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n Digging for the Disappeared, Adam Rosenblatt examines the work of forensic anthropology teams in the context of criminal and humanitarian investigations of mass killings. His stated goal is to relate and scrutinize the politics and ethics of the forensic investigation of mass graves. Until very recently, this fairly young practice has mostly been represented by trope-heavy media stories that laud the good, but refrain from exposing potential problems in the process. The facile, lop-sided representation presumably stems from a taboo over finding flaw in an overall noble and also uncomfortable process: the exhumation of bodies, victims of atrocity crimes, from clandestine graves.

As a participant observer and humanity scholar, Rosenblatt gives us a rigorous, engaging, and edifying review of forensic investigations of these graves, the bodies within, and the community of stakeholders. With the exception of the multi-authored Necropolitics, by Francisco Ferrándiz and Antonius Robben, which was published two months after Rosenblatt’s book, previous work on the same subject is context-specific (e.g., Wagner, 2008 on Bosnia; Ferrándiz, 2013 on Spain). Digging for the Disappeared covers the development of a burgeoning movement and discipline across several continents. In the introduction Rosenblatt quotes from one of his interviews with the founding father of international forensic anthropology investigations, Clyde Snow:

“I’m not a human rights activist. I’m a scientist. I’m an expert. If I have a philosophy, it’s that I’m anti-homicide” (page 18).

Rosenblatt challenges these deflections in an exploratory, rather than interrogatory way and throughout the book he convincingly demonstrates how his subjects’ actions demonstrate a victim family-centered, activist-minded scientific practice that borders on betrayal of the cold, unemotional, and politically dis-engaged persona projected by many forensic anthropologists themselves.

As one of the scientists in the discipline under study by Rosenblatt, I confess to being disconcerted about (mis)representation by outsiders, something we are subjected to in an often bellicose way during cross-examination in court. Digging for the Disappeared presents these investigations acutely, thoughtfully, and at times in an uncomfortably critical—though just—way. Rosenblatt’s book is not an exposé, but he does not shirk from telling several critical formational stories that the practitioners have not, to date, been forthcoming about. He clearly and accurately outlines the complexity of the birth and development of this scientific practice fixed on death.

The book has a relatively long introduction followed by five chapters, divided into two sections: The politics of mass graves, and the philosophy of mass graves. The introduction helps define the landscape and culture of forensic exhumations. Suitably, he uses the term “political autonomy” (page 24) to describe the approach of many investigations and to distinguish them from less appropriate descriptors such as neutral and (politically) independent (because all of these operations are embedded with political elements). For practitioners, the nuance captured in these expressions are probably seldom considered, but critical. Chapter 2 recounts in detail the stories of the Madres and Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, the mothers-of-victims-turned-activists in Argentina, who inspired the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, the members of which were pioneers (under the initial tutelage of Clyde Snow) in the investigation of wide-spread political killings. Rosenblatt’s critical focus is on the divergent perspectives of the Madres who split into two groups: one advocating exhumations of victims, the other claiming that digging up the dead compromises justice by placating victim families in the absence of a full accounting and punishment of all people guilty of state-led killings during the country’s 1976-1983 Dirty War. This provokes an important discussion about stakeholders and how, or even if, they are being served by exhumations and forensic investigation, which is an essential preliminary question few, including forensic anthropologists, ask (instead of assuming that their own conceptions of what is just and good is a universal). Rosenblatt also recounts similar divisions among civil groups in Spain who represent families during exhumations of victims of the Civil War and Franco dictatorship.

The third chapter of Digging for the Disappeared explores religious objection to exhumations, where he ably deconstructs the common (and false) dichotomous characterization of science versus religion. The setting is mostly at a mass gravesite of Jews who were murdered in Poland during the Second World War, but Rosenblatt also shows how the supposedly unquestionable “sacred” can be used politically to block grave exhumations in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Chapters four and five reveal Rosenblatt’s unique, humanist approach to forensic investigations of illegal killings and burials. Here he examines questions about rights of the dead, as obvious, but ambiguous, liminal stake-holders, and care theory evidenced by forensic anthropologists in the course of their investigations. Rosenblatt cites an early publication of mine where a co-author and I state blankly that forensic scientists are working solely for the living and not the dead (pages 194, 195). When I wrote that, I believed it. Years later, I have doubt. With time and experience among diverse cultures I have come to appreciate and, perhaps even at particular moments believe, that there is more to the dead than just a corpse (Pinzón González, 2016; Young, 2016).

It is perhaps for psychologically defensive reasons that scientists wish to distance themselves from the victim, victim family, and community. At a domestic crime scene, we (forensic scientists) do it under the guise of objectivity and cases are typically initiated by the chance discovery of anonymous human remains or the confession of a guilty party. In international human rights investigations, however, we are often directly dependent upon the victim family and community to show us the burial site, to provide us with information about the circumstances of death and identity, and sometimes they even help us excavate the graves. We are no longer able to be distant and this might be why those who have experience in this international human rights context have a different, more caring approach. When I first read Rosenblatt’s book, just after it had been released, I did not particularly like these final chapters. Re-reading the book for this review, however, I recognized their importance. I suspect that my first instance of dislike reflected my discomfort with the subject’s themes: qualitative, speculative, and emotive. Subconsciously, Rosenblatt’s words might have reminded me of moments in my own work when I was particularly insensitive and uncaring about those I was examining, times when I realized (sometimes through the kind reproach of a colleague) that I was acutely insensitive and uncaring.

There are some minor inaccuracies in the book. Rosenblatt states matter-of-factly that all scientific tests have error rates (page 22). In forensic anthropology (like other sciences), some assessments are made based on qualitative criteria or even quantifiable traits drawn from presumably or purportedly representative samples. For some techniques, there are no known or agreed upon error rates, typically because we do not know how representative samples are of the population being examined. Some of the problems recounted in the book, such as misidentification or exhumed remains, resulted from tests without error rates.

Another problem stems from the author’s lack of first-hand knowledge and an absence of sources to verify claims or at least discern nuance in those claims. In the introduction, he refers to an article by Baraybar et al. in which they claimed that investigations by the UN tribunal in Kosovo “narrowed its focus to offences committed by the Milosevic regime, rather than investigating all crimes committed during the conflict . . . prioritis[ing] crimes against Kosovo Albanians over those committed against non-Albanian Kosovans” (2007: 268). Rosenblatt interprets this as: “the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia’s [ICTY] decision to investigate only the war crimes committed by the Miločević [sic] regime meant that crimes against Kosovo Albanians were documented while very similar crimes against other groups, including disappearances of Kosovo Serbs, were largely ignored” (page 26). The distinction between these two expressions might not seem significant, but for those of us who were involved in investigations, it resonates with a common, often unjustified critique of the work. Other authors have claimed an investigation bias in the former Yugoslavia and to a degree I have addressed this elsewhere (Congram 2014: 203, 204). It is also important to note that at the end of the war in Kosovo, many Kosovo Serbs fled or were forced out of Kosovo by the majority Albanian population, ending up in Serbia. Serbia, having been the target of NATO bombings and the subject of UN and EU (among others) opprobrium, was not cooperating with ICTY investigations. This, plus an undoubted distrust of tribunal investigators, made many Kosovar Serb witnesses to crimes against their own people unavailable or unwilling to give testimony. Add to this the disproportionality of victimization (Kosovo Albanians bearing the overall brunt of crimes, but also sharing in some responsibility for killings) leads many to presume bias, make misleading generalizations and/or relativize degrees of population victimhood. There are several causes of such mistakes, but some responsibility certainly lies with practitioners themselves who, for different reasons, do not broadly, effectively communicate their work outside of their own professional community. As such, we need more work like Rosenblatt’s alongside first-hand accounts.

Practitioners have mostly occupied themselves with researching and publishing on methodological advances, rather than reflecting on the broader nature and impact of their work as Rosenblatt has done. Only very recently are we seeing a socio-philosophical cross-examination of the discipline. A systemic reflection of this is the 2014 name change of the “Physical Anthropology” (skeletal biology, lab-focused) section at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS) to simply “Anthropology,” a recognition of the archaeological and social anthropological contributions to the practice of forensic anthropology. In February 2016, Rosenblatt was one of several speakers in a block of oral presentations at the AAFS annual meeting exploring sociocultural contributions to/examinations of forensic anthropology. We are seeing the exciting beginnings of a meta-investigation, of forensic anthropologists under the microscope, being developed principally by Sarah Wagner (e.g., 2015), Francisco Ferrándiz (e.g., 2015), Robin Reineke (e.g., 2016) and Zoe Crossland (e.g., 2013). Rosenblatt’s book is a welcome, original and significant part of this body of work. 

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References

Baraybar JP, Brasey V, and Zadel A (2007) The need for a centralised and humanitarian-based approach to missing persons in Iraq: An example from Kosovo. The International Journal of Human Rights 11(3): 265-74.

Congram D (2014) Cognitive dissonance and the military archaeology complex. In: González-Ruibal A and Moshenska G (eds) Ethics and the Archaeology of Violence. New York: Springer, pp. 199-213.

Crossland Z (2013) Evidential regimes of forensic archaeology. Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 121-37.

Ferrándiz F (2013) Exhuming the defeated: Civil War mass graves in 21st-century Spain. American Ethnologist 40(1): 38-54.

Ferrándiz F (2015) Ethnographies on the limit. Ethnographic versatility and short-circuits before contemporary violence. Etnologia, 40: 47-60.

Ferrándiz F and Robben AGCM (eds) (2015) Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Koff C (2004) The Bone Woman: A Forensic Anthropologist’s Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo. London: Atlantic Books.

Pinzón González M (2016) Psychosocial perspectives on the enforced disappearance of indigenous peoples in Guatemala. In: Conram D (ed) Missing Persons; Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Disappeared. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, pp. 102-118.

Reineke R (2016) Los Desaparecidos de la frontera: The missing of the border. In: Rubio-Goldsmith R, Fernández C, Finch J, and Masterson-Algar A (eds) Migrant Deaths in the Arizona Desert: La vida no vale nada. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Rosenblatt A (2015) Digging for the Disappeared; Forensic Science after Atrocity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Wagner S (2008) To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for Srebrenica’s Missing. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wagner S (2015) The quandaries of partial and commingled remains: Srebrenica’s missing and Korean War casualties compared. In: Ferrándiz F and Robben A (eds) Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 119-39.

Young J (2016) Collection, curation, repatriation: Exploring the concept of museum skeletal populations as missing persons. In: Missing Persons; Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Disappeared. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, pp. 119-133.