Alexa Hagerty

A powerful and difficult look at the work involved in, and the meaning underpinning, the recovery of the remains of the Disappeared. Alexa Hegarty here recounts her work as a forensic anthropologist in Guatemala and Argentina, two countries marked by horrific dictatorial violence in the twentieth century. Individuals and sometimes whole communities were tortured and massacred, their remains dumped in mass graves or tossed down wells or dumped out at sea. When it's even possible to recover these remains—the sea tends to keep its secrets; some wells plumb too deep to be excavated safely—restoring their names to them is another very difficult task. Still Life with Bones is an absorbing and elegiac account of the terror that the state can inflict, and the choices that people make in the face of it; Hagerty's commitment to a grassroots, community-focused recovery process is admirable.… (més)

I've done a fair bit of reading general-audience forensic anthropology both in criminal and in human rights contexts. I respect those who have trained themselves to "listen" to bones, flesh, soil, and insect activity in order to "set things right"—to tell the tale of what happened and to seek justice. The titles by forensic anthropologists working in the criminal field are generally presented as series of puzzles. Who was this person? What happened? These titles are often reflective in interesting ways, but each case is separated from others, so one gets a string of short narratives, rather than a longer, single narrative.

The books with a broader, human rights focus elicit an ongoing sort of reflection—cumulative, if you will. That's very much the case for Alexa Hagerty's Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains. Hagerty's book focus on two genocides, in Guatemala and in Argentina. She was still a graduate student when she did this work, though the book reflects her broader, current professional knowledge. She worked on other genocides, but now works in human rights research outside of the forensic realm.

The focus on two regions allows Hagerty time to give us a history of the relatively recent field of human rights forensic anthropology and its application to crimes against humanity. She lets us get to know people working in this field over time, who had the audacity to try to document systems of violence. In the two regions she explores, those who began this work had some guidance from professional forensic anthropologists, but were generally young, college-age individuals who had the courage to challenge regimes still very much in place, even if they'd ostensibly been ended.

Hagerty also provides historical information that contextualizes these atrocities so that they become reflections on the ways we can convince ourselves that a genocide is working toward a "good" of some sort. (I'm using "we" here because many of us might embrace, or at least tolerate, genocide if we were raised within a value system that saw it as achieving a public good. I hope that wouldn't be true for me, but I don't think I can be sanguine and assume my hands would remain clean in other circumstances.)

Hagerty reflects on what it means to disinter and reinter those killed by genocide. The work can provide information, but she's less certain that it provides closure in the sense that many claim it does. Families "lucky" enough to have a disappeared loved one identified have an opportunity to enact funerary rituals, but there is no bringing the dead back. In some cases, relatives embrace forensic investigation. In Guatemala in particular families or communities can be present during disinterments, allowing a kind of kind of witnessing that can include testimony as the violent past is being uncovered. This is a rarity in a field where the demands of science have tended to put barriers between anthropologists and affected individuals.

I could go on here, but Hagerty says all of this better, more powerfully, and with more carefully selected detail than I possibly can. If you are the sort who asks questions about what it means to be human, what we are capable of—both good and bad—and the way systems make violence possible, you will want to read Still Life with Bones. Hagerty is an effective, thoughtful companion through this journey.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own.… (més)