The restitution of "disappeared". Bodies: restoring identities and breaking the curse of dehumanization

Book Chapter

Summary *

It is in this context that this chapter focuses on the question “what is restored in a restitution of human remains?” It attempts to revisit and analyse a process that often anchors discussions in the act of re-interment itself or "moment of restitution" per se and its immediate political and social effects. However, I believe that another dimension is added to understanding of the significance of such moments when attention turns generically to "times of restitution" as a ritualized temporality in order to be able to grasp ethnographically how the genesis of this restitutive action is constituted and, above all, how a confluence and layering of memories and identities come into play in such moments. I am referring to the attempt of the bereaved to create an archaeology of memories of the dead in order to understand a number of neglected aspects of these events: the ways and means in which the formal marking and commemoration of such events have crystallized; the way present feelings and affects become directly linked to that past, subjectively abolishing chronological time; the shifting modes of memorial transmission from generation to generation; the silences and suppressions of memory that appear and/or are broken; and particularly, the value of these memories as a common good and shared blessing within the affective communities that struggle to make their existential losses and demands visible and oppose the narratives that at some point constructed their loved ones and heroes as enemies, as violent threats, as “things” to be eliminated, as monsters. Information provided by the agent in SIGEVA