Abstract

MASSA, Jimena María. Blood and ink marks: kinship-building substances and senses of family in an identity restitution case. Rev. Mus. Antropol. [online]. 2023, vol.16, n.2, pp.403-414.  Epub Aug 31, 2023. ISSN 1852-060X.  http://dx.doi.org/10.31048/1852.4826.v16.n2.38903.

Based on an ethnography on the ways in which restituted grandchildren (re)build their kinship ties once its origin story is known, this article describes some stages of the singular restitution process of identity of María Carolina Guallane, a “granddaughter” who after searching for her biological ancestry built a way of naming, created her own identity marks and set up an expanded map of beloved persons. This is the biography of who, as a child, was appropriated as part of the systematic plan of theft of babies perpetrated by the last Argentine civic-military dictatorship (1976-1983), and who knew her origin story at the age of 23. At that age she became the “granddaughter 61”; the first who was looking for her biological family by own decision at a time (year 1998) when being a “daughter of the disappeared” still provoked fears and suspicions. The work aims to show the different substances that produce kinship and the plurality of connections that these enable, and also emphasize the distinction between origin and identity, seeking to transcend the opposition between the biological and the social when describing the wide inventory of understandings of what being a relative implies.

Keywords : Kinship; Restitution; Identity; Dictatorship; Substance.

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