Abstract
Forensic anthropology has an important contribution to make to the investigation of human rights violations, yet the globalization of forensic practice raises complex issues. For example, forensic protocols imported from the US (and European) traditions have been modified due to the different cultural, economic and scientific realities of the region of application. Whereas the American tradition is limited to the physical analysis of skeletal remains, elsewhere, forensic investigations include the intertwining of four disciplines: social anthropology, forensic archaeology, forensic anthropology and forensic genetics. This challenges the forms of standardization and regimes of knowledge production which invariably affect the way in which forensic evidence is both assessed and constituted as evidence. Despite the prominence of South American anthropological investigations, such traditions have not been as successful at crossing over to Europe. This chapter explores the notion that scientific experts must mediate between globally circulating ideas and their local appropriation, which includes the negotiation and contestation of institutional interests that lie behind the importation or exportation of ‘scientific’ models.
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Notes
- 1.
Thomas Keenan, “Getting the Dead to Tell me What Happened: Justice, Prosopopoeia, and Forensic Afterlives,” in Forensics. The Architecture of Public Truth, ed. Forensic Architecture (Berlin/New York: Sternberg Press, 2014), 35–55.
- 2.
Ibid.
- 3.
Mehmet Yaşar İşcan and Horacio Elbio Solla Olivera, “Forensic Anthropology in Latin America,” Forensic Science International 109 (2000): 15–30.
- 4.
Margaret Cox, “A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Investigation of Crimes against Humanity, War Crimes and Genocide: The Inforce Foundation,” Science & Justice 43 (2003): 225–227. Margaret Cox, Ambika Flavel, Ian Hanson, Joanna Laver and Roland Wessling, The Scientific Investigations of Mass Graves. Towards Protocols and Standard Operative Procedures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
- 5.
Andrea Behrends, Sung-Joon Park and Richard Rottenburg, “Travelling Models. Introducing an Analytical Concept to Globalisation Studies,” in Travelling Models in African Conflict Management. Translating Technologies of Social Ordering, ed. Andrea Behrends, Sung-Joon Park, and Richard Rottenburg (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014), 1–40.
- 6.
Ibid.
- 7.
Sheila Jasanoff, States of Knowledge. The Co-Production of Science and Social Order (London: Routledge, 2004).
- 8.
Thomas Dale Stewart, Essentials of Forensic Anthropology (Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 1979), ix.
- 9.
Tim Thompson, “Deconstructing the Ideal of Standardization in Forensic Anthropology,” in Disturbing Bodies: Perspectives on Forensic Anthropology, ed. Zoë Crossland and Rosemary A. Joyce (Santa Fe: School of Advanced Research Press, 2015), 63–84.
- 10.
Rebecca Gowland and Tim Thompson, Human Identity and Identification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
- 11.
Jose Pablo Baraybar, “When DNA is Not Available, Can We Still Identify People? Recommendations for Best Practice,” Journal of Forensic Sciences 53 (2008): 533–540. Gillian Fowler and Tim Thompson, “A Mere Technical Exercise? Challenges and Technological Solutions to the Identification of Individuals in Mass Grave Scenarios in the Modern Context,” in Human Remains and Violence, ed. Élisabeth Gessat-Anstett and Jean-Marc Dreyfus (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 117–141.
- 12.
Baraybar, “When DNA is Not Available”.
- 13.
Francisco Ferrandiz, “Exhuming the Defeated: Civil War Mass Graves in Twenty-First-Century Spain,” American Ethnologist 40 (2013): 38–54.
- 14.
The Manual on the Effective Prevention and Investigation of Extra-Legal, Arbitrary and Summary Executions (or the Minnesota Protocol) of 1991.
- 15.
Gowland and Thompson, Human Identity and Identification.
- 16.
Erin H. Kimmerle, Richard L. Jantz, Lyle W. Konigsberg and Jose Pablo Baraybard, “Skeletal Estimation and Identification in American and East European Populations,” Journal of Forensic Sciences 53 (2008): 524–532. Maureen Schaefer, “A Summary of Epiphyseal Union Timings in Bosnian Males,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 18 (2008): 536–545. Maureen Schaefer and Sue M. Black “Comparison of Ages of Epiphyseal Union in North American and Bosnian Skeletal Material,” Journal of Forensic Sciences 50 (2005): 777–784.
- 17.
Douglas H. Ubelaker, “Issues in the Global Applications of Methodology in Forensic Anthropology,” Journal of Forensic Sciences 53 (2008): 606–607.
- 18.
Mercedes Salado and Luis Fondebrider, El desarrollo de la antropología forense en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Asociación Andaluza de Médicos Forenses, 2009).
- 19.
Ibid.
- 20.
Gabriel Aguilera et al., Dialéctica del terror en Guatemala (Costa Rica: Ciudad Universitaria Rodrigo Facio, 1981). Historical Clarification Commission, Guatemala: Memory of Silence (Guatemala City: Historical Clarification Commission, 1999).
- 21.
Jiménez Gaytan and Daniel Alonzo, Contexto Histórico y Desarrollo de la Antropología Forense en Guatemala (1954–2011) (Guatemala: Escuela de Historia, Área de Antropología, Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, 2011).
- 22.
Mario Slaus, Davor Strinovic, Vedrana Petrovecki, Davor Mayer et al., “Identification and Analyses of Female Civilian Victims of the 1991 War in Croatia from the Glina and Petrinja Areas,” Forensic Science International Supplement Series 1 (2009): 69–71. Fowler and Thompson, “A Mere Technical Exercise?”.
- 23.
Slaus, Strinovic, Petrovecki, Mayer et al., “Identification and Analyses”.
- 24.
Kimmerle, Jantz, Konigsberg and Baraybard, “Skeletal Estimation”.
- 25.
Melanie Klinker, “Proving Genocide? Forensic Expertise and the ICTY,” Journal of International Criminal Justice 6 (2008): 447–466. Melanie Klinker, “Karadžić’s Guilty Verdict and Forensic Evidence from Bosnia’s Mass Graves,” Science & Justice 56 (2016): 498–504.
- 26.
Fowler and Thompson, “A Mere Technical Exercise?”. Melanie Klinker, “Proving Genocide?”. Slaus, Strinovic, Petrovecki, Mayer et al., “Identification and Analyses”.
- 27.
Roxana Ferllini, “Human Rights Investigations in Spain,” Annals of Anthropological Practice 38 (2014): 65–80. Ríos, Luis, José Ignacio Casado and Jorge Puente Prieto, “Identification Process in Mass Graves from the Spanish Civil War I,” Forensic Science International 199 (2010): e27–e36.
- 28.
Roxana Ferllini, “Human Rights Investigations in Spain”.
- 29.
Ríos, Casado and Prieto, “Identification Process”.
- 30.
Roxana Ferllini, “Tissue Preservation and Projectile Context in Spanish Civil War Victims,” Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine 17 (2010): 285–288. Roxana Ferllini, “Human Rights Investigations in Spain,” Annals of Anthropological Practice 38 (2014): 65–80.
- 31.
Hugh Tuller, “Identification versus Prosecution: Is it that Simple, and Where Should the Archaeologist Stand?” in Disturbing Bodies: Perspectives on Forensic Anthropology, ed. Zoë Crossland and Rosemary A. Joyce (Santa Fe: School of Advanced Research Press, 2015), 85–101; Tim Thompson, “Deconstructing the Ideal of Standardisation”.
- 32.
Baraybar, “When DNA is Not Available”.
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
Roxana Ferllini, “Human Rights Investigations in Spain”.
- 35.
Ibid.
- 36.
Ibid.
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Thompson, T., Jiménez Gaytan, D., Bedoya Sánchez, S., Pleitez Quiñónez, A.N. (2018). Forensic Anthropology: Whose Rules Are We Playing by?—Contextualizing the Role of Forensic Protocols in Human Rights Investigations. In: War Crimes Trials and Investigations. St Antony's Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64072-3_3
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