Laura Huttunen and Gerhild Perl, "An Anthropology of Disappearance: Politics, Intimacies and Alternative Ways of Knowing" (Berghahn Books, 2023)

Mar 10, 2024

Scholars explore disappearances in different cultural contexts, addressing human life, rituals, citizenship, and agency. The podcast delves into methodological challenges and ethical considerations of researching disappearances. It discusses the political urgency of terms in conflict anthropology and the role of imagination in coping with disappearances. The complexity of disappearance as a social phenomenon, grief, loss, and alternative ways of knowing are also examined.

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Introduction

00:00 • 2min

Unpacking Disappearance in Anthropology

01:55 • 17min

Exploring the Political Urgency of Concepts in Anthropology

18:47 • 2min

Exploring the Framework of Understanding Disappearances Through Voice, Politics, and Knowledge

20:53 • 6min

The Complexity of Disappearance as a Social Phenomenon

26:41 • 22min

Exploring the Role of Imagination in Coping with Disappearances

48:16 • 16min

Exploring Grief, Loss, and Alternative Ways of Knowing in Anthropology

01:04:22 • 2min

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. An Anthropology of Disappearance: Politics, Intimacies and Alternative Ways of Knowing (Berghahn Books, 2023) brings together scholars who engage ethnographically with such disappearances in various cultural, social and political contexts. This volume 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 makes this book a unique combination.

Laura Huttunen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Tampere University, Finland. In 2013-14 she ran a project that focused on the question of missing and disappeared persons in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In 2018-2022 she led a research project with a focus on disappearances in migratory contexts.

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.

Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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