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https://theconversation.com/reading-the-bones-of-the-dead-the-painstaking-painful-process-of-returning-genocide-victims-to-their-families-202631>
Review: Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics and What Remains – Alexa
Hagerty (Penguin Random House)
"“Who would like to share their
testimonio with the North American
anthropologist?” a local woman asks a room full of men, women and children,
survivors of genocide in Guatemala.
Testimonio is a ritual for the collective telling and sharing of stories of
violence and loss. Alexa Hagerty, a US anthropologist who was present in the
room, did not see this coming. She had spent months training with forensic
teams in exhumation at mass grave sites, investigating human rights violations
in Guatemala and Argentina, countries ravaged by dictatorships and genocide.
In this room, in the El Quiché region, in 2014, a local woman gestured to her
to take a seat and to listen to
testimonios. Hagerty did as she was told, but
felt as though she was intruding in other people’s lives and their pain. She
wondered if she was doing more harm than good by hearing stories of systemic
persecution, of massacres, torture, rape, murdered children and pregnant women,
destroyed villages and scorched fields.
Hagerty knows that “taking the lid off sadness” could be retraumatising and
will not necessarily bring meaningful change into the storytellers’ lives. It
will not suddenly lift them from poverty or help them find peace. She “was
slowly learning” that “the fieldwork” in Guatemala did not mean doing “one on
one interviews” in a private setting. Instead, she found herself listening to
“the soup pot of
testimonio”; a chorus of “silence and words” from the abyss
of grief and loss.
One of the longest armed conflicts in Latin America, the Guatemalan Civil War
raged from 1960 to 1996 (when a peace accord was signed). Of almost 200,000
people who were killed or forcibly “disappeared”, 83% of victims were
indigenous. Some 93% of civilian executions were carried out by government
forces.
Similarly, in Argentina, 30,000 people were forcibly disappeared between 1976
and 1983. They are the
desaparecidos Hagerty and teams of forensic
anthropologists have been trying to uncover in their “work against impunity and
forgetting”."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
