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Kinship across conflict: family blood, political bones, and exhumation in contemporary Spain

In post-conflict countries, caring for the dead challenges how family kinship and national history are organised. The exhumation of unmarked mass graves following decolonisation, civil war, and other forms of violence and oppression is one way by which heritage managers reconfigure kinship and history in the aftermath of conflict. Where governments fail to identify and acknowledge the dead, archaeologists and other heritage managers use exhuming to negotiate how the dead and their familial and political ties are remembered. In Spain, the exhumation of anti-Francoist guerrillas killed after the 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War serves to restore broken kinship lines and give the dead a proper burial. Yet the symbolic and material recovery of their bones obligates families – and the nation – to confront the political past and their relationship with the anti-Francoist dead. Drawing on ethnographic data from Teilán, Spain, I examine how the material presence of the anti-Francoist dead resurfaces competing kinship responsibilities and ongoing political legacies in contemporary Spain. I conclude by drawing from these lessons to reflect on the exhumation process in other countries, drawing out the inferences especially for countries across Africa.