Guest Talk Laura Huttunen

1 June 2026, 16.15
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Oettingenstraße 67
80538 München

Prof. Dr. Laura Huttunen (Tampere University):

The anthropology of disappearance: political landscapes and cultural practices

Abstract
In this presentation, I examine human disappearances in various contexts, ranging from enforced disappearances under oppressive governments and during armed conflicts to disappearing undocumented migrants and, finally, to people who go missing under more everyday circumstances in the Global North. Building on empirical work in Bosnian diaspora and in the context of migrant disappearances, I argue that a missing person is always an anomaly in relation to the social and cultural order, and every disappeared person disturbs the normal flow of social life in families and communities, often also the smooth working of state bureaucracies. In order to provide a dynamic understanding of disappearances, I look both at the circumstances that make some people disappear and the variety of responses that disappearances give rise to; the latter include projects focused on searching for the missing and identifying unidentified dead bodies, as well as political projects that call for accountability for disappear-rances. However, if the missing are not located alive or as dead bodies or remains, they insistently reappear in more symbolic forms, such as memorials and museums, as artwork and media spectacles, but also as ghosts and spirits. I will argue that anthropology of disappearance is a fruitful project to rethink life and death, presence and absence, the state, citizenship and exclusion, personhood and community, knowledge and knowledge production, protection and vulnerability, and rupture and continuity.

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