Still Life with Bones: A forensic quest for justice among Latin America s mass graves : CHOSEN AS ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2023 BY FT READERS AND THE NEW YORKER - Alexa Hagerty

Still Life with Bones: A forensic quest for justice among Latin America s mass graves

CHOSEN AS ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2023 BY FT READERS AND THE NEW YORKER

By: Alexa Hagerty

Paperback | 14 March 2023 | Edition Number 1

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An anthropologist working with forensic teams and victims' families to investigate crimes against humanity in Latin America explores what science can tell us about the lives of the dead in this haunting account of grief, the power of ritual, and a quest for justice.

"Exhumation can divide brothers and restore fathers, open old wounds and open the possibility of regeneration-of building something new with the pile of broken mirrors that is loss and mourning."

Over the course of Guatemala's thirty-year armed conflict -the longest ever in Central America-over 200,000 people were killed. During Argentina's military dictatorship in the seventies, over 30,000 people were disappeared. Today, forensic anthropologists in each country are gathering evidence to prove atrocities and seek justice. But these teams do more than just study skeletons-they work to repair families and countries torn apart by violence.

In Still Life with Bones, anthropologist Alexa Hagerty learns to see the dead body with a forensic eye. She examines bones for evidence of torture and fatal wounds-hands bound by rope, cuts from machetes-but also for signs of a life lived: to articulate how life shapes us down to the bone. A weaver is recognized from the tiny bones of the toes, molded by years of kneeling before a loom; a girl is identified alongside her pet dog. In the tenderness of understanding these bones, Hagerty discovers how exhumation serves as a ritual in the naming and placement of the dead, and connects ancestors with future generations. She shows us how this work can bring meaning to families dealing with unimaginable loss, and how its symbolic force can also extend to entire societies in the aftermath of state terror and genocide. Encountering the dead has the power to transform us, making us consider each other, our lives, and the world differently.

Weaving together powerful stories about investigative breakthroughs, grieving families, histories of violence, and her own forensic coming of age, Hagerty crafts a moving portrait of the living and the dead.

About the Author

Alexa Hagerty is an anthropologist, researcher, and scholar of science, technology, and society. She holds a PhD from Stanford and is an associate fellow at the University of Cambridge. Her research has received honours and funding from the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Ethnological Society, among others. She has written for The Los Angeles Review of Books, Wired, Social Anthropology, and Palais de Tokyo.
Industry Reviews
Still Life With Bones is a stunning book, which forces the reader to ask themselves questions about grief, justice, the cruelty humans are capable of, and what it means to be human in the first place. I learnt so much about the quiet but essential work forensic anthropologists are doing as they slowly and carefully uncover the recent, violent, past in many countries, and bring some closure to relatives still searching for their missing loved ones. Dr Alexa Hagerty's writing is beautiful. The dedication of the people she meets shines through, offering hope that there can be some accountability for the crimes that have taken place, as well as a warning to anyone who might carry them out in the future.

Meticulous, luminous, utterly brilliant. The prose is as delicate and sharp as a ribcage, but the book's beating heart is Alexa Hagerty's wise and compassionate voice, a welcome guide through the atrocities she documents. Equally powerful on the horrors we do one another and the care we are capable of, Still Life with Bones is essential reading as a human.

Touching but achingly honest-a most amazing account of training as a forensic anthropologist...When Hagerty talks about 'lives being violently made into bones,' I defy you not to be moved. The text is unflinching, but then the crimes and the victims deserve nothing less. I guarantee that this will make you think long and hard about cruelty and human rights and the dedication and humanity of the forensic scientist.

Still Life with Bones will hold readers rapt. Hagerty takes us deeply inside the experience of an anthropologist learning to dispassionately decode scientific clues while never forgetting that in each bone there is a brutally murdered person who still cries.... A startling and profound meditation on death and resilience.

In this unforgettable debut, Alexa Hagerty reveals the intimacy and sacredness of forensics, revealing it as a task that, despite its Sisyphean nature, is ever-more vital to the preservation of memory, story, and ritual-a slow, intricate counterweight to the obliterating power of modern violence. Still Life with Bones is at once horrifying and impossibly hopeful.

Still Life with Bones is a well-researched, electrifying read, full of profound personal insight and intellectual generosity. Bones tell chilling stories about our past, but they preserve, too, the potency of alternative outcomes. Alexa Hagerty unlocks this possibility with wisdom and compassion.

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