Posesiones inalienables: conservación y circulación de objetos de personas desaparecidas en la Argentina y Colombia

Abstract

Throughout my field work in Argentina and Colombia (2000-2020), I had the opportunity to record different situations in which objects that belonged to missing persons are safeguarded in multiple ways from the vicissitudes of time and oblivion. One of these ways of making them durable has been through domestic altars, forensic practices, public denunciation performances and artistic works. Such objects –understood as “inalienable possessions” (Weiner 1992)– acquire value through their preservation, archiving, and aesthetic display, rather than through exchange in a market or prestige economy. In this text, based on the description of different experiences, I analyze what are the practices aimed at preserving the existence of objects that have transcended the disappearance of their owners and the restricted ways of circulating or exposing them in certain situations or contexts in which they acquire novel meanings. This analysis allows us to see the way in which such objects become relics or traces of denied existence and, at the same time, in mediations for the political claim in public settings.