Culture Versus Science and Technology

Some of the ideas in the third chapter of To Know Where He Lies really reminded me of what I discussed in my blog post about DNA testing last week. Separate from the idea of possible inaccuracy in DNA testing, is the idea that even concrete, correct results, may not offer the closure people are looking for. While it is indeed amazing that the technology to identify the thousands of bodies that were unceremoniously and inhumanely buried, is now available, the grief that these egregious doings caused, cannot be abated by this technology.

           

            This idea was approached from two angles, one being that the cultural beliefs of the Bosnian Muslim people, conflict with the type of genetic testing that was done.  Since the testing done was primarily based on mitochondrial DNA, and thus of the female lineage, this “may have seemed incongruous with Bosnian Muslims' kinship reckoning, which is primarily agnatic," or based on a male governed lineage (p. 117). Not uncommon to medical anthropological ethnographies is the struggle to reconcile cultural beliefs about medicine with scientific medical knowledge; I have seen countless examples of this especially in studies about maternity and childbirth. Women in severe obstructed labour will go to their village shaman instead of traveling to a hospital to get a required C-section. Thankfully the conflict of belief here is not potentially life threatening, but the emotional trauma that could persist if a mother does not believe she has found her dead son’s body is nonetheless scarring.

Another reason the author discusses as to why a family might not accept the genetic identification of a loved one’s remains is rooted in the emotional trauma of the situation. Regardless of the fact that these tests may offer the most concrete, most reliable, scientifically accessible confirmation, this may not be congruent with emotional acceptance on the part of the family. The horror of the genocide and of its repercussions shook me in this particular quote describing a mother signing paperwork acknowledging her son’s identification: “She accepted officially what emotionally and rationally she denied: her son's death…For her, all the sophistication and precision of DNA analysis could not make sense of her loss of reorder of her life. In that moment the technology offered few consolations, despite its impressive statistics,” (p. 118). Too often we think that science and technology can solve all of our problems and provide all of the answers. The truth is that while they may be able to outline the facts and tell us what is true and what is false, they offer little condolence relative to the hardships these facts may bring.