Institutional Landscapes. An exploratory ethnography of emerging state institutions under the stress of extreme violence - the search commissions in Mexico and Colombia

• Applicant: Dr. Anne Huffschmid
• Subject Area: African, American and Oceania Studies
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 536695083

The dehumanizing violence of enforced disappearances, as perfected in Latin America during dictatorships, remains one of the continent's most unresolved human rights crises today, and in two countries in particular: Mexico and Colombia, where more than 100,000 people are currently registered as forcibly disappeared in each. While research to date has focused primarily on the current dynamics of violence and governance and on aspects of Transitional Justice, social and cultural anthropological studies of the performance and perception of state institutions are rare and of the inner workings of the state in such contexts of violence are a desideratum. This research proposal, situated in the field of political anthropology, aims to use an exploratory research design in order to explore how two relatively new state institutions – the commissions that were established in Mexico and Colombia, respectively, in 2018 to search for the forcibly disappeared, which announce a "new" way of dealing with this phenomenon of violence – act concretely, how they communicate, how this acting and communicating is perceived by other social actors, and how it reverberates on social imaginaries of statehood: How does something like state legitimacy emerge? How do experiences with or images of statehood change – or reproduce? The project will employ approaches that have already been tried and tested in the applicant's research trajectory (such as ethnographic, photographic and video-based methods, image and discourse analysis, transmedia formats) as well as new accounts, for example with regard to the sensory dimension (soundscapes). In terms of content, the project follows on from the previous project "Forensic Landscapes" (2013-2020), which investigated forensic processes in Mexico using ethnographic and audiovisual methods, focusing primarily on non-state actors (victims of violence, non-governmental forensic teams); state authorities, widely perceived as indifferent and inefficient, remained marked as a blank space. The new project now focuses on the state itself and its interaction with civil society. Under the "magnifying glass" of an expanded "institutional ethnography" (Dorothy Smith), everyday life, practices, interactions, atmospheres in interior, border and threshold spaces will be 'scrutinized'. The explored "institutional landscapes" are contextualized in Mexico and Colombia respectively and, moreover, related to each other in order to work out differences but also overlapping patterns, interconnections and knowledge transfers. The results - also on the methodological potential of explorative and sensitive state research - will be made accessible in two academic articles as well as in a multimodal platform. In doing so, the project can build on the experience of the interactive web documentation www.forensiclandscapes.com (2020) and further develop it methodologically.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants