Description
Book SynopsisEvery year at least 20,000 people go missing in São Paulo, Brazil. Many will be found, sometimes in mundane mass graves, but thousands will not.Keep the Bones Aliveexplores this phenomenon and why there is little concern for those who vanish. Ethnographer Graham Denyer Willis works beside family members, state workers, and gravediggers to examine the rationalization behind why bodies are missing in spacefrom cemeteries, the criminal coroner's office, prisons, and elsewhere. By accompanying the bereaved as they confront an indifferent state and a suspicious society and search for loved ones against all odds, this gripping book reveals where missing bodies go and the reasons why people can disappear without being pursued. Recognizing that disappearance has long been central to Brazil's everyday political order, this humanistic account of the silences surrounding disappearance shows why a demand for a politics of life is needed now more than ever.
Trade Review"Denyer Willis’s
Keep the Bones Alive makes an important contribution to our understanding of contemporary disappearances in Latin America." * The Latin Americanist *
Table of ContentsContents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Gone
1 Disappearance and the Search
2 Keep the Bones Alive
3 Unearthing Life
4 Disappearance and the Cemetery
5 The Usefulness of Capricious Knowledge
6 The Disappearable Subject
7 From Disappearance, Presence
8 Muted Martyrdom
9 Make Live, Make Disappear
10 “I Just Want to Live”
Appendix. Reading Life through Disappearance:
A Note on Method
Notes
References
Index
