Interpreters of the Dead: Forensic Knowledge, Human Remains and the Politics of the Past

http://sls.sagepub.com/Social & Legal Studies

http://sls.sagepub.com/content/22/2/149The online version of this article can be found at:

DOI: 10.1177/0964663912463724 2013 22: 149 originally published online 8 January 2013Social & Legal Studies

Claire MoonPolitics of the Past

Interpreters of the Dead : Forensic Knowledge, Human Remains and the

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

can be found at:Social & Legal StudiesAdditional services and information for

http://sls.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:

http://sls.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:

http://sls.sagepub.com/content/22/2/149.refs.htmlCitations:

What is This?

- Jan 8, 2013OnlineFirst Version of Record

- Jan 15, 2013OnlineFirst Version of Record

- Jun 6, 2013Version of Record >>

at London School of Economics & Political Sciences on June 6, 2013sls.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Article

Interpreters of theDead: ForensicKnowledge, HumanRemains and the Politicsof the Past

Claire Moon

London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

Abstract

Forensic anthropology makes particular professional claims – scientific, probative, huma-

nitarian, historical, political and deterrent – which attempt to finalise interpretations of the

past. However, I argue that these claims conceal a range of contests and conflicts around

the social, political, legal and scientific significance of human remains. I look at the ways in

which forensic work is embedded within a network of artefacts, actors and institutions

that have different stakes in the interpretation of the past. I analyse conflicts over humanremains by positing them as ‘boundary objects’ with agency, in which a number of com-

munities are invested and show how forensic knowledge does not finalise, but interacts

with social, political and historical interpretations of past violence in ways that are both

conflicted and unpredictable.

Keywords

Forensic anthropology, human rights, atrocity, boundary objects, human remains

‘ . . . science can serve history by protecting it from revisionists’

(Doretti and Snow, 2003)

‘ . . . graves must be catalogued, protected, and then turned into monuments against

intolerance and barbarism’, Juan Vidal, forensic archaeologist

(Machado, 2010)

Corresponding author:

Claire Moon, Department of Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street,

London WC2A 2AE, UK.

Email: [email protected]

Social & Legal Studies

22(2) 149–169

ª The Author(s) 2012

Reprints and permission:

sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/0964663912463724

sls.sagepub.com


I have been writing for some time now, and in various ways, about political change

and the politics of the past. It is a subject I have often been on the verge of leaving behind

but whenever I threaten to do so, something vital and interesting about it draws me back

in. This time, I blame my inability to move on to my failure to have properly registered

something crucial all along: the central significance of the dead in the politics of the past.

More specifically, I had failed to attend to the emergence of forensic knowledge in the

resignification of past atrocity.

Two recent scenarios index the contemporary power of forensic knowledge and

illustrate the diverse contexts in which forensic interventions into the past operate.

The first of these is in Spain where, in the summer of 2011, a striking photograph

in the daily El Pais captured the temporal contradictions of the recent endeavour

to illuminate the horrible secrets of the Civil War. The photograph showed a bright

yellow digger scraping the surface of a children’s playground in search of a mass

grave alleged to contain up to 500 bodies. Two children playing there that afternoon,

Iker and Adrian, expressed surprise at the presence of so many adults there that after-

noon. ‘I think it’s ok that they are looking for bones, but this afternoon we’ve come

to play’ they say (Hernandez, 2011). In this scenario, the playgrounds of Spain

appear as part of the political architecture of forgetting that conditioned the post-

Franco years during which political elites forged a ‘pact of oblivion’, founding

Spain’s transition to democracy.1 Over the past decade this pact has been in dispute,

driven in part by the work of Spain’s historical memory movement (the ARMH)

and aided by the expertise of local and international forensic anthropologists who

have been industriously exhuming the many unmarked Civil War graves.2 In Spain

‘there is no place where there are no graves’, remarks forensic volunteer Francisco

Etxeberrıa (cited in Elkin, 2006). Forensic work has thus been making dramatic

incursions into Spain’s past and, concomitantly, its present political landscape, con-

tributing to the emergence of a new historical and humanitarian framework for

analyzing the Civil War, what the historian Paul Preston has renamed the ‘Spanish

Holocaust’ (Preston, 2011). These exhumations represent one important way in

which the secretly buried and ‘forgotten’ details of Franco’s violent campaign are

finally coming to light.

My second scenario unites two locations, one honouring a venerated national

leader; the other, simultaneously, revealing the extent of his alleged crimes. On 16 Sep-

tember 2010, Rwanda’s Paul Kagame delivered the prestigious Annual Oppenheimer

Lecture at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. The same day a

leaked UN Report accused his forces of committing genocide in the Democratic

Republic of the Congo (DRC), allegations that Kagame described as ‘absurd’ (Hilsum,

2010).3 The findings of the report were supported by the work of the first team of

Congolese forensic investigators led by Peruvian forensic expert Jose Pablo Baraybar.

Film footage screened on the same day of Kagame’s formal veneration showed the

team at work and featured an arresting interview with Baraybar, renowned for his

work in Srebrenica. ‘We are interpreters of the dead’, he said. ‘We will be able to say

what these bodies reveal’ and to state categorically ‘whether what has happened is

systematic’ (Hilsum, 2010). This forensic intervention has important implications

for post-genocide politics in Rwanda, presenting a radical challenge to Kagame’s

150 Social & Legal Studies 22(2)


legitimacy, which is thoroughly predicated upon his status as post-genocide reconciler

of Rwanda.4

It was on hearing Baraybar speak that I realised that a new paradigm of knowledge

and expertise – a new truth for human rights – had somehow, and surreptitiously,

arrived. Whilst my attention had been concentrated elsewhere, forensic anthropology

had already become firmly lodged within the wider ambit of truth regimes upon which

investigations of atrocities have come to be predicated. What is immediately striking

about forensic expertise is its claim to be able to finalise social and political contests

about past atrocity, through an appeal to scientism. As Verdery puts it, ‘if one wants

to revise the past . . . it is comforting to have actual bones to hand’ (1999: 113). Yet,

forensic knowledge is not simply making an ‘objective’ contribution to the array of

practices upon which humanitarianism is predicated, but is also, and sometimes

unwittingly, making powerful and unpredictable incursions into social and political

life.

The aim of this discussion, then, is to evaluate the role of forensic knowledge in

settling contesting interpretations of past state violence and to look at some of the more

recent ways in which the dead register in social and political life. What I argue, against

some of the claims made by the professional field of forensic anthropology is that

forensic truths do not settle the past but take their place within social, political and

historical interpretations by which past violence is renegotiated and reinterpreted, in

ways that are both conflicted and unpredictable. In order to do this I chart the professio-

nalisation of forensic anthropology as coterminous, temporally, with a particular set of

political and legal conditions within and due to which the field has flourished and look at

how these conditions have framed the particular claims made by the field. I identify these

‘faiths’ of the field as scientific, probative, humanitarian, historical, political and

deterrent, and show these to be underpinned by a set of legal-scientific definitions,

practices and technologies which impact upon how human rights and the politics of the

past is thought, practiced and administered. Furthermore, I analyse human remains as

‘boundary objects’ (Star and Greisemer, 1989) in order to argue that claims made by for-

ensic anthropologists conceal a range of contests and conflicts around the social, polit-

ical, legal and scientific significance of human remains in which multiple social agents

are differently invested. In doing so, I examine some of the ways in which forensic work

is embedded within a network of actors, artefacts and institutions that have different

stakes in the interpretation of the past in order to demonstrate the indivisibility of scien-

tific claims from the social and political contexts within which science is operative, and

upon which it claims to act with finality.

Forensic Knowledge in Politics and Humanitarianism:

Some History

The emergent power of forensic knowledge in the politics of the past has been conse-

quent upon the acceleration of human rights and humanitarian law in the post-1945

period, and a distinctive set of political conditions have formed the background for

attempts to establish responsibility for state and war crimes since the early 1980s. As

a consequence, the last 30 years has witnessed a dramatic increase in the deployment

Moon 151


of forensic techniques in the investigation of the consequences of political violence, or

what have come to be known as ‘gross violations of human rights’. Family and victim

groups, humanitarian organisations, states, ad hoc investigations and criminal courts

now regularly call upon forensic anthropologists to assist with the recovery and identi-

fication of human remains in order to verify and confirm the commission of forced

disappearances, war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The story about the

incorporation of forensic knowledge into the administration of human rights is a recent

one that entails, as all such stories do, a convergence of history, politics, new institutions,

social groups and particular individuals.

A first, crucial politico-historical thread of this story concerns the last three

decades’ wave of transitions to more democratic political orders, including transitions

from military rule in Latin America from around the mid-1980s, the post–Cold War

Eastern European political transitions from 1989 onwards and the transition from

apartheid in South Africa in 1994. Many of these transitions have been accompanied

by some form of accounting for past state crimes. This has entailed the instantiation

and proliferation of a new institution – the truth commission – and a number of ad hoc

and permanent criminal tribunals: the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

(ICTR), the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the

Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the International Criminal Court (ICC). This envi-

ronment has provided a fertile context for the emergence of forensic expertise because

establishing the truth about past crimes has become a powerful moral cornerstone of

human rights and transitional politics. A new set of accountability scenarios are now

also opening up in the context of political change across North Africa and the Middle

East. Indeed, forensic experts are already busy at work on mass graves in some of

Libya’s most notorious prisons.

Meanwhile, a different but coterminous coalescence of forces predating but overlapping

with these transitional contexts concerns the intensified legalisation of human rights in the

postwar period to which forensics is harnessed and within which forensic expertise has

flourished.

The rise of forensic expertise in human rights is also embedded within another

overlapping context: a new clustering of professional organisations with a specific inter-

est in human rights and the concomitant professionalisation of the field of forensic

anthropology. In 1977, the American Association for the Advancement of Science

(AAAS) created a special program, the Science and Human Rights Program (SHRP),

mandated to engage scientists and scientific tools to enhance and advance human rights

work, and in turn, to bring human rights norms into the conduct of science. Since that

time, the SHRP has developed a reputation for pioneering applications of science and

technology to human rights, including advocating the deployment of forensic and

genetic sciences, statistical and information management techniques, electronic

encryption technologies and geospatial technologies (SHRP, 2007). This shift to science

in human rights was also advanced and consolidated by the Minnesota Lawyers Interna-

tional Human Rights Committee, which in 1986 drafted guidelines outlining methods for

investigating crimes against humanity. TheMinnesota Protocol was adopted in 1989 by

the UN Economic and Social Council and presents a model for investigating extra-legal,

arbitrary and summary executions, carrying out autopsies, disinterments and analysis of



human remains within the framework of international human rights standards (United

Nations, Economic and Social Council, 1989). The Protocol further professionalised and

consolidated the work of forensic anthropologists within the field of human rights and

currently stands as the key manual for forensic professionals investigating deaths

resulting from human rights violations. Crucially, the Protocol conjoins forensic

knowledge and expertise with the international legal framework within which human

rights are currently arbitrated.

The branch of forensics most closely identified with contemporary human rights

investigations is that of forensic anthropology. Forensic anthropologists are physical

anthropologists, specifically osteologists, who carry out investigations within the context

of a legal investigative process. The field became formalised and professionalised partly as

a consequence of the Second World and Korean wars during which physical anthropolo-

gists were called upon by the U.S. army to identify the skeletal remains of soldiers killed

overseas for the purposes of repatriation. Research on the war dead in turn advanced and

improved identification techniques. Krogman (1939), often described as the founder of

forensic anthropology, developed researchmethods for identifying human skeletal remains

in legal and military contexts, intended to assist and train medico-legal personnel. Whilst

physical anthropologists continued to apply themselves to forensic matters, the term ‘for-

ensic anthropology’ as an area of specialisation was not formally consolidated until the

founding of a physical anthropology section of the American Academy of Forensic

Sciences (AAFS) in 1972 and the subsequent establishment of the American Board of

Forensic Anthropology in 1977 sponsored by the AAFS and the Forensic Sciences Foun-

dation (Nafte, 2009: 31–32). These institutions established the accreditation of experts

leading to further professionalisation and expansion of the field throughout the 1970s and

1980s, accompanied by a proliferation of training manuals, handbooks and research papers

outlining and advancing research methods and techniques.

But why did forensic anthropology rise to particular prominence in the field of human

rights? This is a genealogical question. Where something new occurs, such as the rise of

particular knowledge techniques, it often happens at the intersection of various and rel-

atively distinct pathways of development, which converge and create the conditions

under which something new can emerge. In this case, the historical and political conflu-

ence of human rights and transitional justice provided the context within which forensic

anthropology could come to prominence because its techniques of analysis answered to

some of the problems that these fields attempted to address – such as establishing the

identities of the dead and disappeared, the nature of their deaths and the scope of the

crimes – and, powerfully, coincided with the aspirations of these fields – documenting

human rights violations, truth, justice and reconciliation. As such, the particular conver-

gence of the fields of human rights and transitional justice in the early 1980s constituted

the broad questions to which forensic anthropology appeared to provide answers: who

were the dead and disappeared? How had they died? Was there evidence of mass (state)

crimes? This confluence was particularly compelling in the context of post-junta

Argentina where forensic anthropology as a distinct branch of forensics appeared to both

service human rights ideas and intervene into the politics of the past. Forensic anthropol-

ogy promised to establish the identities of the disappeared, the causes of death and the

scope and nature of the junta’s crimes. The work of forensic anthropologists is also

Moon 153


deeply connected to human rights and transitional justice ideas about dignity and heal-

ing. The identification of human remains has come to be critical to the ‘dignification’ of

both the dead – by restoring their names and allowing proper burial – and the living fam-

ily members by vindicating their, often denied, claims about state crimes. The recovery

and identification of human remains is also alleged to serve therapeutic aims, facilitating

the ritual and ‘healing’ function of mortuary rites and underpins the legal complex within

which human rights is thought and administered by providing scientific evidence of hei-

nous crimes such as disappearance, genocide and crimes against humanity.

This story would be incomplete without attention to the contribution of an

extraordinary individual whose professional trajectory provides a window onto this

convergence of forces. Clyde Snow, the forensic anthropologist famed for his identi-

fication of the remains of Tutankhamun and Josef Mengele’s skull, is a founding agent

of the meeting of forensics and human rights and author of some of the most compel-

ling statements about the power of forensics to speak incontrovertible truths: ‘bones

don’t lie and they don’t forget’, he argues, and adds with dry urbanity, ‘and they’re

hard to cross-examine’ (cited in Guntzel, 2004). The aftermath of Argentina’s ‘Dirty

War’ against its citizens from 1976 to 1983 provided the context in which Snow, and

forensic anthropology as a profession, secured an important foothold in the field of

human rights.5 Snow visited Argentina in 1984 as a delegate from the AAFS, and as

a member of the SHRP, on the invitation of Argentina’s National Commission on the

Disappeared (CONADEP), which was investigating the crimes of the junta. The

Madres de Plaza de Mayo (mothers of the disappeared) also invited Snow to help to

investigate the many clandestine graves. Once there, he consolidated his ‘osteobio-

graphic method’ in which he developed and advanced a set of techniques to elicit the

‘biography’ of a crime from a set of human remains. Snow established the non-

governmental Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF) in 1986 and trained the

team in forensic techniques for the location, exhumation and identification of the dis-

appeared. Argentina saw the first investigations of this kind and the EEAF went on to

become the pioneering agent of the application and proliferation of forensic anthropo-

logical techniques in the field of human rights. Since 1986, the EAAF has worked in

around 30 different countries including Angola, Bosnia, the Democratic Republic of

Congo, East Timor, Iraqi Kurdistan, Peru, Sierra Leone and South Africa and has been

instrumental in the initiation and training of other similar teams in Chile in 1989, Guate-

mala in 1991 and Peru in 2001. A regional professional network emerged and the Latin

American Association of Forensic Anthropology was formed in 2003 with members from

Argentina, Columbia, Mexico, Peru, Chile and Guatemala with the aim of furthering and

consolidating the alignment between forensic anthropology and human rights. Snow’s own

career has followed the same political geography of clandestine graves and crimes against

humanity, the too familiar legacy of the late twentieth century. Since Argentina, he has

worked on mass graves in Guatemala, Vukovar, Croatia and northern Iraq, as well as tes-

tifying as expert witness in the war crimes prosecutions of SaddamHussein and Ali Hassan

Al-Majid. He has ensured that consultation with forensic anthropologists is now common-

place in the attempt to uncover evidence of atrocity.

This brief history of the emergence of forensic anthropology is necessary in order to

illuminate the contexts and forces into which it intervenes and which in turn have shaped



both its emergence as a field and the particular professional claims it makes. Its emphasis

on the historical, social and political contexts of the formation of the science are intended

to demonstrate the broader – humanitarian – questions to which the science sought

answers, which in turn shaped the emergence of the science and its particular claims.

I turn now to explore some of these professional claims and to a discussion of the ways

in which forensic anthropological investigations promise to finalise social and political

contestations over violence and history by investing human remains with scientific

authority, probative certainty and therapeutic and humanitarian power.

Field, Forum, Faith

The term forensics belongs to, and simultaneously conjoins, two domains: the field and

the forum. It refers on the one hand the application of scientific research to ‘things’ that

may come to constitute ‘evidence’ within a legal investigative process (the field) and on

the other the rhetoric or formal debate, that is, the public presentation of that evidence

(the forum). Forensics unites these two domains by traversing a range of professional

activities from the techniques and knowledges of the field, to the practice of public

presentation and argumentation in court, in order to service the legal process of which

forensics is intrinsically a part.

Fieldwork

Forensic anthropology involves the application of the science of physical or biological

anthropology and human osteology – that is, the analysis of human skeletal remains –

to a legal, most commonly criminal, process where the remains are in an advanced state

of decomposition – through, for example, burning, dismemberment or fragmentation –

thus ruling out analysis of soft tissue through autopsy. Forensic anthropologists also

undertake archeological training in the recovery of human remains. Their methods are

underpinned by the principles of skeletal biology (the study of development, anatomy,

physiology, histology and the biomechanics of bone tissue) and biological anthropology

(drawing on human anthropometrics or body measurements, human genetics and

osteology). They apply the principles derived from these fields to construct ‘the story

bones tell for the purposes of identification’ (Steadman, 2003: 4), otherwise known as

‘osteobiography’, in demonstration of the ‘capability of science to shed light on legal

matters, such as the identity of the deceased and circumstances of death’ (2).

What distinguishes forensic anthropology from other branches of forensics is its

‘biocultural’ perspective (which is also vexing, as I discuss later) (Sauer, 1992a: 105).

It integrates medicine, biology, archaeology and social and cultural analysis in order

to answer questions such as the significance of a particular burial pattern or the ethnic

identity of the dead. As a consequence, forensic anthropologists are in part distinguished

by their attempt to read the social significance of human remains in the reconstruction of

the biography of both the person and the crime under investigation.

Forensic anthropology is centrally concerned with two things: first, with recovering

and interpreting evidence of trauma to the skeleton in order, where possible, to determine

the possible causes and contexts of death; and second, with identification of the skeleton.

Moon 155


Identificatory work involves inventorying the available skeletal material and other

available evidence and constructing a skeletal biography that can be compared with

missing persons databases. For example, in the case of Argentina, records of the Ningun

Nombre provided a starting point in the attempt to locate and identify the disappeared.

Biological profiles entail establishing the age, sex, stature and ancestry of the skeleton

as well as, more controversially, race and ethnic profile. Techniques to establish identity

include measuring the skeleton, sex and age determination, dentition and bone develop-

ment analysis, racial identification, facial reconstruction, DNA ‘fingerprinting’, ‘typing’

and ‘profiling’ (see Nafte, 2009: 91–124 and 141–163). DNA profiling may also be car-

ried out and this technique has been critical to cases in Argentina in which the identifi-

cation of missing grandchildren, born in detention, has been attempted.

Forensic anthropologists are not always in a position to determine the manner and

cause of death since the remains they handle are largely decomposed to the point where

regular autopsy is impossible, therefore they are restricted to assigning biological

identity to, and describing the condition of, human remains (Nafte, 2009: 126).

Forumwork

Forensic anthropologists sometimes appear as expert witnesses in a court of law, and in

anticipation of this, their professional training involves the preparation of a detailed case

report. This includes documentation of their methods of identification, a reconstruction

of the trauma at around the time of death and the estimated time since death. They are

trained in handling and processing physical evidence and in fulfilling a role as expert

witness when giving testimony, commenting upon damage to the skeleton, which objects

may have caused such damage and when the damage was sustained. Human skeletal

remains are not available for exhibit in the courtroom. It is up to the forensic

anthropologist to rely upon his or her rhetorical skills to bring to life skeletal identity and

condition, drawing on his or her records and documentation.

An insight into the legal performance of forensic truth is revealed by an etymology of

the term ‘forensic’, derived from the Latin word forum: a Roman public assembly place

for the performance of legal and public business, where trials, sentencing and executions

were forensic (literally, ‘on public view’) in nature. Forensic art is thus intrinsically

harnessed to that of rhetoric: the presentation of an argument before a professional gath-

ering. Forensics not only conjoins field and forum but also speech and materiality

through the constitution of ‘evidence’. ‘Evidence’, derived from the Latin videre (‘to

see’) means ‘to make visible’, is entailed in the verification or refutation of legal argu-

ment. Evidence can exist in the form of testimony or it can be physical. That is to say,

evidence is constituted by both human and non-human agents: it comprises speech acts

such as testimony or confessional, and things, or artefacts, refracted through a set of

expert knowledges and techniques. As such, evidence emerges at the point of confluence

of a set of forces, scientific, legal, political and social, each being implicated in the other.

For instance, certain methods and techniques in forensics have emerged because forensic

science is harnessed, intrinsically, to law. What distinguishes the work of forensic

anthropologists from other subdisciplines of biological anthropology is that they ‘pre-

pare scientifically valid legal records in the form of case reports, and . . . present their



results in judicial proceedings’ (Nafte, 2009: 17). As such, their methods of skeletal anal-

ysis are subject to the rules and procedures of their field but also to the rhetorical formu-

lae related to giving evidence in a court of law. Forensic anthropologists are often

required to discuss their choice of scientific methods and the theory underpinning those

methods to defend their choices and to work under cross-examination in a language

accessible to the forum public, the judge and the jury.

The claims made by forensic anthropologists appear to be much less circumspect than

those made by forensic experts in other fields,6which is partly a consequence of the ways

in which they work at the intersection of, and in dialogue with, law, politics and

humanitarianism. Evidence for this lies in the particular and striking claims (or ‘faiths’)

of the field regarding its interventions into human rights and the politics of the past. In

order to identify these claims, I surveyed key forensic anthropology training manuals

with a particular focus on human rights investigations (Burns, 1999; Nafte, 2009;

Steadman, 2003) and influential scientific articles and commentaries on the same subject

(Doretti and Snow, 2003; Elkin, 2006; Kirschner and Hannibal, 1994; Snow, 1993; Snow

et al. 1984, 1989; Steadman and Haglund, 2005). From these sources I garnered the core,

most recurrent, claims made on behalf of the field and thematised them as follows:

scientific, probative, humanitarian, historical, political and deterrent. These claims are

worth scrutinising because they intersect intimately with other, overlapping, interests

in the recovery of human remains, and in that intersection, aim to settle, scientifically,

the competing claims of other fields of interest and expertise, as I will show in

subsequent sections of this article.

Scientific. As the field developed, forensic entrepreneurs aimed to provide as objective

and scientific a picture as possible of human rights violations. By ‘synthesizing the

frequency, location and demographic profile of victims across the continents, forensic

anthropologists’ created ‘anew,objective perspective on someof themostnotorious, aswell

as forgotten, events of the20th century’ (SteadmanandHaglund, 2005: 24). In addition, they

aimed to collect, preserve and interpret objectively physical evidence that might bring per-

petrators to trial. As Snow et al. argue, ‘. . . the identification and determination of the cause

of death . . . could provide the courts with objective and scientific evidence critical to the

conviction of those responsible for these deaths’ (Snow et al, 1984: 298).

Forensic anthropologists claim to make ‘a unique contribution to human rights

through the application of scientific methods and techniques to the investigation of

human rights violations’ (Burns, 1999: 205). They do so by providing ‘irrefutable

evidence’ of torture and extrajudicial executions and by ‘exposing such crimes to

international scrutiny’. Science claims the power to make the dead speak again: ‘tradi-

tion has vested the profession with a solemn authority to speak for victims. The dead

cannot perjure themselves. . .’ (Snow et al., 1989).

Probative. Forensic anthropological work claims particular probative power which is

why their incursions into human rights cases have proliferated, reflecting the contempo-

rary legal domination of human rights. The prime purpose of forensic incursions

involves uncovering ‘legally admissible evidence that will result in the conviction of

those responsible for the crimes’ (Kirschner and Hannibal, 1994: 453). The scientificity

Moon 157


of forensic evidence underscores its authority, thus making convictions possible, for

example, of the nine junta jefes in the early days of Argentina’s new democratic govern-

ment. More broadly, forensic expertise claims to contribute to strengthening judicial

institutions by providing new tools to uphold the rule of law’ (Doretti and Snow,

2003: 304), thus strengthening legal cases and in turn faith in the rule of law. Wider still,

the field claims the ‘potential to make significant contributions to . . . the international

justice system. . .’ (Steadman and Haglund, 2005: 24).

Humanitarian. Forensic anthropologists promote the humanitarian value of their work

which is claimed to offer ‘a unique humanitarian service in a world troubled by

violence . . . Peace and humanity begin with the effort to identify the dead and

understand their fate’ (Burns, 1999: 2). The humanitarian aspect of the work frames the

investigations from the outset, since experts often work at the invitation or behest of

families of the disappeared, who in turn often assist with exhumations. Forensics experts

aim to ‘provide some solace to their families who are at last able to properly mourn and

bury their dead’ (Doretti & Snow, 2003: 293) and to help them ‘end their painful quests

and heal the wounds caused by cruel uncertainty’ (310). These humanitarian and

therapeutic objectives constitute the core animators of their work and are iterated

frequently in the professional literature.7

Historical. Many assert the power of their work to ‘set the historical record straight’

(Kirschner and Hannibal, 1994: 453). The provision of scientific evidence of mass

atrocity is alleged to help ‘reconstruct the often distorted or hidden histories of repressive

regimes’ (Doretti and Snow, 2003: 293). By ‘setting the record straight’ science is put in

the service of history ‘by protecting it from revisionists’ (309). This claim is character-

istic of the professional literature but denies the complex web of competing narratives –

into which forensic interpretations enter and take their place – within which violence

occurs and is later adjudicated, as will be seen in the later discussion of Argentina. There

are some acknowledgements, however, that whilst forensic science may do much to

‘correct’ the historical record, it offers no guarantee that justice will follow on from that

correction. Snow notes that the proliferation of amnesty agreements has led to justice

‘falling victim’ to history (Snow, 1993: 20) but that ‘forensic anthropologists can at least

help make sure that the historical record is correct: ‘Fifty years from now, people in for-

mer Yugoslavia may try to repeat their predecessor’s mistakes, as revisionists assert that

ethnic cleansing and mass executions never took place . . . It is pretty hard, I have found,

to argue against a skull with a bullet hole in it’ (Snow, 1993: 20).

Political. Forensic anthropologists also claim to facilitate political change and judicial

reform: ‘forensic anthropological evidence may also contribute to strengthening

democratic and judicial institutions by providing new tools to uphold the rule of law’ (Dor-

etti and Snow, 2003: 304). In Spain, Elkin comments on the relationship between democ-

racy and exhumation stating that ‘the children and siblings of victims learned how to not

talk about it [the Civil War] as if it were a stain on their families – they learned to live with

the burden. But their grandchildren who grew up under the democracy are different, and

they have no qualms about looking for answers’ (2006: 43). Forensic anthropology also



claims to impact upon a range of political constituencies, including those national leaders

who may have allowed, or perpetrated atrocities, the international community or ‘citizens

of the world who otherwise might have silently looked the other way’ but now, as a con-

sequence of forensic work, bring pressure for change (Burns, 1999: 225).

Deterrent. The final, recurrent claim in the professional literature is that of facilitating

deterrence against future repetition of violations. Forensic evidence strengthens legal

cases that in turn facilitates deterrence: ‘. . . through forensic documentation and subse-

quent litigation, the knowledge that governments can be held accountable for their

actions, may act as a deterrent to such practices in the future both in Argentina and else-

where’ (Snow et al., 1984: 298). Protection against repetition is fortified by scientific

verification because it is linked to punishment and accountability: ‘The application of

the forensic sciences to human rights investigations can be crucial in proving that such

violations occurred and in obtaining judicial redress for criminal activity (Hannibal cited

in Burns 206). This claim is one that is common to the practice of international human

rights law, but it is a claim that as yet has very little evidential basis. Forensics seems to

be borrowing this – normative – framework, rather than scientifically establishing the

relationship between forensic investigations, legal work and deterrence. Hence, there

is a complicity here between the claims of law and the claims of forensics, each working

to support the other framework of adjudication, rather than speaking beyond those fra-

meworks. For instance, it is arguable that law shifts the focus away from the causes and

contexts of violence (which is where the more substantive work of deterrence might,

rather, take place), to its symptoms (Marks, 2011), thus limiting law’s deterrent power.

These distinctive ‘faiths’ of the forensics regime of truth have entered into and

imprinted the ways in which atrocity investigations are evidenced, argued and arbitrated.

What unites these claims is that they are made to appear to settle otherwise contested ver-

sions of history, politics and social life. Their claims do not acknowledge that forensic

interpretations are themselves contingent and subject to contestation. They operate instead

as though they were objective, separate from the contexts in which they have been gener-

ated and in which the emergence and professionalisation of forensic anthropology as a dis-

tinctive branch of the forensic sciences has taken place. Yet these themes have been

generated within the very particular histories of transition and human rights that have

emerged in the post-war and post-Cold War eras and with which they are integrated. That

is to say, that the scientificity of these claims is always-already embedded within the con-

texts that are generating the broader claims that forensics is alleged to be supporting scien-

tifically. Far from making objective, value-free incursions into social and political life,

science serves to underpin a broader set of truth regimes about historical revisionism, polit-

ical denial, accountability, therapy and so on that became the dominant themes of transi-

tional politics and human rights around the turn of the last century. I have shown that the

science itself is, in turn, framed by its interaction with these histories and politics.

Do Bones have Politics?

Human remains emerge as ‘boundary objects’ (Star and Greisemer, 1989) in the politics

of the past.8 They lie at the intersection of different social worlds in which diverse

Moon 159


parties – legal, forensic, humanitarian, historical, political, social and familial – are dif-

ferently invested. Boundary objects link different – sometimes converging, sometimes

diverging – interests, allowing groups to form working relationships.9 Whilst boundary

objects might be common to different social worlds (or Communities of Practice), they

can be interpreted or used differently by each of them, but simultaneously offer up suf-

ficient points of mutual contact, serving as a point of mediation and negotiation. They are

flexible enough to adapt to local needs, having distinct identities within different social

worlds, but are robust enough to maintain a common identity across these worlds in order

to facilitate shared work.10

In the context of the politics of the past, the term ‘boundary object’ is deeply

amplified and reveals a more expansive potential application than the description of the

boundary through which several fields of professional interest intersect, which is the

focus of its original theoretical elaboration. Human remains occupy the intersection

between and cross, constitute and negotiate a complex and expansive set of boundaries

including those between family and nation, past and present, violence and justice,

authoritarianism and democracy, memory and commemoration, denial and truth, and

much is at stake in the interpretation and deployment of human remains by interested

parties. The process of trying to reach consensus about past atrocity engages multiple

actors who participate from the perspective of different social and professional worlds.

For example, a human rights professional attempting to diagnose political violence

within the framework of ‘gross violations of human rights’ does so in a different way

from the politician who is concerned with establishing democratic order. This is different

again from attempts by courts to prosecute the perpetrators of atrocity and again from the

interests of families who wish to recover, bury and memorialise their dead relatives.

Most parties, however, testify to the probative power of human remains. For example,

for post-authoritarian political regimes human remains may constitute evidence of the

crimes of the previous regime, and thus potentially serve to underpin the authority of the

new political order. For humanitarian entrepreneurs and for families of the dead, human

remains provide evidence that challenges state denial of atrocity and facilitates the

prosecution of perpetrators. Human remains carry similar and different meanings across

these related worlds and these meanings inhabit and express the nexus of the sometimes

convergent, sometimes conflicting, interests that they conjoin.

However, forensic knowledge has come to occupy a special place in the politics of the

past because it claims to settle social and political contests scientifically, and thus, it is

claimed, indubitably. As we have already seen, forensic knowledge claims to assert a

particular, and uniquely unencumbered access to the truth about the past. After all,

‘bones don’t lie’. Forensics experts assert that their interpretations of human remains are

capable of resolving tensions and contestations between the competing versions of the

past within which they circulate and to which they contribute. So, my aim in what fol-

lows is to elucidate some of the insights facilitated by the ‘boundary object’ frame, but it

is not to proceed, as is regularly the case in that theoretical field, by examining in detail

the competing claims around boundary objects made by all interested parties because I

want to concentrate more closely on the way in which forensic expertise attempts to set-

tle competing claims by trumping, scientifically, other interpretations of human remains.

The general ‘weak structure’ of human remains that appears to facilitate co-operation



across groups is revealed, on closer examination of their local interpretations to be

strongly structured, creating conflicts of interpretation that cannot fully be subsumed,

or subordinated to, scientific interpretations.

The two empirical discussions that follow illuminate two areas of conflict around

human remains that occur at the intersections of science and law and politics and social

justice. These illustrations show that interpretations of human remains refuse settlement

by forensic intervention but instead enter into and interact with other interpretations that

both conflict with forensic work and assumptions and refuse the settlement of the past

that forensics aims to achieve. The two examples I will draw upon in this discussion are

(a) the interaction of law and science in the legal attempt to racialise human remains.

This shows the tensions that one (the legal) deposits in the operation of the other

(biological) and (b) the interaction of forensic work with the social and political field

in Argentina, where forensic exhumations were contested by the Madres in ways that

challenge the scientific and humanitarian claims advanced by forensic anthropology.

These two illustrations evidence and advance the central argument of this article that for-

ensic anthropological claims are indivisible from the social and political contexts within

which this relatively new field of science is operative. They interact with the contexts

and contests of the politics of the past in unexpected and unpredictable ways, rather than

acting upon them with finality.

Racialising Human Remains

The work on boundary objects shows that when different groups collaborate on a com-

mon task, the progress of their work is contingent on some form of local agreement on

their meaning, which, as the work advances, is subject to negotiation and renegotiation:

‘in conducting collective work, people coming together from different social worlds fre-

quently have the experience of addressing an object that has a different meaning for each

of them. Each social world has partial jurisdiction over the resources represented by that

object and mismatches caused by the overlap become problems for negotiation. . .’ (Star

and Greisemer, 1989: 412).11 This places demands on the integrity of information arising

from, and being used in, more than one world and sometimes results in the standardiza-

tion of interfaces between different worlds (413). In forensic anthropology, the profes-

sional protocols underpinning the elicitation of identity from human remains function

within a mixed economy of information and interpretation that it seeks to settle.

One compelling example of this in which two types of artefact – human remains and

legal texts – are made to speak and interact, engages the intersection of forensic

anthropology and the law. This produces problematic consequences for the scientificity

of forensic knowledge itself but shows how forensic professionals find ways of negotiat-

ing these consequences in order to make their work both service the law and simultane-

ously maintain a professional distance from legal frameworks of knowledge. This

negotiation enables the two communities of practice to co-operate and speak to one

another without the one being fully subsumed within the schema of the other. These

interactions also, as I will show, demonstrate the agency of artefacts in relationship to one

another within the conflicts generated by the combined professional imperatives of

forensics and law.

Moon 161


Human rights and humanitarian law has a number of conventions – artefacts of legal

reasoning – at its disposal in deciphering and establishing the crimes of state. The

Genocide Convention is the one with most historic and moral power and requires that

in order for mass killing to be considered as genocide, victims must be proven to belong

to a social group and to have been targeted on the basis of that social identity. Article 2 of

the Genocide Convention (United Nations General Assembly, 1948) defines genocide as

acts ‘. . . committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial

or religious group as such. . .’. This legal text provides one framework requiring forensic

anthropologists to read social constructs, such as, and in particular, race, back into

human remains in order to reconstruct a story that confirms or disconfirms the occur-

rence of genocide. This imperative, and the problems it presents for forensic anthropol-

ogists, is widely noted in the professional literature. For example, Nafte notes that

forensic anthropologists are ‘obligated to assign a racial identity to unknown remains’

(2009: 118) that falls ‘in line with the current legal, social and political definitions of

race’. The imperative to read race biologically, then, is claimed to come from sources

outside of the profession, which itself professes discomfort with this imperative. Their

approach, Nafte argues, is, however ‘less likely to reflect the biological view than the

social/political one’ (2009: 118).

This is rather disingenuous. Law does not simply provide a framework within which

forensic anthropology is made to speak. Forensic anthropology is closely related to

physical and biological anthropology and shares techniques of analysis with those fields,

which include techniques facilitating the ‘reading of race’ into human remains. Contem-

porary professional manuals are replete with a set of techniques for this purpose – iden-

tifying craniofacial traits, for example. These techniques, more familiar to the

raciological sciences of the nineteenth century, represent a deposited residue of those

sciences, which interacts in the present with legal frameworks of knowledge.

This historical remainder, lodged in contemporary professional practices, puts the field at

odds with that of the broader (contemporary) anthropological endeavour to put ‘race’ under

critical scrutiny. Forensic anthropologists have been criticised by other anthropologists ‘for

upholding the race conceptwhenever they estimate the ‘race’ of a skeleton’ (Steadman, 2003:

13). They are simultaneously defensive and critically distant from these aspects of its practice

maintaining that the ‘practical’ assignment of race to a skeleton is not a vindication of their

intellectual subscription to the biological basis of race.12Those forensic experts whowish to

reflect the ‘everyday usage’ of identity categories defend this practice: ‘. . . forensic anthro-

pologistsmust report how this individualmay have classified himself or herself in life, orwas

classified by society at large’ in order ‘to be of value’ (13). Steadman argues that whilst ‘bio-

logical anthropology is historically rooted in raciology’, contemporary approaches are ‘no

longer typological in nature’ but rather attempt to understand ‘range of variation within and

between groups without necessarily creating artificial boundaries between them’ (2003: 12).

In seeking to elucidate the human story from human remains, forensic anthropology seeks to

assert that ‘an individual, whilst alive was assigned to a particular – socially constructed –

‘racial’ category’ (Sauer, 1992b: 107). This is not a particularly satisfactory answer since

it still seeksa racial imprint in thebones themselveswith the implication that social categories

can be deduced, scientifically, from human remains. Indeed, Nafte argues that ‘the use of

these racial categories is considered problematic primarily because it relies on the concept



that standard racial traits are inherited in a consistent manner’ (Nafte, 2009: 119). That is to

say, racial characteristics are not considered by the profession to be problematic in and of

themselves, but because the categories cannot consistently (i.e. scientifically) be applied.

That is to say, it is ‘bad science’. This evidences the raciological continuities between the

ways in which the ascendant anthropological sciences of the nineteenth century – from biol-

ogy, ethnology and ethnography – rely heavily on the symbolic currency of race but so too do

those who might contest that conceptual framework altogether (Gilroy, 2004).

The reading of race into human remains is reinforced by the interpretations of material

evidence required by the humanitarian legal architecture. However, whilst artefacts such

as the Genocide Convention might appear to overdetermine the meanings construed from

human remains, the Convention itself does not posit these as objective (scientific) identity

categories. The identity categories it identifies are important insofar as these are assigned by

perpetrators to the targeted group. This sometimes gets lost in the legal process itself when

the interaction of legal texts and human remains seem to require a scientific reading of iden-

tity. Consequently, we could argue that the legal text ‘works on’ human remains – two arte-

facts in dialogue – to fix meanings and interpretations that are neither inherent to the legal

understanding nor to the practice of forensic anthropology itself but are consequent upon the

interplay between the two artefacts – the politics of things – within the collaboration and

negotiation of different expertise on the common task of establishing the crimes of state.

Forensic anthropologists attempt to negotiate such epistemic conflicts between law

and their science. On the one hand they attempt to read human remains within the script

conferred by law but simultaneously try to repudiate or put into question that very script.

For example, Steadman describes the process, in expert witness work, of balancing pro-

fessional ethics against the pressures generated by the justice system as the ‘challenge of

educating both judge and jury about modern anthropology’s rejection of the traditional

biological race concept’ (2003: 78). This professional ethic, it seems to me, speaks as

much to a tacit acknowledgement (and perhaps embarrassment) of the contemporary

residue of raciology within the profession itself as much as it does to an epistemological

conflict between the forensic anthropology and the law.

Steadman also acknowledges frustration on the part of the forensic experts with the ‘pug-

ilistic’ environment of a court of law, where the pursuit of ‘truth’ might be an agreed upon

objective on the part of both communities but is subject to the rhetorical culture of the legal

forum which is contrary to the culture of scientific debate:

Scientists who enter the courtroom out of professional duty find their motives questioned

and their integrity impugned, and they quickly find that the best scientific credentials count

for little on the stand. Whilst the scientists are there to debate the best methodologies . . . the

lawyers are out to win. . . Instead the normal processes of scientific debate or error and

correction are used to pillory witnesses on the stand (Roberts cited in Steadman, 2003: 80).

Life Always Defeats Death: Against Exhumations

This second example is one of conflict over human remains in the social and political

sphere and examines the conflict that emerged between the Argentinean government,

which began exhumations of the victims of the junta in the mid-1980s, and activists –

Moon 163


one branch of the mothers of the disappeared – who were campaigning for justice on

behalf of their missing family members. The example shows how the state sought to

resignify human remains within a particular political narrative about the past and illus-

trates the ways in which the mothers repudiated this narrative. It also shows how the

mothers contested the purported humanitarian power invested in human remains by

forensic knowledge. The case is important because Argentina is the constitutive case

in the introduction of forensic anthropology to the practice of documenting and investi-

gating the crimes of state, and out of which a powerful epistemic community, set of

knowledges, assumptions and practices has flowed. The case also provides some impor-

tant theoretical amplification because some of the literature on boundary objects ignores

the effects of intergroup politics and local conditions on the objects themselves. This

case illuminates not just the ways in which boundary objects can be seen in terms of their

communicative capabilities but requires that they are also situated in the context of the

motivations of the people that choose or draw upon the object thus illustrating ‘the

interplay between boundary object and broker’ (Kimble et al., 2021: 437). What this

example illustrates is that knowledge about, and investment in, human remains is

structured differently across different interest groups with the consequence that problems

and contestations often arise in relationship to their significance and ‘use’.

Argentina’s CONADEP was set up in 1983 by Alfonsın’s post-junta government. Its

aim was to ‘chronicle the past’ by identifying illegal detention camps and documenting

torture and forced disappearance under the junta. The new government launched a

programme of exhumations, which would evidence the crimes of the previous regime, and,

by implication, underscore the right of the new political regime to rule. Concomitantly,

exhumations were to be a reparative and therapeutic gesture, returning human remains

to families for proper burial. Both the Madres and the CONADEP had contacted Stover

to help provide forensic expertise to help them to establish the extent of the junta’s crimes,

and forensic anthropologists were thus working at the intersection of state and family. Yet,

whilst the two seemed to have a common interest in the recovery of human remains, the

Madres rejected the CONADEP’s efforts because they saw them as subservient to the

political interests of the new regime: it was interested only in documenting the crimes

of the junta, but not in punishing the perpetrators of those crimes.13 TheMadres contested

the political framework of the exhumations and wanted instead to shift the focus away

from reparation to victims and towards the punishment of perpetrators.

The CONADEP’s exhumations formed part of its reparations programme, and the

principles onwhich theywere based coincidedwith the general humanitarian and therapeu-

tic claimsmade by forensic anthropologists working in the field of human rights. However,

these measures were also designed to address the crimes of the past without threatening the

stability of the new regime: that is to say, they compensated in part for Alfonsın’s political

inability to put all of those responsible on trial. Furthermore, the new political narrative

about past violence attempted to recognise the previous crimes of the statewhilst also appor-

tioning some of the blame to its opponents: emerging in Alfonsın’s theory that there were

‘twodevils’ at large in the crimes of the past. This theorywent someway to vindicate junta’s

claim that it was fighting a necessarily ‘dirty war’ against its citizens.

This political narrative worked its way into the exhumations. In 1984, some of the

mothers received telegrams from the government asking them to collect their children’s



remains, along with an indemnity payment and a request to sign a certificate that

confirmed that ‘the child had fought with the police and was killed as a conse-

quence’ (Guzman-Bouvard, 1994: 140). The conditions placed on collection of the

remains seemed to collude with the junta’s claim that a violent response had been

warranted. In response, the mothers refused to accept the remains sent to them by

the government and launched the ‘no exhumations, no posthumous homage and

no economic reparations campaign’. They demonstrated at exhumation sites to inter-

rupt the proceedings, and repudiated the ways in which forensic exhumation and

identification provided scientific corroboration of testimonials: ‘no deaths are

needed to confirm the testimonies. We do not accept the exhumation of the corpses

because not everyone will appear. Many were thrown into the river, many burned’

(Guzman Bouvard, 1994: 152). The junta’s techniques of terror exceeded forensic

accounting, they seemed to suggest. Their refusal of exhumation, then, was a refusal

of the government’s ‘two devils’ theory but also of the technical accounting for ter-

ror and administration of social suffering (Moon, 2012). The Madres insisted that

there should be no forensic examination of human remains unless this was preceded

by an exhaustive enquiry in order to determine who gave the orders to torture and

disappear. The Madres ‘had come to believe that the discovery of mass graves was

being orchestrated carefully by the government to silence them’ (Guzman-Bouvard,

1994: 142). For the mothers, returning the remains to families threatened to dispel

their probative power because it risked erasing vital evidence of the nature of the

crimes. Furthermore, the mothers refuse to accept that their children were dead

because they viewed this as something the government wanted them to accept in

order to bury the past and give up the pursuit of justice: ‘I am asking for her

[daughter] alive, because if she isn’t, I want to know who killed her and I want that

assassin to be put in jail. If I ask for her as a corpse, then I am killing her. . .’

(Guzman-Bouvard, 1994: 139). The women argued that if their children were not going

to returned alive, then the government would have to explain what had happened to

them and take responsibility for prosecuting those responsible for their deaths.

The mothers launched the ‘Bring them back alive’ campaign in 1984 as a way of

contesting what they saw as the state’s attempt to silence the issue. They explained

that this demand was simply about ‘asking a question of those who do not wish to

answer it and questioning a whole system which generated a savage repression

against the population’ (Bonafini, 1990). Here, the struggle over human remains,

what they represented and how they should be dealt with, was a struggle over inter-

pretations of the past, and of questions about what constituted proper justice: exhu-

mation and reparation or punishment of the perpetrators. In addition, the Madres

were concerned about the emphasis on exhumations when there was overwhelming

evidence of forced disappearances, and they argued that many of them might be

alive. Why not concentrate instead on finding those who were alive?

This contest over exhumations became a public crisis in which the state and the

Madres struggled to promote the hegemony of their own interpretations of the past,

a contest that was not simply resolvable by recourse to forensic science since it was

implicated in the struggle itself in its attendance to humanitarian principles that

privileged the therapeutic work of returning human remains to the families.

Moon 165


Conclusions

The field of forensic anthropology has emerged, proliferated and matured in the context

of the rise of human rights and political transitions to democracy. Mass crimes have

shaped the science, and the science has become unavoidably inflected with the political

and humanitarian questions that have distinguished these contexts. As such, it is

indivisible from them: it both enters into the social, legal and political conflicts generated

by human rights and transitions and is, in turn, shaped by them.

However, forensic knowledge attempts to determine and settle a complexity of questions

surrounding the politics of human remains that cross a number of fields of practice and

enquiry, historical, political, humanitarian, scientific and legal. As knowledge brokers, for-

ensics entrepreneurs attempt to control or govern information surrounding the interpretation

of human remains. Yet, as Star andGreisemer suggest, the attempt by brokers to impose one

interpretation over another leads to certain failure. For them,boundaryobjects, rather, ‘act as

anchors or bridges’ between different worlds (1989: 414) rather than being fixed and immu-

table. Forensic interpretations of human remains, and the objectives they claim to serve, take

their place among competing interpretations of the past because the ‘objects’ with which

theyare professionally invested, are significantobjects of concern and interest toother social

groups, and are situatedwithin a complex network of knowledge, practice andmotivation in

which interpretations of the dead resist complete and final settlement.

The rise of forensic knowledge also heralds a new materiality in human rights and a

subtle shift in the epistemologies through which atrocity is arbitrated, confirmed or

disputed. It situates human remains as a source of truth about the past, as historical

corrective, agent of justice and of political change. This shift is not necessarily a shift

away from the truth regimes – testimonial and confessional – that have more commonly

been at the heart of the adjudication of past atrocity but adds a scientific dimension to

them, with the consequence of further securing the legal domination of the field, even

if law is sometimes at odds with forensic knowledge. Indeed, if law claims to provide

the means of establishing a rational, predictable and secure social and political order

in the wake of atrocity, then forensics promises a scientific basis to that project. Yet, the

task of reordering the social in the wake of atrocity is not contingent on legal–scientific

administration alone. The task of lodging the disappeared back into the social order, for

example, means that forensics enters into plastic domains in which scientific interpreta-

tions of human remains come into dialogue with other social, legal and political impera-

tives. Science does not provide an Archimedean point from which to settle such disputes.

Acknowledgement

Grateful thanks are due to Javier Trevino-Rangel for his comments on an earlier draft and

assistance with translation and to two anonymous referees for their valuable comments.

Notes

1. This included avoiding public references to Franco and destroying some memorials venerating

him. The purpose of this political amnesia was to found a new political legitimacy that appealed

to a democratic future without first engaging with the problems of the past, something that

seems alien to today’s transitology norms.



2. This work has led to a government capitulation. In May 2011, it released the first countrywide

map of around 2000 civil war graves that will form part of a set of measures to support the

portentously entitled Historical Memory Law passed in 2007.

3. The report accused Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front of committing atrocities in the eastern

part of the DRC during its pursuit of fleeing Hutu genocidaires. This ‘revenge genocide’, the

report suggests, was perpetrated by the same soldiers who stopped the genocide of the Tutsi.

Kagame’s political legitimacy is predicated on his reputation as having ended Rwanda’s 1994

genocide, and in his fury at these allegations threatened to withdraw Rwandan forces from UN

peacekeeping duties, notably in Darfur.

4. Since the release of the United Nations report, the United States has cut aid to Rwanda and

publicly admonished Kagame for supporting rebels in the DRC in ‘a major shift that suggests

Washington’s concern at continued bloodletting in the Democratic Republic of Congo now

outweighs western guilt over the 1994 genocide’ (McGreal, August 2012). Kagame may now

be investigated by the International Criminal Court.

5. Whilst the Argentinean case is constitutive, the historical inauguration of forensic enquiries

into mass atrocity is sometimes attributed to the 1943 German commission of enquiry set

up to investigate the massacre of 25,000 Polish officers in Katyn, Poland (Lacquer, 2002).

6. See, for example, the more circumspect claims made by Forensic Medical Examiners in rape

cases (Rees, 2010).

7. These statements usually turn on the therapeutic effects of forensic interventions: ‘families of

missing persons . . . find a sense of closure and even empowerment through the process of

funeral rituals’ (Burns, 1999: 2); ‘From a humanitarian point of view, families will finally

know the fate of their loved ones and be able to give them a proper burial’ (Snow et al,

1984: 298); ‘. . . these excavations are so therapeutic’ (Elkin, 2006: 41).

8. A boundary object is ‘an object that lives in multiple social worlds and which has different

identities in each’ (Star and Greisemer, 1989: 409). Examples of boundary objects are wildly

variant. They range from physical artefacts (maps and buildings) to sets of information (con-

tracts, rules and norms).

9. As Bechky has shown (2003), boundary objects allow coordination without consensus as they

permit the possibility of reframing an actor’s local understanding in terms of a wider collective

activity, thus facilitating collaboration.

10. Boundary objects ‘are weakly structured in common use, and become strongly structured in

individual-site use. They may be abstract or concrete. They have different meanings in differ-

ent social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them

recognizable, a means of translation’ (Star and Greisemer, 1989: 393).

11. One important line of enquiry in science and technology studies has sought to excavate and

illuminate the agency of ‘things’ by analysing networks of relationships between humans

(actors) and nonhumans (actants) (Callon, 1981; Latour, 1987; Law, 1992). This perspective

views humans and things as inseparably joined in and through a network, or field of action and

interpretation, in which both humans and things demonstrate agency. The type of agency

ascribed to actants differs from that ascribed to humans in that it is, broadly, assigned to them

by actors, and consequential on the ways in which things are harnessed and made meaningful

in conflicts of interests between humans.

12. Steadman argues that for the profession, race is ‘a social construct that has no biological basis’

(2003: 12).

Moon 167


13. Bonafini, spokeswoman for the Madres, claimed that Alfonsın used the CONADEP ‘to give

himself time’ (1988), referencing his political reluctance to bring the junta to full and proper

trial.

References

Bonafini HD (1988) Historia de las Madres de Plaza de Mayo. Conferencia pronunciada el 6 de

julio de 1988. Available at: http://www.madres.org/[Historia] (accessed 20 June 2010).

Bonafini HD (1990) The Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Argentina). Index on Censorship 19(9): 42.

Bechky BA (2003) Sharing meaning across occupational communities: the transformation of

understanding on a production floor. Organization Science 14(3): 312–330.

Burns KR (1999) Forensic Anthropology Training Manual. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Callon M (1981) Struggles and negotiations to define what is problematic and what is not: the

socio-logic of translation. In: Knorr KD (ed) The Social Process of Scientific Investigation.

Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, pp. 197–221.

Doretti M and Clyde CS (2003) Forensic anthropology and human rights. In: Dawnie WS (ed)

Hard Evidence: Case studies in forensic anthropology. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Elkin M (2006) Opening Franco’s graves. Archaeology 59(5): 38–43.

Gilroy P (2004) Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race. 2nd Ed. London, UK:

Routledge.

Guntzel J (2004) ‘The bones don’t lie’: forensic anthropologist Clyde snow travels continents to

bring the crimes of mass murderers to light. National Catholic Reporter, July 30.

Guzman-Bouvard M (1994) Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.

Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc.

Hernandez (2011) Una fosa con 250 represaliados bajo los columpios de Palencia. El Pais, 16

August.

Hilsum L (2010) Rwanda condemns UN ‘genocide’ Congo report. Channel Four News, 16

September.

Kimble C, Corrine G and Karine GP (2010) Innovation and knowledge sharing across professional

boundaries: political interplay between boundary objects and brokers. International Journal of

Information Management 30: 437–444.

Kirschner RH and Kari EH (1994) The application of forensic sciences to human rights investiga-

tions. Medicine and Law 13: 451–460.

Krogman WM (1939) A guide to the identification of human skeletal material. FBI Law

Enforcement Bulletin 8: 3–31.

Lacquer T (2002) The dead body and human rights. In: Sean TS and Ian H (eds) The Body.

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 75–93.

Latour B (1987) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society.

Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press.

Law J (1992) Notes on the Theory of the Actor Network: Ordering, Strategy and Heterogeneity.

Lancaster: Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University.

Machado LH (2010) Memory of the earth: Civil war graves gradually reveal their secrets. El Pais

(English version), 22 November.

Marks S (2011) Human rights and root causes. Modern Law Review 74/1: 57–78.

McGreal C (2012) US support for Rwanda wanes amid concern over violence in Congo. The

Guardian, 1 August.



Moon C (2012) Who’ll pay reparations on my soul? Compensation, social control and social

suffering. Social & Legal Studies 21(2): 187–199.

Nafte M (2009) Flesh and Bone: An Introduction to Forensic Anthropology. 2nd Ed. Durham, NC:

Carolina Academic Press.

Preston P (2012) The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth Century

Spain. London, UK: HarperCollins.

Rees G (2010) It’s not for me to say whether consent was given or not: Forensic medical

examiners’ construction of ’neutral reports’ in rape cases. Social & Legal Studies 19(3):

371–386.

Sauer NJ (1992a) Forensic anthropology: Introduction. Social Science and Medicine 34(2): 105.

Sauer NJ (1992b) Forensic anthropology and the concept of race: If races don’t exist, why are forensic

anthropologists so good at identifying them? Social Science and Medicine 34(2): 107–111.

Science and Human Rights Program (SHRP), American Association for the Advancement of

Science (2007) Available at: http://shr.aaas.org/about/history/ (accessed 30 August 2011).

Snow C (1993) Murder most foul. The Sciences 35(3): 16–20.

Snow CC, Stover E and Hannibal K (1989) Scientists as detectives: Investigating human rights.

Technology Review 92(2): 43–51.

Snow CC, Levine L, Lukash L, Tedeschi LG, Orrego C and Stover E (1984) The investigation of

the human remains of the ‘disappeared’ in Argentina. American Journal of Forensic Medicine

and Pathology 5(4): 297–299.

Star SL and Greisemer JR (1989) Institutional ecology, ‘translations’ and boundary objects:

Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology 1907-39. Social

Studies of Science 19(3): 387–420.

Steadman DW (2003) Hard Evidence: Case Studies in Forensic Anthropology. Upper Saddle

River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Steadman DW and Haglund W (2005) The scope of anthropological contributions to human rights

investigations. Journal of Forensic Science 50(1): 23–30.

United Nations Economic and Social Council (1989) Minnesota protocol: Manual on the effective

prevention and investigation of extra-legal, arbitrary and summary executions. Economic and

Social Council Resolution 1989/65, 24 May.

United Nations General Assembly (1948) Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the

Crime of Genocide. 9 December.

Verdery K (1999) The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New

York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Moon 169


Interpreters of the Dead: Forensic Knowledge, Human Remains and the Politics of the Past

Documents

Transcript of Interpreters of the Dead: Forensic Knowledge, Human Remains and the Politics of the Past