time: I will tell a case that took place some years ago to a person who was my nephew’s friend. They were in Morocco together and took the boat to Spain the same day. They were put into different boats, but on the same ­day … ­And my nephew arrived, but the other ­boy … ­the boat did not ­arrive … t­hey didn’t a­rrive … ­they stayed at the sea. The boy disappeared. And the father [who already lived in Spain] did not accept the news that this boy had died. The father thought that the boy had arrived in Spain and that he was in the prison or in some other place and that he does not want to communicate with the relatives. And my nephew said that no, the boy took the boat, but this boat did not arrive. And in addition, some people who were with him knew that he had died. They had seen his body.   But the father did not acknowledge this, he did not want to accept it. Neither did the mother believe that he was dead. The father went to Morocco to search for him. He came here to talk with me because he was already here in Spain. The father came here to the association to talk to me. He called the police, searched the hospitals, searched, they did everything, did not find the boy. Almost everyone knew that the boy had died, but the father did not want to accept it. Until, I don’t know, four, six, seven months passed, then they said that there is no need to search any more and that the boy is dead. After that the father finally acknowledged that he was dead.

This description of Amadou’s parents’ frantic search for their son shows how they exhausted the possibilities of finding him alive,

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or of finding his body to be buried, before accepting his death in the absence of the body. It is a story of doubting the information provided, with hope fading and disbelief turning into acceptance with the passage of time. This account is not, however, the most common kind: not all disappeared persons have relatives already living in Spain. The families left behind in the countries of origin are seldom able to travel to Spain to search themselves; many do not have the financial means to travel or the opportunity to obtain visas. In the depiction above, the careful search, combined with the witness accounts from Mbaye’s nephew and other travellers, and the passage of time, finally convinced Amadou’s parents that their son was dead.

Discussion In this chapter we have followed the ways in which people try to come to terms with the disappearance of a person during an undocumented journey, and how they assess evidence and evaluate the possibility of death in the absence of a body or other forensic evidence. All these narratives weave a canvas of constant threat of disappearance and death, of which migrants embarking on a crossing of the Mediterranean, as well as their families and larger communities, are aware. This possibility necessarily affects the ways in which different pieces of evidence are interpreted when a migrant goes missing. However, when there is no tangible evidence, the course of events is often reconstructed through a reliance on rumours, secondary information and experience of similar circumstances and events. The social world of undocumented migration is permeated with constant uncertainty, including what we have called ‘epistemic uncertainty’. All knowledge is evaluated in situations when a co-­traveller or somebody else connected to the disappeared person tries to reach conclusions about the uncertain events and to forward this information to others. Many migrants end up as witnesses, having seen the death or disappearance of their friends and co-­travellers. Such a situation often carries the silent obligation to inform the family and community in the sending country about what has happened. Both the co-­travellers who witness events en route and the families left behind assess the information in order to make sense of the existing, often scarce, evidence of the events. The evidence is assessed and negotiated by the relatives and by other travellers, and certain forms of evidence,

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such as narratives and witness accounts given by co-­travellers, can be important, but fragile and insufficient on their own. In this sense, this limited, incomplete and fragmented knowledge creates ‘epistemic uncertainty’, leading to various interpretations of the events by both the co-­travellers and the relatives of the disappeared. In the process of assessment, co-­travellers who witness an event with their own eyes are positioned differently to the families left behind, who need to make sense of the accounts that they hear. Based on their own experiences and their empirical observations of the circumstances of travel, co-­travellers evaluate the probabilities of survival of the disappeared person. Similarly, boats that are known to have departed but have not been confirmed as arrived can be interpreted as evidence of death by co-­travellers. This evidence is reinforced by the ever-­present knowledge of the possibility of death during the journey and the accumulating number of other migrants losing their lives in the crossings. The accounts of co-­travellers are important to the families left behind but, beyond these, they assess other indications of disappearance, such as the passage of time. Families and friends constantly evaluate the duration of time between departure and the expected phone call informing them that the migrant has arrived at the destination. The longer the period of no contact, the more convincing this evidence of distress becomes. However, in this landscape of constant uncertainty, there are always many possible explanations for the absence of contact, making the process of evaluation complex and multifaceted. Thus, both the co-­travellers and the families left behind assess the existing evidence, but are differently positioned in relation to it. While co-­travellers have first-­hand knowledge of both the circumstances of travel and the events during the journey, the families are often dependent on news brought by these individuals. In this situation, co-­travellers become the messengers of death, which is often felt to be a burdensome duty. Co-­travellers, then, assess what they have seen and experienced, while the families assess their general knowledge of the circumstances of disappearance as well as the information they are told by the co-­travellers. In other words, the families need to assess the credibility of both the evidence and the witness. In a sense, they are doing what judges and juries in formal court cases do: they assess whether the evidence is convincing, whether it is enough to prove the case and whether the witness is trustworthy. However, what is identical in both the co-­travellers’ and the relatives’ process of assessing the evidence is that when

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there is an expectation that the disappeared person would contact them if they could, they interpret the absence and loss of contact as evidence. The importance of the co-­travellers’ accounts is underlined by the limited possibilities of finding a person disappeared at sea, and by the absence of states as actors in the search for the undocumented missing. Even though the Spanish police works with the identification of dead migrant bodies found in its territory, none of the interlocutors in this chapter refer to the police when recounting how they tried to discover the fate of the disappeared persons. The Moroccan state is present in Ndeye’s story, but only as a violent actor pushing the disappeared young man to his death. In place of states, some NGOs figure in these accounts as potential searchers and transferers of information. However, unofficial contacts and social networks seem to be the most important channels of information, thus corroborating the understandings of earlier research (Lucht 2012; Dearden, Last and Spencer 2020). Among the families left behind, the acceptance of the death of a disappeared person in the absence of a body is a patchwork of weaving together various kinds of evidence: loss of contact, witness accounts of trusted persons and the exhausting of the possibilities of finding the missing person by visiting hospitals, prisons and morgues whenever such a search in Spain or Morocco is possible. At some point, there is enough such accumulated evidence to convince those left behind that the disappeared person is dead. The passage of time is often a crucial factor in this accumulation, as the final proof of death. However, this process of evaluation and negotiation of the ontological status of the absent loved one is marked by epistemic uncertainty throughout. In addition, there are always those who remain unconvinced, for whom the fate of the absent loved one remains a haunting question, and their return a possibility tinged with intertwined hope and despair (see also Perl 2019; Huttunen forthcoming). This process of evaluation and negotiation is thus marked by pervasive epistemic uncertainty. Robert Hertz’s (1960) classic text argues that death is a process, in both a social and a material sense. We end this chapter by returning to this idea of process. In the world of undocumented migration, marked by vulnerabilities, deep uncertainties and a lack of protection by any state, this process is very complicated and evidence is fragile. The difficulty of knowing what has happened to the absent loved one makes the process uncertain, and the porous line between life, death and disappearance open to reinterpretation. Epistemic uncertainty

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leaves its deep mark on the process of facing death in these circumstances. However, with the passage of time, the process of death proceeds, even when surrounded by uncertainty.

Acknowledgements This chapter is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted by Saila Kivilahti, the conceptual analysis of which was carried out together with Laura Huttunen. The chapter is part of a research project on migrant disappearances entitled ‘Governance and Grieving: Disappearing Migrants and Emergent Politics’, led by Laura Huttunen and funded by the Academy of Finland (grant numbers 315979 and 326570). Saila Kivilahti is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at Tampere University, Finland. Her dissertation explores the search for and identification of undocumented disappeared migrants in the western Mediterranean by focusing on the knowledge and evidence surrounding the disappearances. She has conducted fieldwork in Spain and Morocco with the relatives, friends and travel companions of disappeared migrants, as well as with NGOs and authorities working with the disappearances. Laura Huttunen is Professor of Social Anthropology at Tampere University, Finland. She has worked extensively on issues of migration and transnational communities, and has conducted ethnographic research among the Bosnian diaspora since 2001. More recently, she has worked on the anthropology of human disappearances. In 2013–14 she ran a project that focused on the question of missing and disappeared persons in Bosnia–Herzegovina; in 2018–22 she led a research project with a focus on disappearances in migratory contexts. Currently, she is working on a monograph on human disappearances and reappearances.

Notes 1. Spanish law enforcement is divided between different agencies, such as the Civil Guard (Guardia Civil) and the National Police (Policía Nacional). 2. International Committee of the Red Cross. 3. International Organization for Migration.

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4. International Commission on Missing Persons. 5. For example, Algeciras Acoge, Centro Internacional para la Identificación de Migrantes Desaparecidos (CIPIMD), Fundación Cepaim and the Spanish Red Cross. 6. Four of them were from Senegal and one was from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 7. In SK’s material there were also stories of shootings and other types of killing or death caused by the authorities or by criminal networks; the IOM’s Fatal Journeys reports, numbers 1 to 4, reveal a whole range of other causes of death. See https://publications.iom.int/search?search=Fata​ l+Journeys&f%5B0%5D=category%3A130 (accessed 9 February 2023). 8. They might, for example, be arrested by the police, get injured, decide to disappear or stop contact for other reasons.

References Albahari, Maurizio. 2016. Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations at the World’s Deadliest Border. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Andersson, Ruben. 2014. Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press. Crenzel, Emilio. 2011. ‘Between the Voices of the State and the Human Rights Movement: Never Again and the Memories of the Disappeared in Argentina’, Journal of Social History 44(4): 1063–76. Dearden, Kate, Tamara Last and Craig Spencer. 2020. ‘Mortality and Border Deaths Data: Key Challenges and Ways Forward’, in Paolo Cuttitta and Tamara Last (eds), Border Deaths: Causes, Dynamics and Consequences of Migration-Related Mortality. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 53–70. Durham Peters, John. 2001. ‘Witnessing’, Media, Culture & Society 23: 707–23. Hertz, Robert. [1909] 1960. Death and the Right Hand. Glencoe: Free Press. Huttunen, Laura. 2016. ‘Liminality and Contested Communitas: The Missing Persons in Bosnia-­Herzegovina’, Conflict and Society: Advances in Research 2: 201–18. https://doi.org/10.3167/arcs.2016.020117. —-—-—. Forthcoming. ‘Narratives of Absence: Making Sense of Loss and Liminality in the Post-­War Bosnian Diaspora’, in B. Bonisch-­Brednich et al. (eds), Migrant N ­ arratives – ­Moving Stories: Modalities of Agency, Collectivity and Performativity. Routledge. IOM. 2021. ‘Families of Missing Migrants: Their Search for Answers and the Impacts of Loss’. IOM Publications Platform. Retrieved 9 February 2023 from https://publications.iom.int/books/families-­missing-­migrants​ -­their-­search-­answers-­and-­impacts-­loss.

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—-—-—. 2022. ‘23,568 Missing Migrants Recorded in the Mediterranean (since 2014)’. Missing Migrants Project. Retrieved 9 February 2023 from https://missingmigrants.iom.int/region/mediterranean. Jelin, Elizabeth. 2003. State Repression and the Labors of Memory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Laakkonen, Ville. 2022. ‘Death, Disappearances, Borders: Migrant Disappearability as a Technology of Deterrence’, Political Geography 99: 102767. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2022.102767. Le Courant, Stefan. 2019. ‘Imposture at the Border: Law and the Construction of Identities among Undocumented Migrants’, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 27(3): 472–85. https://doi.org/10.11​ 11/1469-­8676.12572. Lucht, Hans. 2012. Darkness before Daybreak: African Migrants Living on the Margins in Southern Italy Today. Berkeley: University of California Press. Metcalf, Peter, and Richard Huntington. 1991. Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parr, Hester, Olivia Stevenson and Penny Woolnough. 2016. ‘Search/ing for Missing People: Families Living with Ambiguous Absence’, Emotion, Space and Society 19: 66–75. Perl, Gerhild. 2016. ‘Uncertain Belongings: Absent Mourning, Burial, and Post-­Mortem Repatriations at the External Border of the EU in Spain’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 37(2): 195–209. —-—-—. 2018. ‘Lethal Borders and Translocal Politics of “Ordinary People”’, Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 27(2): 85–104. —-—-—. 2019. ‘Traces of Death: Exploring Affective Responsiveness across the Spanish-­Moroccan Sea’, PhD thesis. Bern: University of Bern. Pospíšil, Leopold. 1971. Anthropology of Law: A Comparative Theory. New York: Harper & Row. Robben, Antonius C.G.M. 2004. ‘Death and Anthropology: An Introduction’, in Antonius C.G.M. Robben (ed.), Death, Mourning and Burial: A Cross-Cultural Reader. London: Blackwell, pp. 1–16. —-—-—. 2005a. ‘How Traumatized Societies Remember: The Aftermath of Argentina’s Dirty War’, Cultural Critique 59: 120–64. —-—-—. 2005b. Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Rouland, Norbert. 1994. Legal Anthropology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sant Cassia, Paul. 2007. Bodies of Evidence: Burial, Memory and the Recovery of Missing Persons in Cyprus. New York: Berghahn. Shalev Greene, Karen, and Lilian Alys (eds). 2017. Missing Persons: A Handbook of Research. London: Routledge. Steward, Pamela J., and Andrew Strathern. 2004. Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors, and Gossip. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Diana. 1997. Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and

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Nationalism in Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wagner, Sarah. 2008. To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for Srebrenica’s Missing. Berkeley: University of California Press. Zagaria, Valentina. 2020. ‘“Burning” Borders: Migration, Death and Dignity in a Tunisia Coastal Town’, unpublished PhD thesis. London: London School of Economics.

11 The Mediterranean as a Forensic Archive Zuzanna Dziuban

Disappeared Dead In her book Water Graves, devoted to lives lost to water, both those resulting from the Middle Passage and contemporary deaths attributed to deadly migration policies, Valerie Loichot (2020: 1) insists: ‘Water graves matter.’ While this insistence stems from Loichot’s engagement with works of literature and art that are committed to the memory of ‘sites of loss for the enslaved, the migrant, the refugee, the destitute’ (ibid.), it speaks, too, to the fact that such graves are very often seen not to matter. This holds true regarding the deaths of those forcibly boarded onto slave ships crossing the Atlantic in the colonial period and also those of modern-­day undocumented migrants who drown trying to escape war, oppression or poverty. A report addressing death and disappearance in the Mediterranean asserts: ‘The reality of undocumented migrant deaths and migrant bodies has been conspicuously absent from border migration narratives and from the rhetoric ­of … ­actors involved in policy, academia and the media’ (Ampuero Villagran 2018: 3). The intention of Loichot’s Water Graves was to counter this absence and this withdrawal of care, and so too is the objective of this chapter. Dedicated to the reality of European border deaths, my chapter arises from, and articulates, the same insistence that drove Loichot’s book. It is an intervention in the cultural epistemologies and political orders of knowledge that perpetuate the normative categories of the living and the dead, rendering the deaths of certain categories of subjects unnoteworthy, ‘normalized’, invisible. Whereas it

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is unquestionable that the deaths discussed in this chapter are acknowledged, experienced and mourned by survivors and relatives of the dead, in the following I focus on the ‘conspicuous absence’ of engagement with them by European states. As an (East) European myself, I turn critical attention towards dominant discourses and politics that construct migration to Europe and, ostensibly, do so in my name.1 The chapter looks at the structural violence behind border deaths and foregrounds the European aspect of this violence, tracing the processes behind the production of invisibilized death and its disturbing conditions of possibility. It considers the Mediterranean as a complex political, cultural and material space constructed by various modalities of violence, including violence against human remains. The chapter does this in order to propose a way of engaging with border deaths that intervenes in those dominant epistemologies and orders of knowledge, from within the European perspective, in order not to privilege this perspective but to unsettle it. In the following, I construct the Mediterranean as a fluid space of violence, a violence of policing and abandonment that partakes in the production of death but also in post-­mortem violence against the dead, conceptualized here as a form of disappearance. This perspective on the Mediterranean is, nevertheless, challenged in the remainder of the chapter: in looking at the Mediterranean through the prism of the material reality of border deaths, I consider it as an archive, brimming with traces of death and of the violence of the European border regime. I do so by drawing from several art and activist projects carried out by European artists and scholars who engage with the sea. Centring on the question of European complicity in and (un) accountability for border deaths, these projects propose new ways to interrogate, repurpose and reshape the dominant frames and technologies of visibility around such deaths, recasting the Mediterranean as an archive of the violence it is meant to invisibilize. In my chapter, this artistically and technologically mediated archive is established as fluid and forensic but also as decentred and post-­anthropocentric. Working with several meanings of forensics, I turn analytical attention to water itself, casting it as a nature–culture infrastructure that matters for the ways in which the water dead are constructed and undone. Finally, I attend to the very challenge posed by the material affordances of the sea and the bodies submerged in it in retaining and archiving the presence of border deaths, as much symbolically and politically as materially, in order to literalize human remains (a notion I develop later on) and their lingering corporeal presence, and make water deaths ‘reappear’ and matter.

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My engagement with the Mediterranean results from an acknowledgment that it has become the deadliest environment for undocumented migrants. Over 22,900 people are considered to have gone missing or have lost their lives (or both) trying to cross to Europe since 2014 alone (International Organization for Migration n.d.) and the actual number is most probably much higher. But my chapter is also a response to a theoretical reorganization of the field of border and migration studies and ­ beyond – ­ as an outcome of constant shifts in migration management ­policies – t­hat extends its attention from the countries of departure, transit and destination to offshore spaces, spaces between states, and territorial and extraterritorial waters as geographical and material (re)articulations of sovereignty and political power (Peters, Steinberg and Stratford 2018; Mountz 2020). Especially in recent decades, the seas and oceans have become prime subjects of political technologies of territorialization, a means of managing human mobility, and objects of extensive control and surveillance – ­ ­ a surveillance consequently blind to water deaths (Halkort 2021) – that constitute the palpable outcome of border violence. In this reconfigured field, bodies of water emerge as objects of governance and as its tools, weaponized and re-­weaponized to contain the migration of people deemed illegal. Bodies of water are made into borders, a means of deterrence and spaces of political violence (as sites of loss of life), to finally make those who drowned disappear (Duncan 2019). They are central components of complex natural-­ cultural infrastructures that are simultaneously used and naturalized in the enforcement of border regimes, enacting codes of citizenship such that some bodies belong and some do not and, therefore, ‘can’ drown. This holds true both for Europe and for countries and actors elsewhere managing migration through the Mediterranean. Yet thinking through slippery ‘territories beyond terra’ requires, too, an acknowledgement of the ways in which those ‘voluminous, elemental, fluid’ (Peters, Steinberg and Stratford 2018: 5) spaces probe the notions of sovereignty and power. Unlike the supposedly stable earth, watery spaces are ambiguous, dynamic, on the move; they are changeable, unpredictable and unruly, never fully controllable; they complicate state practices of juridical and political bordering. And while this undoubtedly poses a challenge for sovereignty, this is equally the case for engagement with ‘water graves’ (a notion I will soon abandon). It is, after all, also the unruly nature of water that translates into the fact that the actual number of lives lost to water will never be fully known, with many deaths unaccounted for and bodies never recovered. The ostensible absence of bodies lost to

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water has also resulted in scholarship on border deaths centring primarily either on bodies washed up on European and non-­European shores or on those recovered, and the dense political, material and memorial practices that revolve and evolve around them both, on the part of the relatives and communities of the dead and various civil society initiatives (Perl 2016; M’charek 2018; Cuttitta and Last 2020). In most cases the recovery of drowned undocumented migrants is not prioritized, and neither is the systematic collection of data and numbers regarding those who never reached European shores. The counting, condemned to inadequacy, is outsourced to civil society organizations. Indeed, the palpable (un)presence of the submerged and unrecovered bodies at once constitutes an alibi for their disappearance in the water and an infrastructure through which it ­unfolds – a­ point I will be developing throughout the chapter. The necessity of raising questions about the posthumous fates of these bodies disappears, along with any need for accountability for their deaths. In this context it is not merely the fragmentation of juridical regimes at sea or the extraterritoriality of waters that is deployed as an excuse for inaction and the lack of ­counting – ­deaths outside the territorial waters of European and non-­European states lie beyond the scope of these states’ sovereign l­iability – ­it is also about the ostensible opacity of water. As made manifest by Monika Halkort (2021), despite the unprecedented deployment of remote sensing technologies, environmental sensors and d ­ rones – p ­ ut in place by militarized border control at sea and bodies monitoring the environmental transformations of the M ­ editerranean – ­their presence has by no means translated into knowledge about deaths in the sea. On the contrary. Structural violence behind border deaths goes hand in hand with the structural inaction that contributes towards their unfolding, and also with structural blindness to their material underwater realities and outcomes. It is against this background that I conceptualize disappearance as disappearance of the dead. The notion of disappearance pertains here to bodies submerged and never recovered, not because they cannot be retrieved but because they are considered not to matter to either the European states or the non-­European countries to which the former outsource the management of migration (Heller and Pezzani 2020; Duncan 2019). This intervention draws from the notion of disappearance in its trajectory from a specific mode of repressive political violence that evolved in many Latin American states to its more recent reconceptualizations in sociology and anthropology of migration as a structural violence of exclusion and abandonment (Schindel

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and Gatti 2020). Conceptualized, first, in relation to a geographically specific mode of repressive political v­ iolence – t­ he forcible disappearance of citizens by the ­state – ­and later codified in international law, the notion informs today’s analyses of the normative categories of the living who are subjected to exclusion, deemed expendable, denied access to the legalities of formal citizenship and made to disappear structurally, in order to foreground the accountability behind every form of disappearance (Schindel 2019). My intention, nevertheless, is not to contribute to debates on theoretical and political modalities of the concept (see Huttunen and Perl, this volume), nor to dwell on the analytically charged (un)distinction between enforced disappearance and death (Schindel 2019; Distretti 2020). Rather, the notion of disappearance is, here, further expanded to include human ­remains – ­the bodies of those disappeared or d ­ ead – t­hus accounting for the post-­ mortem experience of violence, of devaluation, abandonment and invisibilization in and through water. This violence is considered here as material, political and epistemological in its direct forms, but also less visible or, indeed, effectively invisibilized when inflicted upon the classed and racialized bodies of undocumented migrants. What this notion of disappearance inherits from its predecessors is, nevertheless, a demand for accountability as a transitive concept (no body just disappears unless it is made to disappear or is disappeared) against the normalization and accidentalization of the fates of human remains in watery environments, and against the withdrawal of the will or capacity to know and to care. Perhaps more importantly, as the notion moves beyond the definitional suspension of the disappeared between life and death, it retains the uneasy ontological question of (un)presence, of oscillation between presence and absence, carried by the notion of disappearance. This latter dimension of water disappearance reverberates, too, in Loichot’s Water Graves, when she writes that aquatic bodies as ‘unspecified places of dying or repose’ are ‘ambiguous: the dead are both nowhere to be found and potentially everywhere’ (Loichot 2020: 13). I agree, but not entirely, and perhaps it is here that our interpretations part ways, Loichot’s being structured around the investigation of the unritual and the sacred negotiated by art and literature that memorializes bodies lost to water.2 I feel uneasy about framing the Mediterranean as a space of repose and as a metaphorical grave sacralized by the presence of dead bodies; sacralization soothes, and implies a hegemonic closure where perhaps none should be sought. This is especially the case when the analysed reality is essentially

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structured not around the past but around unfolding violence, as with border deaths, and the watery environment itself is deployed and weaponized ‘as concealment and mode of erasure’ (Duncan 2019: 36). In other words, the environment remains entangled in the politics that induces death by the policing, abandonment and, finally, disappearance of human remains in and through water. Through this lens, the Mediterranean is not so much a site of repose as a means and mode of disposal and invisibilization. However, I am also somewhat troubled by the ‘nowhere’ and ‘potentially’ in the above quotation from Water Graves. The dead are to be found, and they are everywhere. They are there, in the water, perhaps concealed, but present, not merely metaphorically but literally due to their physical, biological and biochemical qualities. They are on the move, transforming with, in and through the water in which they are submerged, far from being ‘put to rest’. They unexpectedly wash up and resurface, often quite literally and of their own accord or through the agency of their aquatic environments (Duncan 2019: 169); at other times, they are deliberately searched for and recovered, or merely, but poignantly, imagined in their (in)visible being there. I call this imagining a literalization of human remains, which restores the corporeality and post-­mortem material presence of bodies swallowed by water, and I argue that it has the ability to challenge the dominant regimes of (in)visibility around them. There are many ways in which to unsettle those regimes, most prominent among them being the opening up of space for migrant voices and the foregrounding of their agency. In this chapter I follow a different trajectory. And while this trajectory is established by European activism and art that, in my view, seeks to literalize the presence of migrant bodies in aquatic ­environments – ­radically unsettling both the notion that once submerged, bodies disappear entirely, and the concept of water as abysmal and void, or as a soothing site of ­repose – ­it ultimately confers agency on bodies of the dead and on the sea, retaining the presence of human remains in their capacity to disturb European imaginaries of the Mediterranean. In the remainder of this chapter, I will, therefore, turn my attention to several politically motivated art and activist projects that, in different ways, work to enable those disappeared in water to reappear, casting the sea not so much as a grave but as an a­ rchive – ­an archive that is fluid and forensic.

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Fluid Archive – Forensic Archive The notion of the Mediterranean as a fluid archive comes from Ian Chambers (2014). It is in these terms that he intervenes in the epistemologies of the sea rooted in the ‘abstract universalism of discriminatory mapping’ (Chambers 2008: 19) and in the modern constructions of the Mediterranean as European, both defined against the racialized others of Europe and instrumental in their production. The Mediterranean that Chambers critically unpacks is the sea, considered as a space of bordering and demarcations, of territorial and extraterritorial claims, of military, scientific and economic appropriation, born in the colonial period and perpetuated to this very day. For ­Chambers – ­and he is definitely not alone in his thinking (Sharpe 2016; Cuttitta and Distretti 2020) – it is virtually impossible to think of the Mediterranean as a cultural and political space without acknowledging the colonial, nationalist and racial ideologies that underpinned its production and reverberate in contemporary practices of geographical and material articulations of sovereignty. These continuities are most powerfully articulated, writes Chambers (2008: 7), in the figure of the ‘migrant body’, a body of the structurally and politically excluded, exposed like no other to ‘aquatic vulnerability’ (Loichot 2020: 1), to drowning and submergence in the Mediterranean, as articulations of the politics of exclusion and alterity. And yet, it is the same ‘migrant body’ that most powerfully probes and ‘exposes the instability of abstract distinctions and confines’ (Chambers 2008: 7) that define state control over territory. Through its sheer presence, and through its precarious mobility, the migrant body defies bordering and demarcations, renders them unruly. This unruliness is inscribed, therefore, in the Mediterranean as a migrant landscape, a landscape of movement and set in movement, whose liquid materiality has the potential to challenge the imaginaries attached to it. ‘It is the sea itself that promotes the adoption of a more fluid cartography in which the presumed stability of the historical archive, together with its associated “facts” and interpretations, is set to float: susceptible to drift, unplanned contacts, even shipwreck’, proposes Chambers (ibid.: 24). For him this implies an attentiveness to aspects of modernity that remain invisible from European shores and from within dominant imaginaries, to its repressed and negated complexity, which is retained in the fluid archive of the M ­ editerranean – a­ n archive of excluded pasts and subjectivities, unobtrusively haunted by the alternative knowledges of the sea, and

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by contemporary forms of exclusion and dispossession effectuated in and through it. To think with and through the Mediterranean is to attend to the migrant body, challenging the dominant regime of visibility critically, but also necessarily, from the position of epistemological ‘vulnerability’ (Chambers 2014: 20) – a position I also, necessarily, adopt. For Chambers the sea is primarily a metaphor for an epistemological reconfiguration of the Mediterranean as a cultural and political concept, and a method of rewriting its tangled history. In the following, I stay closer to those scholars who take the notion of a sea as an archive more literally. Challenging the notion of watery environments as a void, Jessica Lehman (2017) writes about the ocean as a record of history, an ‘­archive … ­formed and filtered through marine dynamics, and only available to us in partial and unpredictable ways’. Lehman thinks of the ocean as a record of the waste of the Anthropocene, but she draws, too, from theoreticians of the Middle Passage to consider how material properties of bodies of water allow them to ‘remember’, sometimes beyond and beneath human intention and control, harbouring what was thought and hoped to have disappeared below the surface, in its depths, on the invisible seabed. What Lehman shares with Chambers is, then, the belief that the fluid archive of the watery environment can serve as a wellspring of alternative epistemologies and knowledges of the violence of modernity, and of capitalist globalization. However, I argue in this chapter that this environment is also an archive of the violence of the EU’s border ­regime – ­a fluid but decodable crime scene of an unfolding violence of policing and abandonment, of invisibilization and d ­ isappearance – ­an archive that is, therefore, thoroughly forensic. The understanding of forensics that is mobilized here expands beyond its traditional definition as the application of scientific knowledge to investigate and establish facts in a court of law or as state-­deployed practices and technologies of surveillance and control intended to govern populations (Weizman 2017: 65–66). Instead, I adopt an extended meaning of forensics as a means to reshape the field of visibility and the politics of knowledge production in a way that challenges the policies adopted by the state(s). This notion of forensics, developed in the emergent field of forensic activism and art, draws from the etymological meaning of the word as ‘pertaining to the forum’ in order to cast forensics as a critical aesthetic practice, ­which – w ­ hen appropriated by scholars, artists and a­ ctivists – c­ an be mobilized to expose political violence perpetrated and effectively concealed by the states involved. Forensics is conceptualized, in this

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sense, as an arena where evidence is presented, constructed and contested; where claims and counter-­claims are made; where the forensic gaze can be ‘inverted to detect and interrupt state violations’ (ibid.: 10); and, finally, where new forms of visibility and ways of perceiving reality can be put forward and pondered. It is also the meaning of forensics that governs the practice of ‘Forensic Oceanography’, a project whose activist-­aesthetic interventions I will move on to analyse, positing that what they do can be read as constructing the Mediterranean as a forensic archive. Established in 2011 within the framework of Forensic A ­ rchi­tecture – a team of theorists, activists, architects, artists and film-­makers under the leadership of Eyal W ­ eizman – t­he ‘Forensic Oceanography’ project, led by Lorenzo Pezzani and Charles Heller, documents violations of the rights of migrants, and their deaths, in and through the Mediterranean. Addressing the forms and outcomes of the shifting modalities of violence of the European border regime(s), the project makes manifest the ways in which water is weaponized and mediates violence, termed by Pezzani and Heller ‘liquid violence’ (also the title of several exhibitions based on the outcomes of their project).3 This is a violence that is outsourced to water and, at the same time, naturalized and instrumentalized by the EU and by non-­EU states to render migrant deaths ‘accidental’, while, in fact, it is not merely the geophysical characteristics of the sea but also its deployment as a border that make it a deadly environment. ‘Most migrants’ deaths across the Mediterranean frontier have not only occurred at sea, but through sea, which has been turned into a deadly liquid as a result of the EU’s exclusionary policies’, state Heller and Pezzani (2020: 95, original emphasis). And they add: ‘The sea’s “geopower” has become embedded in a form of killing operating without state actors directly touching migrants’ bodies, in which violence is rather inflicted in a mediated way, through water’ (ibid.: 95–96, original emphasis). But there is yet another aspect to the liquid violence, one that is consolidated and mediated by the ‘aesthetic regime of (in)visibility’ (Heller and Pezzani 2020: 103) established by practices previously discussed: sophisticated technologies of surveillance and control; repressive state policies; and the properties of the highly policed sea. These all entail the production of impunity through the restriction of visibility, and through unequal access (among states, activists and migrants) to the available means of seeing and sensing the sea and to technologies and media that condition the vision and constrain political action. All those practices partake in the invisibilization of the liquid violence and its outcomes, that is, migrant deaths; they all

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make dead bodies disappear once they drown and submerge; they all translate into Chambers’s epistemological vulnerability associated with thinking of the Mediterranean as an ­archive – ­a ‘witness of the events’ but available only in ‘partial and unpredictable ways’ (Lehman 2017). The form of violence that ‘Forensic Oceanography’ has focused on is primarily that of non-­assistance, in its development from a recurrent practice, as addressed in the ‘The Left-­to-­Die Boat’ case (Forensic Oceanography 2012), to a state policy, and further transformed by the criminalization of rescue initiatives launched by civil society organizations in response to the lack of structural state support for migrants in distress, which is unpacked in the ‘The Sea Watch vs Libyan Coast Guard Case’ case (Forensic Oceanography 2018). Those shifting constellations of border violence called upon new practices of documentation, of registering the traces of this violence in and through the sea, and translated, too, into varying degrees of proximity to the material reality of border deaths. ‘The Left-­to-­ Die Boat’ was an investigation into the 2011 disaster involving a boat carrying seventy-­two migrants, which for days hopelessly drifted in the Mediterranean. No help arrived, even though the boat could be spotted by aircraft and ships, and the distress call was sent out. In order to document this case, ‘Forensic Oceanography’ reconstructed the spatiotemporal coordinates of the drift of the boat, locating it in proximity to various vessels, including those not accounted for by open-­access vessel tracking systems, and comparing available data with satellite images, scarce photographic documentation, meteorological and geospatial data, oceanographic analysis and survivors’ testimonies. The outcome was a video report that not only corroborated survivors’ accounts but also showed that many actors present in the area, despite their legal obligation to assist, simply refused to help and, thus, were legally culpable for the deaths of sixty-­three people. ‘The Left-­to-­Die Boat’ established the Mediterranean as a dynamic, complex, animated landscape, perhaps unruly, set in motion by currents and winds, and yet rich in traces of violence and resulting deaths, traces left in water and mediated by multiple sensing devices: remote sensing technologies, electromagnetic waves, vessel tracking systems and optical and radar satellite imagery. Repurposed by ‘Forensic Oceanography’, the data provided by those surveillance devices and technologies became a means of creating an ‘alternative knowledge’ of the sea, of recording and reading its depth and surface against the invisibilities established by the European border regime and its securitization. The data rendered the sea a digital sensorium, a

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‘digital archive’, ‘a new sea altogether’, ‘traversed by the energy that forms its waves and currents, but [also] by different electromagnetic waves sent and received by multiple sensing devices’ (Heller and Pezzani 2014: 657). Yet it is perhaps the ‘The Sea Watch vs Libyan Coast Guard Case’ (Forensic Oceanography 2018) that in the most palpable and disturbing way made manifest the material reality of the migrant deaths that were unfolding in and through the sea, and the ways in which the sea as an archive is constituted, and literalized, by the media used to document it. This investigation was concerned with a confrontation in November 2017 between a rescue boat crewed by the German NGO Sea-­Watch and the Libyan coast guard, both of which were asked to help a migrant boat in distress and whose support would have meant either transportation to Italy or a violent pull-­back to Libya and the certainty of further human rights violations of the kind in which Libya is known to be involved against undocumented migrants. Alongside images produced by remote sensing devices that ‘The Sea Watch vs Libyan Coast Guard Case’ mobilized, audiovisual recordings came from the deck of Sea-Watch 3. What they provided was direct documentation of the operation as carried out by the NGO and the Libyans, the rescue of the people set adrift, the active flight of several migrants from the Libyan vessel, where they were being violently beaten up, to that of the NGO, and also footage of two bodies being swallowed by the sea, of death as it unfolded and disappeared in the Mediterranean. I share the ethical unease regarding these images articulated by Heller and Pezzani (2020) in an article commenting on their work. This unease revolves around the question of consent, of symbolic violence inscribed in the use of images of violence and the reproduction of the racialized asymmetry between those in a radically precarious situation and the ‘rescuers’ (ibid.: 122). This unease pertains, too, to the question of the power to produce and circulate such images, within and outside of juridical forums, and their ability to objectify and disempower migrants, even when serving as evidence and as a basis for legal claims. All this poses a key ethical challenge in the engagement with the structure, logic and corporeal impact of the liquid violence of the European border regime, the closer it gets to the material reality of border deaths. Perhaps it is, too, an articulation of epistemological (and ethical) vulnerability. And yet, it is exactly the disturbing proximity of such images that serves to ground abstract narratives of violence and could be read as a moral imperative not to look away and to really c­ omprehend – t­ o comprehend the tactile

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and corporeal experience behind every border death documented through counter-­forensic means. The presence of such images shocks and radically unsettles the frame of visibility imposed by the bodies and states involved (in this case, those of both the EU and Libya), enabling a glimpse into the violent reality they effectuate. But it also exposes the limits of the digitally constructed archive of the Mediterranean, foregrounding what it only hints at and mediates: the material and tacit presence of the bodies swallowed and retained by the watery environment. For Heller and Pezzani (2020: 122), the images in ‘The Sea Watch vs Libyan Coast Guard Case’ remain haunted by the ghosts of the dead, whose deaths they seek to document. What I also saw in them myself was a haunted sea, haunted not so much by ghosts but by the material, albeit (in)visibilized presence of dead bodies. To put it bluntly, this project perhaps unintentionally irreversibly transformed my thinking of the watery environment. The sea emerged as a bearer of violence against the living but also against the dead, the latter (due to being submerged) largely invisible to the forensic digital sensorium. One realizes, however, that below the surface the sea retains the capacity to carry the ‘alternative knowledges’ of those forms of violence, against a belief in the obfuscating capacities of water and the completeness of the post-­mortem disappearances it creates.

Above and Below the Surface Paradoxically, it is in the context of the abovementioned belief that I encountered the work I analyse next in this chapter, the photographic series Migrant Bodies/Corpi migranti (2015–17) by Max Hirzel. The series was shown in June and July 2019 at the P21 Gallery in London as part of the exhibition Sink without a Trace. Against the interpretive regime imposed by the exhibition’s title, which suggests the seeming tracelessness of sinking and submergence, I argue that what Migrant Bodies does is just the opposite. It recasts the Mediterranean as an archive brimming with traces of border deaths. The photographic series revolves around a rare case of forensic recovery of bodies of migrants from a highly publicized shipwreck in April 2015. After the suspension by Italy of its Mare Nostrum search-­and-­rescue operation at the end of 2014, which resulted in a rescue gap and the delegation of support for migrant boats in distress to commercial, and largely unprepared, vessels, one such incident of attempted rescue ended in a collision between a cargo ship and a

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migrant boat. The boat sank, and with it over eight hundred people. Only twenty-­nine people survived. Under heavy public and media pressure surrounding what was, at that time, the deadliest shipwreck ever in the Mediterranean, the Italian National Commission for Missing ­Persons – ­also responsible for the recovery and identification of the victims of the October 2013 Lampedusa shipwreck, in the first state-­run operation of its ­kind – l­aunched a series of operations to retrieve the bodies (Olivieri et al. 2018). Following the recovery of bodies drifting in the vicinity of the sunken boat, the wreck was also retrieved from the sea, an action generously funded by the Italian state and widely televised. While this media circulation perhaps made migrant deaths situationally visible, and conveniently cast this EU state as being responsive to a tragedy, what it in fact effectuated was the reconfiguration of the Mediterranean as a deterrent, a deadly environment of accidentalized deaths, which allowed for the responsibility for those deaths to be dispersed in water or interred elsewhere (preferably, in the undocumented migrants themselves). And yet, the recovery of the April 2015 shipwreck resulted in an extended forensic effort carried out by forensic scientists from various Italian universities, ‘working in their spare time, without any compensation’ (M’charek 2018: 104) on autopsies and registration of the dead. Similarly, the task of identification was not commissioned by the government but was outsourced to research institutions (M’charek and Casartelli 2019: 744, 748). Upon recovery, the remains, nonetheless, entered a highly structured realm of forensic practices of investigation, testing, 3D scanning, DNA sampling, documenting and storage, to eventually be buried in Sicilian cemeteries. It was this trajectory that Hirzel selectively reconstructed in his series Migrant Bodies. Rather than preserving the chronology of the images and maintaining the order of steps secured by the forensic protocol, he provided a series of scenes, objects, forensic tools and practices, including one photograph depicting fragmentary human remains (fifty-­two femur sections) and photos of the victims’ relatives at the burial sites. Those were supplemented by images of living migrant bodies ‘processed’ by the European border authorities. Hirzel’s work has been interpreted as both an attempt to uncover personal stories behind border deaths through engaging with relatives of the dead, and a tribute to the work of forensic scientists tasked with the recovery and identification of the victims, bringing closure to the bereaved families. While these are perhaps the intentions behind his work, it yields a more critical reading as well, directed against the frames of visibility around border deaths. Indeed, Hirzel’s

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project revisualizes the histories of intimate, personal loss associated with the shipwreck. It also brings into the picture yet another meaning of forensics, one that is tied to the practices of searching for, recovering and identifying the dead in the aftermath of mass disasters and political ­violence – a­ practice increasingly ‘normalized’ as a response to mass death (Weizman 2017). But, as the context of border deaths exemplifies, this is a practice still largely unevenly distributed, rendering the forensic framing of the border ­dead – ­their recovery, identification and repatriation to ­relatives – n ­ ot so much the rule as an exception. This is further complicated by the fact that the relatives, who would be able to identify the dead or provide comparative material for DNA identification, are not available, so identification remains extremely rare, with most of the dead buried in anonymous graves (Perl 2016). Thus far no forensic recovery or investigation of the dead has been mobilized in such cases as a means to put forward claims regarding accountability for the deaths. It is perhaps no surprise, however, that the usual calls for recovery and investigation have not been forthcoming, given the context of structural violence in which they would unfold. The rationale behind the ‘forensic infrastructure’ that is emerging around European border deaths remains humanitarian and compensatory; the ties to the violence from which the deaths originated severed and invisibilized. In Migrant Bodies this link is decisively re-­established. Firstly, this is done through the dual meaning of both the Italian and English words corpo and body, signifying simultaneously a (living) body and a corpse. This dualling is further strengthened by the juxtaposition of the pictures of the migrants as they arrive in Europe, managed by the border enforcement agencies, and of the human remains being processed within the framework of the ‘forensic infrastructure’. This term, which I borrow from Amade M’charek (2018: 99), names the ‘kind of o ­ rganization … i­n place to manage bodies and to arrive at identification’, the latter, in fact, an ‘accidentalized’ and rare occurrence in the context of border deaths, as a result of constantly reinforced geopolitical and racialized divisions. Through Hirzel’s critical lens, this humanitarian and compensatory infrastructure is rendered a structural counterpart of the practices and infrastructures put in place to classify, recognize and govern living migrants by means of border control, biometrics, policing and detention. What he depicts, therefore, is a double-­sided regime of visibility through which the ‘migrant body’, living and dead, enters the European imaginary and is constructed as a subject: as a person encircled and secured by a border guard, or as a body bag attended to by a forensic

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anthropologist; as a number on an asylum claim or on an anonymous grave; as an abstracted racialized ‘threat’ or a fragmentary body ­part – a­ piece of femur, perhaps being prepared for the taking of measurements or the extraction of DNA. In Hirzel’s (2015–17) own words, Migrant Bodies is about the similarities he saw between ‘the reception of migrant people survivors [sic] and the management of migrants’ corpses: codes, lines, numbers, suits, masks’, and, indeed, he was primarily after the person, the individual story behind each body. What he achieved, additionally, was a critical take on modes of bureaucratic and inherently partial materialization and visibilization through sophisticated infrastructures of border security and forensic science, and a glimpse into the complex reality that they disappear, the reality not only of migrant life but of migrant death and the sea as the natural-­cultural infrastructure through which it unfolds. While not depicted directly, the Mediterranean haunts Hirzel’s photos. It is the missing but constitutive link between the images from ‘there’, the countries of departure, and the ‘here’ of bordered and securitized Europe. It is the space connecting and dividing the continents and also the subjects both into normative racialized categories, some of which become reducible to numbers and c­ odes – ­as much in death as in ­life – ­and into those who will make it alive and those who will not. The snapshots from the ­land – ­from the docks where the migrants are received, and from forensic labs where those recovered from the sea are subject to forensic i­nvestigation – ­depict an image of the sea as yet another structural counterpart of the complex infrastructure deployed to manage migration, through indirect means and modes of ‘selection’ and disposal. The sea is also cast in Migrant Bodies as rife with the presence of migrant bodies produced by the violence of policing and abandonment, bodies of a third, neglected category exposed to the post-­mortem experience of violence: those neither admitted nor recovered. Their absence is, nevertheless, conveyed. Every photographed person, recovered object, bone, body bag and grave speaks to others not captured in the photographic series, and to the underwater space from which they originated and in and through which they disappeared. And it is exactly in this interpretive shift from the mere documentation of ­forensics – ­both as a technology of surveillance and border control and as the scientific management of the ­dead – ­to a forensic documentation of what the forensics selectively excludes and makes disappear that Hirzel’s project comes to shatter the frame of the Sink without a Trace idiom. The traces are there, captured in the fluid archive of the Mediterranean. They are recoverable and

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sometimes, indeed, recovered. But for the most part they remain submerged, forming a fluid and dynamic record of the liquid violence of the European border regime and its modalities of erasure.

‘Aquatic Archiving’ Once submerged in aquatic environments, human remains rarely rest in one place, and this, too, gives voice to the fluidity of the Mediterranean as a forensic archive. Bodies resurface, wash up on beaches or shores, are found trapped in fishing nets or are seen drifting on the surface of the water. They are set in motion by the sea’s waves, currents and winds, but also by the biological, physical and biochemical processes and changes they themselves undergo, most of which escape human intention and control. Although, as is often asserted, there is still little research on the process to which human remains are subjected after drowning, the knowledge about it is steadily growing. It is this knowledge, developed in the field of forensic science and, specifically, in forensic taphonomy (Rodriguez 1997; Haglund and Sorg 2002), that allows for yet another reconfiguration of the Mediterranean. Again challenging the notion that the sea is empty and void, with an irreversibly obfuscating (de-­archiving) nature, it casts it, rather, as a forensically rich and complex epistemic resource: a dynamic and processual environment in which human remains undergo transformations, but which is also itself transformed by the presence of the remains. This notion is further reinforced by the scholarship (Bakker 2012; Chen, MacLeod and Neimanis 2013) on the sociality and materiality of watery environments, as complex nature–culture assemblages, ‘reciprocally constitutional in social and political conditions’ (Duncan 2019: 26) and by no means reducible to a homogenous chemical compound: H2O. Seas are biodiverse ecosystems, dense with elements and forms of life, and biophysical characteristics that render them controllable economic resources or political weapons, while at the same time asserting their unpredictable a­ gentivity – c­ ontrol over and knowledge about water bodies is never complete. It is in this sense that Lehman (2017) writes of the ocean archive as one ‘that does not have human experts at its centre’ and ‘takes in what is surrendered to it, but always threatens to issue forth strange returns’. Thought of from beyond the nature–culture divide, at the intersection of human and natural sciences, the Mediterranean is established as an archive whose depth, unruliness and transformability are dictated as much

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by human actions as by the material affordances of the sea itself and the bodies submerged in it. In ‘Hydrology of the Powerless’, Ifor Duncan (2019) engages the archiving capacities of riverine ecosystems deployed as weapons and means of erasure. Thinking against the grain of the impunity that disposal in and through water ostensibly creates, he casts rivers as archiving structures (ibid.: 176) and proposes a particularly cogent reconceptualization of the notion of the aquatic archive. The non-­ human riverine archive, he argues, is solvent, it dissolves and disperses and yet remains thick with the traces of the violence it was supposed to erase; it is an active archive transforming what it receives and entangling it with its own material dynamics, its sedimentations and movements; it is an archive that archives incompletely and differently depending on its flows, depths and material properties; it is a processual archive governed by unpredictability and contingency but nonetheless reserving the submerged; it is a record of history, but tangled and ever contemporaneous. While the river disappears, the riverine archiving retains. And as the river does, so does the sea, albeit ­differently – ­against the violence of the (posthumous) disappearance. Maritime archiving, organized by and through the sea, unfolds at a different pace to that of a river. The coldness and salinity of sea water slows down the processes of decomposition, inhibiting bacterial activity and preventing the absorption of water into the circulatory system that causes the body to swell, rupture and decompose (Rodriguez 1997: 465; Ellingham et al. 2017: 230). This decomposition is conditioned, too, on other factors, such as ambient temperature, oxygen levels, depths and currents, and the condition of the body as it enters the water, whether it is dressed and how. As a result of all those factors, the trajectories of human remains in water can vary significantly (Haglund and Sorg 2002: 202). If it is a living body that drowns, it will generally sink, pulled down by the aspirated water and the loss of oxygen, and settle at the bottom of the sea. Direct contact with the sediment and with maritime scavengers leads to a loss of soft tissue, skeletonization and the gradual dispersal of bones along the seabed. But this need not be the case. Some bodies, when arriving at great depths, remain preserved for extended periods of time, for months or even years, set in place or subtly moved by the currents (Ellingham et al. 2017: 234). Others begin to decompose and, as their buoyancy increases, they ascend to the surface, passing through different stages of destruction, decay and disarticulation (Rodriguez 1997; Olivieri et al. 2018). During this process, bodies

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remain on the move, drifting below and along the surface, at times over long distances. When a body is submerged for an extended period of time, its soft tissues and fat begin to converse and form waxy residues of body fat in the form of adipocere, which covers the body and inhibits decay and skeletonization. This process takes several months, although it, too, can be substantially constrained by clothing and other f­ actors – s­ ome bodies are discovered preserved after several decades (Ellingham et al. 2017: 232). But if bodies fragment and disarticulate, then each fragment moves or settles, entering a new environment and becoming entangled in different dynamics and biochemical processes. Similarly to disarticulated body parts, isolated bones are also set in motion, some of them lagging behind and becoming encrusted by marine organisms, others being subjected to abrasion, bioerosion and dissolution. They are scavenged upon and processed by water animals, and break into particles and elements. Most of these long-­lasting and complex processes remain invisible, but this does not diminish their palpable, if unobtrusive, underwater durability and presence. In In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Christina Sharpe (2016: 20) posits that water remembers the dead. Reflecting on the contemporaneity of the experience of slavery and its afterlives in the present-­day experience of Black life, including the unfolding racialized violence of European border deaths, Sharpe introduces the notion of ‘residence time’. One way in which she does this is through engaging with the lingering materiality in the ocean of those thrown overboard and drowned in the Middle Passage. ‘Residence time’ is the time during which the traces of deaths are archived in and by the water, even if only in atomic form: ‘Human blood is salty, and ­sodium … ­has a residence time of 260 million years’ (ibid.: 41). This time has not yet passed; we are not even close. Instead, like the sea itself, time folds and moulds, quite literally haunted by the presence of what is supposedly past and the ever-­repeating, albeit shifting and structurally different, modalities of violence. I make reference to Sharpe not to equate the violence of chattel slavery with the structural violence behind European border deaths, even though they are unquestionably implicated in one another. Rather, I do so because for S­ harpe – a­ nd this is the perspective that I ­share – ­to think of the sea as retaining the presence of the deaths, as archiving them in and through water, is a thoroughly ethical and political claim, however vulnerable and partial the access to this fluid and forensic archive might be. This is especially the case in the context in which the violence from which this archive originates

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is continuously denied and erased in the dominant regimes of (in) visibility. There are, unquestionably, many ways in which those regimes can be unsettled, for instance, by opening up space for migrant voices and foregrounding their agency. In this chapter I opted to take another path and conferred the ability to unsettle on both the archiving sea and the human remains themselves, literalized in their corporeality and their post-­mortem material presence, which lingers on in spite of the violence of invisibilization and disappearance to which they are subjected. This human-­made but simultaneously post-­anthropocentric a­ rchive – r­ ife with the presence of dead ­bodies – c­ onstitutes the alternative knowledge of the sea. And even if human actors refuse to acknowledge, care about and remember the presence of those bodies, the sea will remember, haunting the European imaginaries of the Mediterranean.

Acknowledgements The work on this chapter was conducted within the framework of the project Globalized Memorial Museums (GMM), which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (GMM grant agreement No. 816784). I wish to thank the editors, David Mwambari, Agata Dziuban and my friends from the Cultural History of the Holocaust Network for their careful readings and helpful comments. Zuzanna Dziuban is a senior postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Culture Studies and Theatre History of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, within the ERC project Globalized Memorial Museums. She is the author of Foreignness, Homelessness, Loss: Dimensions of Atopia of the Contemporary Cultural Experience (2009), the editor of The ‘Spectral Turn’: Jewish Ghosts in the Polish Post-Holocaust Imaginaire (2019) and The ‘Forensic Turn’: Engaging Materialities of Mass Death in Holocaust Studies and Beyond (2017), and a co-­ editor of ‘The Surviving Thing: Personal Objects in the Aftermath of Violence’, a special issue of the Journal of Material Culture (2020, with Ewa Stańczyk).

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Notes 1. My work on this chapter coincided with violent events that led to the death of several dozen people seeking asylum in the EU, who for weeks were trapped at the Polish–Belarusian border in the summer and autumn of 2021, and even into the winter. While most of them were fleeing war, their death was a direct result of Polish migration ­politics – ­the Polish state deployed illegal pushbacks, denied people access to asylum procedures and to food and water, let them die of hunger and cold and introduced a state of emergency to deny access to journalists and activists. While I do not look at the Polish–Belarusian border here, the chapter is, to a large extent, born out of desperation, helplessness and anger towards the European state of which I am still a citizen, and towards the European bodies to which it belongs. 2. The unritual in Loichot’s (2020: 7–13) book pertains to the ‘obstruction of the sacred’ resulting from the fact that the water dead are and have been refused a rite of burial, and, therefore, remain suspended in the realm of the profane, if not desecrated. And yet, argues Loichot, the very presence of the dead renders the water in which they were once submerged a carrier of the sacral, recovered or amplified by the engagement of art. 3. See the project’s website at https://forensic-­architecture.org/category/fo​ rensic-­oceanography (accessed 9 February 2023).

References Ampuero Villagran, Ottavia. 2018. Identifying Migrant Bodies in the Mediterranean. Policy Report No. 5/2. Barcelona: United Nations University Institute on Globalization, Culture and Mobility. Bakker, Karen. 2012. ‘Water: Political, Biopolitical, Material’, Social Studies of Science 42(4): 616–23. Chambers, Iain. 2008. Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. —-—-—. 2014. ‘Fluid Archive’. Retrieved 10 September 2020 from https://​ mediterraneoblueshome.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/a-­fluid-­archive​ -­3.pdf. Chen, Cecilia, Janine MacLeod and Astrida Neimanis (eds). 2013. Thinking with Water. Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press. Cuttitta, Paolo, and Tamara Last (eds). 2020. Border Deaths: Causes, Dynamics and Consequences of Migration-Related Mortality. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press. Distretti, Emilio. 2020. ‘Enforced Disappearances and Border Deaths along the Migrant Trail’, in Paolo Cuttitta and Tamara Last (eds), Border Deaths: Causes, Dynamics and Consequences of Migration-Related Mortality. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, pp. 117–29.

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Duncan, Ifor. 2019. ‘Hydrology of the Powerless’, PhD dissertation. London: Goldsmiths, University of London. Ellingham, Sarah, et al. 2017. ‘The Fate of Human Remains in a Maritime Context and Feasibility for Forensic Humanitarian Intervention to Assist in their Recovery and Identification’, Forensic Science International 299: 229–34. Forensic Oceanography. 2012. ‘The-­Left-­to-­Die-­Boat’. Retrieved 15 September 2021 from https://forensic-­architecture.org/investigation​ /the-­left-­to-­die-­boat. —-—-—. 2018. ‘The Sea Watch vs. the Libyan Coastguard’. Retrieved 16 September 2021 https://forensic-­architecture.org/investigation/seawa​ tch-­vs-­the-­libyan-­coastguard. Haglund, William, and Marcella Sorg. 2002. ‘Human Remains in Water Environments’, in William Haglund and Marcella Sorg (eds), Advances in Forensic Taphonomy: Method, Theory and Archaeological Perspectives. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, pp. 201–18. Halkort, Monika. 2021. ‘Post-­Human Tactility: Race, Death and Epistemic Justice in the Mediterranean Sea’, in Rolien Hoyng and Gladys P.L. Chong (eds), Communication and Innovation: A Critique of the New in a Multipolar World. East Lansing: Michigan University Press. Heller, Charles, and Lorenzo Pezzani. 2014. ‘Liquid Traces’, in Forensic Architecture (ed.), Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth. Berlin: Sternberg Press, pp. 657–84. —-—-—. 2020. ‘Forensic Oceanography: Tracing Violence Within and Against the Mediterranean Frontier’s Aesthetic Regime’, in Krista G. Lynes, Tyler Morgenstern and Ian A. Paul (eds), Moving Images: Mediating Migration as Crisis. Bielefeld: transcript, pp. 95–125. Hirzel, Max. 2015–17. ‘Migrant Bodies’. Retrieved 20 June 2021 from https://maxhirzel.photoshelter.com/index/G00004NTbJ8ILraE. International Organization for Migration. n.d. ‘Missing Migrants Project’. Retrieved 12 November 2021 from https://missingmigrants.iom.int/. Lehman, Jessica. 2017. ‘Blue History’, New Inquiry, 6 February. Retrieved 10 October 2021 from https://thenewinquiry.com/blue-­history/. Loichot, Valerie. 2020. Water Graves: The Art of the Unritual in the Greater Caribbean. Charlottesville: Virginia University Press. M’charek, Amade. 2018. ‘“Dead-­Bodies-­at-­the-­Border”: Distributed Evidence and Emerging Forensic Infrastructure for Identification’, in Mark Maguire, Ursula Rao and Nils Zurawski (eds), Bodies as Evidence: Security, Knowledge, and Power. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 80–109. M’charek, Amade, and Sara Casartelli. 2019. ‘Identifying Dead Migrants: Forensic Care Work and Relational Citizenship’, Citizenship Studies 23(7): 738–57. Mountz, Alison. 2020. The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Olivieri, Lara, et al. 2018. ‘Challenges in the Identification of Dead

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Migrants in the Mediterranean: The Case Study of the Lampedusa Shipwreck of October 3rd 2013’, Forensic Science International 285: 121–28. Perl, Gerhild. 2016. ‘Uncertain Belongings: Absent Mourning, Burial, and Post-­Mortem Repatriations at the External Border of the EU in Spain’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 37(2): 195–209. Peters, Kimberley, Philip Steinberg, and Elaine Stratford (eds). 2018. Territory beyond Terra. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Rodriguez, William C. 1997. ‘Decomposition of Buried and Submerged Bodies’, in William Haglund and Marcela Sorg (eds), Forensic Taphonomy: The Postmortem Fate of Human Remains. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, pp. 459–68. Schindel, Estela. 2019. ‘Deaths and Disappearances in Migration to Europe: Exploring the Uses of a Transnationalized Category’, American Behavioral Scientist 64(4): 389–407. Schindel, Estela, and Gabriel Gatti (eds). 2020. Social Disappearance: Explorations between Latin America and Eastern Europe. Berlin: Forum Transregionale Studien. Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Weizman, Eyal. 2017. Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability. New York: Zone.

Afterword Imaginations and Traces of the Disappeared Antonius C.G.M. Robben

‘Where are our children? They took them but we don’t know where they are!’ Two women approached me with these questions in April 1978 as I was strolling across the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, less than two months before the World Cup football tournament was to start in Argentina and public protests against the ongoing disappearances were severely repressed by the reigning dictatorship. When democracy returned in 1983, and a truth commission concluded that the disappeared were dead, the urgent pleas about their whereabouts were replaced by concerns about exhumations, reparations, memorializations and the accountability of the perpetrators. Nevertheless, the two mothers’ questions about the fate of their children have stayed with me ever since because they were asked at a time when massive numbers of people were disappearing. Many searching relatives believed then that the disappeared were alive somewhere because others had returned after days or weeks in oblivion. They sought them in hospitals and police stations, called on friends and tried to speak with eyewitnesses. They visualized their state of ­being – ­injured, tied down, drugged, unconscious or in ­pain – ­and spent sleepless hours agonizing about whether or not their missing loved ones had been able to rest that night. The relatives searched for clues and traces that might reveal the predicament of the disappeared and made enquiries at morgues and cemeteries when they were feared dead. The disappearances in Argentina were carried out by the military and police of an authoritarian state. They differ from the

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disappearances of refugees who drown at sea or die from dehydration or hypothermia in a remote desert or mountain range. They differ from migrant workers who stop communicating with their relatives at home, people kidnapped for ransom or a prisoner exchange, stolen babies and infants forced into adoption, troops missing in action and people who are never found after a natural disaster, a suicide, an accident or because they began a new life under a false name. This book provides a much-­needed conceptual framework for comparing such a wide range of disappearances by departing from two common denominators: the disappeared lead a liminal existence between life and death, and their uncertain fate affects relatives and communities deeply. Whatever the circumstances under which people disappear, the concerned families and communities try to imagine where they may be, and search for any trace that could reveal whether they are dead or alive.

Imagination and Fate Whether disappearances are enforced, accidental, migratory or voluntary, people’s imagination of the whereabouts and well-­being of missing persons is part of what Laura Huttunen and Gerhild Perl have termed ‘the extended disappearance’ whose impact ‘stretches beyond the individual to entire families, communities and properties’ (Introduction, this volume). The search efforts and coping practices of affected relatives and communities are influenced by their imagination of the disappeared person’s c­ ondition – d ­ ead or alive, captive or at liberty, suffering from memory loss or a troubled afterlife for lack of a mortuary ritual. Those affected pass mentally through the places where the missing person might be. They draw on their own experiences and their knowledge of the disappeared’s life and activities. These imaginations help families and communities cope with the disappearances and influence their courses of action. The parties concerned may have different ideas about a missing person’s fate. The disappearance in 2019 of a Kurdish woman, Nima, who attempted to cross the Channel from France to Great Britain, gave rise to several scenarios about her destination among Kurdish migrants living in a makeshift settlement near Dunkirk, France. Victoria Tecca (Chapter 8) describes how the press believed she had accidentally fallen overboard. A search mission failed to find her but did rescue the two men who had been with her in the dinghy. However, several smugglers spread the rumour that Nima had not

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boarded the boat but was still somewhere in France or had been raped and killed by the men who had supposedly accompanied her to England. Tecca suggests that the smugglers were afraid that the story of Nima’s drowning would deter migrants from travelling by boat. Instead, one of Nima’s friends said that Nima was recovering in a British hospital. Two weeks after the disappearance, the body of a woman was found off the Belgian coast. The authorities assumed her to be Nima. These imagined scenarios reveal how people, each in their own way, coped with Nima’s disappearance and constructed what they believed to be plausible explanations based on different suppositions and their experience with undocumented migrants and unlawful border crossings. However, these conflicting scenarios obscure the wider circumstances of illegal migration and its lethal risks, according to Tecca. They conceal the structural violence inflicted by states that oblige undocumented migrants to cross hazardous natural barriers, in particular seas, rivers, deserts and mountains, and then blame the ensuing deaths and disappearances on unfortunate accidents caused by reckless decisions and greedy smugglers. The Cape Verdean islands have a migration history that dates back to the early nineteenth century, when migrants went to the United States. Since 1975, they have been travelling increasingly to Europe and Portugal’s former African colonies. Some labour migrants disappear, usually voluntarily. ‘In transnational families’, writes Heike Drotbohm (Chapter 2, this volume), ‘absences are both a normalized element of the everyday and a troubling void indicating the risks and uncertainties of maintaining contact across spatial distances.’ She demonstrates how relatives cope with these chosen social disappearances when for various reasons phone calls, remittances and periodic visits become less frequent, and eventually all contact ceases. Migrants might fail to achieve the anticipated success or become involved in criminal activities. They may also escape a conflictive relationship at home or be unwilling to assume responsibility for an unplanned child or a sick parent. The relatives try to imagine the life lived abroad. They may worry about the hardship and shame endured by the unsuccessful migrant or learn that the absent migrant has remarried. They might also fantasize about the luxury in which the migrant’s children are growing up and lament their own poor living conditions on the Cape Verdean islands. These imaginations about the predicament of a disappeared relative will influence their ideas about migration and the value of family ties. Do people like the Cape Verdean migrants have the legal right to vanish? Most states assume that people are sovereign human

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beings and therefore do not investigate voluntary disappearances. Poland is an exception. Its profound Catholicism emphasizes the preservation of family ties, and its socialist past makes people expect assistance from the state authorities, according to Anna Matyska (Chapter 4). Since 2018, the Polish police have been obliged to find missing persons in Poland and abroad. Once successfully located, those found are requested to notify their relatives of the decision to restore or deny contact so that the case can be closed. Polish law distinguishes between three search levels that say as much about the perceived urgency of the disappearance as about where and how the missing person is believed to have ended up. The highest priority is given to disappearances in which the life, health or freedom of a person is at stake. The person may be held captive or be seriously ill, and therefore incapable of calling for help. The intermediate level concerns people who are at risk due to their medication. They may be confused and lost in their home town or abroad. In addition there are migrant workers who have not been able to communicate their safe arrival abroad, making families worry that they are suffering from substance abuse and mental health problems or have died from an accident at work. The lowest priority level applies to people who are not believed to be in danger or do not want any contact with their relatives. They may be staying at a friend’s place after a night out or have moved to a new residence in Poland. All these scenarios, at whatever level of urgency, derive from people’s imaginations about the missing person’s whereabouts. This destination includes the hereafter when the disappeared person is presumed dead. Their Catholic faith makes many Polish families want to recover the disappeared person’s dead body for a mortuary ritual that guarantees the soul a peaceful afterlife. Rather than ‘disappeared’, Ori Katz (Chapter 3) prefers to use the term ‘missing’ for the four thousand Israeli civilians that vanish each year, because their status is most often temporary. They are generally missing because of personal problems, and more than 99 per cent reappear within a year. Katz regards the searching by relatives as an organizing principle that connects three dynamic issues: the missing person’s fate, the family’s emotional coping and the social construction of disappearance as a distinct social status and ontological category. Relatives try to find out what happened to the missing person and mobilize their social networks to expand the search. How they cope emotionally with the disappearance changes as time passes. ‘Uncertainty and reversibility provide space for changing narratives and for negotiation over its meanings [referring to disappearance

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or missingness] – all the more so in the absence of applicable cultural scripts’ (Katz, Chapter 3, this volume). Searching gives people a sense of control over the ongoing uncertainty, as Katz argues, but also becomes a way of life that gives meaning to people’s existence by continuing their bond with the missing person. This coping includes a visualization of the condition of the loved one, who might be depressed and in pain while wandering the streets and eating in soup kitchens. In the process, for some relatives the missing person becomes an inner reality that overshadows the initial oscillation between imaginations of life and death, and makes them stop searching altogether as the permanency of the disappearance settles in. A related concern about the fate of missing persons is what the future would bring them if they reappeared or what might have become of them if they are dead. Will the reappeared continue where they left off or will the experience of disappearance radically change their lives? Will their involvement in politics that caused their abduction by state agents be resumed and allow them to realize their ideals? And what about the disappeared-­dead? Would they have had children? Would they have become prominent political leaders? Such thoughts might have arisen about the South Sudanese dissidents who were abducted from the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya during the South Sudanese Civil War (2013–20). The enforced disappearances were intended to undermine the political opposition in exile. The Kenyan authorities helped the South Sudanese government with these attempts to smother the opposition’s political aspirations. These methods echoed the colonial repression of Mau Mau insurgents during their uprising (1952–60) against British rule in Kenya. Captured Mau Mau combatants were tortured and supporters were held in large detention centres. The disappearance of South Sudanese dissidents changed the daily political practices of the refugees, as Stefan Millar (Chapter 6) shows. At the same time, these refugees must have contemplated what would become of their lives if they were abducted, and how their political activities might lead to acts of revenge against members of their ethnic group in South Sudan. An estimated 200,000–300,000 babies and infants disappeared during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), the dictatorial regime of General Franco (1939–75) and the two decades thereafter. These adoptive disappearances were organized by the Spanish state, with active assistance from the Roman Catholic Church and adoption agencies, because the parents were regarded as unfit to raise the children. Parents with Republican, leftist convictions or incarcerated as

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political prisoners were seen as ideologically contaminated, while poor families were considered unable to provide a nurturing environment for their children. Diana Marre and Jessaca Leinaweaver (Chapter 5) emphasize that most adoptive parents were unaware that their children had been stolen or that the biological parents were still alive. The new parents’ religious beliefs and political convictions were expected to provide an identity desired by the state for the adopted children, who would have become different people had they remained with their birth families. The stolen children were given new names and raised with anti-­communist sentiments and perhaps even sympathy for Franco’s fascism. The pedagogy of conservative Catholicism and patriarchal authority inculcated at school during the dictatorship resonated with the democratic government’s silence about the past when Franco died in 1975. Reflections on the repressive past were suspended until the Amnesty Law of 1977 was replaced by the Law of Historical Memory of 2007, which established the legal rights of the dictatorship’s victims. The new law has facilitated the exhumation and identification of the Republican dead resting in mass graves but did not make much headway in re-­establishing the broken family ties of forcibly adopted children (Ferrándiz 2013; Marre and Gaggiotti 2021). The different life trajectories of the reappeared stolen children can be expected to complicate future relationships with their genealogical relatives. These relatives had to cope for decades with the social death of a loved one who grew into adulthood with intimate ties to an adoptive family that raised them into the people they have become.

Traces and Material Agency This book embraces Yael Navaro’s (2020) proposal for a negative methodology to examine the evidentiary voids remaining after violent events and delineate the contours of the unattainable knowledge. These gaps in knowledge are revealed in several kinds of traces, such as mass graves, ruins, bodily scars and abrupt silences in eyewitness accounts. This approach obliges the anthropologist to surmise in roundabout ways what cannot be learned directly through empirical research because certain knowledge is ‘manipulated, silenced and made inaccessible to specific people and populations’ (Introduction, this volume). Disappearances are therefore studied only through a circuitous interpretation of testimonies, human remains and personal belongings. How are those traces connected to the people who

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underwent violent events, and why have these traces such importance for searching relatives and concerned communities? An anthropology of disappearance that studies the social, cultural and political processes surrounding unaccounted-­for absences will benefit from regarding the traces not just as residues or symbols of the disappeared but also as constitutive of the disappearances. In order to exist in the world, people need things. They interact with the material agency of their belongings to put them to use. This interaction of human and material agency becomes particularly apparent when people are on the brink between life and death. The debris left by undocumented migrants on the riverbanks and shores of Greece, such as boats, life vests, backpacks, shoes, medicines and plastic bottles, are traces of border crossings, as Ville Laakkonen (Chapter 9, this volume) writes: ‘They speak of flight and of dinghies punctured either by sharp rocks, Greek authorities or panicked migrants trying to avoid being towed back to Turkish waters. They address the gaps, voids and silences in our accounts of disappearances.’ They do so because things have agency, as several scholars have shown (e.g. Knappett 2005; Latour 1999; Miller 2005). The material agency consists of their affordances, that is, the multiple uses to which people can put them. In the case of undocumented migrants trying to enter Greece across turbulent waters, their choice of things has consequences for the odds of life and death. Ramshackle rubber boats lead to more deaths and disappearances than sturdy wooden vessels. A sequence of events between departure and landing may thus be pieced together from the debris, in combination with the testimonies of surviving witnesses who can attest to being forced by smugglers into overcrowded dinghies and being pushed back by border authorities. In addition to being traces, the debris has an aura that mesmerizes the observer, according to Laakkonen. Walter Benjamin used the term ‘aura’ to describe the sensation of experiencing authentic artworks. Likewise, the confrontation with debris left by refugees entering Greece illegally is an emotional experience for a fieldworker. Its aura emerges from the interaction of the abandoned belongings and the anthropologist, who perceives the intertwinement of material and human agencies, and imagines how the things had enabled, endangered or obstructed the migrant’s journey. Once thrown away as debris, the things offer new affordances, as demonstrated by the multiple uses to which discarded life vests and rubber dinghies have been put. In 2016, the Chinese artist-­in-­exile Ai Weiwei employed the aura of fourteen thousand life jackets abandoned on

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the Greek island Lesvos in an art installation at Berlin’s concert hall to impress the plight of Syrian refugees on the German public (Neuendorf 2016). In the same year, two Dutch designers taught refugees on Lesvos how to make travel bags from stranded rubber dinghies (Cheslow 2016). I doubt if these backpacks had any aura for their users, because they were primarily functional items for personal use that helped the migrants carry their belongings during the journey north. Eventually, some refugees became involved in an initiative by other Dutch activists. A start-­up was founded in Amsterdam to recycle life vests into laptop and tablet sleeves, wine coolers and an assortment of bags. Life vests that had once provided safety to people crossing the Mediterranean Sea now became sources of income (Amsterdam Made n.d.). Rather than being purely commercial products, I believe that the recycled items exude an aura for the makers and the consumers, because the recycling process made the producers realize that the life vests passing through their hands had once belonged to desperate, expectant travellers like themselves. They had also faced natural adversities to reach the shores of Europe and met with numerous bureaucratic obstacles to arrive at their final destination in the Netherlands. In turn, Dutch consumers are drawn to the goods because the stories of flight have made them sympathize with the refugees. The aura of the recycled products emerges from the interaction of the former use of the discarded life vests and the consumers’ compassion with the hazardous travels of the refugees. Saila Kivilahti and Laura Huttunen (Chapter 10) discuss the ways that relatives in the countries of origin interpret the testimonial and material traces of over twenty-­ three thousand migrants who have disappeared in the Mediterranean since 2014. They focus on the ways in which family members assess the credibility of the accounts circulating among informal social networks of witnesses and concerned people living in Spain and Morocco. A co-­traveller’s account of seeing a capsized boat may seem conclusive evidence that the people aboard drowned, but this testimony may not entirely convince the relatives, because migrants occasionally turn up after having been missing for an extended time. Short of receiving a dead body for burial, they require additional proof. A prolonged silence, when a phone call is expected to confirm the migrant’s safe arrival, helps to confirm the eyewitness account. ‘Death and disappearance get intertwined, creating haunting uncertainties among those left behind’, write Kivilahti and Huttunen (Chapter 10, this volume), but so do material remnants and disappeared persons, because both have agency. The agency of a punctured rubber boat implies that the

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vessel is unfit for further travel, that some passengers drowned but that others may have survived by swimming or were rescued. The absence of a corpse makes relatives look for corroborating traces in accounts and communications, such as personal effects found on the beach. The accumulation of consistent accounts and tangible traces will eventually tip the balance between hope for life and fear of death because of the intertwined human and material agencies. The traces of an unaccounted-­for person may exist in nothing more than the official registration of the disappearance. Atreyee Sen (Chapter 1) describes how an Indian woman, Shanta, carries a pink file around Calcutta that contains her son’s missing person’s report. Fourteen-­year-­old Mahesh was taken from his home for questioning by the police in 1974, allegedly for being a member of a Maoist revolutionary organization. Shanta’s file gives material content to the vernacular Bengali word khali, which means ‘empty’ but also ‘refers to the hollowing out of joy, disappearance, lonely absence, haunting loss and a vacant existence in its many conversational references’ (Sen, Chapter 1, this volume). The tattered pink file became a material metonym of Mahesh, a substitution of one material thing for another, because of the co-­constitution of the disappearance and the missing person’s report (Robben 2021). The file stood to such a degree for Mahesh that Shanta’s dying husband wanted her to cremate him together with the folder. Shanta refused because the file had become an extension of herself, yet also an inseparable enemy that constantly reminded her of her painful loss. Having been unable to prevent her son’s detention, she was determined to protect and eventually die with the file. As Sen puts it: ‘She attributed character and agency to the file, as a humanized non-­human entity that played an integral part in her journey’ (Chapter 1, this volume). The file’s material agency made Shanta act: she took the file wherever she ­went – t­ o the police station, to her neighbours, to politicians’ offices, to former Maoist revolutionaries, to the relatives of other disappeared persons and to lectures and political rallies. The file interacted with Shanta, making her protest her son’s disappearance in public and, having reconciled herself with his death, demand an admission from the state authorities that they had killed him. Shanta’s interminable quest to know her son’s fate and have his death acknowledged turned into a lonely journey after her husband died and neighbours stopped helping her. Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo (Chapter 7) describes an opposite situation, in which the search for the disappeared-­dead in northern Mexico created a political solidarity among the searching women that made them question

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their country’s violent misogyny and racism, as well as its exploitative labour relations. An estimated one hundred thousand people fell victim to enforced disappearances between 2006 and 2021 that were carried out by drug syndicates and state authorities. The mothers, sisters and wives in northern Mexico have been searching for the ossified remains of their disappeared loved ones as forensic activists. Traces of the disappeared also appear in dreams, premonitions and oneiric visits by deceased children and grandchildren that announce the imminent discovery of human remains. Finding these remains allows for a redignification of the dead and expresses the care that relatives bestow on their deceased loved ones. European states go to such lengths to prevent the arrival of undocumented migrants that they even try to stop their corpses from entering. These states have transformed the Mediterranean from an open natural expanse into a political, cultural and geographical barrier that obstructs the voyage of undocumented travellers. The sea has become a weapon whose currents and waves endanger the inflatable boats and may cast passengers overboard. It is exploited by the authorities to interact with the swallowed bodies through the material agency of its saline water and aquatic creatures and organisms. Zuzanna Dziuban (Chapter 11) analyses the sea as an archive that documents the human traces of structural violence. Coastguards do little to recover the corpses that float near sinking vessels or become entangled in fishing nets, while fishermen have become increasingly reluctant to take drowned or drowning undocumented migrants aboard because the authorities may impound their boats for weeks (Albahari 2015: 101–3). This passiveness allows submerged bodies to disappear and erase the evidence of human rights violations. As Dziuban (Chapter 11, this volume) writes, ‘the Mediterranean is not so much a site of repose as a means and mode of disposal and invisibilization’. The state authorities portray the sea as too unruly to retrieve the floating bodies and too unfathomable to recover them from the sea floor. Paradoxically, they deploy the most advanced surveillance technology to detect undocumented migrants, and monopolize the right to respond to or ignore their distress calls, because, as Maurizio Albahari (2015: 113) has stated, ‘The object of surveillance is not territory but the bodies of migrants and would­be migrants, their distribution in space, the optimization of their usability and productivity as talent or labor, and their inscription in a regime of visibility and regulation’. Drowned migrants are treated as forever lost at sea but, due to their post-­mortem agency, the human remains interact with the aquatic environment and occasionally rise

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to the surface and drift ashore to be buried anonymously at the beach. Humanitarian NGOs and activist art collectives have exposed disappearances by making the human remains of drowned migrants and their personal belongings visible. In 2015, the art project ‘The Dead Are Coming’ exhumed several graves in southern Europe and reburied the human remains in Germany: ‘Those who died of thirst or hunger at our borders on their way to a new life, were thus able to reach the destination of their dreams beyond their death’ (Center for Political Beauty n.d.). The Austrian news agency ORF commented: ‘Those who find this macabre and ask about the dignity of the dead must of course also ask about the dignity of the living that drown in the Mediterranean. People die all the time on the run and no one prevents it’ (cited in ibid.). On 16 June 2015, a 34-­year-­old Syrian woman who had drowned in March that year during her crossing to Italy was reburied in Berlin. The German art activists had exhumed her body in Sicily and had brought it to Germany with the permission of her husband, who was seeking asylum together with their three surviving children. The burial of the white coffin holding the woman’s body was presided over by an imam (Eddy 2015). There was also a child’s coffin at the funeral at Gatow cemetery. The small casket was empty because the Italian authorities did not allow the exhumation of the 2-­year-­old infant who had drowned with his mother. The art collective reburied more exhumed migrants in Germany and made a design for a cemetery to be situated in front of the German Reichstag. The burial ground was supposed to consist of a large arch, with the inscription ‘To the Unknown Immigrants’, which was to span a field of thousands of graves marked by white concrete slabs. The graves would be packed so closely together that visitors would be forced to tread on the dead below, just as tourists in southern Europe sail over the disappeared who have drowned at sea. The design was never realized, but its proposed location emphasized that European states bear a responsibility for the people who die at their borders, and that their remains deserve the respect owed to every human being.

Final Remarks This book’s ethnographic cases demonstrate convincingly the unresolved status of disappeared persons as either dead or alive, and the emotional burden carried by concerned families and communities about their uncertain fate. Liminality affects them all. The

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disappeared’s classificatory ambiguity is upsetting because they do not fit in the cultural classifications that organize societies and social lives. Paradoxically, liminality posits the disappeared and the searchers between irreconcilable social statuses that, in an uncanny way, are at the same time contained by them. The forced disappeared-­living exist in a world only known to their captors, whereas the voluntary disappeared-­living have isolated themselves from the people who are searching for them. These two types of disappearances create a liminal status between life and death. The disappeared-­dead have a different liminal status. Their corpses were buried, destroyed or abandoned unceremoniously. The absence of a mortuary ritual deprives them of their status as deceased members of society and, dependent on their religious beliefs, may confine them to a spiritual limbo, unable to enter the afterworld. These various liminal statuses are lifted when the disappeared-­living reappear or when the disappeared-­dead are found and identified. The liminal status of the disappeared also affects their families and communities. They are shrouded in liminality because they do not know whether they are bereaved persons who should mourn the deceased disappeared or searchers who will eventually find the missing loved ones alive if they continue their efforts relentlessly (Robben 2016). This liminal status may be reinforced by the ways in which they are perceived and treated by other people and the state, which can include social exclusion or marginalization. The disappeared’s uncertain fate may haunt families and communities when the disappearance was violent or inexplicable, as shown in most of this book’s chapters, but may also become an accepted social status and cultural category when the disappearance is believed to be voluntary or anticipated, as was shown in several other chapters. Of course, the search for disappeared persons believed to be alive differs from the search for their corpses. The concern of relatives and communities for the disappeared-­ dead is related to their cultural understanding of death. Life and death are discrete realms of existence in many cultures, but they may also be conceptualized as phases of a cyclical process or as coexisting ontologies that generate one another. People who reject these religious beliefs may still worry about the disappeared-­dead due to their personal and social attachment. Such attachment was nurtured during the disappeared’s lifetime, as generally happens with relatives and friends, but may also arise from compassion, as was shown by the German activists with their art project ‘The Dead Are Coming’. The art project accused European states of forsaking their legal

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responsibilities towards refugees and appealed to fellow citizens to have pity on the dead and grant them a decent burial. Religious and secular mortuary rituals are generally founded on personal and social bonds with the deceased person. Caring relatives and friends, and mournful attention by communities and social associations, act on the mutual trust that underlies those attachments. It is this trust that makes the disappeared’s uncertain fate so tormenting for them, because most human beings expect that their relatives and communities will protect them when they are in danger, look after them when sick or hurt, search for them when missing and gather at a mortuary ritual when dead. Antonius C.G.M. Robben is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and past President of the Netherlands Society of Anthropology. His most recent books include Perpetrators: Encountering Humanity’s Dark Side (2023, co-­ authored with Alex Hinton), the monograph Argentina Betrayed: Memory, Mourning, and Accountability (2018) and the edited volumes Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights (2015, co-­edited with Francisco Ferrándiz), Death, Mourning, and Burial: A Cross-Cultural Reader (2017, 2nd edn) and A Companion to the Anthropology of Death (2018).

References Albahari, Maurizio. 2015. Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations at the World’s Deadliest Border. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Amsterdam Made. n.d. ‘Makers Unite’. Retrieved 6 September 2022 from https://www.amsterdammade.org/en/makers/makers-­unite/. Center for Political Beauty. n.d. ‘The Dead Are Coming’. Retrieved 12 July 2022 from https://politicalbeauty.com/dead.html. Cheslow, Daniella. 2016. ‘On Lesbos, Dutch Volunteers Teach Migrants to Turn Boats into Backpacks’, RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty, 3 March. Retrieved 6 September 2022 from https://www.rferl.org/a/lesbos-­migran​ ts-­turning-­boats-­into-­backpacks-­dutch-­volunteers/27587663.html. Eddy, Melissa. 2015. ‘Migrant’s Funeral in Berlin Highlights Europe’s Refugee Crisis’, New York Times, 16 June. Ferrándiz, Francisco. 2013. ‘Exhuming the Defeated: Civil War Mass Graves in 21st-­Century Spain’, American Ethnologist 40(1): 38–54. Knappett, Carl. 2005. Thinking through Material Culture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

282  ◆  Antonius C.G.M. Robben

Latour, Bruno. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Miller, Daniel (ed.). 2005. Materiality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Marre, Diana, and Hugo Gaggiotti. 2021. ‘Irregular Adoptions and Infrastructures of Memory in Spain: Remnant Practices from the Franco Regime’, Childhood 28(4): 570–84. Navaro, Yael. 2020. ‘The Aftermath of Mass Violence: A Negative Methodology’, Annual Review of Anthropology 49: 161–73. Neuendorf, Henri. 2016. ‘Ai Weiwei Commemorates Drowned Refugees with Public Installation during Berlin Film Festival’, HuffPost, 15 February. Retrieved 6 September 2022 from https://news.artnet.com​ /art-­world/ai-­weiwei-­life-­jackets-­installation-­berlin-­427247. Robben, Antonius C.G.M. 2016. ‘Disappearance and Liminality: Argentina’s Mourning of State Terror’, in P. Berger and J. Kroesen (eds), Ultimate Ambiguities: Investigating Death and Liminality. New York: Berghahn, pp. 99–122. —-—-—. 2021. ‘Metonyms of Destruction: Death, Ruination, and the Bombing of Rotterdam in the Second World War’, Journal of Material Culture 26(3): 324–43.

Index

abandonment, 10, 52, 54, 60­–61, 66–68, 98, 126–27, 133n9, 248, 250–52, 254, 261 absence, 1, 4, 7, 9, 11, 14, 18, 32, 46, 52–55, 57–59, 63, 67–68, 77, 85, 100–1, 122–23, 187, 200, 209–10, 219, 224, 229–30, 235, 241, 247–48, 251, 261, 271, 277, 280 anthropology of, 2 of body, 2, 13, 232–33, 240, 242, 249 of cultural scripts (see under cultural scripts) of evidence (see evidence) of knowledge (see knowledge) presence of, 47, 223 (see also presence) unaccounted for, 3, 6, 33, 56, 62, 275 accountability, 5, 7–8, 16, 232, 248, 250–51, 260, 269 activism, 5, 37, 43, 49, 252, 254 adoption, 103, 120, 123, 125, 134n18, 144, 253, 273 forced, 7, 119, 121–22, 127, 129, 131, 132n2, 132n4, 270 illegal. See under forced adoption international, 128, 130, 132n3, 133n11, 134nn13–14 plenary, 126, 133n8 simple, 133n9 transnational. See under adoption: international affects, 13, 77, 144, 172, 234, 240, 270, 279, 280 affective economy, 188, 197–201

affordance, 248, 263, 275 agency, 14, 40–41, 77, 90, 111, 144, 148, 170, 181n9, 197, 221, 224n1, 252, 265, 276, 279 epistemic (see under epistemic) material, 274–75, 277–78 archive, 20, 34, 132n2, 222, 248, 256–58, 263, 278 fluid, 252–54, 264 forensic, 255, 262. See also forensics post-anthropocentric, 265 Arendt, Hannah, 10 Argentina, 4–5, 10, 13, 15–16, 37, 102, 131, 166, 197–98, 232, 269 attachment, 14, 221, 280–81 aura, 208–09, 217, 221, 223, 275–76 auratic qualities, 218–20, 222 autonomy, 106 Bangladesh, 48 Benjamin, Walter, 208–09, 218–20, 275 birth parent, 126, 133n8 birth mother, 62, 127, 129–31, 134n18 border control, 7, 68, 189, 199, 250, 260–61 Bosnia-Herzegovina, 15 Bosnian, 6, 12, 15–16, 210, 221 Cambodia, 16 camps, 133n7, 146, 189, 212 Kakuma Refugee Camp, 14, 142–43, 147, 157, 273 refugee camps, 148

284  ◆ Index

Cape Verde, 14, 52, 54, 56, 58, 61, 63, 66, 271 Cape Verdean diaspora, 53, 55, 59, 68 children’s rights, 126, 130. See also rights United Nations Convention on Children’s Rights, 133n12 European Letter of Children’s Rights child theft. See under adoption: forced stolen babies (see under adoption: forced) Chile, 4, 37, 119 citizenship, 2, 9, 60–61, 192, 249, 251 class, 9, 11, 35, 48, 61, 251 Clinic Santa Cristina, 134n17 Clinic San Ramon, 129–31, 134 colonialism, 4 colonial, 10, 40, 144–46, 148–49, 153, 156, 211, 219, 224n1, 247, 253, 273 colonial legacies, 7, 14, 142, 158 decolonial feminism, 170 decolonialization, 162–66, 166, 172, 179 postcolonial, 7, 36 communication technologies, 2 community, 3, 5, 14, 33, 39, 48, 52, 54, 64, 129, 143, 151, 153, 155, 157, 163, 172, 177, 179, 192, 197, 199, 214, 231, 240 emotional, 169–70 concealment, 14, 20, 64, 66, 252 context, 1–8, 13, 15, 21, 35, 37, 48–49, 57, 59–61, 65, 68, 76–77, 97, 102, 106, 128, 144, 162–66, 168–70, 173–74, 177–79, 190, 198, 200–1, 208–9, 211, 213, 216–17, 219, 223–24, 230, 231–33, 250, 258, 260, 264 contextualization, 9, 18–19, 222 (see also context) ethnography as. See ethnography crime, 16, 62, 99, 107, 134n17 decodable, 254 desk (see under violence: bureaucratic)

against humanity, 6, 15 organized, 5, 163, 171–72, 178–79, 181n9 state, 7 (see also state) war, 3 (see also war) cultural scripts, 73, 75–76, 80, 82, 84, 87–89, 273 Cyprus, 5, 146, 232 Dankix, 187–89, 191–99, 201, 202nn3–4, 270 death, 2, 32, 38, 43, 48, 75, 89, 95, 103–4, 106, 120–21, 127, 129, 134n17, 168, 173, 211, 231–35, 237–38, 240–41, 244n7, 247, 249, 255, 261, 266n1, 279 acceptance of, 242 border, 187, 209, 214, 223, 247–48, 250, 252, 256–60, 264 and disappearance, 8–10, 12, 15–16, 19, 34, 41, 190, 200–1, 217, 229–30, 236, 239–40, 242, 251, 271, 275–76. See also disappearance between life and, 3, 20, 33, 74, 80, 85–86, 90, 187, 198, 270, 273, 275, 277, 280 process of, 243 proof of, 242 social, 14, 45, 58, 68, 174, 274 decolonial feminism, 170. See also under colonialism: decolonial feminism detention, 4, 8, 65, 134n17, 165, 174, 210, 260, 273, 277 deterrence, 8, 190, 210, 249 dictatorship, 4, 5, 7, 9, 119–20, 123, 132n1, 133n10, 147, 197–98, 213, 269, 274 disappearability, 9, 202, 208, 209–12, 216, 219, 223 disappearance, 2, 9, 17, 19, 21, 32–35, 37–39, 41–44, 46–47, 49, 57, 60, 62, 65, 73–74, 77, 79, 81–85, 88, 96, 98–100, 102–8, 110–11, 120, 151, 168–69, 171–72, 174, 177, 179, 187–88, 192–97, 199–200,

Index  ◆  285

202, 207–9, 212–14, 216–17, 219, 222–23, 228–33, 236–42, 247–48, 250, 252, 254, 258, 263, 265, 269, 272, 274–75, 277, 279–80 accidentialized, 6, 8, 10–11, 15, 122, 201 adoptive, 123–24, 126, 128–31, 134n18, 273 anthropology of, 1, 3, 16, 18, 20 civilian, 75 death and (see death) (en)forced, 4, 5, 7, 12–14, 76, 89, 94, 97, 101, 132n1, 143–48, 150, 152–53 155–58, 162–67, 170, 173, 176, 178, 180n2, 181n8, 210, 251, 278 extended, 149, 154, 198, 270 human remains (see human remains) mundane, 94 (see also missing) politics of, 95 state sponsored (see state) social, 52–53, 59, 61, 66–68, 75, 271 disappeared, 1, 2, 5, 8, 10–17, 20–21, 32, 36, 39, 47–49, 53, 58–59, 60, 66–68, 73, 82, 89, 90n1, 94, 102, 104, 109–10, 120–25, 130, 134n16, 143, 162–63, 166–68, 171–75, 177–78, 180n3, 187–88, 197, 200–1, 210, 212–13, 217, 229–30, 232–42, 247, 251–52, 254, 257, 261, 269–73, 275–81 adoptive, 129 category of, 3, 4, 6–7, 18–19, 76 detained-disappeared individual, 97, 216, 231 migrants (see migrants) original, 198 victims (see victims) disappearing agent, 8, 10, 60, 75, 89 disinformation, 20, 188, 192, 197, 200 DNA, 19–20, 21n2, 132n2, 167, 176, 219, 223, 259–61 documents, 2, 9, 34, 163, 177, 197, 255, 278 ID, 207, 219 Dunkirk. See Dankix

Edkins, Jenny, 12, 76, 78, 94–96, 101 epistemic, 165, 262 agency, 20 (see also agency) decolonialization (see under colonialism: decolonialization) hierarchies (see under power relations) murk, 188, 197–99, 201 power relations, 21, 177–78 (un)certainties, 18–19, 164, 168, 230 uncertainty (see uncertainty) violence (see violence) epistemology epistemological certainty, 200 epistemological challenges, 200, 217 epistemological questions, 84, 86–87, 90 epistemological vulnerability, 256–57 negative, 34 (see also negative methodology) ethnic cleansing, 4 ethnography, 200, 216–17, 222–23 as context, 20, 208, 221 ethnographic approach, 12 ethnographic content analysis, 97 ethnographic particularities, 13 ethnographic pathway, 32 ethnographic sensibilities, 11, 123 ethnographic task, 18 murk, 199 practice of, 17, 209 eugenic practices, 123 eugenic times, 123 eugenic theories, 125, 133n7 Europe, 20, 61, 108, 123, 125, 130–31, 214, 224n3, 236, 238, 247–50, 252–53, 255–57 259–62, 264–65, 266n1, 271, 276, 278–80 European convention, 128 evidence, 3, 40, 44, 95, 133n11, 172, 188, 200, 210, 215, 219, 223, 231–32, 235–36, 238–39, 255, 257, 276, 278 absence of, 230 (see also absence) accessibility of, 216 convincing, 234, 237, 241

286  ◆ Index

evidence (cont.) of crime, 16 elusive, 209 forensic, 167, 240 (see also forensics) fragile, 233, 242 new, 88 exhumations, 15, 19, 132n2, 167, 269 family, 2–5, 7, 11–15, 33–34, 36, 38, 41–42, 44–46, 48, 54, 56–57, 59–66, 68, 74, 78–87, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100–11, 112n3, 119, 126, 128–31, 133n8, 150, 166–68, 177, 179, 188, 190, 195–96, 210–12, 222, 229, 231, 233–36, 238, 240, 271–72, 274, 276. See also networks forensics, 224, 248, 254–55, 260–61. See also archive and evidence ‘forensic turn’, 19 France, 9, 55, 119, 125, 187, 189–91, 194, 196, 270–71 Franco, Francisco, 119–20, 123, 125–30, 133n10, 273–74 Garzon, Baltasar, 123–24, 130 Gatti, Gabriel, 4–6, 8, 15, 18, 53, 75, 89, 97, 134n16, 144, 210, 251 gender, 11, 59, 75, 179 gendered, 37, 47, 60–61, 63, 65, 166, 202n3 genocide, 4, 122, 174, 209, 233 Gomez Valbuena, Sister, 129, 134n17 Greece, 207, 211–14, 217, 219, 221–22, 224n3, 275 grief, 11, 34, 38–39, 41, 48–49, 57, 102, 200 ‘frozen’, 74 maternal, 33 guilt, 11, 53, 56, 64–68 guilty, 65, 173–74 Hague Convention, 128, 133n12 Hassan II, King of Morocco, 13. See also Morocco

human remains, 16–17, 19, 198, 251, 259–60, 262–63, 265, 274, 278 disappearance, 252, 279 (see also disappearance) literalization of, 252 violence against, 248 (see also violence) identification, 3, 5, 15–16, 19–20, 202, 216, 223, 228–29, 242, 259–60, 274 identifying, 167, 21n2 unidentified, 120, 163, 219, 222 illegitimacy, 124 imagination, 18, 40, 76, 198, 222, 233, 270–73 India, 7, 11, 14, 32, 35–36, 40, 60, 77, 277 International Convention for the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance, 5–6, 94 interpretation, 16, 18–19, 59, 61, 64, 66–68, 78, 98, 103, 241–42, 251, 253, 274 intimacy, 2, 34, 143, 151 ‘disturbed intimacies’, 3, 11, 13–14, 33, 54, 59, 68, 88, 95, 200, 230 Israel, 73–76, 81–82, 88, 89, 90n1, 272 Kashmir, 5, 48 Kenya, 7, 14, 142–49, 151–54, 156–58, 159n5, 273 Kenyan Criminal Investigation Department (CID), 144–45, 147–49, 151–53, 156–58 kinship, 5, 11, 13–14, 44, 95–97, 100–1, 103, 107, 111, 112n3, 167, 211 fictive, 3 networks (see networks) Kitson, Frank, 144–47, 149, 153, 157–58 knowledge, 3, 5–6, 8, 21, 38, 53, 66, 74, 77–81, 84, 86–89, 103–4, 109, 122, 125, 129–30, 152, 163–64, 171–72, 176–79, 180n1, 191, 194, 196, 199, 202, 207–8, 215–16,

Index  ◆  287

219, 222, 230–31, 233, 237, 240, 247–48, 250, 262, 270, 274, 277 absence of, 18 (see also absence) alternative, 253–54, 256, 258, 265 anthropology, 211 as contextualization, 18 fragmented, 241 manipulation of (see also manipulation) positive, 19–20, 209 trouble, 17 Kurdistan Iran, 192, 195–96, 211 Iraq, 189 Las Rastreadoras, 162, 164, 166–78, 180n1, 180n7 Latin America, 4–5, 102, 163–66, 170, 172, 210, 250 law, 5–7, 10, 63, 65, 96–97, 101, 106–7, 111, 120, 123–26, 128, 132n1–2, 133n5, 133n8–9, 134n14, 134n17, 176, 181n10, 229, 243n1, 251, 254, 272, 274. See also International human rights law international humanitarian law, 7 (see also rights) international human rights law, 5, 7 (see also rights and law) protection of, 4 Lebanon, 5 liminality, 2–3, 210, 279–80 Machar, Riek, 143, 149, 154 Madres de Plaza de Mayo, 5, 102 manipulation, 16, 20 Mediterranean, 9–10, 19–20, 207, 228, 231, 234–35, 240, 247–59, 261–62, 265, 276, 278–79 memory, 35, 47, 162, 164–66, 168, 170–72, 174, 177–79, 200, 211, 220, 232, 247, 270 historical, 120, 132n1, 274 workshops, 164–66, 168, 170–72, 174, 177 methodology, 97, 164–66, 188, 209, 217

limits of, 199 methodological challenges, 17–19, 217, 230 negative methodology, 17, 199–200, 216, 219, 223, 274 on traces, 221 metonym, 277 Mexico, 11, 128, 162–63, 166–67, 174–76, 178–79, 217, 231, 277–78 migration, 8, 15, 19, 55, 59, 61, 99, 175, 190, 208, 210, 229, 235, 243n3, 247–50, 261, 266n1, 271 ‘industries’, 2 narratives, 257 (see also narratives) undocumented, 9, 189, 228, 231–32, 240, 242 (see also migrants) migrants, 8, 17, 19–20, 56–58, 60, 97, 109, 191–93, 197, 202n4, 203n5, 208, 212–14, 216, 219–20, 222–23, 228, 236–37, 255–56, 258, 260–61, 276, 279 co-travellers, 229–33, 240–42 disappeared, 163, 210, 217, 231 Kurdish, 187–90, 270 undocumented, 2, 7, 9, 201, 229, 238, 247, 249–51, 257, 259, 271, 275, 278 (see also migration) missing, 1, 6, 8, 12–15, 17, 19, 36, 40, 48, 56, 59, 61, 63, 67, 96, 98, 121–22, 126–27, 131, 147–48, 195–96, 210–12, 228, 232, 240, 249, 261, 269, 276, 280–81 missingness, 45–46, 49–80, 84, 123, 273 mundane, 10, 75 (see also disappearance) person, 2–4, 7, 10, 16, 18, 20–21, 31–35, 37–38, 43–44, 47, 62, 64, 68, 73–79, 81–83, 85–90, 94–95, 97, 99–111, 163, 167, 169, 171, 173, 176, 192, 233, 236, 242, 244n4, 259, 270, 272, 277 mobility, 2, 8, 10, 54–56, 59–61, 207–10, 219, 221–23, 249, 253 Morocco, 13, 76, 228, 230, 233–37, 239, 242, 276. See also Hassan II, King of Morocco

288  ◆ Index

mourning, 2, 14–15, 34, 48, 55–56, 104, 168–69, 177, 200, 211 narratives, 34–36, 47, 49, 76, 97, 104, 172, 195, 198–99, 240–41, 257, 272 competing, 17–18, 187–88, 192, 197, 200 confusing (see under competing narratives) control over, 20 hegemonic, 179 ‘master’ migration (see migration) official, 169, 217 natural catastrophes, 1, 19 Navaro, Yael, 17–18, 143, 199–200, 209, 216, 219, 223, 274 negativity, 217 networks, 3, 48, 53, 74, 78, 127, 194, 234 criminal, 244n7 extended family, 54 family, 15, 20 (see also family) grass-roots, 20 informal, 9, 59, 229–32, 276 intelligence, 145 kinship, 44 (see also kinship) private, 62, 119, 123, 130 relational, 76, 88 social, 217, 242, 272 Nuer, 142, 151, 154–57, 159n6 opacity, 61–62, 64, 68, 209, 250 Oufkir, Mohamed, 13 Pacific Ocean, 9 passport, 2, 84 Peter Pan children, 133n6 Poland, 96–99, 101, 104, 107–9, 111, 272 police, 2, 14, 19, 31–32, 34–36, 38–43, 45, 49, 59, 61, 64, 68, 73–75, 77–82, 86, 94–96, 100–5, 108–11, 144, 146, 156, 173–75, 181n9, 190–92, 194, 196–97, 199, 202n3, 213, 224, 229, 236–39, 242, 243n1,

244n8, 269, 272, 277 policing, 50, 97–99, 107, 248, 252, 254, 260–61 presence, 1–2, 9, 12, 18, 41, 47, 55, 63–64, 79, 110, 122, 144–45, 149, 152–53, 157, 191, 208, 214, 216–17, 223, 229, 248, 250–53, 258, 261–62, 264–65, 266n2. See also absence property, 2–3, 10, 33, 218 pushbacks, 8, 10, 210, 266n1 race, 11, 75, 251 racism, 167, 169, 174, 176, 278 reappearance, 4, 13, 17, 52, 66, 94, 110–11 politics of, 15–16, 95 religion Catholic faith, 272 God, 46, 64, 127, 176, 195 Republicans, 123, 125 research ethics, 209, 212 rights, 10, 48, 60–61, 98, 105, 125, 130, 133n12, 255, 274. See also Children’s rights, international humanitarian law, international human rights law and law human, 4–5, 7, 40, 120, 126, 147, 158n4, 162–63, 167, 234, 257, 278 liberty, 95–96, 106–8, 111 rituals, 2, 15, 48–49, 63, 103, 167, 281 Robben, Antonius C.G.M., 3–6, 9–10, 13, 15, 198, 200, 210, 216, 223, 231–32, 277, 280 Rwanda, 16 Sahara, 9 Schindel, Estela, 5–6, 8, 53, 60, 250–51 search, 3–5, 7, 11, 14, 16, 18, 34, 37–38, 44, 46, 48, 59, 61, 67, 77, 94–101, 103–11, 129, 131, 169, 172–73, 177, 180n2, 192, 194, 234, 238–40, 258, 270, 281 research, 19, 36, 53–54, 56, 63, 65, 68–69, 73, 76, 130, 132n1, 163–66, 170–71, 188–89, 191,

Index  ◆  289

207–14, 216–18, 223, 230–31, 242, 259, 262, 274 (see also research ethics) searching, 17, 20, 45, 47, 49, 62, 66, 74–75, 78–89, 102, 167–68, 175–78, 229, 260, 269, 272–73, 275, 277–78, 280 Senegal, 54, 236–37, 244n6 sense, 10, 34, 44, 46–48, 52–53, 55–56, 61, 63–64, 66, 76–77, 80–81, 86–87, 89, 101, 103–4, 111, 127, 130, 151, 155, 163, 167, 169, 172–73, 177, 190, 208–9, 212, 217–19, 221, 224, 230, 232, 235, 240–42, 262, 273 sensing, 67, 250, 255–57 shame, 11, 14, 53, 56, 66–68, 124, 271 silences, 53, 59, 64, 67, 120, 129, 130, 165, 200, 209, 212, 216–17, 219, 223, 274–75 slave trade, 4 Slyomovics, Susan, 6, 13, 15, 17, 76, 198, 201 smuggling business, 189, 194 smuggling/smugglers, 8–9, 188–99, 201, 202n3–4, 270–71, 275 social media, 2, 97, 180n5, 194, 196 Sonoran Desert, 9, 190, 217 South Sudan, 143, 148–49, 152, 154–56, 159n7, 273. See also Sudan People’s Liberation Army-in-Opposition Spain, 16, 60, 119–31, 132n3, 132n7, 132nn11–12, 133n5, 228–31, 234–37, 239–40, 242, 276 Spanish Civil War. See war, see also Franco, Francisco; Republicans state, 1, 3, 8–9, 13, 15, 19–20, 32–37, 39, 41–45, 47–49, 61, 65, 68, 74, 76, 83, 85–86, 88–89, 94, 96–97, 99–110, 112n1, 119, 121, 123–25, 129, 132n2, 133n11, 144–49, 151–53, 156–57, 163, 166–67, 171–73, 175, 178, 188–92, 194–95, 197–98, 201, 210–11, 213–14, 229, 238, 242, 248–51, 253–56, 258–59, 266n1, 269–74, 277–80. See also

crime, disappearance, strategy, violence complicity, 5, 7, 59, 122, 162, 177 regulations, 10, 95, 98, 111 sponsored disappearance, 4, 11, 165 strategy, 68, 169, 178, 210, 238 cover-up, 13 of deterrence (see under deterrence) of governance (see under strategy: state) legal, 124 paramilitary, 123 political, 7 state, 47, 190, 210 (see also state) testimonies as, 165 (see also testimony) Sudan People’s Liberation Army-inOpposition, 143. See also South Sudan supernatural, 83–84, 89 testimony, 17, 34, 41, 170, 175, 199, 231–32, 276 testimony as strategy (see under strategy) time, 2–3, 6, 11–13, 32–34, 37–38, 40, 42–45, 49, 53, 55–60, 62–64, 68, 73–74, 76–78, 82– 89, 95, 98, 102, 107, 109, 112n4, 121, 123, 126–29, 132n2, 142, 144–45, 150, 153–54, 162, 164, 175, 188–89, 193–94, 196–99, 203n6, 208, 210–11, 213, 215, 221–22, 230–32, 236–37, 252, 255, 259, 262–64, 269, 272–73, 276, 279–80 passage of, 235, 239–43 traces, 9, 17–18, 32, 44, 53, 102, 106, 124, 200, 208–9, 217–19, 221, 223, 248, 256, 258, 261, 263–64, 269, 274–78 Turkey, 208, 219–20, 221–23 uncertainty, 3, 10–11, 49, 53, 55–58, 60, 67, 73–77, 79, 81, 88–90, 102, 111, 143, 151, 197, 200–1, 209, 228, 231, 235–36, 239, 243, 271–73, 276

290  ◆ Index

uncertainty (cont.) epistemic, 18–19, 230, 240–42 (see also epistemic) United Kingdom, 187, 190 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 142–43, 147, 154, 158n4, 159n6, 224n1 UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, 8 Uruguay, 4 Vallejo Nájera, Antonio, 133n7 Vela, Eduardo, 129, 134n17 victims, 2, 8, 17, 60, 76, 78, 104, 110, 131, 132n1, 124n17, 162, 168, 171–73, 175–76, 178, 181n8, 223, 259, 274 associations, 120–21 disappeared, 94, 174, 213, 233, 278 (See also disappeared) homogenized, 165, 170 ‘ideal’, 73 victimhood, 95 violence, 9, 12, 31–32, 36–37, 39, 41, 47–49, 61, 122, 125, 145, 147, 154–57, 162–68, 171, 177, 179, 187, 192, 197, 200, 202n2, 209–11, 216–17, 219, 252, 256, 258, 261, 263, 265. See also crime,

epistemic, human remains, state and war bureaucratic, 169, 173, 175–76 epistemic, 20 extreme, 172, 174 liquid, 255, 257, 262 political, 2, 35, 249–51, 254, 260 state, 1, 5, 7, 11, 13–14, 33, 213, 223 structural, 8, 170, 178, 201, 238, 248, 264, 271, 278 visa, 57, 61, 240 restrictions, 7, 20 Wagner, Sarah, 4, 6–7, 19, 210, 233 war, 3, 12, 33, 35, 37, 41, 76, 95, 104, 121, 123–24, 129, 132n1, 143, 146, 148–49, 158n2, 169, 178, 180n2, 197, 221, 247, 266n1 Spanish Civil War, 120, 273 and violence, 48–49 (see also violence) witness accounts, 17, 223, 230, 232–33, 240–42 witnesses, 15, 100, 151, 230, 232–33, 240, 275–76 witnessing, 223, 231–33 Yugoslavia, 7, 19