Dr. Cristian Alvarado Leyton

Research fellow

Lateinamerika-Institut

Freie Universität Berlin

Forschung und Projekte

Derzeitige Position(en)

Research fellow (DFG Eigene Stelle), Lateinamerika-Zentrum, FU Berlin

Aktuelle(s) Projekt(e)

Terror and kinship
This project is informed by a critique of the study of violence and kinship that both frequently evade experiences of violence. It aims at understanding the long-term effects of state terror by studying the imaginations of a personal history of violence and practices of kinship of the "nietos", those persons who were kidnapped alongside their parents or who were born in secret detention camps during the last Argentinean dictatorship. Whereas their parents "disappeared" after the kidnapping, the children were raised with a false identity, not infrequently by the perpetrators themselves. After being located and a DNA testing, these children are "restituted" and receive their original identity. The project is guided by the following questions: how do these children make sense of their history of violence related to the discovery of their stolen identity? How do they live their relationships with their "new" and "former" kin? The project will constitute an original contribution to the study of violence and the anthropology of kinship, as it will provide an ethnography of the understudied experiences of systematic political violence. Focusing on practices of kinship and the ways imagination is used to deal with familial histories of violence, it will explore ethnographically the virtually uncharted long-term effects of state terrorism on human beings and render theoretical suggestions about the practice of kinship in general.

Veröffentlichungen

Monographien (und Dissertation)

Allianzbeziehungen der Patenschaft. Zur zentralen Machttechnik verwandtschaftlich gestalteter Patronage von Eliten kapitalistischer Verhältnisse. Hamburg 2006: LIT (Bd. 59 der Reihe Interethnische Beziehungen und Kulturwandel)
Native Anthropology. Kritische Ethnographie einer Debatte um den Zweck der Ethnologie. Berlin 2009: LIT (Bd. 66 der Reihe Interethnische Beziehungen und Kulturwandel)

Herausgeberschaften und Editionen

(mit Christian Müller, Silke Edinger): Nahbeziehungen zwischen Freundschaft und Patronage. Zur Politik und Typologie affektiver Vergemeinschaftung. Göttingen 2017: V & R unipress (Bd. 12 der Reihe Freunde, Gönner, Getreue. Studien zur Semantik und Praxis von Freundschaft und Patronage)
Der andere 11. September. Gesellschaft und Ethik nach dem Militärputsch in Chile. Münster 2010: Westfälisches Dampfboot (Reihe Politik und Ökonomie)
(mit Philipp Erchinger): Identität und Unterschied. Zur Theorie von Kultur, Differenz und Transdifferenz. Bielefeld 2010: Transcript (Reihe Kultur- und Medientheorie)
Der Fall Krickeberg. Ein Lehrstück zur Ethnologie im Nationalsozialismus. Hamburg 2006: Eigenverlag [DVD mit Videoaufnahme der Performance und Begleittext]

Forschungsinteressen und Arbeitsgebiete

relationships and power, identity/difference, kinship, violence, elites, whiteness, history of anthropology