Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains

An Interview with Dr. Alexa Hagerty
By Aseel Ibrahim // February 28, 2024

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 other institutions. She has written for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Wired, Social Anthropology, and Palais de Tokyo. Her book Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains, won the 2024 Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America.

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How did you become interested in the study of anthropology and human rights in Latin America?

The book is based on the fieldwork that I did for my PhD. I'm a social anthropologist, and the fieldwork that I did was to accompany forensic teams who are searching for mass graves (mostly clandestine mass graves) and then exhuming them to identify the victims of political violence in Latin America.

What's particularly interesting, maybe from a historical perspective, is that forensic exhumation for human rights is now understood to be a very important thing in the wake of political violence as part of the judicial process for justice, but it's also important for families and communities alike. Forensic exhumation for human rights started in Latin America, and then that knowledge got shared from Latin American practitioners to the rest of the world. I was so surprised to learn that forensic examination for human rights began in 1984. Originally, I wasn't going to go to Latin America. I got very interested in explanations for human rights and Latin America is the birthplace so that's how I ended up in Latin America.

I was always so curious and wanted to know, “What makes us human?” I took lots of philosophy and literature [courses]. Then, much later, I found my way back into anthropology. I get the opportunity as an anthropologist to actually really see what things are like on the ground. And that, to me, is always so interesting, because we always have ideas about how things are or how things should be. And then there's reality, right? And reality is really messy. So I feel very lucky to be in a field where that messiness is welcome. Being able to have that experience of being in the real mess of the real world with real people hearing real stories that are complicated and full of contradiction is, to me, the great strength of anthropology.



What challenges or experiences did you encounter while doing your research in Latin America, especially after investigating these painful crimes?

In my research, I mostly spoke with people who were interested in exhumation - certainly the [forensic] teams, but in the families as well. Most people I spoke with wanted to exhumate. Now, that doesn't mean that everyone is thinking exactly the same. That's the joke about anthropology - the answer to every question is, “It's complicated.” So it's complicated. For example, in places like Guatemala, there's been a lot of impunity. Most of the perpetrators of these terrible crimes have never gone to jail and are just living in the communities, living side by side with victims and families of victims. In a circumstance like that, a family might feel that [supporting exhumation] will be dangerous for them. There are real stakes to that decision.

Very early on, at some of the earliest exhumations in Argentina, [some members of] the Mothers of the Disappeared, who had themselves become this incredible political force during the dictatorship, did not want exhumations. From their point of view, they felt that the exhumations were kind of like a political trick. Instead of having this category of disappeared victims of the dictator, exhumation was a means of hiding the mass atrocity of what had happened and turning this into this private grief. It's not that we are as a society going to confront what happened to not just your child, but all of these children.

More:
https://humanrights.fhi.duke.edu/story/genocide-forensics-and-what-remains/