Liminality and Missing Persons

Bibliographic Data

ID3082045
AuthorsLaura Huttunen (0000-0003-1455-9588, Tampere University, corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume2
Issue1
Pages201-218
Publication date2016-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueConflict and Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2164-4543 • E-ISSN: 2164-4551
PublisherBerghahn Books (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.3167/arcs.2016.020117
OpenAlexW2539919966
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited18

In many armed conflicts, forced disappearances and hiding the bodies of victims of mass atrocities are used strategically. This article argues that disappearances are powerful weapons, as their consequences reach from the most intimate relations to the formation of political communities. Consequently, political projects of forced disappearances leave difficult legacies for post-conflict reconciliation, and they give rise to a need to address individuals' and families' needs as well as relations between national and political groups implicated in the conflict. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this articles explores the question of missing persons in post-1992 Bosnia. The processes of identification and practices of remembering and commemorating the missing are analyzed through the concept of liminality. The article argues that the future-oriented temporality of liminality gives rise to numerous practices of encountering the enigma of the missing, while the political atmosphere of postwar Bosnia restricts possibilities of communitas-type relationality across ethnonational differences

Communitas · Epistemology · Ethnography · Liminality · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Temporality · Anthropology · Balkans: History, Politics, Society · Gender Studies · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Turkey's Politics and Society

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