This online book launch presents a new volume, which asks about the potentiality to reverse the anthropological gaze and not focus on objects, facts and actions but instead on inactivity, waiting, silences, and disappearances. What epistemological consequences does this shift imply? Gerhild Perl and Laura Huttunen use the example of missing persons in the aftermath of the Yugoslav wars and the lens of migration studies to show that this view is grounded in empirical realities and at the same time emerges at a time in which global inequalities continuously (re)produce absences, situations of stuckness and paralyzation. In addition, artist Nayarí Castillo-Rutz will provide insights into how this way of thinking may translate into public art dedicated to traces and shifting temporalities.

Book presenters

Laura Huttunen is a Professor of Social Anthropology at the Tampere University, Finland. In 2013-14 she ran a project that focused on the question of missing and disappeared persons in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In 2018-2022 she led a research project with a focus on disappearances in migratory contexts.

Gerhild Perl is an Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Trier, Germany. Her work has been published in journals such as the Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Journal of Intercultural Studies. Her doctoral dissertation on death during migration across the Spanish-Moroccan Sea was awarded the Maria Ioannis Baganha Award and the Dissertation Prize of the German Anthropological Association.

A session hosted by the Southeast Europe Society, Klagenfurt branch in cooperation with the Gustav Mahler Private University for Music, the Department of Cultural Analysis, University of Klagenfurt, and the DGEKW Working Group “Europeanization_Globalization: Ethnographies of the Political”.