Forensic Knowledge and the Politics of the Past

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

Politics of the Past
Claire Moon
Social & Legal Studies 2013 22: 149 originally published online 8 January 2013
DOI: 10.1177/0964663912463724
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Article
Interpreters of the
Dead: Forensic
Knowledge, Human
Remains and the Politics
of the Past
Social & Legal Studies

22(2) 149169
The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663912463724
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Claire Moon
London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
Abstract
Forensic anthropology makes particular professional claims scientific, probative, humanitarian, 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 human
remains by positing them as boundary objects with agency, in which a number of communities 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: c.moon@lse.ac.uk
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Social & Legal Studies 22(2)
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 childrens 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 afternoon. I think its ok that they are looking for bones, but this afternoon weve 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 postFranco years during which political elites forged a pact of oblivion, founding
Spains transition to democracy.1 Over the past decade this pact has been in dispute,
driven in part by the work of Spains 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
Etxeberra (cited in Elkin, 2006). Forensic work has thus been making dramatic
incursions into Spains past and, concomitantly, its present political landscape, contributing 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 Francos 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 September 2010, Rwandas 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 Kagames 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 Kagames
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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 professionalisation 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 forensic anthropologists conceal a range of contests and conflicts around the social, political, 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 scientific 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 consequent 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
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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 identification 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 postCold 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 environment 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
Libyas 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 interest 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 International Human Rights Committee, which in 1986 drafted guidelines outlining methods for
investigating crimes against humanity. The Minnesota 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
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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 anthropologists 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 research methods 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 forensic 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 Foundation (Nafte, 2009: 3132). 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 relatively distinct pathways of development, which converge and create the conditions
under which something new can emerge. In this case, the historical and political confluence 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 convergence 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 anthropology promised to establish the identities of the disappeared, the causes of death and the
scope and nature of the juntas crimes. The work of forensic anthropologists is also
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deeply connected to human rights and transitional justice ideas about dignity and healing. 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 family 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 heinous 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 identification of the remains of Tutankhamun and Josef Mengeles skull, is a founding agent
of the meeting of forensics and human rights and author of some of the most compelling statements about the power of forensics to speak incontrovertible truths: bones
dont lie and they dont forget, he argues, and adds with dry urbanity, and theyre
hard to cross-examine (cited in Guntzel, 2004). The aftermath of Argentinas 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 Argentinas 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 osteobiographic 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 nongovernmental Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF) in 1986 and trained the
team in forensic techniques for the location, exhumation and identification of the disappeared. 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 anthropological 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, Guatemala 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. Snows 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 testifying as expert witness in the war crimes prosecutions of Saddam Hussein and Ali Hassan
Al-Majid. He has ensured that consultation with forensic anthropologists is now commonplace 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
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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.
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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 development analysis, racial identification, facial reconstruction, DNA fingerprinting, typing
and profiling (see Nafte, 2009: 91124 and 141163). DNA profiling may also be carried out and this technique has been critical to cases in Argentina in which the identification 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 gathering. 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 argument. 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 prepare scientifically valid legal records in the form of case reports, and . . . present their
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results in judicial proceedings (Nafte, 2009: 17). As such, their methods of skeletal analysis are subject to the rules and procedures of their field but also to the rhetorical formulae 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,6 which 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 a new, objective perspective on some of the most notorious, as well
as forgotten, events of the 20th century (Steadman and Haglund, 2005: 24). In addition, they
aimed to collect, preserve and interpret objectively physical evidence that might bring perpetrators 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: tradition 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 contemporary 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
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of forensic evidence underscores its authority, thus making convictions possible, for
example, of the nine junta jefes in the early days of Argentinas new democratic government. 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 characteristic 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 former Yugoslavia may try to repeat their predecessors 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 (Doretti and Snow, 2003: 304). In Spain, Elkin comments on the relationship between democracy 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
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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 consequence 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 subsequent 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 elsewhere (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 frameworks. 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 laws 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 versions 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 generated and in which the emergence and professionalisation of forensic anthropology as a distinctive 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 contexts that are generating the broader claims that forensics is alleged to be supporting scientifically. 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, political denial, accountability, therapy and so on that became the dominant themes of transitional 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
160
parties legal, forensic, humanitarian, historical, political, social and familial are differently 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 sufficient 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 dont 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 follows 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 settle competing claims by trumping, scientifically, other interpretations of human remains.
The general weak structure of human remains that appears to facilitate co-operation
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Moon
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 forensic 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 common 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 frequently 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 standardization of interfaces between different worlds (413). In forensic anthropology, the professional 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 negotiating these consequences in order to make their work both service the law and simultaneously 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.
162
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 occurrence of genocide. This imperative, and the problems it presents for forensic anthropologists, 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. Contemporary professional manuals are replete with a set of techniques for this purpose identifying 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 concept whenever 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.12 Those forensic experts who wish to
reflect the everyday usage of identity categories defend this practice: . . . forensic anthropologists must report how this individual may have classified himself or herself in life, or was
classified by society at large in order to be of value (13). Steadman argues that whilst biological 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 seeks a racial imprint in the bones themselves with 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
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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 biology, 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 identity. Consequently, we could argue that the legal text works on human remains two artefacts 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 professional ethics against the pressures generated by the justice system as the challenge of
educating both judge and jury about modern anthropologys 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 pugilistic 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
164
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 illustrates 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 investigating 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 important 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.
Argentinas CONADEP was set up in 1983 by Alfonsns 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 juntas 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 CONADEPs 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 The Madres 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 CONADEPs exhumations formed part of its reparations programme, and the
principles on which they were based coincided with the general humanitarian and therapeutic claims made 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 Alfonsns 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 state whilst also apportioning some of the blame to its opponents: emerging in Alfonsns theory that there were
two devils at large in the crimes of the past. This theory went some way to vindicate juntas
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 childrens
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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 consequence (Guzman-Bouvard, 1994: 140). The conditions placed on collection of the
remains seemed to collude with the juntas 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 interrupt 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 juntas techniques of terror exceeded forensic
accounting, they seemed to suggest. Their refusal of exhumation, then, was a refusal
of the governments two devils theory but also of the technical accounting for terror 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 isnt, 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 states 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 interpretations of the past, and of questions about what constituted proper justice: exhumation 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.
166
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, forensics entrepreneurs attempt to control or govern information surrounding the interpretation
of human remains. Yet, as Star and Greisemer suggest, the attempt by brokers to impose one
interpretation over another leads to certain failure. For them, boundary objects, rather, act as
anchors or bridges between different worlds (1989: 414) rather than being fixed and immutable. 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
they are professionally invested, are significant objects of concern and interest to other social
groups, and are situated within a complex network of knowledge, practice and motivation 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 legalscientific
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 interpretations of human remains come into dialogue with other social, legal and political imperatives. 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 todays transitology norms.
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Moon
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 Kagames 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.
Kagames political legitimacy is predicated on his reputation as having ended Rwandas 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
Washingtons 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 (contracts, rules and norms).
9. As Bechky has shown (2003), boundary objects allow coordination without consensus as they
permit the possibility of reframing an actors 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 different 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).
168
13. Bonafini, spokeswoman for the Madres, claimed that Alfonsn used the CONADEP to give
himself time (1988), referencing his political reluctance to bring the junta to full and proper
trial.
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Forensic Knowledge and the Politics of the Past

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Forensic Knowledge and the Politics of the Past

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

>> Version of Record - Jun 6, 2013

Social & Legal Studies

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

Social & Legal Studies 22(2)

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

Forensic Knowledge in Politics and Humanitarianism:

Social & Legal Studies 22(2)

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

Social & Legal Studies 22(2)

Field, Forum, Faith

Social & Legal Studies 22(2)

Social & Legal Studies 22(2)

Do Bones have Politics?

Social & Legal Studies 22(2)

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

Racialising Human Remains

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Life Always Defeats Death: Against Exhumations

Social & Legal Studies 22(2)

Social & Legal Studies 22(2)

Social & Legal Studies 22(2)

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