Who are "you"?

                Wagner covers a broad range of topics in chapters 3 through 5 in To Know Where He Lies, but I want to focus on her discussion of the issue that arose among the ICMP case workers regarding whether or not to notify family members in the case of incomplete remains. Should families be notified of their missing relative's status the moment a single bone is found, even if the rest of the body has not been recovered and may not even be found in the same secondary mass grave? Or should the ICMP wait until a full body has been recovered, at the risk of prolonging the family's suffering over the uncertainty of their loved one's fate? The ICMP eventually settled on a seemingly arbitrary value of 70% of bones as constituting a "complete" body, but they revised their protocol after family representatives voted for the discovery of even a single bone as sufficient grounds for notification. Even this was unsatisfactory to some families notified in accordance to this process - why was the ICMP notifying them when they had only found their relative's collarbone or femur? Why weren't they waiting to notify them after they had found the relative himself?

              

                 I was especially interested in this bit because it brings up important anthropological and philosophical issues regarding what constitutes a “person”. How much of someone can be taken away before they cease to be themselves? Does the loss of an arm or leg result in a loss of identity? Probably not, but what about decapitation? Is the bottom half "their" body, or is the top half "their" head? Ancient Egyptians viewed the heart as the seat of the soul, but the brain seems to have taken up that role in more recent times.

              

                 But is the person even rooted in any sort of physical remains at all? Wagner noticed that relatives of the genocide victims oftentimes responded more strongly to recovered personal possessions than they did to actual remains. The stark disparity between their last memories of the relatives they lost, still very alive at the time, and the sterile remains lying on the table often proved to be irreconcilable and  a major obstacle towards acceptance of the identification. A watch, a cigar box, or any other personal keepsake - in the same or similar state as it was in all those years ago - did a much better job at bridging that gap between the past and the now. People are defined by others in the context of their actions and their influences on other people. When someone dies, when their body stops acting as father a brother or a son, where has the person gone?

Wagner, Sarah E. To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for Srebrenica's Missing. Berkeley: University of California, 2008. Print. pp145-185