Surviving Forced Disappearance in Argentina and Uruguay: Identity and Meaning by Gabriel Gatti (review)

How to represent the unrepresentable, how to imagine the unimaginable, and how to speak about the unspeakable that the figure of the desaparecido embodies? In his book entitled Surviving Forced Disappearance in Argentina and Uruguay: Identity and Meaning, sociologist Gabriel Gatti attempts to understand the causes and effects of the repressive practice of "making people disappear" which was widely employed during the Latin American military dictatorships in the second half of the last century.

Based on extensive fieldwork in Argentina and Uruguay, this study explores the legal figure of the desaparecido by asking how detained and disappeared persons inhabit the categories that international criminal law has constructed to define, prosecute, and repair the consequences of these acts of state terrorism. According to Gatti, who speaks both as a relative of a disappeared (he is a son, brother, and brother-in-law of a desaparecido), and as an academic, forced disappearance is a "catastrophe for identity and meaning."¹ Therefore, the central and most innovative question he addresses is how to imagine, evoke, and represent this attempt at obliteration.

In this double position, as a sociologist who in a self-reflexive, subjective, and accessible style from the beginning, explicitly makes clear that he writes from the gut,² Gatti focuses especially on the (im) possibilities of representing the desaparecido: Parting from the widely-explored idea that the disappeared victims have a "body without identity and an identity without body,"being neither dead nor alive, the desaparecido establishes a new category, where these "bodiless figure[s]" are neither present nor absent.³ Using an interdisciplinary approach combined with fragments of his field research diary, the author composes complex and powerful arguments that draw on theories from sociology, memory studies, philosophy, anthropology, and representation to describe this paradoxical phenomenon: This new state of being creates an uncomfortable limbo that makes moving beyond the void impossible for survivors and relatives. In an extensive analysis of forensic anthropology, human rights law, academic discourse, and civil society activism, Gatti points out the varied attempts to try to fill the void, what he coins the "narratives of meaning."

Within these human rights discourses, forensic anthropology applied in post violence situations is fundamental takeout, because it is part of "identical ingredients regardless of where they are applied and however different the situation they are meant to solve."⁴ Gatti exemplifies these narratives of meaning through forensic work as a scientific discipline involving technical protocols of the exhumation of human remains, DNA extraction, or research in archives. The forensic anthropologist forms part of a "humanitarian rationality"⁵ by using effective archeological techniques, which are able to establish purportedly objective information about the genetic ties of a nameless victim, reconstruct a biological "truth."

Notably, Gatti analyzes the efforts of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo to use blood ties and DNA testing to create a link between family and identity in order to restore the identity of their disappeared grandchildren, the niños desaparecidos. As Gatti points out, the biological approach emphasizing family bonds and blood ties has become increasingly dominant in Human Rights policies, for it proves to be an effective strategy in offering evidence of what happened. With the example of the Grandmothers' search for their disappeared grandchildren, Gatti problematizes their rhetoric of identity formation regarding the niños desaparecidos that are built around biological ties. By politically framing their bodies in a "socially legitimized concept of identity"⁶ as a stable, biological essence, Gatti discloses the desire for linear identities, thereby letting disappear identity-breaks that the act of child kidnapping during the Argentine dictatorship necessarily entails. The powerful discourse of "appropriated" or "violated identities," guided by rather conservative ideas of lineage and family bonds in order to recover the true identity (identidad verdadera) has—according to Gatti—created an essentialist "theoretical construct with universal aspirations" which with its unintended consequences goes much beyond its tactical necessity and political...