Bones and humanity. On Forensic Anthropology and its constitutive power facing forced disappearance

Abstract

Forensic anthropologists seek to decipher traces of anonymous dead, to restitute identities of human remains and to provide their families with the possibility to conclude mourning and even of justice. The article explores the contributions and meanings of forensic anthropology as state-independent practice beyond a mereley criminalistic approach, as it was conceptualized by the Argentine pioneers after the last dictatorship in this nation. I conceive this practice as a sort of arqueology of contemporary terror that seeks to confront a specific violence as the forced disappearance of persons and the deshumanization of their dead bodies. The article proposes reading forensic anthropology as a 'situated cience', with its complexities and ambigueties, that operates between nameless bones (the human remains) and names without bodies (the so-called disappeared) in settings of violent pasts such as Argentina or Guatemala, and especially in Mexico, where mass graves became the new symbol of a horrified present.