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Alexa Hagerty, "Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains" (Crown, 2023)
01:03:54
An interview with Alexa Hagerty
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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
B
Hi, and welcome to New Books and Genocide Studies, a channel on the New Books Network of podcasts. My name is Kellen McFall from Newman University and I'm a host of the show and today I'm thrilled to welcome Alexa Haggerty to the show. Alexa is the author of a brand new book, about a month old title, or not even a month old, titled Still Life with Bones, published oh a couple weeks ago by Crown. Longtime listeners will have noticed that while I do my best to interview people from a wide variety of time periods and regional and geographic regions, I probably don't interview as many people who write about Latin America as other regions. I'm excited that Alexa has experience in Latin America and is going to be able to talk about it with us. But I'm also excited that this book is different. It's a wonderful book and you should run out and get it as soon as you finish the interview. It's a combination of journalism and anthropology and memoir. It reads beautifully and it introduces people to a field and a kind of experience that few people know much about or have had. And that is the. The responsibility and honor and task of identifying human remains and trying to connect those human remains with living relatives and with people who are investigating the disappearances. So it's a fabulous book. I'm excited to talk about it with Alexa. So, Alexa, thanks for joining us and welcome to New Books in Genocide Studies.
- [02:48]
C
Thanks so much for having me.
- [02:51]
B
So, Alexa, I always start with the same question. And so I'd like to invite you to say just a little bit about yourself and how you became interested in anthropology to begin with.
- [03:01]
C
Well, that's a good question. I think it was kind of a slow burn for me. I remember one of my professors as an undergrad saying that she thought I might enjoy taking an anthropology class and thinking to myself, no, I don't. That doesn't sound very interesting. It sounded kind of dusty. So, yeah, I was always interested in psychology, in philosophy, in history. But anthropology came later and I think it came through reading anthropologists. I remember that I read Charles Briggs and Clara Mantini Briggs book on the cholera epidemic. And that really was kind of shifted my thinking a lot and got me very curious about medical anthropology. And eventually I did end up studying at Berkeley and Charles was my advisor. So yeah, it took a while, but yes, I wound up in anthropology.
- [04:00]
B
The heart of this book is your time working in Guatemala and Argentina. So help us walk us through that. How did you decide you wanted to spend time in Guatemala and Argentina and, and what did you hope to learn and experience there?
- [04:17]
C
Yeah, I was actually in Argentina working on a different project, a project on human trafficking. And I happened to learn about the Argentine forensics team and then have a chance to talk with someone on the team. And it just captured my interest, my curiosity. It was just something I immediately felt drawn to and just needed to know more about, particularly learning about the way that the team began their work, which maybe we'll talk about later. But that story, I just found it astounding and I needed to know more.
- [04:59]
B
When you went there, did you plan on writing the book or is that something that an idea that emerged over time while you were there, or did that not come to you until after?
- [05:09]
C
Well, I went working on my dissertation research and so when I first went into the field, I imagined that I would write an academic book, publish with an academic publisher. And so that was what I was thinking. But the seed of writing something more public facing was planted very early in my research when I had an exchange with someone that I got to know in Guatemala and who said to me, what happened here? Referring to the genocide in Guatemala, you know, can't be forgotten. And yeah, this planted a seed. And it took, you know, maybe a while to grow, but I knew early on I thought, well, I'll I'll certainly write an article that's public facing that I think became a. My first goal pretty early on.
- [06:02]
B
And you use pseudonyms, which I'm sure is. I'm not an anthropologist, but I suspect it's part of the ethical code in anthropology, but it's also a necessity in these regions. So I wonder what it was like to write about people knowing that you could not identify them in any way that might put them in danger.
- [06:25]
C
Yes, well, that was, like you say that it is standard practice in anthropology to use pseudonyms, although like many things in anthropology, there's discussion about that and the pros and cons of that. But it's particularly important in a place like Guatemala where there's been impunity, although there's also been really courageous fights against impunity for decades and in which perpetrators and victims continue to live side by side, often in small communities. I mean, people would tell me about walking past the house of a perpetrator every day on the way to pick up, you know, kids from school. So, so yes, it's becomes not just a matter of sort of anthropological practice, but a matter of, of a vital matter of safety for people.
- [07:27]
B
Let's talk about the book. And as I hinted at the beginning, this is something that a lot of our listeners will have heard about, about, but not know very much about. So maybe we'll start with the practicalities for those people who aren't familiar with this. And I know this is something you can talk about for hours, but we don't have hours. What is it? What is a site where bodies are being exhumed, I assume is the pronunciation. What does that site look like? And how do people, people. What kind of procedures are employed to exhume safely and responsibly and then to identify bodies?
- [08:12]
C
Right. Well, the answer to this is context dependent because there are mass graves in urban areas, there are mass graves in rural areas. It really depends. But let's say in Guatemala and rural Guatemala, which is some of the sites that I worked at and sites at which the Guatemalan forensic team is working on all the time as we speak, that there might be, for example, the community might know where the mass grave is. There may be knowledge held in the community about where that is, but that has not necessarily come out for fear of reprisal for all the reasons that we just touched on in this context of impunity. So it may be a matter of just talking to people and learning where the site is. But then of course, because time has passed, the site may have changed. So then the forensic team goes in and they look at the contours of the landscape, for example, to see maybe where there might be a depression. They look for changes in the soil to see where the soil may have been disturbed. They could look for clues in the flora so that maybe, yeah, there can be disturbances that they can see in the flora. So that's a way that the gravesite can be identified. And then they begin by digging trenches, looking for the actual site itself. In other cases, like in the case of Pozo de Vargas, where I worked in Argentina, that site neighbors had seen something happening there. They'd seen trucks coming and going. During the dictatorship, a neighbor had gone out quite dangerously really to go and look at it and seen some bloody clothing near the site. And then there had been a kind of drunken confession by one of the perpetrators that quasi located the site. So it could happen all sorts of ways. At Dos Eres, their community members had seen bones surfacing near the massacre site and had reported that to priests who had then reported eventually to a human rights activist. So there could be different ways. There are also some really high tech ways which aren't usually available because they're very resource intensive. But there could be things like ground penetrating radar, satellite imagery. So yeah, there's a number of ways that the sites can be identified.
- [10:58]
B
These are not your words, but I'm reading into you. The word that comes to mind is painstaking. Painstaking is kind of metaphorical, but in other words kind of practical. As I read your account, that it can be painful to carefully and slowly uncover bodies. So what is that experience? Like most of us haven't had that. What, what was it like to slowly uncover remains?
- [11:27]
C
Yeah, this was the part that I think was one of the first surprises for me was just how incredibly labor intensive this process is. So there's this sort of, you have to do thing after thing after thing. So you have to first identify, just figure out where you should be looking. Then you have to actually find the site. So let's say you're in the general area, then you're digging these trenches to actually find the site. Then as you, you know, now you have the site, maybe you've seen a bone, then it's a matter of carefully exposing the remains where they are, cleaning them off without moving them at all. So that you can document very precisely with photographs, with drawings. Because all of this forms part of the evidence of atrocity of genocide. And then there's removing the remains from the site, transporting them to the lab where they are Carefully articulated, pieced back together in order to make this forensic profile to understand age, sex, trauma. Then there's DNA testing, but then, you know, DNA testing of the bones. So that requires sawing out a piece of bone, but that also requires that you have something to test against. So it also means that teams have gone out into communities to collect DNA samples from surviving family members. It's just an incredible process of labor.
- [13:03]
B
I want to come back later to some of the practical questions of that about how you decide which sites to investigate. So we'll put a pin on that for now. You're talking about read. You talk about. You used a word, articulate, and you talk in the book about learning to read remains. So help us understand what that means. What are people looking for in the remains that will help them identify causes of death or when a particular injury was experienced or something like that?
- [13:39]
C
Right. Well, this is something that I had the opportunity to train with other. I'm a social cultural anthropologist. But training with people who were in the process of learning to become forensic anthropologists. So watching what an experienced forensic anthropologist would experience, forensic practitioner can read in bones is staggering. There's all kinds of ways in which life and death are imprinted in bones. So this could be something like looking at bones to determine the a, the approximate age of someone. But it could also be looking for something like, let's say a family has given an oral history of someone's disappearance. Part of that might be asking questions about, did this person ever have an accident in which they broke a bone, did they ever chip a tooth, something like that. So then you could be examining the skeleton, looking for evidence of a previous fracture that may have been healed, like from childhood or a chipped tooth. But it could also be learning how to sort out that kind of fracture, which happened during someone's life to some damage that was inflicted on the skeletal remains after death. Say, for example, if the remains were moved, like shoveled up and moved, sometimes that happens to try to hide the mass graves, and the skeletons could be damaged in that process. It also can be about clues about what someone did in life. And I talk about a case in which the incredible forensic anthropologists and forensic practitioners on the Guatemalan team could be looking at these tiny bones in someone's feet and toes and see in them clues that someone had been a weaver. Because when you weave, you sit in front of the loom in this way in which you kind of sit back on your heels. And if you do that year after year, that leaves an it kind of Sort of forms your bones. It leaves an impression in the bones of your feet and heels. So, yeah, so there's all kinds of clues that can be read in. Read in a. In remains, red and bones.
- [16:08]
B
What was learning to do this? Like, how did someone teach. I guess apprentice is maybe the right word to do this kind of work.
- [16:18]
C
Yeah, I think apprentice is the right word. There are a lot of ways that this training happens. Some are formal ways, like the kind of field school that I went to, where I enrolled and showed up and sat in lectures and then went in a lab and was presented with case studies. But there's also a lot of more apprenticeship based learning, more informal study, which has to do with younger practitioners coming into the field and accompanying more experienced practitioners and learning from them. But there's all kinds of learning. There's studying textbooks, learning anatomy. But then there's also learning the ways in which textbooks may not apply. Because so many textbook cases. This is beginning to change. But so many textbook cases were developed on remains from soldiers, for example, from World War II. So these would be mostly male bodies, many European bodies. So this may not exactly apply to when we're looking for bodies in a place like Guatemala. So I was really impressed. In the lab in Guatemala, they would have these charts and you know, all these things that you'd be referring to to try to figure out different features of the forensic profile. But they'd be annotated, you know, through years of experience, through learning the differences from the textbook cases to these real life cases. And then there's other aspects too. There's learning to use the haptics sense, a sense of touch to decode textures that can be meaningful in bones around when an injury happened or around the age of a bone. So there's. Yeah, many, many forms of learning.
- [18:08]
B
Apprentices require mentors. So maybe let's back up. As you said, part of your goal with this is to get this project was to understand how this field developed and who the people were who. Sure, they're not the first people who ever tried to, but first people who made this A SC Is that. I guess that's the right word. So can you tell us a little bit of the history of the attempt to exhume and identify the remains of people killed by government.
- [18:38]
C
Yes. Well, this is what initially really attracted me to this research was learning that forensic exhumation for human rights really emerged in Guatemala. Excuse me. In let me back up. That forensic exhumation as a field dedicated to human rights emerged in Argentina immediately after the dictatorship that really surprised me when I first learned it. Because to me, the idea that we would go in after, you know, after catastrophic violence, that we would dig up the remains of people to, for evidence of atrocity, to return to families, that felt so natural. It seemed like it must have always existed. So to learn that it really came into being in 1984 in Argentina, that surprised me and I was so curious about that. So the background of that story is really fascinating. It's that after the, immediately after the return of democracy, there, you know, was an immediate attempt to put together a truth commission to, to look at, you know, what had happened, to unpack what had happened in Argentina. And in fact, there were some very early attempts at a kind of something like exhumation anyway, where there had been rumors and suspicions that people who had been kidnapped and killed under the dictatorship, that their bodies had been hidden in municipal cemeteries. So there was sort of an initial attempt where they sort of sent in like backhoes and heavy machinery and they were digging around in, in cemeteries. And they did indeed dig up skeletons, but it wasn't really clear whose skeletons they, they belonged to or what was going on. And this was broadcast in the evening news and was sometimes referred to as the horror show. You're like seeing all these, these skeletons dug up. And families of, of the missing, particularly mothers, began to look outside of Argentina for support in their attempt both to identify the dead, but they were also looking for babies that had been born in these secret prisons and had been kidnapped, had been appropriated by the military. So they were looking, they were, they were looking like, could science help them? Could science help them identify the dead and to look for these missing children? So they eventually approached the aaas and the AAAS sent a, sent a kind of group of scientists to Argentina to look into the situation there. And it was just going to be a quick trip, a 10 day trip. One of the scientists who came on this visit was Clyde Snow, who is a forensic practitioner in the US who is very well known for kind of high profile cases like looking into, into serial killers and yeah, things like that. So he came, he saw what was happening with these sort of proto exhumations of the cemeteries with this heavy machinery. And he was like, this has to stop because there's so much damage being done to the evidence through this is not the right way to do it. So the, so the AAAS group visiting called for a stop. And one of the judges in Argentina kind of threw down a challenge to Clyde Snow and said, okay, well you say that by doing One careful exhumation, you would learn more than by doing this, you know, pulling up all these bodies. Can you, like we have a suspicion about a grave. Can you actually carry out an exhumation while you're here? So Clyde Snow began to look around for professional, Professional archaeologists, people who could help him with this because he couldn't do it on his own and he couldn't find anyone. He couldn't find anyone. Partly this is because this is immediately after the dictatorship there. And Argentina had up to that point, a very tumultuous political history. So there was absolutely no guarantee that another dictatorship wasn't right around the corner or that maybe some form of this dictatorship wouldn't come back. We're just months out of the dictatorship at this point, like six months out of the dictatorship. So people were afraid. They, like, they didn't want to go looking for these bodies. That would put a target on your back if the. If the dictatorship or an allied political, somewhat people who were sympathetic with the dictatorship came into power. And it was also because people were implicated, people, many professionals, people at morgues, had helped the dictatorship hide bodies. So what ended up happening was that Clyde Snow's kind of informal translator, a young medical student, just went around and asked his friends, like, oh, could you come and help? Come and help this guy? Like, come and help this guy do this. So a group of students, medical students, but mostly anthropology students, archaeology students, and cultural anthropology students came and started to help Clyde Snow do this. And these are the students who became the Argentine forensic team.
- [24:54]
B
That's an amazing story. And there's hours and hours again that we can talk about this. I'm curious. How do they move from becoming, I guess, willing volunteers may be the right way to put it to. To experienced professionals. Is. Is that Clyde Snow tutoring everybody? Is that. How does that work?
- [25:20]
C
Well, Clyde Snow, I think, was instrumental in some of the initial training, but it's the. This group of students really took it on themselves to both learn the technical knowledge that Clyde Snow was sharing. But also what Clyde. The piece that Clyde Snow didn't have was the political piece. So one of the things that Luis Fonda Bridare, who's one of the founders of the Argentine team, said to me that has always stayed with me is that he said, you know, Clyde had all of the science, but, like, the students had the politics. For them, this was a political act. This was an act to speak out against any kind of impunity, against forgetting to prove the atrocities that had taken place in Argentina.
- [26:18]
B
As I read this, as this team became more experienced, as this practice extended outside of Argentina to among other Guatemala, there developed a willingness to allow family members to become somehow engaged in the process. You talk about this as family centered forensic practice. What is this and what does it mean to practice forensic science in a family centered way?
- [26:57]
C
Right. Well, I would say that it's much more profound than teams allowing families to be present. It's that from the beginning, it's the families who were pushing. The families were pushing the human rights agenda. They were pushing to know the fate of their loved ones and they were looking for ways that science could help them. So it's really the families that are spearheading the effort and the teams become enrolled in this effort and co create this effort with the families. And it also has to be said, there's not necessarily an absolute divide between teams and families. There are many team members who lost people during the dictatorships in, in Guatemala and in Argentina. These are not. This is not a clear, necessarily a clear dividend. But yeah, I think that what a family centered practice means is that the family is really, families and communities are involved really in every step along the way. And that I think is one of the great contributions of Latin American forensic science. Not only is it that the field was initiated in Latin America, but it's also that it was initiated with a very particular, a particular structure in which the families and communities are centered and in which there is always a political act, an act against impunity at the heart of what they're doing.
- [28:39]
B
One thing that comes out of this, both the involvement of families, but also the fact that many of the team members were alive during the oppression and experienced oppression, is this fact that some of them have, or some people around you, as you are exhuming these bodies, have stories to tell. You talk about these as testimonials. So what is a testimonial and what was it like to listen to one?
- [29:09]
C
Yeah, well, the stories of families are integral to the process. So they're integral in the sense that you need the oral histories, for example, to identify where the graves are. You need them to know these important details of missing people. Like we discuss like, you know, like if someone had broken a bone, that could be a very important clue. And there's also testimonials. So the testimonial as I experience it is not the oral history. It's not the piece that's directly related to the search for the missing people, but it accompanies it very closely. And a testimonial is a form that came out of Holocaust survivors, but really, I think flourished and has bloomed in Latin America in a particular and powerful way. So a testimonial is a public storytelling of. Of someone's experience of oppression. And it has, you know, I think, many elements. It has an element that's sort of therapeutic and sort of kind of talk therapy. It's a. It's around heal and trauma, but it has also a very political element that's giving testimony even in circumstances in which the judicial process may not be functioning, in which you may not be able to seek justice along more formal routes. And it's also. And this, I think, is part of what was a very profound lesson for me is that it's. It's very different than an interview. It's not as if. It's not that I went into the field. I was trained to interview people, and I went in, you know, with my. The notes I'd taken in my methods class. But this is not an interview. This is something very different. And it's. It's different because it's on the. The terms of the speaker. And it also ethically implicates the listener. Ethically implicates. You know, I felt ethically implicated listening to these testimonials because it's also kind of a call to. A call to action.
- [31:22]
B
The book is history, as I said, but it's also reflection. And so I'd like to turn to some of those kind of elements of your book. And I guess I'll start by asking you about closure. Right, because in some sense, we think of this process as. As something designed to offer families, I don't know, an escape and end, a pause, whatever the word is. You seem uncomfortable with the notion of closure. Is that right? And if so, how so right?
- [32:00]
C
Well, closure is a word that turns up a lot around forensic exhumation, sometimes by the teams themselves, but more often I would say from funding agencies that will talk about that this work brings closure to families. There are several clues, I think, to me that closure might not be the right word, might not describe what was going on. In part, I was drawing on my own experiences of grief in. In my experiences of grief closure. I didn't. Never felt like closure described that even many years after loss has. Has not described my experience. So that was one piece of the clue for me. But also I remembered that I was interviewing a son of a disappeared father, and he had said to me about the experience of having a piece of his. His father's. Well, having his father's remains return returned to him. And so he was telling me, when the remains were returned to me, I had. It was, you know, it was really good because it brought me closure. It closed the story. It. It ends the grief. And then he paused and he said, well, no, actually it. It opens things up. And that I thought, oh, that's interesting, because both seem to be true. Both seem to be true for him. And I heard similar. I heard that theme in discussion with many people, that there was something that felt like closure, and there was something that felt like opening. So when I turn to look more at the psychology of grief and some of the literature there, I discovered that, in fact, psychologists have also sort of moved beyond closure as a way of thinking about grief, that there's many other ways to think about grief in terms of meaning making, in terms of continued bonds with the dead, many other ways to think about grief. Although at the same time, I do think that the idea of closure, the idea of a kind of linear march toward, excuse me, let's have a sip of water. That even as in the psychological literature, sort of moving beyond closure, that closure, this idea of a linear march toward getting over things, holds a lot of sway. It's like, it's quite a stubborn notion that I think we still find.
- [34:53]
A
You.
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C
Know, in everything from sympathy cards to advice that friends might give us, things like that. But I don't think that, you know, after having done this research and having had many conversations with families and loved ones of the. Of people who were killed and also with forensic teams, I think that generally something more complex than closure is going on, and this extends to the kind of political realm of grief. So one of the points that the mothers of the disappeared have made. So one of the points that the mothers of the disappeared have made. There's a beautiful quote from one of the founders of the Madres in Argentina where she talks about that there's a sense that people want to forget about what happened, they want to close the wound, but she and the other mothers, that we want the wound to be open. And so I think that this is interesting to see in both in the personal experience of grief, but also in the political experience of grief, that there can be a generative opening, a generative continuation, where we're not aiming for closure, we're aiming for something more like transformation.
- [36:20]
B
As I've said previously on this podcast, and years ago, I took them shortly after the memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe was first opened, I guess is the right word, and watched people around that memorial make sure that kids did not play on it and in it and around it, and watched that kind of relax over time until it became simply just another thing in. In the landscape, as opposed to an open wound. And that's been very interesting. We think of exhumations and funerals as two separate things. @ least I always did. But you write, I've come to see exhumations as sacred practices of caring for the dead. In other words, exhumations don't just allow funeral rituals, they are funeral rituals. What do you.
- [37:21]
C
Mean? Yeah, well, this is a conclusion that I came to slowly through my research. I went in, seeing the connection between exhumation and funeral ritual in a way that I think most of us do, which is that exhumation is really important because it recovers a body. And by recovering the body, you allow for funeral ritual. You allow that the family to give their loved one a proper burial or other. Other farewell. But as I did my research, one of the first things that I realized, which is a rather obvious thing, is that most bodies will never be recovered, because the cruel logic of disappearance is that bodies are burned and hidden and, you know, dropped from airplanes into the ocean and, you know, all of these terrible things. So no matter how hard forensic teams, you know, no matter how dedicated they are, and they are incredibly dedicated, not all bodies will be found. So it began to seem to me that the sort of metric that would generally get used to say whether or not a forensic team had been successful, which would be how many bodies were discovered at a site and how many identifications were made, didn't actually capture the full meaning or the full significance of the exhumation. Because when you are talking to families, you hear how powerful and how meaningful it is that the teams are there looking, looking for their person who. And even when that person is not found, the fact that their name is being spoken, the fact that someone is hearing this oral history of their disappearance, the fact that it's all being kind of entered into evidence, is very powerful. So I just began to slowly shift the way that I thought about exhumations. I mean, obviously, exhumations are really important for the material evidence of atrocity that they produce and the ways in which that can enter judicial processes. And obviously, they're also very important for those families who do recover remains and are able to have funerals. But they are also really important for families and communities, even when no one. Even when no one is found. And that, I would say, is the ritual power of.
- [40:15]
B
Exhumations. You're writing. You are. And the phrase that I'm using here is unflinchingly honest about the way this experience transforms. Formed you and, and I wrote in my notes, traumatized, perhaps even traumatized you. I don't know if those are the words you use, but can you say a little bit about how this experience challenged you and, and how you.
- [40:38]
C
Responded? Yeah, I mean, in all honesty, I think probably traumatized and transformed are both accurate descriptions. This research was very difficult for me. I struggled often to do this research. I, I found it very difficult. And that the fact that I found it so difficult really allowed me, I think, to be a certain kind or to bear witness in a certain way to the work that these forensic teams do. Because it's like work that I couldn't do just in the way that I could never be a surgeon or like, I just, just don't have that ability. I, I couldn't, I couldn't do the work that they do. But it kind of shows me all the more how incredible the work they do is and the fact that they are able to, to do it year after year, to integrate the difficulty to, to go on in this labor, this incredible labor for justice. But yeah, it, it impacted me. It was very difficult for me and I knew that I was not going. I would say I was so impressed with what the teams do and I was just so, I just found it so meaningful. There was part of me that, like, oh, I wish that I could do this. Like, what a meaningful form of anthropology this is. This is. And in fact, one of the people at my first field school, they're one of the leaders, used to joke with me, stay with us and learn to be a real anthropologist. And, and that was, there was something very appealing in that. But I quickly realized that I, yeah, I didn't, I did not have what it would take to do that. So yeah, I was not able to. To work in the day and cry at night, which is what Clyde Snow advised the teams that he mentored in Argentina and Guatemala to do. I found the work very.
- [42:43]
B
Distressing. So I'm intrigued because you just told a story about someone stressing the value of anthropology and yet you seem, at least in parts of your reflections, to question anthropology, at least as a academic discipline in the sense. I'll just read your words, right, but you're talking about this idea that the world must not forget. And you said you write, but sharing with me is not sharing with the world. Half a dozen people came to the last conference talk I gave, and even big name anthropologists aren't widely read outside the field. Sadly, this is true of history as well. Just a parenthetical comment. These stories will help my research, but how will it benefit these women? It seems terribly wrong. And thoughts like these are slowly eating away at my relationship with anthropology. So I wonder if you could just say a little bit about that experience and, and then tell me if that's still your, I don't know, relationship with anthropology, your perception of anthropology. Where do you stand with that.
- [43:54]
C
Now? Yes, well, that passage you read was me reflecting on these women who had gathered to, just to share their testimonials with me, recounting stories of such, such terror, such trauma, such loss, very much with the expectation that I would amplify the stories. And yet I felt in, particularly in those early days in Guatemala, I felt that I, you know, that they, that I was not, that's not what was going to happen with, with the stories because I was going to, in the best case scenario, write them in my dissertation. And there's a joke, a pre digital joke about dissertations that someone told me when I started my program that if you put a twenty dollar bill in the sort of hard copy of your dissertation that lives in the library and you go back 10 years later, it will, you know, it'll still be there. So I just had this real sense of that, that they were sharing with me these incredibly painful stories, important stories with an expectation that I share them, but that I wasn't going to be able to do that through a dissertation or probably even through an academic article or a presentation at our big anthropology conference. So this just really, really troubled me. And I'm certainly not the first anthropologist or the last anthropologist to struggle with the field, which is very deeply rooted in colonialism and indeed in genocide, in the genocide of indigenous peoples, in the forms of quote unquote science that created racial categories and hierarchies that have been used to justify so many forms of catastrop violence from mass atrocity to structural violence. So we know that anthropology has played this role. There has also been tremendous soul searching in the discipline and there have been attempts at repair and I think there have been arguably some quite meaningful attempts. But I don't think that the discipline has entangled itself from this very problematic history or this ongoing violence. I think that it's just very deeply rooted in the field. And part of this is a myth of a lone ethnographer traveling off to some far away place to sort of report back. And yeah, this myth has been questioned, but has it been dismantled? I don't, I don't think that it has. And I'll give you just a small example that from my inbox this week, which is that at our big conference, the AAAs, there's been a problem for many years where you cannot, if you're trying to register your panel, there can only be one person that can be put in the, the box as organizer and only one person can be put in the box as the, the, the author of a paper. So even in sort of our digital, our digital infrastructure we are holding on to this idea of, of sort of this heroic lonely author. And certainly we see that in the way that the gold standard of being a single authored article or single authored book. So I'd say that there's a kind of opening and curiosity about more collaborative or co designed forms of research, but it's still very deeply written into the field, these foundational myths. So I think we have a long, a long way to go and I don't know. Yeah, I continue to grapple and struggle with the field while also really feeling there's something so valuable about close to the ground research, about really looking at life's incredible complexity and messiness on the ground. So I do value that about.
- [48:30]
B
Anthropology. Well, you of course have tried to reach more people and done so if I say, may say very successfully. It's a wonderfully written book. It's a book designed as you say, for an audience of non specialists. And so we have graduate students and new professionals who read this or listen to this podcast. Sorry, so maybe, maybe a couple questions that, that where you can offer advice to those people about how to write well. So one of them is I gotta, I, I have to say I don't think I could do this. There's clearly a way you have managed to discipline yourself to take notes in a way that will allow you to write in a style that seems organic and yet is clearly carefully structured and remembered. So how do you keep the kind of notes that allow you to make the story come alive? Did you do that at night? Did you do that on the weekend? What does it look like? What tips can you give to graduate.
- [49:38]
C
Students? Well, in terms of field notes, this is always a really vexed topic because it's kind of an impossible project. And, and in the book I, you know, I talk about like coming back from the field and then trying to write up my field notes. And, and I compare it to the Borges story in which the, the map of the empire becomes the size of the empire. Like it's kind of impossible and then somehow it always ends up that something that was very. Turns out to be. Later you realize the most important part of something that you participated in or. Or observed was the piece that you didn't put in your notes, or you. You only mentioned, you know, more briefly, and then you were like, oh, why didn't I record that more carefully? So I don't know. I mean, there's no. There's no neat and tidy answer to this, but some of these things are just burned into your memory, too. But in terms of writing, I would first sort of maybe push back and say that I think that academic disciplines would first need to want and reward and align incentives with accessible writing. Is that something that we really want, or is that something we just kind of say that we want? So, I don't know. I mean, I. I do feel that sometimes being told that you're an accessible writer can be a kind of back. And, how do we say, a backhanded compliment. And I have. I have sometimes had the experience where I felt that my scholarship was, or my authority was maybe questioned or in some way because I wrote. I chose to write in a clear, accessible fashion. I hope that this is changing because I truly believe that those of us who are fortunate enough to have our job be researching, thinking, teaching, this is really a privilege, and that the riches in our disciplines must be shared widely and that they're too important to keep. To keep closed up in the ivory tower. I really believe that that doesn't mean there's not room for, you know, for us also to have dense conversations or write texts that are more dense in certain circumstances. But I would like to believe that there is also room to really be publicly engaged and that that is a serious part of our work. And I'd say that the tip for writing is, I think, always the same and kind of unsatisfactory to hear. But it's reading. It's. You just have to read. Read beautiful prose or poetry and get the rhythm of that in. In your mind. I often will if I'm feeling stuck or even just to start my day writing will just read something that I admire, that I think is beautifully done just to get the rhythm in my.
- [53:01]
B
Mind. I think that's good advice. It's advice I give my students. Although with the decreasing attention span of our students, it's sometimes difficult to persuade them that reading can be useful that way. But hope springs eternal. I want to read you a couple quotes as a way to kind of move toward the conclusion of the interview. One is from a New York Times Review of your book, which is almost always very favorable, and it ends with a quote from you. That is the dead whisper to me that it didn't have to be this way. The massacres, secret prisons and hidden graves, all the terror and loss. Another world is possible. And she ends the quote there, the reviewer, and talks about the kind of optimism implicit in that. But in your book, just before that passage, you write this one quote. Excuse me. What is to be learned from the catastrophe of history? Can inheritance of violence be transformed? Where are the wellsprings of courage found? How do we go on in the face of incalculable loss? These are the questions the dead ask of us. They cannot be answered or ignored. We can only live into these quests or into the questions. So I wonder now, now that you. I know the book was just published, but we also know that it takes a year or so to kind of move through the publication process. What do you think about the juxtaposition of those, those two quotes and those two sentiments? And what does it mean to you to live into these.
- [54:43]
C
Questions? Well, I mean, this, I think, is a life's work. So I certainly don't have it all figured.
- [54:49]
B
Out. I try and ask easy.
- [54:52]
C
Questions, a good, an easy question. I think that something that I have thought a lot about or something I learned from my research, something that has impressed me is the ways in which families and communities have transformed grief and loss into powerful commitments to justice. And something else that has really struck me is the ways in which the team's work is so slow, you know, it's so slow, so painstaking, as you said, and yet they carry on, you know, they carry on week after week, year after year, decade after decade. And so I think that that has maybe helped me reflect on maybe the pace and scope of my own contributions, that both that what I will do will be modest, but that if I keep doing it, or, and I work with others, if we keep doing it together, that it is meaningful, it can be a meaningful contribution. I. I also have been thinking a lot about the kind of social context that leads up to genocide, that leads up to this kinds of, this kind of atrocity. And I think about something that Timothy Snyder has called anticipatory obedience, that he, he writes that most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given, that we think ahead about what an oppressive regime might want. And then we offer it, we offer it up. And so I think that one thing I have thought about is kind of building as best I can a muscle of courage, even if it's a small courage, even if it's just trying to speak up or if it's something like, I mean, to be really frank, to publish a, as an academic, to publish a book not with an academic press has felt like a risk. But I, I wanted to do it because I felt that the stories that had been entrusted with me needed to be shared with as many people as possible and that a trade press was, could do that better. So I think that those are maybe the things I, maybe those are the ways in which I'm living into those questions as best I can.
- [57:32]
B
Imperfectly. Well, we've taken a lot of your time, and so maybe we'll just cycle to the last couple questions and here I will just say, well, actually, I'll let you say that. So the first question I always ask is, do you have a book suggestion or a movie or a documentary, something that the audience can go to that was meaningful to you, whether that's an academic text or a memoir or something that, that you would suggest that we would benefit from reading or watching or listening.
- [58:04]
C
To? Oh, yeah, lots. If you are interested in the Guatemalan genocide or just in the violence and the aftermath in Guatemala. Diane Nelson's trilogy on Guatemala, A Finger in the Wound, Reckoning, and who Counts are such powerful, creative books. They're also wonderful books for anyone who's interested in writing. They're so beautifully written. So those I would recommend wholeheartedly. I also always like. I like to read fiction, too. That sort of. When I'm thinking about my ethnographic research, I really find fiction to be a great resource. So I really loved Rodrigo Ray Rosa's Human Matter, which is about the police archive. Well, it's not just about. It's about many things, but it's in part grounded in the police archive in Guatemala City. Another novel that I found very powerful is by Patricio Prawn, an Argentine writer that's called My Father's Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain. And this looks at the kind of intergenerational trauma of the disappearances in Argentina. I also love poetry, so Javier Zamora's Unaccompanied has been very meaningful to me and Natalie Diaz's work. So those are just some.
- [59:40]
B
Recommendations. But yeah, well, I now have a number of good excuses to postpone grading. Well, I mean, things that are important to my profession and to my life. So thank you very much. The last question, and here I'll say you've continued to write for a popular audience, and I would point the listeners to articles you've written in particular a really interesting one about the Ukraine. But where can people follow you and what are you up to.
- [60:09]
C
Next? Yeah, well, I've just made a website that's alexaheggerty.com so you could find me there or on Twitter, also under Alexa Haggerty, and a little bit on Instagram. So those are some places that you could follow me and I could follow you back. So what I work on now is I have shifted. I've really shifted when I realized that I was not kind of, I couldn't work on forensic exhumation forever because it was. Was so profoundly difficult. Even though I feel very privileged to have done this research, I've really turned my attention to thinking about the human rights implications of emerging technologies, particularly technologies of mass surveillance like facial recognition technology, because I do see these as some of the raising some of the most profound questions about human rights and unfortunately, probably about genocide that we face now. So that's really what I am. That's where my attention has. Has turned now, is to looking at these emerging technologies. So I'm also, you know, investigating other forms of writing like fiction and poetry. So we'll see where that takes.
- [61:35]
B
Me. Well, wherever it takes you, I hope that you'll come back and talk with us again. We have been talking with Alexa Haggerty about her book Still Life With Bones. Genocide, Forensic and what. Excuse me, Genocide, Forensics and what Remains. It's a terrific book. I encourage you to go out and get it. But in the meantime, Alexa, thank you so much for joining us and I hope we'll talk again.
- [61:57]
C
Soon. Thank you so.