Wednesday June 24th - Ethnography in Progress with Kristen Drybread and Georgia Butcher
Join Kristen Drybread and Georgia ButcherÌýWednesday, June 24 for Ethnography in Progress!
They will be discussing Kristen Drybread's article "The Infrastructural Terror of Brazil’s Clandestine Graves" (abstract below). Georgia Butcher, Ph.D. Student in Cultural Anthropology, will be the discussant.
The Details:
Date: Wednesday, June 24
Time: 12:00pm–1:30pm MT
Location: Zoom Video Call
Please email paige.edmiston@colorado.eduÌýto RSVP.
Ìý
The Infrastructural Terror of Brazil’s Clandestine Graves
Each year since the U.S.-backed War on Drugs began, thousands of people have gone missing in Brazil. The patterns of disappearance and killing are similar to those that plagued much of Latin America during the famously brutal military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s; however, the current source of terror has shifted from an obviously identifiable state to a nebulous host of actors ranging from petty drug dealers and rank-and-file police officers to drug kingpins and corrupt government officials. The constant threat these actors pose to ordinary men and women whose daily lives have become haunted by the absence of their missing loved ones is rendered especially terrifying by the growing presence of what might be called "the mundane mass grave." Throughout Brazil, a number of unauthorized communal burial pits have recently been unearthed, revealing some of ways that this form of clandestine infrastructure works to, on the one hand, disappear the casualties of contemporary conflicts over the spoils of power and illicit commerce and, on the other hand, to terrorize into silence the vulnerable men and women who attempt to live dignified lives while under threat of such an ignominious death. This paper will tell the story of the discovery and unearthing of a few such cemeteries in order to examine how bereaved mothers and fathers have, in the absence of social and legal infrastructures adequate to stanch the flood of disappearances and killings, mobilized to locate and to reveal mundane mass graves and to, thereby, expose not only the corpses but also the injustice and violence they contain.