Mission Impossible? Search Commissions as Contact Zones Between the State and Searching Communities: Notes for Their Exploration

Abstract

Based on an ongoing research project focusing on two search institutions for disappeared persons in Mexico and Colombia, this article discusses the potential of an expanded anthropology to record and understand statehood frameworks in contexts of extreme violence. Drawing upon a preliminary selection of fieldwork records from both institutions—Colombia’s UBPD (Unidad de Búsqueda de Personas dadas por Desaparecidas / Search Unit for Persons Deemed Missing) and Mexico’s CNB (Comisión Nacional de Búsqueda / National Search Commission), both explicitly etablished to respond to the demands of searching individuals and communities—it presents the contributions of an exploratory ethnography. This methodology combines continuous audio and video recording of spaces, experiences, work routines, tensions, and interactions between officials and searching families with situated conversations, accompaniment, and observation. A concept that proved productive for this exploration—both for its analytical deconstruction and narrative reconstruction—is that of an „institutional theater,“ which allows the recorded data to be understood in terms of stages, roles, costumes, and scripts.
It is argued that audiovisual tools, enriched by sensory studies, are particularly crucial in enabling us to transcend the view of the State as a mere abstraction or monolithic Otherness. Instead, they allow us to approach these institutions as a complex web of tensions, contradictions, affective impacts, and mixed feelings that materialize through bodies, objects, atmospheres, interiors, exteriors, thresholds, and in-between spaces. We propose understanding these new humanitarian bureaucracies as a contact zone between institutions and society, where a series of dilemmas must be navigated. Prominent among these is what might be termed a state debt—perceived as co-responsible for multiple forms of violence—as well as the rift between a mandate to search and the impossibility of quantifying findings.