The disappeared

Doctoral student, Daniel James, describes the subject of his fieldwork in Chile and Argentina. Death – like birth – has a time and a place. We mark each. Societies and cultures around the world have devised (invented?) an elaborate array of rituals to close the chapter of a person’s life in a way that signifies meaning. In obituaries, on tombstones, at a funeral or a wake, it is customary to note where and when someone was born, and died. Touchingly, it is sometimes even the same place that is recorded; a tantalising envelope that hints at the life led in-between, or a gesture perhaps to the lived experience before today’s globalised age? But what if the time and place of someone’s death are not yet known? What if there is even still uncertainty about whether somebody is really dead at all? This is what my research looks at.