Reading Response 9/22

The reading this week laid out the use of DNA technology (with forensic anthropological techniques use) as well as the organizations backing them and their collective response. Rationale for the DNA identification program is framed as a quest for a truthful, humanitarian effort to bring the identities of the dead and missing back from a state of nothing-ness. Formerly, remains were simply that, objects in decomposition. These new technologies, whose development the author traces, assigned a newfound meaning and significance to them by assigning them identity.

This week, I am interested in the anthropological discussion of the DNA technology that Wagner uses, principally with the idea that the identities of the missing persons were "codified and institutionalized in order to make them socially significant" (90). This means, the recognition that these were people whose existence was made null by acts of genocide, a term which wasn't used to reference the massacre until later in 2001 during the International Criminal Tribunal Case of Radislav Krisic. In addition, the development of the DNA identification technology took the effort leaps and bounds from the forensic methods used, which only were able to identify a scant number of people and which moved with painfully slow progress.

The idea of social significance leads well into the next point, which is the complication factor of such a massive undertaking. The fact that identification was made irrevocably difficult by the intermixing of various personal artifacts and creation of mass secondary graves makes these efforts all the more impressive. Personal histories and blood samples were collected from family members of the missing in order to assign to them a humanity which had stripped away. However, Wagner goes on to argue her concept of DNA as synecdoche and puts that into the context of Bosnian understanding. She argues that a certain de-humanization of the missing had to be enacted, putting all of their genetic information onto a barcode while ignoring personal narrative. This same temporary de-humanization (DNA technology) would "become the critical, entrusted, indeed, indispensable proof of individual identity for the thousands of sets of nameless mortal remains." (Wagner 119). However, the fact that this work occured in conjunction with familial narratives and other evidence given is not to be understated. In essence, genes and DNA are the primary locus of identitty, important above all else, but at times illegible to the greater Bosnian community, whose women and girls (the primary suppliers of DNA) did not understand or believe in the greater implications due to an ingrained structure of limited education. Here, we again should note the response and systems of those who are being affected, for in their eyes, DNA was not nearly as salient or relevant. This was further constrained by a research methodology that did not entirely map onto the conceptual model for Bosnian kinship relations.

By so breaking down the pathology of the research in Srebrenica, we are able to take a surprisingly humanistic viewpoint at the experience of the affected Bosnians (alive and deceased) through a look at communal response to a development which would impart to them knowledge they never thought they'd have. We learn through Wagner's analysis that this response was in turn informed by the cultural economy and psychology (see the woman's dilemma of her two sons in Ch. 5) of the time.