Adam Rosenblatt Digging for the Disappeared; Forensic Science after Atrocity, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 2015, 304 pages. $24.95, paperback, ISBN: 9780804794916.
In Digging for the Disappeared, Adam Rosenblatt examines the work of forensic anthropology teams in the context of criminal and humanitarian investigations of mass killings. His stated goal is to relate and scrutinize the politics and ethics of the forensic investigation of mass graves. Until very recently, this fairly young practice has mostly been represented by trope-heavy media stories that laud the good, but refrain from exposing potential problems in the process. The facile, lop-sided representation presumably stems from a taboo over finding flaw in an overall noble and also uncomfortable process: the exhumation of bodies, victims of atrocity crimes, from clandestine graves.
As a participant observer and humanity scholar, Rosenblatt gives us a rigorous, engaging, and edifying review of forensic investigations of these graves, the bodies within, and the community of stakeholders. With the exception of the multi-authored Necropolitics, by Francisco Ferrándiz and Antonius Robben, which was published two months after Rosenblatt’s book, previous work on the same subject is context-specific (e.g., Wagner, 2008 on Bosnia; Ferrándiz, 2013 on Spain). Digging for the Disappeared covers the development of a burgeoning movement and discipline across several continents. In the introduction Rosenblatt quotes from one of his interviews with the founding father of international forensic anthropology investigations, Clyde Snow: “I’m not a human rights activist. I’m a scientist. I’m an expert. If I have a philosophy, it’s that I’m anti-homicide” (page 18). Rosenblatt challenges these deflections in an exploratory, rather than interrogatory way and throughout the book he convincingly demonstrates how his subjects’ actions demonstrate a victim family-centred, activist-minded scientific practice that borders on betrayal of the cold, unemotional, and politically dis-engaged persona projected by many forensic anthropologists themselves.
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