Known Unknowns: Forensic Science, The Nation-State, and the Iconic Dead

68. The Foragers of Point Hope: The Biology and Archaeology of Humans on the Edge of the Alaskan ArcticzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Charles E. Hilton, Benjamin M. Auerbach R Libby W. Cowgill (eds.) 978 1 107 02250 8 69. Bioarchaeology: Interpreting Behavior from the Human Skeleton, 2nd edn. Clark Spencer Larsen 978 0 521 83869 6 R 978 0 521 54748 2 Anthropological PerspectiveszyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJI 70. Fossil Primates Susan Cachel 978 1 107 00530 3 71. Demography and Evolutionary Ecology of Hadza Hunter-Gatherers Studies in Forensic Biohistory Nicholas Blurton Jones 978 1 107 06982 4 72. Skeletal Biology of the Ancient Rapanui (Easter Islanders) Vincent H. Stefan R George W. Gill 978 1 107023666 73. The Dwarf and Mouse Lemurs of Madagascar: Biology, Behavior and Conservation Biogeography of the Cheirogaleidae Shawn M. Lehman, Ute Radespiel R Elke Zimmermann 978 1 10707559 7 74. The Missing Lemur Link: An Ancestral Step in the Evolution of Human Behaviour Ivan Edited by CHRISTOPHER M. STOJANOWSKI Professor Arizona State University, USA Norscia R Elisabetta Palagi 978 1 107016088zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA WILLIAM Associate N. DUNCAN Professor East Tennessee State University, USA ~ CAMBRIDGE ~ UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE Contents UNIVERSITY PRESSzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. page x xii List of Contributors Acknowledgments It furthers the University's mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. 1 Defining an Anthropological Biohistorical Research Agenda: Scale, and Scope of an Emerging Discipline www.cambridge.org The History, Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107073548zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA 1 Christopher M. Stojanowski and William N. Duncan © Cambridge University Press 2016 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2017 2 Defining and Delineating a Biohistorical Research Agenda The Scope of Biohistory Volume Rationale, Goals, and Organization Conclusion Autopsy of Past Leaders: What Do Remains Tell Us About Them? 2 6 11 18 29 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow CornwallzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Philippe Charlier A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Names: Stojanowski, Christopher M. (Christopher Michael), 1973- editor. I Duncan, William N., editor. Title: Studies in forensic biohistory : anthropological perspectives / edited Christopher M. Stojanowski, Arizona State University, USA, William N. Duncan, East Tennessee State University, USA. Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge, [2016]1 Series: Cambridge studies in biological and evolutionary anthropology I Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016030824 I ISBN 9781107073548 (Hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Forensic anthropology. I Physical anthropology. I Human remains (Archaeology) I Sociobiology. Classification: LCC GN69.8 .S78 2016 I DOC 614/.17-dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016030824 ISBN 978-1-107-07354-8 3 2.1 2.2 2.3 First Patient: Richard I the Lionheart Second Patient: Henri IV of France Third Patient: Maximilien de Robespierre 2.4 Conclusion Game of Thrones: Richard III and the Creation of Cultural Heritage 29 32 38 40 43 Richard Toon and Laurie Stone 3.1 3.2 4 43 62 A Game of Thrones Epilogue (April 2015) The Search for Don Francisco de Paula Marin: Servant, Friend, and Advisor to King Kamehameha I, Kingdom of Hawai'i 67 Michael Pietrusewsky, Michele Toomay Douglas, Rona M. Ikehara-Quebral, and Conrad Mac Goodwin Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA 5 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 Marin Tower Housing Project Marin's Health and Physical Features Objectives of Study Methods (Sex, Age, Stature, Ancestry) 71 4.5 4.6 Results Conclusion 79 88 Unearthing Robert Kennicott: Naturalist, Explorer, Smithsonian Scientist 75 77 77 92 Karin S. Bruwelheide, Sandra S. Schlachtmeyer, Douglas W. Owsley, Vicki E. Simon, Arthur C. Aufderheide, Larry W. Cartmell, and Stephan J. Swanson 5.1 5.2 Robert Kennicott The Opening and Postmortem Examination 93 96 "zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcb 236 Lyle W. Konigsbergand Lee Meadows JantzzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Trotter, M. and Gieser, G. C. (1952). Estimation of stature from long bones of American Whites and Negroes.zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 10(4), 463-514. Ubelaker, D. H., Bubniak, E., and O'Donnell, G. (1992). Computer-assisted photographic superimposition. Journal of Forensic Sciences, 37(3), 750-762. Willey, P. and Falsetti, T. (1991). Inaccuracy of height information on driver's licenses. Journal of Forensic Sciences, 36(3), 813-819. Xavier, R., Philippe, D., and Geoffroy, L. (2014). Discussion surrounding the identification of Henry IV's alleged skull. Journal of Forensic Research, 5(212), 2. 11 Known Unknowns: Forensic Science, the Nation-State, and the Iconic Dead Sarah Wagner and Adam Rosenblatt Dead people come with a curriculum vitae or resume - several possible resumes, depending on which aspect of their life is being considered. They lend themselves to analogy with other people's resumes .... Dead bodies have another great advantage as symbols: they don't talk much on their own (though they once did). Words can be put in their mouths - often quite ambiguous words - or their own actual words can be ambiguated by quoting them out of context. It is thus easier to rewrite history with dead people than with other kinds of symbols that are speechless. (Verdery, 1999: 29) Known and unknown, celebrated and reviled, dead bodies, as anthropologist Katherine Verdery has so eloquently written, have political lives. I In the context of post-conflict societies, dead bodies demand response and urge action. They are hard to ignore - for communities of survivors and mourners, if not for the state itself. The politics surrounding these dead are also rarely static, despite best efforts by surviving kin, frctive and real, to fIX identity and with it narratives of loss, sacrifice, and redemption. In this chapter, through the examples of high-profile historical cases in the USA and Chile, we examine the effects of forensic science, this most powerful source of evidence, in attaching such narratives to the bodies of persons deemed sacred to the nation-state. The two broader contexts (post-Vietnam War USA and post-conflict Chile) that produced the iconic individuals we discuss - and thus also sacralized their remains differ greatly despite their close chronological coupling and shared Cold War backdrop. The Vietnam War was an act of aggression conducted by the world's major superpower in a foreign theater, while the violence under the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, though part of a network of US-sponsored right-wing repression in the region (see McSherry, 2005), was largely seen by its supporters as a civil war against a Marxist threat, or by Pinochet's critics as an authoritarian political purge. Nevertheless, in both cases we can witness, in the aftermath of violence and with the involvement of an insecure (though far from impotent) state, the digging up and revisiting of certain iconic dead bodies associated with the time of conflict. In each ofthese individual cases, the narrative attached to that dead body - and thus to the conflict the body is asked to memorialize and even consecrate - is reworked. The cultural "work" taking place in these cases is layered over, or in some instances 1 On this theme of the political import of the dead, see also the chapters by Duncan and Stojanowski, and Moon in this volume. III ! 238 zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Sarah Wagner and Adam RosenblattzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA even concealed, by reliance on forensic procedures whose results are reported in the language of fact. These iconic bodies are not simply unknowns to be identified, or cases of violent death to be solved. They are also vessels of sacredness, imbued with stories and sufferings that are seen as permanent and transcendent in landscapes of national memory that many know to be shifting around them. We construe sacredness loosely here, defining it largely in terms of political worth derived from diverse sources that both elevates the relevant dead in the imaginary of the nation-state and sets them apart from the more "ordinary" deceased. Known Unknowns 239 Absent bodies themselves, ones that have not been located but that are nevertheless the object of forensic recovery efforts, can trigger contestation over the identity of the dead. For example, the search for the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, Our emphasis is two-fold: On the one hand, we aim to trace the kinds of political discourse both driving and emerging from the postmortem analysis of "heroes," or celebrated figures, thrown into relief by the nation-stater' With whose grave has not been found despite multiple excavations of suspected grave sites, has unfolded amidst the everyday digging up of Civil War-era dead in a country that is re-examining its long-silenced past (Ferrandiz, 2013). Illustrating the possibility for generating new and different posthumous identities, Lorca's absent body is remembered by some Spaniards as a martyr whose fame can help tell the story of an entire country's sufferings. Members of his own family recall him as "one victim among many" (Garcia-Lorca, 2009), whose elevation to the status of dead celebrity "a YouTube spectacle" in the words of his niece, Laura Garcia-Lorca (quoted in Anderson, 2009: 48) - would betray the democratic values of Spanish republicanism. the examples raised, we explore how forensic analysis has enabled states to tell particular stories, which in turn stick to a set of remains and thus continue To still others, Lorca is remembered as a poet and homosexual whose targeting by death squads has made him an icon of how cultural marginalization lives within, and intersects with, political repression (Jongh, 2014). If absence can produce such to circulate among the public, even decades or generations later. What are some diverse stories, what happens when the bodies of lost heroes or national icons are of the sociopolitical consequences of a state's attempts to account for its past and recovered, their formerly unrecognizable remains identified, or the stories of their project power in the present through the recovered body of a renowned figure? What is it about the particular technologies of identification and analysis that deaths revisited? influence how the stories are told? On the other hand, we also seek to shed light on how these high-profile examples speak to, and sometimes speakzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA over, the other Post-Conflict Knowledge Production 11.1 missing and unknowns in a post-conflict society: The collective or "anonymous," as opposed to iconic, dead. Armed conflicts emerge from highly specific historical and political circumstances and as such are idiosyncratic in nature. But differences can also be analytically The term biohistory suits this discussion well, invoking the history of an individual revealing. In juxtaposing the high-profile cases from two diverse post-conflict life lived alongside a posthumous history in which the body - an individual set of settings, this chapter builds on interdisciplinary scholarship on forensic science remains - takes on a political life as the object of care and control.' Therefore, by focusing on which stories get told and which remain in the shadows, we demonstrate how exhumations and identifications meet political ends, needs, and agendas and, in the process, produce new or different posthumous identities. This notion of expanding sociopolitical significance seems counterintuitive: "Yet because they have a single name and a single body, [the dead] present the illusion of having only one significance" (Verdery, 1999: 29). On the contrary, as Verdery (1999: 3) attests with her analysis of "dead-body manipulations" in the post-socialist bloc, attempts to fix a single, named identity even through the exacting tool of genetic testing often end up proliferating different sets of identities ascribed to a body, or at least the potential interpretations of that individual life story. 2 3 While this chapter analyzes forensic projects driven forward by the state and state agencies (whether military, medicolegal, or both), it is worth mentioning the many contexts in which non-state actors, from international organizations to grassroots human rights groups, have been the drivers in the application of forensic science to post-conflict truth, reconciliation, and/or accountability processes - contexts we have both studied closely elsewhere (Rosenblatt, 2015; Wagner, 2008, 2010). Alondra Nelson examines a related notion of scientifically infor~ed genealogy in the context of DNA ancestry testing and the "geneticization" of race, in which "Root-seekers align bios (life) and bios (life narratives, life histories) in ways that are meaningful to them" (Nelson 2008: 762).zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA and human rights investigations (Crossland, 2009; Doretti and Fondebrider, 2001; Ferrandiz, 2013; Laqueur, 2002; Robben, 2015; Rosenblatt, 2010, 2015; Wagner, 2008) and anthropological understandings of the nation-state (e.g., Ferguson and Gupta, 2002; Navaro-Yashin, 2002; Trouillot, 2003) to explore common ground. At the nexus of the two case studies are the processes and consequences of knowledge production, specifically forensic scientific knowledge generated to tell (or clarity) particular stories about the nation-state. The first case study concerns the exceptional acts of disinterring and identifying the Vietnam Unknown Soldier buried in Arlington National Cemetery, just outside the nation's capital of Washington, DC. Though the USA suffered significantly fewer casualties than it inflicted on the populations of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, nevertheless the dead and the missing in action (MIA) from the highly contentious war in Southeast Asia became critical drivers of the US government's efforts to account for the past and address the legacy of loss and destruction." From the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall to the Vietnam War sarcophagus 4 In Vietnam alone, an estimated three million people were killed between 1954 and 1975, while 58,282 US forces are listed as killed in action or non-combat deaths. Some 1,600 US service members remain missing. (zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZY 240 Known Unknowns Sarah Wagner and Adam Rosenblatt most important commonalities that exists between our two examples is found within the shifting national discourses about the past that serve as both backdrops and impetuses for the respective forensic efforts. Forensic science cast as a cutting-edge mechanism in reckoning with past violence in each instance does more than just produce knowledge; it also enables the state to assert its authority in techno-rational terms. For example, postmortem identification through DNA testing serves its purpose as a "technology of repair" (Wagner, 2008: 245-265) not only because it restores the connection between individual bodies and their identities, but also because it seeks to repair the legacy of the state's own injustices and inadequacies: Whether it is the aggressive warfare of the USA or the transitional Chilean democracy's failure to locate and identify its "disap- at the Tomb of the Unknowns, the conflict's human toll swiftly became bound to national modes and sites of commemoration. The politically fraught war was followed by a politically fraught process of accounting for and memorializing its missing, including through the remains of its designated Unknown. The second example is of Chile, one of the archetypal stories of right-wing repression in Cold War Latin America and in the birth of the global human rights movement during the same era (Keck and Sikkink, 1998).5 With support from the USA, General Augusto Pinochet organized a 1973 coup against the elected socialist president Salvador Allende. As military dictator and president from 1973 to 1990, Pinochet oversaw an era of political violence, exile, union-busting, and economic "shock treatment" (Klein, 2007) in which approximately 5,000 individuals were disappeared and executed (Wyndham and Read, 2010: 33). Among these individuals were some particularly iconic Chileans. On September 11, 1973, the day of the coup, Salvador Allende died of gunshot wounds in his presidential palace, which was under military siege. The famed leftist folk singer Victor Jara died just a few days later, after being imprisoned and tortured in the National Stadium. And before the end of that dark month for the Chilean left, the Nobel Prize-winning poet and Communist Party ambassador Pablo Neruda had also died. After a 1988 plebiscite in which Chileans were given the chance to vote for democratic elections, Pinochet lost power to a coalition of Center and left-wing parties - though members of his regime remained protected by an amnesty law and mechanisms to ensure disproportional representation of Chile's right-wing in the new democratic government (Constable and Valenzuela, 1991). Under these tense and constrained terms, Chile emerged as a pioneering example of the "truth and reconciliation" framework that became paradigmatic for post-conflict societies in the 1990s (Minow, 1998; Teitel, 2002: 126). Bent on restoring order to a divided society, Chile's transitional democracy largely pursued justice through reparations to individual victims and a narrative of widespread societal responsibility for the violence there, which seemed to put as much on the shoulders of Allende-era radicals and idealists as on the military that systematically tortured and murdered them. Rarer still, the state often emphasized its own continuity rather than a radical break between dictatorship and democracy; the first post-Pinochet president, Patricio Aylwin, "assumed the state's guilt for the suffering of its citizens, and accepted responsibility for repairing the damage done" (Robben, 2010: 194) - though whether it did so effectively, or with an even hand, is another matter. With both cases we see how forensic science applied toward the iconic unknown or the renowned but absent body produces new "truths" - scientifically framed knowledge about past violence; about omissions or negligence of the state; about the heroics of its military or the defiance of its resistors; and about the actors, state or otherwise, producing that knowledge in the post-conflict context. Although the sociopolitical circumstances are different, one of the peared" citizens. 11.2 An Unknown Soldier Named: First Lieutenant MichaelzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPO J. Blassie A study in exceptionalism, the example of the identification of the Vietnam Unknown Soldier makes manifest the politics of memory that surround iconic dead bodies. The forensic work of identifIcation took place because of and within exceptional circumstances, and its results helped bolster the US government's narrative of American exceptionalism in how it cares for its war dead. Not surprisingly, then, it is a story that played out in the seat of national power, Washington, DC, home to the nation-state's panoply of war memorials (Griswold and Griswold, 1986; Savage, 2009) and its primary national burial grounds, Arlington National Cemetery. Arlington hosts one of the country's most celebrated monuments dedicated to the ravages of war and the ideal of national sacrifice: The Tomb of the Unknowns, where remains of fallen service members from three of the four major wars of the past century have been interred - World War I, World War II, and the Korean War (Figure 11.1).6 A fourth set of remains, a fourth Unknown, had been placed in a crypt at the same memorial in 1984 to commemorate the Vietnam War. With an unknown soldier from the conflict in Southeast Asia added to the memorial, President Ronald Reagan and his administration sought to recast the war not as a stain on the recent past but a "noble cause" whose wounds needed to be bound up, thereby allowing the American public to "transcend the tragedies of the past" and "trust each other again" (Allen, 2009: 239). The Unknown's resting place at the nation's "most sacred shrine.?" however, proved short-lived. Just 14 years later, in 1998, the Vietnam War crypt was opened and the remains disinterred in an act that Benedict Anderson so presciently characterized over a decade before as a 6 7 5 See also Moon's discussion of human rights in this volume. 241 On the establishment of the monument and the interment of the first Unknown Soldier from World War I, see Piehler (1995: 116-125), Allen (2009: 122-123), Trout (2010: 124-132), and Poole (2009: 133-159). A sign at the cemetery's entrance announces: "Welcome to Arlington National Cemetery, Our Nation's Most Sacred Shrine. Please Conduct Yourselves with Dignity and Respect at All Times. Please Remember These Are Hallowed Grounds." Known Unknowns 242zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Sarah Wagner and Adam Rosenblatt 243 MICHAEL JOSEPH BLASSIE Figure 11.1zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery. Photograph © Sarah Richardson. "sacrilege of a strange, contemporary kind" (Anderson, 2006: 9).8 Within weeks of the exhumation, the bones were identified by forensic staff at the Department of Defense's Central Identification Laboratory of the Joint Task Force Full Accounting and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory as belonging to First Lieutenant (lst Lt.) Michael J. Blassie. An Air Force fighter pilot, 1st Lt. Blassie had been shot down over hostile territory in southern Vietnam in 1972. After 12 years stored within various US military facilities in Southeast Asia and then Hawai'i and another 14 interred at the Tomb of the Unknowns, at long last his remains were sent home to his family in St. Louis, Missouri for burial at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery on July 11, 1998. There he now rests beneath a marked tombstone visited periodically by family, friends, and strangers. His valence has shifted accordingly, from an object of national commemoration to an individual fallen service member with an individuated identity, personal history, and network of social relations. As one member of the MIA accounting community noted somewhat wistfully, he went from being visited and mourned by literally millions of people paying homage to the nation's symbolic sacrificial sons in Arlington, to a much more modest and localized level of renown (Figure 11.2).9 8 9 Drawing on the same passage from Anderson, historian Michael Allen traces the disruption of the memorial in his article, '''Sacrilege of a Strange, Contemporary Kind': The Unknown Soldier and the Imagined Community after the Vietnam War" (Allen, 2011). Author field notes, Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, May 2007. Figure 11.2 1st Lt. Michael © Sarah Wagner. 11.2.1 J. Blassie's tombstone in Jefferson National Barracks. Photograph Disrupting a National Icon While the story of the selection of the Vietnam Unknown is in and of itself a compelling example of the politics of national commemoration and technologies of [delidentlfication and memory (Allen, 2009: 238; Wagner, 2013),zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfed \0 we concentrate here on the processes by which Blassie's remains were defmitively identified. From the onset, the opening of the crypt in Arlington and the removal of the Vietnam Unknown were seen as extraordinary - and, for some, highly contentious - acts prompted by the spotlight of national media and the forceful pleas of 1st Lt. Blassie's surviving kin. The Department of Defense's decision to disinter followed a long and circuitous path and was embedded within the politically charged context of prisoner of war 10 Allen quotes an "unnamed lab official" as explaining that the original designation of the remains as Unknown "was politically expedient. At best it was premature .... Perhaps it was appropriate to the Vietnam War. So much else about it was political" (Allen, 2009: 238). Sarah Wagner and Adam RosenblattzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA 244zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Known Unknowns 245 national public: "To feel the force of this modernity one has only to imagine the (POW)/MIA activism (Allen, 2011). Since the war's end and throughout the various general reaction to the busybody who 'discovered' the Unknown Soldier's name or subsequent administrations, veterans and families of the missing had been fighting insisted on filling the cenotaph with some real bones" (Anderson, 2006: 9). for more aggressive measures of "full accounting" (Allen, 2009). This scrutiny eventually turned to the national memorial in Arlington. Beginning in the mid1990s, rumors surfaced about what some called "the worst kept secret in the 11.2.2 Transformations in Worth and Evidence Weighed Pentagon."zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA II Formal allegations that the Vietnam Unknown's identity might in fact Having been transformed from an unnamed set of remains, lying in storage in a be knowable first emerged in an article published by Vietnam veteran and activist forensic laboratory, to the catalyst for "ghostly national imagining" (Anderson, Ted Sampley: 2006: 9), the scant bones of the Vietnam Unknown almost immediately underwent In 1984, as a result of the US government's eagerness to lay to rest a Vietnam Unknown a metamorphosis of social significance. For the next six weeks, the remains would Soldier, it interred the remains of a missing American serviceman that today can be identified occupy that liminal space between the sacred and profane, simultaneously the object and accounted for through the US government Central Identification laboratory in Hawaii of national reverence as the honored Unknown, yet subject to scientifrc inquiry into (crL-HI) .... The entombment of the Vietnam Unknown was at the very best premature and at the individual presumptive identity of 1st Lt. Michael J. Blassie. As with any rite of the worst a politically expedient attempt to further close the books on the POW/MIA issue. passage, ritual helped ensure a smooth transition from one realm to the next with the (Sampley, 1994) logic of scientific advance underwriting the shifting valence. Once removed from the In the same report, Sampley outlined the connection he believed existed between crypt, the casket was draped with an American flag, and the following day Secretary 1st Lt. Blassie's case and that of an unknown whose file was designated simply as of Defense William Cohen delivered brief remarks before the monument: "We disturb X-26. He argued that the US military's forensic personnel, namely the scientists at this hallowed ground with profound reluctance ... [but] yield to the promise of CILHI, "should be able to right this wrong by determining through DNA if [Blassie's] science with the hope that the heavy burden of doubt may be lifted from a family's remains" were in the Tomb (Sampley, 1994). With DNA framed as the ultimate heart" (Garamone, n.d.) Shortly thereafter, a small procession of cars and Honor corrective, Sampley's article ventured the first suggestion that a scientific means Guard departed the cemetery for Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the Armed existed to undo the work of the Reagan administration - that is, that a new technolForces Institute of Pathology (AFIP). ogy of identification could determine defmitively what had been unknowable a There, the remains "lay in state" in an entirely different fashion than 14 years decade before when the initial selection of a Vietnam Unknown had been made. earlier, when the casket was placed temporarily in the Rotunda of the Capitol for the Sampley's allegations were subsequently picked up by more mainstream journalists, visiting public to pay its respects. Now they were made ready for a different viewing, including Vince Gonzales from CBS News, who, after an eight-month investigation and where military ritual left off, scientific protocol picked up. Padlocks and laborainto the matter, ran a report in January 1998 detailing the government's handling of tory regulations safeguarded the remains from the threat of contamination - any the case. The Blassie family soon fell under public scrutiny, forced to explain and, to intrusion, physical or procedural, into the evidentiary chain of custody that ensured some, defend their request to the Pentagon that the Tomb be opened and the remains the legitimized production of scientific knowledge. Having overseen the disinterexamined. 12 The family spokesperson, 1st Lt. Blassie's sister Pat, spelled it out: "If it's ment, CILHI anthropologist Dr. David Rankin performed the initial forensic anthroMichael, he is not unknown. He might be unidentified, but he's not unidentifiable. pological review, cataloguing and describing the skeletal elements present, while two And we want to bring him home" (CNN, 1998). colleagues, another CILHI forensic anthropologist Dr. Robert Mann and the Director With pressure mounting, the Department of Defense decided at last to exhume the of the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL), looked on to verify remains for analysis. On May 14, 1998, the national monument was closed to protocol. After his preliminary analysis, Rankin prepared each bone in an evidence the public, the sentinel charge of the US Army's Old Guard temporarily disrupted, bag as a potential sample to be cut and analyzed by the AFDIL. The "Evidence/ and the marble slab atop the crypt removed. The disinterment marked the rupture of a Property Custody Document" and accompanying CILHI "Preliminary Analysis" form national icon. It was for many, as Benedict Anderson warned, an unthinkable act to capture the urgency of the moment: "The mtDNA samples were hand-carried by the dislodge or otherwise upset the power of such a monument in the imaginary of the CILHI anthropologist to the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL) and signed over to their custody on 14 May 1998 at approximately 2300 hrs." Working late into the night, staff from all three agencies and the Department of 11 Author interview, St. Louis, Missouri, July 2011. Army shepherded the remains and associated material evidence through the channels 12 In a 2012zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Washington Post article, "Last Soldier Buried in the Tomb of the Unknowns Wasn't Unknown," Bill Thomas chronicles reactions among Blassie family members to the suggestion that their son/brother was buried as the Vietnam Unknown in Arlington: www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/ magazine/last -soldier -buried- in- tomb-of-the-unknowns-wasnt -unknown/20 12/ II /06/ Sda3e7 d6Obdd-Ile2-a310-2363842b70S7 _story.html. of custody and analysis. Internally, the answer came swiftly. Six samples had been cut from the remains and, to ensure blind testing, additional samples were submitted to AFDIL from an Sarah Wagner and Adam RosenblattzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA 246zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA unrelated CILHI case. It is important to note that Blassie was not the only individual potentially associated with the remains: CILHI scientists determined that nine other unaccounted-for American servicemen had been lost in the same approximate location (An Loc, South Vietnam) during the same one-month period (April 26 to May 24, 1972) and therefore needed to be defmitively excluded. Thus, AFDIL requested and received mtDNA samples, "family reference samples," from maternal relatives of seven of the nine missing men. The results were conclusive. Mitochondrial DNA analysis matched the Unknown's sequence to the samples provided by Michael Blassie's mother and sister. 13 While the strength of the DNA evidence was compelling - the matching sequence was "unique to the mtDNA database used by AFDIL and relatively rare within the general population" (Holland, 1998) - it was nevertheless only one line of evidence. The Scientific Director at CILHI, Dr. Thomas Holland, also conducted a forensic anthropological examination of the remains. In doing so, he had to address the disparity in age and stature raised in earlier osteological analyses of Blassie's remains, as well as in David Rankin's assessment following the disinterment, which had itself been peer reviewed by Robert Mann. Holland traveled to the AFIP to carry out his examination of the remains. Notably, the remains stayed in Washington, and CILHI personnel - first Rankin and then Holland - were the only individuals with access to them. Concern about the high-profile nature of the case and strict protocols surrounding the chain of custody demanded that the remains be kept under lock and key at AFIP throughout the period immediately following the disinterment and before the fmal identification. Given the paucity of diagnostic skeletal elements present - the remains consisted of only the right half of the pelvis, the right humerus, and four fragmented rib bones - it was remarkable that estimates of age and stature were even possible. Both Rankin and Holland based their respective age estimates on the innominate, which in this case, though slightly eroded, had intact areas of the pubic symphysis and auricular surface. Rankin judged the Unknown remains to be 30-40 years old; Holland more closely approached the possible margin of error: "my own analysis of the innominate suggests that an age of 25- 35 years is reasonable" (Holland, 1998). Age was in the ballpark. Stature likewise proved a challenging trait to assess because the forensic anthropologists had only the right humerus on which to base their evaluation. Though a long bone, in comparison to the femur or tibia, for example, the humerus is a less reliable basis of analysis; it is less tightly correlated with stature than the leg bones, which contribute more directly to the individual's living stature. In the end, Holland argued that the remains fit within a supportable margin of error: "Lieutenant BLASSIE is listed as a 24-year-old Caucasian male who stood approximately 72 inches tall. The stature estimate (69.0 inches) derived from the humerus using the White formula has a standard error of 1.8 inches (4.57 cm); thus 1Lt BLASSIE's 13 For accounts of the mtDNA analysis of the Blassie remains, see Holland and Parson (1999: 250-251) and Butler (2005). Known Unknowns 247 recorded status falls within two standard errors (65.4-72.6 inches)" (Holland, 1998). The incongruity in both age and stature reflected a basic principle of human variation - that is, Blassie was simply a statistical outlier in the natural span of human variation as expressed in skeletal elements. The stages of scientific analysis that took place during those six weeks signaled how profoundly the US government's forensic facilities and staff had changed over the two decades. Once the forensic anthropological and genetic testing had undergone the rigors of its internal peer review process, CILHI's Scientific Director, Dr. Holland, sent the complete identification packet to three outside, board-certified forensic specialists for additional review. Holland had implemented this practice of external consultation several years before the Blassie case as a measure to ensure the scientific integrity of the identifications produced by the lab. In late June 1998, three notable figures in the field of forensic odontology and anthropology were called on to complete the review: Dr. Lowell Levine, Director of the Medicolegal Investigation Unit of the New York State Police Department; Dr. Hugh Berryman of Middle Tennessee State University; and Dr. P. Willey of California State University at Chico. Concurring with the skeletal analysis by Drs. Holland and Rankin, which "suggests that the individual in question was slightly older and slightly shorter than 1stLt Blassie should have been," Levine argued that "[tlhese slight inconsistent findings would not exclude the possibility that the remains are those of Lt Blassie" (Levine, 1998). The subtext was clear: Variation in human skeletal morphology and development should have been taken into consideration when the remains were originally recovered, examined, and tentatively associated with 1st Lt. Blassie, and later when the remains were being considered for selection as the Vietnam Unknown. As Holland had himself, all three external consultants agreed that the DNA evidence was the most crucial element of the identification; indeed, in the words of Dr. Willey, "the key to the identification" (Willey, 1998). While two of the three cautioned that a DNA consultant should have been included in the external review process, each of them supported the identification, The DNA results provided CILHI with the means to overcome the doubt introduced by the ambiguous, limited evidence of the skeletal remains; the circumstantial evidence correlating the incident location with the recovered remains likewise gained strength through the compelling mtDNA match between Blassie and his maternal relatives. The lines of evidence converged around Blassie's genetic signature. 11.2.3 A Narrative of Technoscientific Triumph: Posthumous Identity at Work If the politics of memory in the early 1980s compelled an anonymous occupant for the Tomb over an empty crypt, the disinterment and identification of 1st Lt. Blassie came about because of a different set of evidentiary claims and political needs. In this instance, state officials, specifically Department of Defense authorities, foregrounded the biotechnological evidence of individual identity presented by DNA testing, a rhetorical move that allowed them to brush aside any insinuations of past negligence or malfeasance. Naming Michael J. Blassie thus became a means to celebrate the ~ 248zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Sarah Wagner and Adam RosenblattzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Known Unknowns 249 biotechnological potency of the state, which could care for its missing and its unknown service members decades after their death. In its public framing of Blass ie's identification, the Department of Defense fell back on the language of scientific progress. Its press release extolled the advances of forensic genetics and the government's expertise that enabled Blassie's identification: 'The identification was made possible by the use of mitochondrial DNA comparison and forensic examination using state-of-the-art technology not available in 1984" (Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense, 1998a). DNA appeared as the infallible means for establishing identity, a "truth machine" whose probabilistic nature was rhetorically downplayed in favor of imputed certainty (Aronson and Cole, 2009; Kreimer, 2005; Lynch, 2008). It also intimated that a new era of accountability had arrived whereby the exacting science of DNA typing could guard against human bias and even negligence. The disinterment and identification of the Vietnam Unknown held profound implications for modes of national remembering. Viewed as transformational, DNA testing promised to change how the nation would commemorate future wars and their missing, honoring the fallen not through anonymous symbols but individuloss. Upon the public disclosure of 1st Lt. Blassie's ated narratives of collectivzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA identity, Secretary of Defense Cohen remarked: "It may be that forensic science has reached the point where there will be no other unknowns in any war" (Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense, 1998b). Figure 11.3 An image of 1st Lt. Michael J. Blassie in the Memorial Display Room at the One can see the legacy of that statement at work at the very site of Michael Memorial Amphitheater, Arlington National Cemetery. Photograph © Sarah Wagner. Blassie's eventual recovery, the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington. There, a certain irony has emerged in the naming of the Vietnam Unknown that persists at the monument to this day. Ride on the cemetery's tour bus and listen to the guide's remarks about the memorial, or tour the newly renovated Memorial Display caring for war dead - Secretary Cohen's future with "no other unknowns in any Room inside the Memorial Amphitheater just above the marble sarcophagus, and war" - deflects attention away from the damaged bodies and psyches of the veterans you will hear a compelling narrative about thezyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA known rather than the unknown. 1st of the Vietnam War, individuals who are not frozen in time as handsome young Lt. Blassie's posthumous fate makes for good storytelling to the throngs of tourists soldiers, but the living scars of a war that the state has tried hard to distance itself who visit the site each day. Indeed, the tale of techno scientific triumph that enabled from and, in the process, reform itself in the American public's imaginary. his identification threatens to eclipse the unknowns of the three other major wars, as the details of his life, his service as an Air Force pilot, the circumstances of his 11.3 The Famous and the Mistaken: Exhumations and Identification in Chile death, and, most especially, his visage - a handsome, smiling young man - displayed within the amphitheater's interior chamber rivet visitors' attention 11.3.1 The President, the Poet, the Singer: Digging Up the Sacred Dead (Figure 11.3). The biohistory of the Vietnam Unknown, now known as 1st Lt. to Consolidate Democratic Order Blassie, becomes a twenty-first-century narrative of the state to spark reflection In his poem "Modestly," found in one of the last unpublished manuscripts written among the public about the ideals of honor, duty, and sacrifice. Wrapped up in before his death, Chile's celebrated bard Pablo Neruda asks "permission to be like language of scientific advances, Blassie's posthumous story also fits neatly into a everybody else, / like the rest of the world and what's more, like anybody else." There narrative of exceptionalism in which the nation-state defied the logic of war's are multiple levels of irony here, including the fact that the poet, though from humble ultimate destruction by identifying its unknown through the sophisticated tools of forensic science. origins and a communist, lived his life far from modestly, with his legendary appetites now memorialized in the wonder cabinet-like collections of objects that One could argue that just as the naming of the Vietnam Unknown Soldier are exhibited in his three houses in Chile and in a string of marriages and affairs that overshadows the memory of the other unknowns in Arlington, so too does it shield are now inseparable from his fame - whether he is remembered as a populist hero, a the state from its failure to care for the living. That is, the triumphalist rhetoric of r 250 Sarah Wagner and Adam RosenblattzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA "somewhat insipid figure of charm and whimsy," or a fraud (Witt, 2015: 37-39~. Neruda ends the same poem with a plea: "resign yourselves to my quiet absence" (Neruda, 2002: 15). Here arises another irony, since Neruda's absence - his posthumous life - has turned out to be anything but quiet. He, along with two of Chile's other most iconic twentieth-century figures - and most sacred dead - has instead become an emblem for the country's post-Pinochet reckoning with its violent past. The story of how and why each of these three famous bodies came to be removed from their tombs involves different families, justifications, and contested stories _ more complexity than can be recounted in full here. However, all of the exhumations were conducted in a narrow four-year window, creating a sense that the most famous ghosts of Chile's still unsettled past were haunting a transformative moment in its contemporary history. Furthermore, all were examined under the auspices of the same nationalized medicolegal system that, as will be described below, was simultaneously undergoing a dramatic crisis related to its own scientific and moral authority in dealing with human rights and the legacy of forced disappearance. The forensic interventions visited upon Neruda's grave and body, along with those of former president Salvador Allende and folk singer Victor lara, were statesponsored attempts to clarity an individual biohistory while also consolidating control over both scientific authority and the national political narrative after decades of fragmentation - but also at a time when the discourses of human rights and memory were ascendant in the country, if not outright hegemonic. 14 These three exhumations of Chile's leftist heroes thus help illustrate the shifting politics of memory and the instrumental role dead bodies of the "extraordinary" - alongside and sometimes above the thousands of "ordinary" victims of state-sponsored repression - play in distancing contemporary governments from bloody pasts as well as performing their democratic legitimacy. Chile's project of exhuming and reburying famous men of the late twentiethcentury left actually stretches back nearly 25 years to 1992, when Orlando Letelier's remains were moved from his family's home-in-exile of Venezuela to his homeland of ChilezyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA (New York Times, 1992; Witt, 2015: 41). Letelier, a diplomat and scholar, 14 The most important monument to this consolidation of power and narrative in Chile _ a sacred site it is not within the scope of this chapter to discuss - is the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (Museum of Memory and Human Rights) in downtown Santiago, a sleek. modem structure that opened in 2010, with a permanent collection about Chilean history from 1973 to 1990 (the years of the dictatorship). as well as space for archives, traveling exhibitions, and a stand-alone exhibit about international human rights. While undeniably moving in its presentation and exhaustive collection of artifacts - as well as in the simple fact of its claiming such prominent public space for the acknowledgment of terror and loss - the museum is also very much a project of narrative consolidation. It defines the time of "memory" and "human rights" in Chile as the 1973-1990 period (excluding not only struggles over land reform. education, indigenous rights, and other causes present long before the Allende and Pinochet years, but also the compromises, injustices, and continuing political marginalization of indigenous Chileans long into democracy), and in its presentation of the struggle for democracy under Pinochet, privileges the role played by official figures and voices of the ruling Concertacion bloc of political parties over many longstanding and courageous forms of grassroots resistance by the poor, labor activists, farmers, and others. Known Unknowns 251 was recently memorialized in Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine (2007) for his insistence that torture and disappearances were not - as many Chilean supporters and foreign observers would often insist - "excesses" of the regime but rather "the central tool of the free-market transformation" (Witt, 2015: 99) that Pinochet was conducting. Letelier was assassinated (along with an aide, Ronnie Moffit] in 1976 by a car bomb in Washington, DC, in one of the most brazen acts of violence of the Pinochet regime. Though not part of a state-controlled or forensic science process, as with the other cases described here, the movement of and attention to Letelier's body was part of a larger political "reordering" (Verdery, 1999: 33-37). In this case, Letelier's family had vowed not to take his body to Chile until democracy had been restored there (New York Times, 1992); therefore, his reburial was a physical manifestation, or even "(re)sacralization" (Verdery, 1999: 32), of Chile's political transition. More recently, in 2004, the family of Eduardo Frei Montalva, who was president just before Allende, requested that his remains be exhumed (Mularski, 2013: 79). Frei, though responsible for a wide array of transformative social welfare programs within Chile (McGuire, 2010: 95, 100), was an initial critic of Allende's who feared a communist dictatorship and advocated military intervention to prevent it; he later opposed Pinochet's authoritarian rule and became a leader in the struggle for democracy (Mularski, 2013: 79). Frei's family and others have alleged that Frei was administered toxins by Pinochet's secret police while hospitalized for minor surgery at the Santa Maria Clinic in Santiago, a verdict that has been affirmed by some forensic investigations, but remains contested (Soto, 2015). Frei's unresolved story has become intertwined with that of the poet Pablo Neruda, who was also being treated at the Santa Maria Clinic at the time of his death (Mularski, 2013: 80; Witt, 2015: 42). Letelier and Frei, despite their importance as thinkers and political actors, participate in a slightly different sort of fame than the three men who have all been exhumed within the past decade, and their deaths, though still sites of controversy and ongoing calls for accountability, are not quite as explicitly mythologized. The recent string of exhumations featuring a triumvirate of Chilean cultural icons - figures who were not only politically left-wing but somehow came to embody the hopes, dreams, songs, and way of life of the Allende years, and the irreparable trauma of their sudden endbegan with Victor lara. lara, who, like Neruda, was born into humble surroundings, was a beloved singer with a mellow but stirring voice, a major figure in the Nueva Cancion Chilena folklore movement and cultural ambassador for Allende's socialist government. On September 12, 1973 - the day after the coup that ousted Allende and brought Pinochet to power - lara was detained and brought, with thousands of others, to the Estadio Chile, a soccer stadium that now bears his name. There, he was beaten, tortured, and ultimately killed. A popular story was often repeated that just before killing lara, soldiers stepped on his hand in order to break his fingers, and then handed him his guitar, demanding that he play. In 2008, efforts by lara's widow, loan, to introduce new evidence against lara's suspected killers led a judge to order his exhumation (see BBC, 2008; McSherry, 2015). Known Unknowns Sarah Wagner and Adam RosenblattzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA 252zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA After his death, loan lara had, like many other relatives of those killed in the early days of the coup, been forced to go to the state morgue herself to identify lara's body, which was riddled with 44 bullets and showed other signs of torture. She collected it and was ultimately able to bury lara in the Cementerio Nacional (National Cemetery) - the sacred space that lara, Allende, and Neruda have all been shuttled in and out of after their deaths. 15 The exhumation confirmed many of the known facts about lara's fmal hours, though no damage was found on his hands - meaning the story of the guitar being forced into his appendages was a poetic, but not forensic, form of truth. No single death in Chile's recent political history has been more bound up with ideas of sacredness and martyrdom than that of the socialist president Salvador Allende Gossens. A physician from an elite Chilean family, Allende spent a long career in politics before being elected to the presidency in 1970, as the leader of the Unidad Popular (Populary Unity) coalition of leftist parties. Allende presided over massive social transformations but also an increasingly polarized and incendiary political situation, which ultimately featured two coup attempts. In the second, successful attempt led by Pinochet, Allende and forces loyal to him were surrounded in the presidential palace of La Moneda, which was bombed by Chilean military jets a stunning act of military violence against the key structure, both physically and figuratively, of the state. Refusing to resign or surrender, Allende gave one last radio address from the palace, and then died from gunshots that would be the subject of mystery - and of competing versions of Allende's myth - for nearly 40 years. The complex relationship between iconic bodies and public buildings, monuments, or sites associated with them - sites that make very explicit the connection between particular political bodies and the larger "body politic" - is present across all of the cases described here: At the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the Cementerio General, the Estadio Chile, La Moneda, and the houses of Pablo Neruda. In the case of La Moneda, the attack on the presidential palace by its own military became interwoven with the death of the president residing within it, lending itself to either a narrative (for Pinochet supporters) of how deeply Pinochet had to penetrate into the state in order to root the sickness of subversion from it, or (for his opponents) of the spectacular auto-violence of the dictatorship: The fact that, even as he was "disappearing" Chilean citizens, Pinochet was also causing the disappearance of the foundations of the Chilean state. If no better spatial metaphor for dictatorship can be found than the attack upon, and subsequent walling off of, the presidential palace, that site would also become an important place from which to project narratives of transition. After his election in 2000, Ricardo Lagos, an opponent of the dictatorship and Chile's first Socialist Party president since Salvador Allende, 15 See Robben's (2004: 139-140) description of the Recoleta cemetery in Buenos Aires, Argentina as "the pantheon of the nation." "Mortal enemies are buried next to one another, and victims rest in the same cemetery as their assassins," and yet all of these layers of opposing and contested figures somehow work together to "infuse ... society" with their historical energies. Santiago's Cemeterio Nacional is a similar space, in which contests over power are embodied while a unified sense of nationhood is nevertheless preserved. 253 would capitalize on the many ways in which the space of La Moneda could be used to symbolize the fully realized transition to democracy that he wished to embody literally, by evoking the memory of Allende's corpse. At Lagos' behest, the interior courtyard of La Moneda was opened to the public, and Morande 80, the door through which Allende's dead body had been carried out of the palace (and which Pinochet had covered over after the coup), was rebuilt. Allende was a martyr and sacred figure for the left wing that spent nearly three decades, under Pinochet's rule, subject to torture, execution, disappearance, infiltration, and terror. The most repeated phrases of his farewell radio address were perfectly calibrated to enhance this enduring sacred status: Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail. Go forward knowing that, sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open again where free men will walk to build a better society. Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers! (Allende, 1973) To hear Allende's words, often replayed and quoted in Chile's folklore music at home and in exile, is to encounter a Chile divided between light and dark - rather than the more complex story of a country driven apart by pressures both internal (such as divisions between an armed revolutionary left and Allende's more moderate "Chilean path to socialism") and external, such as the interests of the USA and multinational corporations (see Gomez-Barris, 2009; Klein, 2007). It was to keep alive a dream of a thoroughly modem urban utopianism 16 - "great avenues" - that is apparent in the design of Allende's prominent tomb in the Cementerio General, which rises up from the earth like a perfectly symmetrical white cityscape (Figure 11.4). By 2011, when Chile observed the 30-year anniversary of the right-wing coup that toppled Allende, Allende's Che Guevara-like status as an icon of the left was unparalleled in Chile, as was the attendant sense that he might be evolving into a pop culture abstraction. The Chilean newspaperzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA The C linic, emerging at the time as a mouthpiece for young left-leaning intellectuals eager to leave behind some of the corroded narratives of dictatorship and martyrdom, placed a cleverly Warhol-esque image of Allende on its cover under the words "Cornpafiero Superstar" (Comrade Superstar). In the meantime, Allende's physical body, rather than his iconic image, still contained mysteries. The most popular narrative, certainly on Chile's left (and repeated by Fidel Castro himself), was that Allende was assassinated as the presidential palace was under siege - a version that was certainly believable, given the murderousness of the regime that replaced him, and the usefulness of the "sin" of suicide as a means to discredit the figurehead of the left and lessen his martyrdom (Rojas, 1976).17 Allende's remains, which were buried after a military-ordered 16 17 Allende was a Marxist, but also an early adopter of computer technology, which he hoped would help him gather data on the satisfaction of workers and their families, and help him run a technologically calibrated socialist state (Morozov, 2014).zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHG Pablo Neruda wrote his own version of what happened to Allende - one that, while inaccurate about the fate of Neruda's political ally, did seem to prefigure the fate of Chile's many "disappeared" persons: "That body was buried secretly, in an inconspicuous spot" (Witt, 2015: 40). Known Unknowns 254zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Sarah Wagner and Adam Rosenblatt 255zyxwvutsrqponm that the remains in fact belonged to Allende. SML's analysis confirmed that Allende had shot himself in the head, using an AK-47 rifle given to him by Fidel Castro (Servico Medico Legal, 2011).18 While the narrative of Allende's martyrdom remains intact, it has thus had to undergo a transformation from what the writer Ariel Dorfman calls "the myth of the good king killed by the treacherous person" (which echoes the accusation of treason in Allende's fmal radio address) to "another myth, that of the king who tells his people that 'my sacrifice will not be in vain,' Figure 11.4 Tomb of Salvador Allende Gossens, Cementerio General, Santiago. Photo © Maximilian Muller, Getty Images. autopsy conducted without forensic specialists present or adequate documentation (Barrionuevo, 201l), rested in an unmarked grave throughout the dictatorship until 1990. Then, with democratic rule reestablished in Chile and Allende's legacy - and his body - ripe for a new place in Chilean public life, his remains were moved to his tomb in the Cementerio General. This move, too, was done without forensic specialists present, allowing the two narratives of Allende's death - assassination and suicide - to persevere without physical evidence for one or the other. While eyewitnesses to Allende's death, having kept largely silent through the years of dictatorship, began to come forward under democracy with reports of his suicide (Pape, 1999), the story of his assassination survived. It was bolstered by one forensic scientist's critique of the 1973 autopsy and his 2008 report - done without access to Allende's actual remains, using the records from the previous autopsy, photographs, and newspaper reports - which alleged that Allende's gunshot wounds were not consistent with suicide, and most likely originated from two separate weapons shot from a greater distance (Ravanal, 2008). In 2011, in order to put the speculation to rest, Allende's family agreed to have his body exhumed and investigated by a team from Chile's national forensic service, the Servicio Medico Legal (SML). Due to the various movements of Allende's corpse, the investigation included both odontological (dental) and DNA analysis to assure taking his own life so that others may live" (Nelsen, 2011). If Allende was the planner and architect of a particular, technically oriented brand of Chilean Marxism, the Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda and Victor lara were key voices of its humanistic soul. Neruda, who served as an ambassador under Allende, lived to witness his defeat and the end of Chile's path to socialism - but only barely. On September 23, 1973, less than two weeks after the coup, Neruda died of heart failure in the Clinic a de Santa Maria in Santiago, where he had been receiving treatment for prostate cancer. Neruda's death was regarded by many as an ill omen, or a result of heartbreak at the events in the country. Though the authorities tried to delay the funeral and deter attendance, it became the first public gathering where Chileans expressed both grief and open dissent against Pinochet's regime. In Neruda's case, a former driver and assistant of the poet's came forward - as with most witnesses to Allende's suicide, speaking up decades after the event - to allege that the poet, who was making plans to go into exile, had been injected with poison at the clinic (Franklin, 2013; Witt, 2015). The same judge who ordered Allende's exhumation, Mario Carroza, once again stepped in with an investigation request. While one of Neruda's nephews, Rodolfo Reyes, supported Carroza's request, the Pablo Neruda Foundation - the most recognized guardian of the poet's legacy bitterly opposed disturbing his grave, and another nephew of the poet, Bernardo Reyes, has denounced Carroza, Rodolfo Reyes, and their supporters as "mythomaniacs" investigating an "imaginary murder" (Feinstein, 2015a). The disagreement between the two camps may have had to do with a power struggle over who "owns" Neruda (seezyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA The C linic, 2013), or whether he is to be remembered as a dreamy poet or a political martyr (Witt, 2015: 42); but it was undoubtedly also fueled by the body's location at his famed home in Isla Negra, a beloved tourist attraction that the Neruda Foundation manages (as it does his two other homes, one in Santiago and one in the port of Valparaiso). Though conducted during democracy rather than dictatorship, and as part of a very different type of search for information, this new intrusion by state authorities onto the grounds of Neruda's sacred space at Isla Negra recalls an incident soon after his death in 1973, when police ransacked the house and 18 Whereas DNA analysis played the role of "truth machine" (Kreimer, 2005) in the identification of 1st Lt. Blassie in the USA - and was at the time of Allende's exhumation serving a similar role in the rc-identification of many of Chile's disappeared victims of the Pinochet regime (see below) - in the analysis of Allende it lacked this decisive status. The former president's gray hair, stature, signs of his osteoarthritis, trauma to his skull (from the gunshot wounds), and the signs of previous autopsy were all among the long catalogue of evidence to confirm the identity of his remains (Servicio Medico Legal, 2011). ••• Sarah Wagner and Adam Rosenblatt 256zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Known Unknowns 257 are still routinely sent to these three houses to absorb Neruda's aura and see Chile through his eyes - surrounded by the artwork, papers, modernist furnishings, seashells and boat prows, and homages to the multiple lovers and wives he also collected. In November 2013, after running tests for the presence of various toxins, SML announced that Neruda's body yielded no signs of poisoning or other foul play. Yet because the tests did not cover every possible toxic agent, supporters of the exhumation, including one nephew, remain unsatisfied with the science and unconvinced that Neruda died of natural causes (Williams, 2013). In 2015, following a Spanish team's discovery ofzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Staphylococcus bacteria in Neruda's bones - which the team judged not to be related to his prostate cancer (Feinstein, 2015b) - the Chilean government released a statement that it was "highly probable" Neruda had been murdered (Sabogal, 2015). As with Allende's autopsy, then, the story constructed through forensic analysis has not yet eliminated a contest over history that, playing out across the field of forensic science, pits Chile's establishment left (the center-left party that has held power for most of the past three decades, the Pablo Neruda Foundation, and so on) against an "unreconstructed" left that is not satisfied its true Figure 11.5zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA View from Pablo Neruda's house at Isla Negra. Photo © AFP/Stringer, Getty Images. destroyed some of his papers and belongings. Here some parallels with the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery emerge: A site that is both shrine and tomb, but also that serves to embody what is seen as a forgotten glory. In the case of the Vietnam Unknown Soldier, that which fades from public memory is the courage of ordinary soldiers in a war that history has not judged kindly; in the case of Isla Negra it is an age of poetry and ideological struggle that was subsumed not only by dictatorship but also by decades of terror, complacency, and cultural anomie between the coup and the transition to democracy - years Emily Witt (2015: 41) says are remembered as "banal and sheltered, undeserving of recollection." Neruda's corpse itself, like Allende's, became a migrant. Originally buried in the Cementerio General in 1992, Neruda was reburied at Isla Negra with his last wife, Matilde Urrutia, in view of the ocean (Figure 11.5). Whereas the Tomb of the Unknowns may now exist as a strange burial site bereft of one sacred body, Isla Negra offered a narrative of the rightful home to which a wandering body has fmally returned - that is, until the 2013 exhumation, when a new round of peregrinations this time undertaken in the name of science - had his remains lying in four different forensic laboratories in four different countries (Feinstein, 2015b). Visitors to Chile story of sacrifice has been told. In the case of Neruda and Allende, in particular, the exhumations were undertaken with mixed or minimal support from some living family members or representatives, and without any immediate plans to bring a perpetrator to trial. Yet these exhumations - like lara's a few years before - became ways of demonstrating democratic Chile's ability to return to its own history and provide techno scientific "answers." It is important to note that, unlike the US Department of Defense's efforts to rhetorically re-frame the identification and reburial of 1st Lt. Blassie as an act of caring for its soldiers, Chilean authorities did not work explicitly to assemble an official narrative of the exhumations of three famous men. Each of these efforts originated with a judge's request, and each was answered by the SML with detailed scientific reports largely devoid of explicitly political language. Yet the very lack of a political framing - the careful treatment of these three exhumations as scientific cases - has its own form of meaning. The exhumations came at a time when the actual politics of Allende, Neruda, and lara - these figures the Chilean state was working to dignify, but also to place firmly in the category of "resolved" histories - were embodied less in the neoliberal policies of the governing center-left coalition (see Han, 2012; Mularski, 2013: 79-80) than in widespread student protests erupting around the country (Witt, 2015: 44). As Jedrek Mularski writes, it is less the direct actions of the state than Chile's "neoliberal environment" (Mularski, 2013: 80) - created during Pinochet's dictatorship but consolidated and expanded in its transition to democracy - that seems to lie behind the focus on famous bodies, whose basic corporeality is intruded upon even as their narratives are transformed, their concrete historical protagonism giving way to abstract iconography and the cloak-and-dagger stories of their deaths. Allende, Neruda, and lara were in the laboratory and on the news, yes, but these "three main voices" (Eduardo Contreras, quoted in Franklin, 2013) of Chile's socialist experiment were also very >,1 ~ 258zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Sarah Wagner and Adam RosenblattzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA ( Known Unknowns 259 zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA or unidentified Chileans whose deaths had no relation to political violence; these were removed from the site every five years, but because non-technical operations were conducted by manual labor at the cemetery, they may have resulted in older remains commingling with the bodies of Pinochet's victims. Some of those victims were buried directly at Patio 29, while others, just like lara's body, were piled up at Disappeared and Mistaken Identities in Chile's Own "Tomb of the Unknowns" the morgue - another place where the bodies of political victims and the indigent may have intermixed in the chaos (Bustamante and Ruderer, 2009: 40-41, 50-51). Dorfman refers to Allende as the "first disappeared victim" of Pinochet's repressive Corpses brought over later from the morgue were, in turn, buried in Patio 29 with the rule over Chile (quoted in Nelsen, 2011). Yet the differences between this "man of the others, often two or three to a single coffin - a practice Pinochet would later jokingly people" and those thousands of "ordinary" citizens who were executed and disapcall "great savings.,,2o Finally, in 1979, in an operation cruelly labeled "television peared are as important as the similarity of their violent ends - and these differences retrieval" ("retiro de televisores''), Patio 29 was among the sites that security agents are accentuated in the posthumous fates of their remains. of the regime clandestinely exhumed, removing many of the remains to throw into The same unit of the Chilean state's forensic service that conducted thezyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA lara, the sea or hide in more remote graves (Bustamante and Ruderer, 2009: 62-63). Allende, and Neruda autopsies, SML, also houses rows of shelves full of boxes that An additional challenge at Patio 29, according to former investigator Ivan Caceres, contain the remains of Chileans who were disappeared and executed during is that many of the unidentified bodies buried there shared common features, most of Pinochet's political purges, and have since been recovered from anonymous graves them being young men of relatively similar background and ancestry (I. Caceres, around the country. A shifting roster of agencies, non-state and state, has worked much present in the streets - among the students being tear-gassed and shot with water cannons by police, a tradition that has continued unbroken from the Pinochet years through the supposedly complete transition to democracy. 11.3.2 to identify these bodies over the years; yet the pace of these investigations has been slow, occurring in a climate in which the paths to legal prosecution of perpetrators were often blocked, and at times receiving more attention from the global audience of human rights supporters than within Chile's own media ecosystem (Crowder-Taraborrelli, 2013: 391). In a dramatic - but not atypical - rendering of these frustrations with the lack of attention paid to the bodies of Chile's desaparecidos, Macarena Gomez-Barris writes: "In its effort to rebrand the nation as a global capitalist player, the state again reproduced exclusion, whereby dead, damaged, and disappeared bodies became debris of capitalist restructuring" (Gomez-Barris, 2009: 17).19 Nowhere in Chile have these "dead, damaged, and disappeared" bodies been more troubling, for the families of victims and for the state, than in a once quiet comer of the Cementerio General called Patio 29. The initial burst of violence in the days after the coup resulted in bodies littering the streets and alleyways of Santiago, floating down the Mapocho River, and piling up in the freezers and hallways of the capital's morgue. Less than a week after the coup, secret burials began at Patio 29 (Wyndham and Read, 2010: 34-35). Rumors quickly made their way from cemetery workers to families of the desaparecidos and human rights groups. During Pinochet's long rule, Patio 29 became a natural focal point in the search for Chile's desaparecidos. Yet despite the site's accessibility, when Patio 29 was fmally exhumed, it would prove uniquely challenging for investigators. The space had long been used for temporary burial of indigent 19 Gomez-Barris' phrasing seems to suggest that, just as the "exclusion" of the dead and disappeared is morally wrong, their "inclusion" is a sign of good faith. There are many different means through which attention, and forms of "inclusion," can be extended to the dead - among them memorials, exhumations, and reburials. Yet the history of each of these forms of inclusion shows that they, also, can involve the instrumentalization of the dead for nationalist narratives, the construction of collective identities, and other motives related to the exercise of power (see Jessee, 2012; Verdery, 1999; Wagner, 2008: 215-220). personal interview, 2012). Chile has been home to ongoing efforts to apply forensic science to the search for the disappeared; but, despite Chile's prominent place in the narratives of "dirty war" and human rights activism in Latin America, its search for the missing is less known and far less celebrated than those of other countries, such as Argentina and Guatemala, where the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team and the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation have become major leaders in the intertwining of forensic science and human rights. This lower profile is partly due to the complexity of the story - its many actors, especially - and partly because it is not a story that lends itself to triumphant tellings. A group of young anthropologists and archaeologists, who had heard reports in Chile of the work of the famed forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow and his students (the future Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team), saw the democratic transition as a chance to begin their own independent, rigorous forensic investigations (Cohen Salama, 1992; Joyce and Stover, 1992). In 1989, they formed the Grupo Chileno de Antropologia Forense (Chilean Forensic Anthropology Group), or GAF. Though trained by Snow and the Argentine team, the GAF's history was in other ways very different from the Argentine experience. Though the GAF took on important projects, its existence was precarious and short-lived. Lacking funding and equipment, and losing members who needed to seek a more stable income, the two remaining permanent members - Isabel Reveco and the archaeologist Ivan Caceres - had a falling out in 1994, and the group disbanded. A new Identification Unit of the state's Instituto Medico Legal, which would later change its name to the Servicio Medico Legal, soon took over official responsibility for the work, employing Reveco as an 20 See report, "Augusto Jose Ramon Pinochet Ugarte y el Patio 29: '[Pero que economia mas grande!" (2011). 260 Known Unknowns Sarah Wagner and Adam RosenblattzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA 261 the forensic truth, however, the years of secrecy about the Patio 29 misidentifications, anthropologist, but handing leadership in the investigations to a state employee and the many hands, competing methods, and technologies that went into documentnamed Patricia Hernandez. ing the errors (Bustamante and Ruderer, 2009: 92-10 1) led Isabel Reveco (personal The work of this unit, movingly portrayed in Silvio Caiozzi's (1998) documentaryzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA interview, 2012) and others to maintain that the truth of what happened there is still Fernando ha vuelto (Fernando Has Returned),21 has subsequently been thrown into elusive. In a fragmented community - and especially among a political left that has question. In 2006, family members of the Patio 29 desaparecidos were called to the lost the common bonds formed through oppression and entered the disillusioning, and central offices of the state's medicolegal services for an unwelcome announcement: often divisive, position of a major political force - forensic science has not always Independent experts had found that 48 of the 96 identifications from Patio 29 were served as the "truth machine" it was hoped to be. mistaken, and another 37 remained in question (Chacon, 2006). Rumors and reports In the case of Patio 29, in fact, bound up with the scientific question of how errors of questionable findings had, in fact, plagued the Chilean identification process made their way into laboratory results is a complex and closely related political story. from at least 1994; over the years, a concert of voices, including former GAF member While the disbanding of the GAF and the creation of a state-run identification process Ivan Caceres, the organizations representing families of the desaparecidos and of resolved a few practical problems (such as salary, office space, and storage for other victims of the regime, and the prominent Chilean geneticist Cristian Ortego remains), the working conditions of the Identification Unit were still far from optimal raised doubts and asked for new oversight. In 1994, scientists in Glasgow began in terms of funding and equipment (Reveco, personal interview 2012). Especially examining plaster casts made from the crania that had been used in the Patio under the 1994-2000 presidency of Eduardo Frei Ruiz- Tagle (the son of Eduardo Frei 29 identifications (a Chilean judge forbade the removal of actual remains from the Montalva, whose body was exhumed in 2004), the Chilean state appears to have been country) and conducting mitochondrial DNA tests on samples sent from Chile interested in "finishing up" the reconciliation process and putting human rights issues (Bustamante and Ruderer, 2009: 92-95; Chacon, 2006); in 2002, scientists in behind it (Bustamante and Ruderer, 2009: 38-39; Reveco, personal interview, 2012). Granada, Spain questioned the methods employed by both the Identification Unit Even under the two Socialist Party presidents who succeeded Frei, both considered in Chile and the Glasgow group (Bustamante and Ruderer, 2009: 98). One result of much more friendly to the cause of human rights, the medicolegal service continued the scandal that fmally broke in 2006 was a terrible re-opening of deep trauma for to cover up reports from experts - Chilean and foreign - warning of possible relatives, including the family portrayed in Caiozzi's film (see Caiozzi, 2006; misidentifications and voicing reservations about the methods and qualifications of Crowder- Taraborrelli, 2013), who thought they had fmally laid their loved ones to the Identification Unit. In concealing the reports they had received - and failing even rest, but were actually reburying strangers. to halt the return of remains to families, given the mounting evidence of errors - the The other result was a crisis of scientific and political legitimacy: The biotechnolomedicolegal service lost the opportunity to address the crisis in a timely manner gical potency of the state, so forcefully asserted in the post-conflict USA as (Bustamante and Ruderer, 2009: 92-101; Cornision de Derechos Humanos, Naciona1st Lt. Blassie was identified, in Chile had hit rock bottom. In the fallout from lidad y Ciudania, 2006). Instead, it wound up reviving a dictatorship-era sense that the the Patio 29 scandal, the Identification Unit was dissolved and the state's forensic institutions of the state had, in the human rights lawyer Pamela Pereira's apt phrase, service completely restructured, with a widely respected surgeon and former political been "instrumentalized for the hiding of information" (personal interview, 2012). prisoner, Patricio Bustos Streeter, directing it. The Patio 29 misidentifications raised Chile's ability to mobilize technology to identify the desaparecidos and regain the several difficult questions, starting with how the number of misidentifications could trust of their families is now closely connected, in the minds of many, with the basic possibly be so high. Depending on whose account one believes, the early identificalegitimacy of the post-dictatorship state and the depth of its commitment to human tions in Chile may have relied too heavily on craniofacial superimposition, and may rights. Since 2007, SML has positively identified 167 desaparecidos using DNA have compared fewer points of correspondence between face and skull than are technology, following international standards of quality assurance - including recommended (1. Caceres, personal interview 2012; see also Cornision de Derechos 61 out of the universe of 124 victims associated with Patio 29 (Servicio Medico Humanos, Nacionalidad y Ciudania, 2006). The anthropologists were conducting Legal, 2014). Its reliance on a panel of international experts to oversee this work, and this work without recourse to a significant body of research on facial and other on foreign labs to conduct the new DNA identifications, has brought it credibility, but physical variations specific to Chile's population (E. Aspillaga, personal interview, also left lingering questions about whether the state ever possessed the right mixture 2012), and declaring identifications 100% positive when the techniques being used of scientific expertise and genuine commitment to identify all of these bodies of state could not possibly yield that kind of certainty (Ciocca, personal interview, 2012). Just as irregularities, competing scientific authorities, and multiple rounds of autopsies in cases such as those of Frei, Allende, and Neruda have prevented consensus on repression.f 22 21 See Crowder- Taraborrelli (2013) for a thoughtful analysis of the film and its sequel, iFernando ha vueito a desaporecer? (Has Fernando Disappeared Again?) (Caiozzi, 2006). For an analysis of the Patio 29 misidentiftcations and restructuring of human rights forensic identification efforts through the lens of international "capacity-building" efforts, see Rosenblatt (2015: 73-82). ...•.. Known Unknowns 262zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Sarah Wagner and Adam RosenblattzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA At the same time, the widely publicized exhumation, reburial, and re-exhumation of so many cultural icons - by the same authorities, and during the same years that the Patio 29 identifications are being revisited - serve, if not as a distraction from the work to identify the "ordinary" dead, at least as a source of exhaustion and cynicism for a country where the number of people interested in revisiting and contesting narratives of the dictatorship years is already dwindling." The sense that contemporary Chile is host to an increasingly absurd "parade of bodies" (Comment from Daniela Munoz inzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA La N acion, 2013) cannot help but bleed out from the autopsies of so many iconic men into the efforts to identify their less famous contemporaries. This is unfortunate, because if the exhumations of famous men are the grounds on which the Chilean state can consolidate narratives of its past, its ability to resolve the cases of the "ordinary" disappeared is still bound up with its democratic. future. 11.4 Conclusion Though embedded in vastly different post-conflict contexts, the high-profile cases of the USA's Vietnam Unknown and Chile's celebrated president, poet, and singer underscore the politicized nature of postmortem identification. In doing so, they also remind us that forensic science is social action - indeed, sociopolitical action - with drivers and beneficiaries, agendas and stakes, consequences intended and unexpected. Through the remains of these much sought-after individuals, stories of loss and redemption are thus spun, offering the state a means to craft narratives of technoscientific triumph, as in the case of 1st Lt. Blassie, or indictments of the past, as with the figures and bodies of Allende, Neruda, and lara. These cases also remind us that stories told through postmortem identification get revisited and reworked as they circulate in the aftermath of violence. In this sense, biohistories are never static - however the nation-state may wish to fIX them - just as iconic and renowned bodies move through different registers of valence as they undergo the processes of analysis, so too do the particularities of genealogy shift with time. Once Unknown, now known, the remains of 1st Lt. Blassie buried beneath the marked headstone in lefferson Barracks National Cemetery evoke different, even incongruous, stories about the nation-state. In this sense, the high-profile cases of the Vietnam Unknown and Chile's iconic figures reveal how the "political lives of dead bodies" are dynamic lives, with complex biohistories that can both challenge and generate state-sponsored narratives about the past in the present. Institute for Science and Education. An earlier version of the text from the Michael J. Blassie case study appeared in the article "The Making and Unmaking of an Unknown Soldier,"zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Social Studies of Science 43(5), 631-656. An earlier version of text from the Patio 29 case study appears in Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science after Atrocity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. References Allen, M. J. (2009). Until the Last Man Comes Home: paws, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. 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They have been addressed in diverse contexts from attempts to establish the (accessed June 9, 2015). identities of the disappeared in Argentina in the mid-1980s to ongoing efforts to Teitel, R. (2002). Transitional Justice. New York: Oxford University Press. Trouillot, M.-R. (2003). Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: return human remains to families of the dead in the former Yugoslavia; to legal Palgrave Macmillan. enquiries into the genocide in Rwanda; to recent exhumations of clandestine civil Trout, S. (2010). On the Battlefield of Memory the First World War and American Remembrance, war graves in Spain; to Cambodia's attempt to establish accountability for its 1919-1941. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. genocide; to the trial for genocide of Guatemala's former president, Rios Montt in Verdery, K. (1999). The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: 2013; and to current, and frustrated, efforts to establish the numbers and identities Columbia University Press. of victims of enforced disappearance in a complex social and political environment Wagner, S. (2008). To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for Srebrenica's Missing. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. in Mexico. Wagner, S. (2010). Identifying Srebrenica's missing: The "shaky balance" of universalism and In such contexts, biohistorical expertise has come to assume two social powers: particularism. In Transitional Justice: Global Mechanisms and Local Realities after Genocide adjudicative and ameliorative. Its adjudicative power derives from the historic and Mass Violence, ed. A. L. Hinton. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, pp. 25-48. subordination of forensics to law and to its role in the legal determination of responsiWagner, S. (2013). The making and unmaking of an unknown soldier. Social Studies of Science, bility for crimes against humanity, that is, acts legally defmed as, although not 43(5), 631-656. Willey, P. (1998). Memorandum to Dr. Thomas Holland, "Proposed identification of CILHI exclusive to, enforced disappearance, torture, extra-judicial killings and genocide, 1998-046-1-01 aszyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA lit Michael J. BLASSIE,490-52-6882, USAF," June 30. J-2 Records Room, file perpetrated as part of widespread and concerted violence against civilians (Rome 1998-046, JPAC, Hawai'i. Statute of the International Criminal Court, 2002). The biohistory of atrocity has also Williams, C. J. (2013). No poison found in exhumed remains of Chilean Poet Pablo Neruda. come to playa social role in the amelioration of human suffering through its power Los Angeles Times, November 8. Available at: http://articles.latimes.com/2013/nov/08/world/ to identify the mass, anonymous dead and facilitate the return of human remains to la-fg-wn-chile-neruda-exhumed-poison-2013IW8 (accessed October 22, 2014). living family members. Further, in these contexts it has advanced a set of professional Witt, E. (2015). Letter from Chile: The body politic - the battle over Pablo Neruda's corpse. Harper's, January, 37-44. arguments that claim to settle questions of historical and political contention. Wyndham, M. and Read, P. (2010). From state terrorism to state errorism: Post-Pinochet Chile's The task of this chapter is to defme this distinctive and proliferating biohistory, long search for truth and justice. The Public Historian, 32(1), 31-44. 12 The Biohistory of Atrocity and the Social Life of Human Remains to historicize its emergence, and to provide a theoretically informed empirical