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In this article, I maintain that Nazi concentrationary model was not the par excellence place of modern biopolitics but rather mainly expressed the tanatopolitical face of biopower. For this purpose, I take up Hannah Arendt's analysis, that articulate antisemitism and imperialism to explain the concentrationary phenomenon as the nucleus of Nazi totalitarianism. From her work, as well as from testimonial texts by survivors, I deduce that Nazi concentrationary mechanism attempted to reduce human life from bios to zoé, in a clear biopolitical exercise although, at the same time, by heading towards the direct and selective extermination of certain population groups, responded more to "making die and letting live", typical of sovereignty power, rather than to "making live and letting die", which characterizes biopolitics. Therefore, it had a primarily tanatopolitical dimension. Finally, I recover the possible replications and mutations of the total concentrationary phenomenon, in the presence of current biopolitical dangers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is used to talk about migrants that cross the border, also for citizens that go missing, for those who were murdered during the Spanish civil war and the following dictatorship, it is also the name used to call those erased of the registers in Dominican Republic or Mexico, and sometimes it is how people refer to uncontacted tribes of the Amazonian... The name for those and many others is disappeared. None of those situations correspond, nevertheless, to what the law qualifies as "enforced disappearance". This Special Topic considers the uses of the category disappearance looking mostly into the social, rather than the savantes, uses. The five articles gathered in this Special Topic show how the category disappearance is exceeded and its potentiality as a tool to analyze subjects expelled, pariahs, the precarious, the vulnerable, abandoned lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than solving a problem, in this text we propose to shape it by outlining some of its lines. We start from the category of enforced disappearance, analyze its origin and underline its success in terms of the notorious international expansion it has had. So much so that it has illuminated other situations in which individuals are removed from the protection of the law. We therefore say that the concept has exceeded its limits and we illustrate this situation with four cases that have the air of a family with forced disappearance: the uncontacted indigenous people in Brazil, the homes of migrants in Mexico, the erased citizens in the Dominican Republic, the unregistered subjects, also in Mexico. We present these four situations in dialogue between legal theory and ethnographic observation in order to present some ideas that allow us to think about the common background that makes disappearance: subjects that do not count. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migrants, remains, UBC (Unidentified Border Crosser or Undocumented Border Crosser), bodies in the desert, unidentified and unknown, John/Jane Doe, disappeared migrants, death person, missing, etc. Those are the categories that governmental and non-governmental agents, as well as scholars, use in the city of Tucson, Arizona, to refer to migrants who cross the border and whose whereabouts are unknown. In this article, based on qualitative fieldwork (mainly in-depth interviews), we analyze the names that those agents use or create to talk about the situation. We show, at the same time, how the more consolidated categories -- specially forced disappearance--, are exceeded when dealing with complex phenomenon such as transnational migrations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forensic anthropologists seek to decipher traces of anonymous dead, to restitute identities of human remains and to provide their families with the possibility to conclude mourning and even of justice. The article explores the contributions and meanings of forensic anthropology as state-independent practice beyond a mereley criminalistic approach, as it was conceptualized by the Argentine pioneers after the last dictatorship in this nation. I conceive this practice as a sort of arqueol - ogy of contemporary terror that seeks to confront a specific violence as the forced disappearance of persons and the deshumanization of their dead bodies. The article proposes reading forensic anthropology as a 'situated cience', with its complexities and ambigueties, that operates between nameless bones (the human remains) and names without bodies (the so-called disappeared) in settings of violent pasts such as Argentina or Guatemala, and especially in Mexico, where mass graves became the new symbol of a horrified present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]