Moral Techniques: Recovering Disappeared Identities through Forensic Anthropology

Abstract

Today, in any situation classified as “post-violence,” a similar battery of categories, professionals, legal devices, and so on are deployed: transitional justice, legal expertise, international bodies, truth and reconciliation commissions, testimony-gathering methods, public hearing protocols for victims of human rights abuses, mechanisms for listening, forensic techniques … That “thick manual” (Lefranc 2009, 562) with aspirations of universality has led to the formulation of recipes that call for identical ingredients regardless of where they are applied and however different the situations they are meant to solve. Forensic anthropology and its methods are an essential part of such recipes.