STILL LIFE WITH BONES

An anthropologist recounts sifting through the remains left by horrific crimes in Guatemala and Argentina.

There have been numerous books on forensic anthropology in the last two decades, when DNA studies and other techniques have been refined for field and laboratory studies of crime. Clea Koff’s The Bone Woman, for instance, describes research in Rwanda, Bosnia, and other killing fields. Hagerty’s first book fits neatly in this tradition, distinguishing itself from other entries by its musings on the nature of political violence. The governor of Buenos Aires Province put it most graphically in the days of the military dictatorship: “First we will kill all of the subversives, then we will kill all of their collaborators, then those who sympathize with subversives, then we will kill those that remain indifferent, and finally we will kill the timid.” Fortunately, the regime collapsed before his vision could be realized; unfortunately, many thousands of Argentinian citizens died, and Hagerty has worked diligently to identify them. The bloodbath was even worse in Guatemala, where, “in a country of eight million people, there were 200,000 dead” after years of government massacres meant to suppress civil unrest. As Hagerty uncovers mass graves and crawls into burial pits and remote caves full of bones, she reflects on the nature of her work, particularly how difficult it is to isolate single victims in a jumble of remains. “The excavation is three-dimensional, sculptural, a Rubik’s Cube,” she writes. Things become more clinical and even less human while cutting away pieces of bone in order to study the DNA, a reliable means of connecting a body to a name—“and with a name, a body can be given a proper burial.” Hagerty is soulful but unsentimental, and she closes with just the right conundrum: With so much knowledge of horrific crimes, how can one return to “the manicured lawns and temperature-controlled archives of the university”?

A powerful meditation on life, death, and sorting out what can be saved of death in life.