Abstract
Based on reflections produced in the context of two ethnographic assessments, this article discusses the development of a national technology for the management of the bodies of disappeared politicians during the Dictatorship (1964-1985) in Brazil. Mobilizing the historical procedural method, I explore the construction of Peru’s clandestine ditch as a forensic case, highlighting the entanglement between two knowledge and power domains over the dead: one legalized and institutionalized in the police sphere and the other in transnational forensic humanitarianism. The aim is to treat the tensions interposed to the development and the exercise of a humanitarian identifying power as a result of disputes by the authorities that unfold it, illuminating the disciplinary aspects of identification. I argue that, by constituting subjects based on analytical acts and writing practices, humanitarian identification also circumscribes them as managed by knowledge and actions that give rise to government acts.
Keywords:
enforced disappearance; identification; forensic turn; bureaucracy; state