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

Gerhild Perl is Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Trier, Germany. Her work has been published in journals such as the Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Journal of Intercultural Studies. Her doctoral dissertation 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.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Why an Anthropology of Disappearance?  A Tentative Introduction
Laura Huttunen and Gerhild Perl
This chapter is available open access thanks to the support of Tampere University.

Part I: Voicing Disappearances: Violence, Intimacies and Afterlives

Chapter 1. 'Who has taken my son (Amar Cheleke Ke Nilo)?' Pervasive Missingness, Custodial Disappearances and Revolutionary Violence in Urban India
Atreyee Sen

Chapter 2. On the Slow Silencing of Absences: Sensing Social Disappearances in Cape Verde
Heike Drotbohm
This chapter is available open access thanks to the support of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.

Chapter 3. 'What to do?': Searching for Missing Persons in Israel
Ori Katz

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

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

Chapter 5. Disappearance via Adoption: On Missing Children in Spain (1936-96)
Diana Marre and Jessaca Leinaweaver

Chapter 6. Enforced Disappearances, Colonial Legacies and Political Affect in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya
Stefan Millar
This chapter is available open access thanks to the support of the University of Helsinki

Chapter 7. Chroniclers of Violence in Contemporary Mexico: Feminist Reflections on Memory and Disappearance
Rosalva Aida Hernández Castillo

Part III: Alternative Ways of Knowing: Mediating Absences, Negotiating Disappearances

Chapter 8. Murky Disappearances: How Competing Narratives Obscure Structures of Power along the France-UK Border
Victoria Tecca

Chapter 9. Being There in the Presence of Absence: Researching the Remains of Migrant Disappearances
Ville Laakkonen
This chapter is available open access thanks to the support of Tampere University.

Chapter 10. Negotiating Epistemic Uncertainties: Coming to Terms with Migrant Disappearances at the Western Mediterranean
Saila Kivilahti and Laura Huttunen
This chapter is available open access thanks to the support of Tampere University.

Chapter 11. The Mediterranean as a Forensic Archive
Zuzanna Dziuban

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

Index