An anthropologist working with forensic teams and victims\' families to investigate crimes against humanity in Latin America explores What science can tell us about the lives of the dead in this haunting account of grief, the power of ritual, and a quest for justice.
Weaving together powerful stories about investigative breakthroughs, histories of violence and resistance, and her own forensic coming of age, Hagerty crafts a moving portrait of the living and the dead..
She comes to see how cutting-edge science also acts as ritual--a way of caring for the dead with symbolic force that can repair societies torn apart by violence.
Working with forensic teams at mass grave sites and in labs, Hagerty discovers how bones bear witness to crimes against humanity and how exhumation can bring families meaning after unimaginable loss.
In the tenderness of understanding these bones, Forensics offers proof of mass atrocity but also tells the story of each Life lost.
A weaver is recognized from the tiny bones of the toes, molded by kneeling before a loom; a girl is identified alongside her pet dog.
She examines bones for marks of torture and fatal wounds--hands bound by rope, machete cuts, and also for signs of a Life lived: how Life shapes us down to the bone.
In Still Life with Bones , anthropologist Alexa Hagerty learns to see the dead body with a forensic eye.
Gathering evidence in the face of intimidation and death threats, they pioneered the field of forensic exhumation for human rights.
Young scientists joined their fight against impunity.
In the wake of genocidal violence, families of the missing searched for the truth.
Argentina\'s military dictatorship disappeared up to 30,000 people.
Throughout Guatemala\'s thirty-six-year armed conflict, state forces killed over 200,000 people.
Exhumation can divide brothers and restore fathers, open old wounds and open the possibility of regeneration--of building something new with the pile of broken mirrors that is memory, loss, and mourning.
An anthropologist working with forensic teams and victims\' families to investigate crimes against humanity in Latin America explores What science can tell us about the lives of the dead in this haunting account of grief, the power of ritual, and a quest for justice
