Missing pieces and body parts: On bodily integrity and political violence

• Published in: Death studies 2024-11, p.1-11
• Main Author: Auchter, Jessica
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0748-1187; 1091-7683; 1091-7683
• DOI: 10.1080/07481187.2024.2424028

While much attention is paid to what happens to dead bodies after political violence, disaster, or atrocity, less attention has been paid to body parts, despite the wide-ranging efforts, both material (often forensic) and discursive, to reconstitute or resuscitate the whole dead body. Materializing the whole body is often considered key to truth-telling mechanisms and for closure for family members of the missing and dead, thus the body part is often posited as a problem in need of a solution. We are seeing, largely due to advances in forensic technologies, an increasing belief that all body parts be identified and distinguished from other materials, and , therefore, be recovered and repatriated to the whole body in its death. To explore this dynamic, I make two key arguments. First, I suggest that reassembling bodies is framed as a mechanism of re-subjectification that is key to reconciliation and justice after political violence. A body part is an object, but a dead body is in most contexts still considered a subject, even dead, so putting a dead body back together is considered re-humanizing and gives the dead body back its political agency. Second, I suggest that when this cannot be done materially due to the obstacles posed by modern warfare, we often see governance techniques that seek to do so discursively.