Lucía Ríos (IDACOR/CONICET Argentina) María José Sarrabayrouse Oliveira (ICA/CONICET Argentina) Mariana Tello Weiss (IDACOR/CONICET Argentina) In recent decades, the study of the remains of victims of mass crimes and the so called “forensic turn” –i.e. the predominance of forensic science as a moral technology in transitional justice schemes– has become prolific worldwide. The thanatological and necropolitical processes inscribed in these bodies enable us to explore the various meanings associated with the remains of deceased “enemies”, as well as the memory processes that unfold around their recovery. This analytical perspective involves considering –among others– the dimensions of visibility and invisibility based on state documentation (Ríos, 2023), as well as burials and murder practices (Robben, 2006; Sarrabayrouse Oliveira, 2003, 2011), and ultimately the political lives (Verdery, 1999) and political uses (Solé i Barjau, 2010; Ferrándiz, 2014, 2021, 2022; Tello, 2025) of corpses. It also allows us to analyze the territories and materialities in which these corpses are inscribed and where, a posteriori, disputes arise about the meanings of that past – whether the focus is on mass graves where the dead were buried and later exhumed, or on memorials representing their absence. The aim of this roundtable is to address the processes of managing the remains of victims of mass violence from an ethnographic perspective. More specifically, it examines the search, exhumation, identification and memorialisation of the bodies of civilian victims of the Spanish Civil War and Francoism in Spain, and well as those of the last Argentine military dictatorship. We propose analyzing the memorial cultures that have emerged in both countries focusing on the treatment of the remains. The two cases are connected in that they both share global memorial paradigms –i.e. victims are conceptualized as disappeared– while also having their own distinctive local characteristics –Argentina’s disappeared have different genealogies from Spain’s. At the same time, the memory processes connected to the search for the disappeared in Spain and Argentina have specific crossovers. Based on long standing fieldwork, we propose to compare both processes and address the circulation between the two countries of expert agents and knowledge, such as forensic and legal experts; strategies in memory activism; and heritage management processes associated with places related to the social life of the dead and disappeared victims. Presentations: "Liminal existences: modes of being and being between the living and the dead in the writing of the judicial morgue book in Cordoba, Argentina, in 1976" (Lucía Rios), "Between the legal and the clandestine: The entry of bodies of detained-disappeared persons into the Judicial Morgue of the City of Buenos Aires during state terrorism in Argentina (1976-1983)" (María José Sarrabayrouse Oliveira), "Disappearances and reappearances: the posthumous lives of the victims of the dictatorship in Argentina" (Mariana Tello)
20260729T110020260729T1230America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires1.2. The Social Life Of Dead Bodies: A Comparison Between Argentina And SpainSV103MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
