Suchergebnisse

The nature of institutions is nothing but their coming into being (nascimento) at certain times and in certain guises. Whenever the time and guise are thus and so, such and not otherwise are the institutions that come into being—Vico, The New Science.

Alterity or otherness is a central notion in cultural anthropology and philosophy, as well as in other disciplines. While anthropology, with its aim of understanding cultural difference, tends to take otherness as a fact, there have been vigorous attempts in contemporary philosophy, particularly in phenomenology, to answer the fundamental question: What is the Other? This book brings the two approaches to otherness - the hermeneutical pragmatics of anthropology, and the radical reflection of philosophy - together, with the goal of enriching one through the other. The philosophy of the German phenomenologist Bernhard Waldenfels, up to now little known to anthropologists, has a central position in this undertaking. Waldenfels's concept of a responsivity to the Other offers to cultural anthropology the possibility of a philosophical engagement with the Other that does not contradict the project of making sense of concrete empirical others. The book illustrates the fertility of this new approach to alterity through a broad spectrum of themes, ranging from reflections on theory formation, via discussions of race and human-animal relations, to personal meditations on experiences of alterity

Between 1973 and 1990, Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile implemented the systematic practice of forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings in order to eradicate the imagined "communist cancer" (Wyndham and Read 2010: 31). A total of 3,227 deaths have been tallied; 1,465 of these were cases of detenidos-desaparecidos, or enforced disappearances (Garrido and Intriago 2012: 34). Scholars suggest that Chile's transition to democracy will remain incomplete without first locating and identifying the desaparecidos (Aguilar 2002). Through methods of comparing postmortem skeletal analysis with antemortem data, forensic anthropologists carry out the important work that makes identifications possible. This thesis evaluates the development of the field of forensic anthropology in Chile, taking into consideration certain peculiarities in such development that led to errors in identifying the dead. An analysis of these errors, the circumstances that led to them, and the resulting response in their aftermath, provides an important lesson for the improvement of the field as it moves forward and is applied in other global contexts. I take an anthropological approach to this case, and rely on comparison with the U.S. and several other international cases. As the field of forensic anthropology matures, ethnographic studies of scientists and their practices have begun to emerge. Additionally, there has been an increased reflexivity on the part of the forensic scientists themselves. Following these trends, I rely on personal interviews and reflections of key forensic practitioners in Chile. This thesis aims to join the ongoing discussion, and to raise awareness of the important role forensic anthropology plays in uncovering the truth, providing evidence of political crimes, revising historical memory and, most importantly, returning loved ones to their families in the hopes of giving them solace from their suffering.