Jonah - Summaries

Accidently thinking the book was assigned for last session only, I decided to read most all of it and I talked about it in my last blog entry. "To Know Where He Lies" by Sarah Wagner discusses the use of scientific technology and the aid it serves in identifying the unknown deceased.  The Bosnian War, which took place from 1992-1995, was one of Europe's worst atrocities since the second World War.  The aftermath revealed a hoard of unmarked mass graves housing genocide victims in Srebrenica, which at the time was designated a UN "safe area."  The innovative genetic technology that was implemented in located over 8 thousand Bosnian Muslim men and boys serves as a focus for the rest of the book.  Unique is the intermixing of a faith in a scientific technological advance, the collective memories of people in the aftermath of the horrible events of the war, and imagination as to what happened and how recovery can best be situated.  The absence felt among the communities in questioned and the process of rebuilding plays interestingly with the added use of this genetic identity tool to help bring sense to the aftermath. 

              A unique concept that I stuck to was the idea of innovative science bringing us closer as a community and with our loved ones.  Typically, at least this is my opinion of our highly modernized world, technology seems to separate us from those in the surrounding vicinity, whether we are buried in phones, working on personal assignments for school on our laptops, or working away in an engineering lab performing hours-long experiments.  However, it is unique that such a tool for personal identification in a time when absence and utter loss was abound, serves to enhance our connections with each other, or at least offer a sense of closure for the deceased people’s loved ones.  Faith in genetic identification allows a community previously unaware of such an ability, to put their efforts in aiding the process and in turn, gaining this closure provided through science above their levels of knowledge and personal experience, especially considering the lived experiences that have crippled them in their near-past.