Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains

“Bones are always joined to grief, memory, and ritual,” contends anthropologist Hagerty in this searing report on the grueling labor and psychological stress of her time in Guatemala and Argentina excavating the mass graves of victims of political violence. Digging into the history of the two countries, the author discusses the Guatemalan government’s massacre of tens of thousands of Maya people from the 1960s to 1996 and the Argentine military dictatorship’s murder of dissidents from 1976 to 1983. She describes using DNA, oral histories, and fragments of clothing to identify victims and return the remains to families, noting that community members can sometimes recognize a body by the unique pattern on a handwoven huipil, a kind of traditional blouse. “To recognize a missing person in a bone is a difficult act of imagination,” she muses, telling the story of a woman who struggled to make sense of her brother’s death after a fragment of his pelvic bone was found in a mass grave. Hagerty never loses sight of the humanity of the dead and the pain felt by the survivors, nimbly weaving together political history and personal narratives to illuminate the difficult process of accounting for atrocities. Intense and emotional, this is a vital rumination on political violence. (Mar.)