Terror and kinship.

• Applicant: Dr. Cristian Alvarado Leyton
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: from 2017 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 350520514

This project is informed by a critique of the study of violence and kinship that both frequently evade experiences of violence. It aims at understanding the long-term effects of state terror by studying the imaginations of a personal history of violence and practices of kinship of the "nietos", those persons who were kidnapped alongside their parents or who were born in secret detention camps during the last Argentinean dictatorship. Whereas their parents "disappeared" after the kidnapping, the children were raised with a false identity, not infrequently by the perpetrators themselves. After being located and a DNA testing, these children are "restituted" and receive their original identity. The project is guided by the following questions: how do these children make sense of their history of violence related to the discovery of their stolen identity? How do they live their relationships with their "new" and "former" kin? The project will constitute an original contribution to the study of violence and the anthropology of kinship, as it will provide an ethnography of the understudied experiences of systematic political violence. Focusing on practices of kinship and the ways imagination is used to deal with familial histories of violence, it will explore ethnographically the virtually uncharted long-term effects of state terrorism on human beings and render theoretical suggestions about the practice of kinship in general.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants