Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains
by Alexa Hagerty
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Mar 2023
320 pages
Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion
Publication Information
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.
"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."
Throughout Guatemala's thirty-six-year armed conflict, state forces killed over 200,000 people. Argentina's military dictatorship disappeared up to 30,000 people. In the wake of genocidal violence, families of the missing searched for the truth. Young scientists joined their fight against impunity. Gathering evidence in the face of intimidation and death threats, they pioneered the field of forensic exhumation for human rights.
In Still Life with Bones, anthropologist Alexa Hagerty learns to see the dead body with a forensic eye. 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. 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. In the tenderness of understanding these bones, forensics offers proof of mass atrocity but also tells the story of each life lost.
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. 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.
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.
"Soulful but unsentimental.... A powerful meditation on life, death, and sorting out what can be saved of death in life." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Searing...Hagerty never loses sight of the humanity of the dead and the pain felt by the survivors, nimbly weaving together political history and personal narratives to illuminate the difficult process of accounting for atrocities. Intense and emotional, this is a vital rumination on political violence." - Publishers Weekly
"Hagerty, a Chekhovian angel of science and poetry, has written an intimate, moving, mesmerizing account. The world is what it is, its global sorrows ever mounting, but this treasure of a book somehow makes it more bearable." - Francisco Goldman, author of Monkey Boy, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
"An electrifying read, full of profound personal insight and intellectual generosity... Bones tell chilling stories about our past, but they preserve, too, the potency of alternative outcomes. Hagerty unlocks this possibility with wisdom and compassion." - Cristina Rivera Garza, author of Liliana's Invincible Summer
This information about Still Life with Bones was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Alexa Hagerty is an anthropologist researching science, technology, and human rights. She holds a PhD from Stanford University and is an associate fellow at the University of Cambridge. Her research has received honors and funding from the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Ethnological Society, among others. She has written for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Wired, Social Anthropology, and Palais de Tokyo.
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