An archaeology of necropolitics: Omission, disappearance and legacies of dictatorship in Brazil

Abstract

This thesis explores the continuities of the forms of disappearance in Brazil during the dictatorship and today. It investigates whether or not is it possible to materialize the precariousness of life at the moment of death. It specifically asks: `what forms of citizenship are constructed in the bureaucratization of death?¿ and `what technologies have been deployed in these strategies?¿ Drawing upon contemporary archaeology to address these questions, this work considers how different bodies, individuals and populations are variously categorized as undesirable, dangerous, and deviant, through the different forms of treatment they have received throughout their lives and deaths. It was found that, if during life these populations are over-controlled by the State through its institutions and forms of policing, they are then also neglected and abandoned in the construction of their citizenship in death. A major approach of this work was to observe how material elements linked to individuality, a fundamental conceptin the identification process, were lost on the way to burial. It is argued that institutional omission is one of the techniques of making people, whose bodies are not considered important, disappear. Further, when racism, sexism and classism essentially crossed paths, in the form of negligence and omission by officers and the State itself in the treatment of those people who are deprived of their status as political subjects, such people can only attain a socially acknowledged status of `disappeared¿ when their fate is exposed by the mass media, social movements and/or family groups. This thesis confirms the idea that the normality of state violence is, in fact, the normality of a broad process of genocide and of annihilation of entire groups, reaffirming these groups¿ status of subalternity. By doing this investigation, this work strongly contributes to the critical scholarship of violence studies that explore other forms of disappearance in the heart of one of the countries affected by Operation Condor during the Cold War and the spectrum of the violence from dictatorship established in institutions and in their everyday practices.