Keep the Bones Alive

Missing People and the Search for Life in Brazil

Graham Denyer Willis

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780520388536
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Every year at least 20, 000 people go missing in São Paulo, Brazil. Many will be found, sometimes in mundane mass graves, but thousands will not. Keep the Bones Alive explores this phenomenon and why there is little concern for those who vanish. Ethnographer Graham Denyer Willis works beside family members, state workers, and gravediggers to examine the rationalization behind why bodies are missing in space—from cemeteries, the criminal coroner's office, prisons, and elsewhere. By accompanying the bereaved as they confront an indifferent state and a suspicious society and search for loved ones against all odds, this gripping book reveals where missing bodies go and the reasons why people can disappear without being pursued. Recognizing that disappearance has long been central to Brazil's everyday political order, this humanistic account of the silences surrounding disappearance shows why a demand for a politics of life is needed now more than ever.

1 Disappearance and the Search

In Brazilian law, disappearance is just a fato atípico; an “atypical occurrence.” It carries no notion of atrocity.¹ The “atypical” sits alongside the positivist “typical” in Brazilian jurisprudence, where the latter works through four enmeshed normative premises: conduct, result, relationship of causality, and legal typology. These four principles, forged in a global colonial legal pact premised on bodies as the pith of knowing, require a linearity between intent, outcome, effect of action, and the ability to categorize according to codified doctrine. The “atypical,” by contrast, is the absence of these complementary and necessary conditions.

Another way of locating the absence of legal reason amid everyday rationality is through a foundational writ: habeus corpus. Bring the body. Brazilian legal theory—derived from hegemonic Western legal theory—holds that if a body has been deprived of liberty, and for such a condition to be contested as unjust, the body must be brought to court for it to attest to its own condition of deprivation. Such a logic of deprivation of liberty vests its premises in the materiality, voice, or representation of the body to the state. The absence of a body untethers the ability, and any substantive demand, to claim “deprivation of liberty.” Without a body there can be no deprivation of liberty, by fact of law. Thus, “atypical.”

How does one come to know who someone is, even when a body is found? One way to end the search is forensic analysis and DNA testing, which are available. Private tests are the quickest, but they’re inaccessible on a moment’s notice for anyone scraping by. The medical examiner can do it too, but there always seems to be a queue, murky knowledge, and arbitrary answers. Even where this supposed silver bullet might matter most, it gets tripped up by a bevy of banality: the body as a site of evidence now can’t be found; a body was misnamed; the body was already buried, nameless, under a numbered wooden stake; there are bones found among many other bones, commingled. Some bones and remains are alive with political agency and the capacity to govern or disrupt governance.² Many others, however, are ungrievable.³ They lack the ability to haunt, to politicize.

And yet, the “adverse non-event” of disappearance moves quietly through the most political of spaces and logics. A given case, or body, can trace pathways to mundane mass graves, to the indigent cemetery or “potter’s field,” through the medical examiner’s room (Instituto Médico Legal [IML]), and through the affective existence of loved ones left behind. Or it may not. And it may, or may not, also move through the “alternative tribunals” of the PCC, an organized crime group, in and out of para-police death squads and murderous policing, or in the gossip and normative silences that surround all of these. Crucial, too, is the weight of the supposition that it may have been any one of these things, and it almost doesn’t matter. Talk of disappearance assumes a life of its own. Silence and unwillingness to join the search speaks.

Disappearance seems a perfect post-truth category, a political shrug at something that shouldn’t have happened, might not have anyway, and that can’t really specify anything if it did in any case. So well subsumed within capitalism’s enactment of life as inequitable, to have disappeared is to be politically evident of nothing much in particular, and to fit within a banal category of human (non-)existence that is neither life, nor body, nor death. This kind of disappearance, in a state of political banality rather than crisis or atrocity, or historical retrospect, also extracts the body as a site of contestation, evidence, and rationality. Where the body cannot be the basis of evidence, “missing people” allow for the reproduction of distinctive kinds of political indifference or disavowal. This works even as the social experience of coping with those who are no longer there—but could one day return—is wrought with a lucidity of supposition, a clear but often whispered normative rationale, and an abyssal depth of atomized suffering for those left behind. But if disappearance can be both politically disavowed and simultaneously socially avowed and understood, its empirical condition is at least partially materialized in landscape. New but banal terrains of burial outside the cemetery have emerged in São Paulo, and throughout Latin America as a region, mass graves of a mundane kind for their inability to rupture political discussion as other mass graves can.

The way disappearance happens, and why it is important, wasn’t always this way. Far from it. A recognition of the basic assumptions of mundane disappearance might be critical in the present, but its shifting characteristics and responses over time—who is pursued when they disappear, why, with what justifications—means tracking it and its ethical assumptions across historical moments. Indeed, disappearance underpins the very development of countries like Brazil, especially in terms of institutional codifications, contested territorial expansion and settlement, violent pursuit and disavowal of populations, and the crystallization of abject and violent relations between the ruler and the ruled. Disappearance is embedded in some of the most basic assumptions of capitalist territorialization and constantly incomplete “state formation” as a mode of power, from past to present.

Attending to disappearance in a historical arc offers a renewed view of political power and the practice of power and order. The fractious relationship between ruler and ruled, in the dualized light of fugitivity and capture amid chattel slavery, is materially inscribed on the landscape and in enduring institutional, social, and political forms. Here, disputed state formation cannot be understood in terms of overcoming or eliminating contesting parties. Rather, it is in the expansion, settlement, and spatiality of power deployed in pursuit of the flight of the disappeared—from the Indigenous settlement, the slave-labor gold mine, the sugar plantation—and their attempted capture. The variegated back-and-forth efforts to disappear from political oppression, slavery and its spaces, and the vigorous and violent efforts to recapture and reassert order, necessarily pushed the spatial, moral, and epistemic boundaries of politics itself, expanding territory in a production of space written through the social relations of disappearance and searching.

Focusing on Brazil in particular reveals a long arc of disappearance and the search as particularly inseparable from lived politics, both in crisis and banality. The history of this territory, to become Brazil, is written through the pursuit of bodies that disappear, and their attempted capture, century after century, region to region. The problem transcends not just space but projects and moments of governance, perhaps especially on the frontier. From the blurry forced labor and indoctrination logics of early Jesuit, Franciscan, and Carmelite missionary outposts, funded through the use of Indigenous “labor” in the search for wild cocoa in the Eastern Amazon basin, to the mocambo “safe havens” of runaway slave Maroons, the colonization process worked in dialogical lockstep with containment and a desire by the contained to flee and search for life beyond.⁴ “By far,” writes Stuart Schwartz (1996: 103), “the most common form of slave resistance was flight.” Flight was quite simply the most obvious way of not getting worked to death; it was the way out.

Disappearance worked at different scales—individuals fleeing the plantation or the mine, Maroon communities forming, other communities vanishing, perhaps obliterated, perhaps starved or dead of disease. Each surrounds a desire, materialization, or practice of “getting out” of a violent system to search for a better life, or being eliminated by it, that pushed outward into the hinterlands in a “civilizing” process. As Flávio dos Santos Gomes (2002: 470) alludes: “Fugitives—blacks, Amerindians, and military deserters—played a leading role in the pursuit of freedom. Through their own acts, they reinvented the meanings and constructed views of slavery and liberty. Moreover, they colonised swathes of the Amazon, particularly those on the international colonial borders. Settlers arrived. Ships cast anchor. Economic calculations were made. Forts were built. Boundary markers were put in place. Laws and regulations were sent. Several kinds of adventures were beginning for the men and women in those parts.” Such lines of flight and settlement in a search for life led in almost every direction, outward from the plantation, mine, and settlement, and from (and into) the city.

This is not solely a question of space or territorial expansion, either. Even the much nationally celebrated settler colonial “pioneers” worked through a logic of disappearance. Bandeirantes, private bands that hunted down Indigenous populations, moved westward through what is today São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Paraná states (and then northward). They did so to steal Indigenous lives to enslave—while in the process expanding the “frontier” in a search for mineral deposits that germinated settlement. The effect was alternately to disappear whole populations, “depopulating areas” by stealing lives while causing others to flee. Those who fled sometimes “took shelter” in Jesuit missions that “besides actually ‘rounding up’ willing indigenous groups, welcomed other indigenous groups who fled bandeirante fury.”⁵

Moreover, the “sheltering” of Indigenous populations in missions made them, in particular, an appetizing target for hunting parties. “One cannot imagine a more tempting prey for slave traders,” wrote Abreu (1998) of the missions. Why steal populations with unintelligible language, incomprehensible mores who attack violently, when “. . . nearby, well sized villages with people schooled in the art of peace, and accepting of authority” (2:111–13) could be invaded? The very idea of human domination over nature, which assumes the conquest of “civil” populations over the Indigenous, cannot be understood without disappearance, flight, and capture—all entwined in forms of searching.

Analytically, following where someone who disappeared, fleeing, may have gone, trails both why they fled and what they may have fled to, and why. Analytically thickening such efforts to “get out,” disappear, and search for a better life is of vital importance for seeing the vivid ways that disappearance has and has not transformed across historical moments. Yuko Miki (2012: 495) writes of Benedito, “a slave who disappeared from prison in a flamboyant escape,” in late nineteenth-century Brazil. After Benedito freed himself from handcuffs by smearing them with sheep fat, he vanished in the night—and likely to (and with the help of) the nearby fugitive slave community, a quilombo. The police officer investigating the incident “grimly acknowledged that arrest would be difficult. . . . He was certain that Benedito would be impossible to capture because he was likely protected by a local quilombo in the city district—and possibly many others” (496).

Histories like these reveal a vital relationship of complementarity between disappearance and searching for life, both empirical and conceptual. In a single case, disappearance and a search exist, and with contrasting meanings. The search was both an effort to obtain life, for slaves, and a means of domination, for masters and their hunters wanting to reobtain their property. The difference between the two rests in one’s position and perspective of political and social order. For the slave, like Benedito, to abscond from the plantation and its prison logic was to flee a system, a life of violent domination, a bleak and foreclosed world where slaves were cheaper to replace from the slave ship than to invest in for more than a handful of years. This was a system where their life was not recognized as human.

For the slave owner, someone disappearing was both a crisis, and much foreseen. It required a search; in this case a violent pursuit to reclaim lost labor and to patch the cracks in their political order. These “manhunts” weren’t single-issue problems of individuals, or an offhand concern (Chamayou 2012). The disappearance of someone who had fled was made to redefine the rule by making the fleeing party reappear after a grand and raucous search, for all to see—and to be punished publicly and spectacularly at its conclusion.

And yet, it wasn’t even the case that slave owners worked to eliminate, to obliterate, the very possibility of disappearance. Rather, some masters let slaves try, as part of a technique of domination. “Owners usually treated the first flight less severely than subsequent attempts,” Mary Karasch (1987: 303) describes, “because they regarded it as part of the seasoning in process, and the new slave earned a valuable lesson: running away was grounds for punishment.” Disappearance from the plantation, or from urban chattel, was both a threat, and useful to demonstrate the power of the search.

Having hope for a better life, and a history of attempts to flee in search of it, also made slaves cheaper. For the Jesuits, who saw humanity and the possibility of salvation in the Indigenous population but denied such recognition to African slaves, failed “seasoning in” was attractive. As one seventeenth-century friar in a remote northern state put it while writing to a slave seller, “Admitting that the [Black slaves] here have nowhere to escape to, it would be convenient if there were a few who could be [sold] more cheaply because of this wrongdoing.”⁶

Disappearance and the search were far from peripheral to political life. The logics of constant disappearance and searching shaped social relations and space in systemic ways, recasting the very meaning of the plantation, the city, and political orderliness itself. In nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, “the city and nearby hills were overrun with runaway slaves” (Karasch, 1987: 304), patterning how space and security were enacted. Not just spatial, though, Amy Chazkel (2020) has written of how the constant inability to control runaways shaped the very temporality of society, where nightly curfews kept fugitives and the enslaved from blending in the sensory disorder of the night, to overrun the daylight. On the fringes of the plantation, the mine, and the city, police and bush-hunting capitães do mato scoured the landscape, returning to punish the disappeared with monstrous spectacle. That someone like Benedito would disappear under cover of night was both a critical logic for his disappearance and well subsumed into the curfew response that sought to rationalize the terms of the search for the disappeared.

All of this meant that disappearance and the search were countered by a barrage of intersecting and contesting interests. Disappearance was so common that it gave way to distinctive institutions of capture, some of a “third-party” or twilight variety, like the capitães do mato. These groups, made up of quasi-free former slave and Indigenous militias, were put to work—per head captured—in the scrubland and forests for those in flight.⁷ Amid police who might deny their ability to do anything, or on the resignation of slave owners to try to get the police to help, hunting parties could be easily deployed. Slave owners, their patrols, one slave owner upon another, groups of Maroons, and capitães were part of a complex and often disassociated tapestry of theft, violence, and capture—from each other.

The contested relationship around disappearance and the search was further complicated by blurred relationships between some slave owners and fugitive slaves. Amid such a terrain of political disorder, pragmatism was important. Miki (2012) shows that slave owners would protect their interests, both from incursions by fugitive slave communities and from other owners, by other surprising means: allowing some Maroons to settle on their land to avoid being found. By doing so, these land owners could accrue free labor, in return for shelter, food and munitions—and a cut of their “criminal” proceeds. From this protected position, the disappeared like Benedito could then steal livestock, staples, and other property from neighboring areas, leveraging a safe haven overseen, at least informally, by a patron.⁸ To disappear was to elide within a different sphere of governance, becoming a shadow in plain sight, protected from the search.

Brazilian politics was, and remains, alive with disappearance and searching. Seeing politics in these terms allows for a consideration of all these crossed lines, the varied violence implied, and the internally contradictory nature of everyday politics made through human inequality. Crucial things have changed over time and with at least two key distinctions for how disappearance and the search must be understood. First, both have been subsumed into a dominant logic of passive ordering, from actively hunting for missing slave labor to letting labor disappear. A manhunt to recapture labor is no longer necessary, nor does it allow for a punitive public spectacle and social pedagogy that absent Black lives and labor will be tracked down. Labor is now compelled in other ways. Subjects are now, already, “disappearable”; their condition of being policed in life but unpursuable in disappearance is evident in non-provision of biopolitical care and ill attention to particular bodies as not worth saving. Disappearance is a systemic assumption that is written through absent policy and inconsistent provision of life-giving infrastructures. The poor are left to disappear, unless one builds a house out of scraps, toils in the informal economy at all hours, or overcomes the disease and diarrhea that happen in the absence of biopolitical techniques of making live. Here, the favela itself is built on the uncertain and shaky landscapes of disappearance as the political condition. Such places that are built, communally, exist against this political assumption as a materialization of an enduring search for life.

Unlike in the past, an active manhunt is reserved for other populations, the pursuit of whom is cast as necessary to right wrongs, to maintain innocence, or to bring justice to bear. The spectacularity of these kinds of pur...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Gone
• 1 Disappearance and the Search
• 2 Keep the Bones Alive
• 3 Unearthing Life
• 4 Disappearance and the Cemetery
• 5 The Usefulness of Capricious Knowledge
• 6 The Disappearable Subject
• 7 From Disappearance, Presence
• 8 Muted Martyrdom
• 9 Make Live, Make Disappear
• 10 “I Just Want to Live”
• Appendix. Reading Life through Disappearance: A Note on Method
• Notes
• References
• Index