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The eight articles that make up this issue were prepared as part of the Transfunerary research program (Mass violence and funeral practices: comparative approach of collective reburial rituals in Europe and Latin America, 20th–21st centuryFootnote1). Coordinated by Elisabeth Anstett (Research Director at CNRS) and Valérie Robin Azevedo (Professor at Université Paris Cité), administered by Clara Duterme (Associate Professor at University of Strasbourg), and funded from 2020 to 2023 by the French National Research Agency (ANR), this international research program aimed to shed light on the impact of the last century of mass violence on funeral practices through the study of their material modalities and symbolic and political expressions, in order to better understand the socio-cultural mechanisms of resilience in times of crisis. These specific issues remain indeed under-researched.
This research program stands in line with those developed over the past twenty years on the relatively recent phenomenon of exhumations now almost systematically carried out in contexts marked by extreme violenceFootnote2, focusing on the unprecedented modalities of having to deal with numerous corpses and human remains. Through case studies empirically documented in different contexts in Europe (Bosnia-Herzegovina, France, Greece) and Latin America (Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Peru), the contributions of this issue shed light on the most contemporary transformations of mortuary and funeral care for human remains, some of which have long been concealed, and most of which are returned fragmented, deteriorated or amalgamated. These questions and issues emerge internationally from the second half of the twentieth century and are part of the historical context of a transformation of sensitivities toward death. In this regard, they participate in the emergence of a true Forensic Turn. With the rise of a new funeral regime that places the dead body at the heart of its concerns, and the development of medico-legal analysis techniques, the practice of exhumation is now essential in situations of mass death. However, this step has repercussions on ordinary funeral practices, as well as on the way human remains are qualified and identified. By paying particular attention to the material treatment of remains and to their different (funeral and non-funeral) fates, the articles in this issue shed light on several aspects of a complex process and reveal the political, social, technical, and religious dimensions of the care of human remains in contexts of mass death.
The issues related to the historical transformation of sensitivities toward dead bodies, as well as the crucial role now played by experts in forensic medicine or forensic anthropology in mortuary as well as funerary practices, are discussed in the articles by Anne Carol and Gaëlle Clavandier, based on two case studies of disasters, one railway and one aeronautical. Anne Carol, historian and Professor at Aix-Marseille University, examines the emergence of a new regime of mortuary and funerary management following the first train accident in France in 1842, which resulted in such a high number of deaths that it can be considered the country’s first industrial disaster. Anne Carol analyzes the challenge posed to the French State by the simultaneous handling of a large number of bodies, including the sorting, naming, recognition, and remembrance of bodies damaged by the catastrophe. The moral and political (including geopolitical) issues surrounding the reconstruction of the identity of fragmented bodies are also addressed by Gaëlle Clavandier, sociologist and social anthropologist, Professor at the University of St. Etienne, who takes as a case study the 2015 Germanwing air crash in the French Alps, which confronted three European States with the need to offer funerary treatment to highly fragmented human remains.
The other articles reflect on the paradigm shift associated with the Forensic Turn, based on the study of situations that are closely associated with the implementation of forensic techniques and that are related to mortality crises caused by armed conflicts or extreme violence. These situations lead to a disruption in the relationship with human remains and a disruption in the relationship with death as it is usually handled. These mortality crises generate fundamental difficulties in adapting the singular materiality of remains (fragmented, skeletonized, damaged) to a mortuary or funerary treatment often occurring several decades after death, sometimes asynchronously, and often remaining highly politicized.
In her study of the funerals of exhumed victims of the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–1995), Elisabeth Anstett, social anthropologist and Research Director at CNRS, questions the funerary and social legacy of body fragmentation. In her article, she shows how the concealment of bodies by perpetrators have a lasting impact on funerary modalities. The case of the victims of Potocari is particularly enlightening in this regard, as the remains of the civilians have undergone multiple clandestine exhumations and reburials in secondary or tertiary mass graves undertaken by the perpetrators, making the identification process extremely long and leading, more than 25 years after the events, to a “never-ending” repetition of funerals with each new identification of fragments. Elisabeth Anstett thus questions the boundary between the mortuary and funerary management of fragmented remains, as well as the global consequences for the Bosnian society of this fragmentation and funeral repetition.
The use of medico-legal techniques transforms the qualification of remains and the timelines for their handling. Central actors in these changes, medico-legal anthropologists have come to occupy an essential role that goes beyond scientific expertise to integrate “relational” work toward the victims’ families. This is particularly the case in the context of Latin American medico-legal anthropology, as shown by Juan Pablo Aranguren, psychologist and Professor at the University of the Andes, which explores the professionalization of this field through the experience of seven medico-legal experts who worked on exhumation processes in Argentina, Peru, and Colombia in highly politicized contexts. His analysis highlights the transformations of the experts’ relationship to their work, which was initially built on a clinical interest in bones but tends to evolve profoundly due to direct and prolonged contact with the victims’ families—who often belong to vulnerable communities or have organized into groups mobilized by the handling of the victims’ remains. Between the injunction to maintain scientific detachment, acceptance of uncertainty, and emotional involvement, professionals are forced to seek the “right distance,” which sometimes leads them to abandon their profession.
The relationship between medico-legal anthropologists and the victims’ families is also at the heart of the works of Laura M. Panizo and Clara Duterme, based on ethnographic investigations of Chilean and Guatemalan cases. By focusing on the victims of Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, Laura M. Panizo, a social anthropologist and researcher at CONICET, traces the different stages of the care of human remains in light of the evolution of political and technical contexts. Her article retraces the various stages of the process, from the first exhumations and identifications carried out between 1991 and 1996 at the end of the dictatorship, to the reexaminations made possible from 2006 by new resources allocated to experts and access to DNA analysis, which revealed errors made during the first identifications, and finally to the processes of restoring trust toward State forensic expertise. Through this case, Laura M. Panizo sheds light on the different stages of a “dignification” process at work, which aims to “repair” the bad death suffered by these deceased.
The Guatemalan case studied by Clara Duterme, a social anthropologist and Associated Professor at University of Strasbourg, highlights a real process of collaboration between forensic anthropologists and the victims’ relatives. Most of them belong to indigenous communities who struggle in their relationship with the State, seeking to have the political violence they suffered recognized through funerals. Far from being passive recipients of the experts’ work, the relatives are involved in the identification of their loved ones, thanks to the information provided by their testimonies, which contribute to the reconstruction of the victim’s profile, but also by developing their own readings of the bones, interpreted in the light of their intimate knowledge of the violence of the conflict. The relationship between relatives and experts in Guatemala is therefore established in a joint effort to develop narratives and truths based on what the bones “tell.”
While the Forensic Turn appears to be a new stage in the treatment of remains, involving human remains in complex processes of identification, dignification, and burial, this stage remains associated with specific historical and political contexts, in which not all dead receive the same treatment: some are excluded from the process of dignification, which seems to be gradually becoming a mandatory passage or norm. Studying the fate of disqualified body parts allows us to question the issues underlying the memorialization and patrimonialization of human remains categorized as problematic. José Pablo Bayrabar and Valérie Robin Azevedo’s article, as well as Galia Valtchinova’s, both highlight the complexity of these issues: in the Peruvian case because it concerns the remains of “terrorists,” and in the Greek case because the remains embody the memory of the defeated.
In their article, José Pablo Baraybar, forensic anthropologist at the International Committee of the Red Cross, and Valérie Robin Azevedo, social anthropologist and Professor at the University of Paris Cité, trace the “posthumous biographies” of former members of the revolutionary group Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso), who were killed during an uprising in 1986. Of the 250 deceased, only 22 bodies could be buried by their relatives while the corpses of the others, scattered in different cemeteries before being looked for and exhumed, still remain in the premises of the Forensic Institute without being identified or returned to their families. To analyze this example of necro-power exerted by the Peruvian state over disqualified bodies, the authors draw a cartography of the spaces of dissemination of the bodies, which allows them to study the conceptualization and meanings of the different places associated with these dead, deprived of any citizenship and to whom the right to dignified funerals is denied.
The last article in this issue addresses the fate of the remains of communist fighters who died during the battle of Florina (1949) during the Greek Civil War. Galia Valtchinova, social anthropologist and Professor at University of Toulouse 2, analyzes here a rare and atypical example in the European context: that of a “sealed” mass grave rather than an open one, and of remains whose location is known but which are not exhumed. To shed light on the memorial process at work in the ambivalent construction of the commemoration of these fighters long labeled as “traitors to the nation,” Galina Vlatchinova thus reconstructs the slow process of transformation of a mass grave into a burial site, and the role played by the erection of a monument above the grave, aggregating the human remains in a collective “tomb.” This work also highlights, by contrast, the memorial dissensions and political sensitivity that the possibility of the problematic exhumation of human remains can bring to the surface—even at a very long distance in time.
What is revealed in particular by the advent of the Forensic Turn in the contexts documented by these eight articles is the continuing importance of mortal remains as a focus of a societal interest bearing a heavy political dimension. For the fact is that, in spite of the fear, anguish and disgust elicited by corpses, the material and ritual handling—in both a figurative and a literal sense—of the bodies of the dead is a process that few societies are ready to abandon. In numerous contexts of mortality crisis, a powerful sense of indignation is thus felt when such remains are missing or mishandled. In this respect, the pressing need to locate the dead in order to bring them back as far as possible into normal social structures seems to constitute a moral imperative bearing a heavy political dimension, the mechanisms of which are in many respects yet to be fully understood.
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1 See the website: https://funeraire.hypotheses.org/
2 Notably In the context of European Research programme Corpses of Mass Violence and Genocide [Anstett & Dreyfus, 2012] and national Research Programmes led in France [Losonczy & Robin Azevedo, 2016 & 2021] and Spain Ferrandiz, 2014], as well as in English-speaking countries [Renshaw, 2011, Rojas-Perez, 2017, Rassool, 2015] and Latin America [Panizo, 2011, Sanford, 2003].