Blood and bone : families, forensic teams, and the poetics of exhuming the dead
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- In the past thirty years, exhumation of mass graves after political violence has become a human rights imperative. Based on fieldwork in Argentina and Guatemala, this dissertation offers an ethnographic tracing and historical meditation on forensic exhumation. It follows the efforts of forensic teams to exhume, identify and return the remains of missing people to their families and considers the experiences of families as this process unfolds. This ethnographic account is juxtaposed with histories of the dead, from Vesalius' revival of dissection in the sixteenth century, to Victorian anatomy museums, to twenty-first century forensic fiction. Ethnographic and historical accounts reveal exhumation to be more than a purely technical, scientific or political practice. The rapid rise of exhumation that began at the end of the twentieth century is not solely due to changing norms of transitional justice, advances in DNA identification or new efforts of humanitarian care, although such factors play important roles. Rather, understanding the intense interest exerted by forensic intervention requires a "poetics of exhumation" that considers the symbolic power of the corpse, its secular-sacred afterlives, and how science and spectacle have been entangled in forensic practice from its beginnings.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2017 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Hagerty, Alexa |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Anthropology. |
| Primary advisor | Jain, Sarah S. Lochlann, 1967- |
| Primary advisor | Luhrmann, T. M. (Tanya M.), 1959- |
| Thesis advisor | Jain, Sarah S. Lochlann, 1967- |
| Thesis advisor | Luhrmann, T. M. (Tanya M.), 1959- |
| Thesis advisor | Hansen, Thomas |
| Thesis advisor | Harrison, Robert Pogue |
| Advisor | Hansen, Thomas |
| Advisor | Harrison, Robert Pogue |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Alexa Hagerty. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Anthropology. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2017. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2017 by Alexa Hagerty
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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