Technoscientific Musings at WUSTL

In To Know Where He Lies, Sarah Wagner analyzes how DNA identification in post war Bosnia plays a role in not only finding missing bodies of loved ones, but also in the people’s coming to terms with death and in a reconstruction of death as a social structure.

It was interesting how Wagner described the horrific act of commingling and separating the dead bodies of the fallen bodies as a kind of innovation that the Bosnian Serbs patented. It was a new way of further dehumanizing the corpses from their legacies to try to erase them. The decision of the government to use DNA technology to identify all the bodies also made me happy, even though Wagner qualified this move as political and necessary. I thought the push for identification exemplified how significance is a very human concept, and seemingly small things could become meaningful through a human perspective. I always found it hopeful how whenever we find a skeleton, such as in the case of the skeleton found under a parking lot later identified to be an old king, we always scramble to identify it. This idea of identity and a rush to assign significance illuminates, in my opinion, the need for us to give meaning to the dead bodies and to recognize their lives as lived. I was grateful that the government that introduced the DNA technology for identification recognized this need for the families to come to terms with the deaths of their loved ones and accommodated them, even if it was a political move.

However, one issue that arose that I found important was that some of the families or family members did not understand what DNA was, or did not accept the verdicts of the DNA technology. This stood out to me because of how, to these families, foreign technologies did not offer any help for closure, and showed the limitations of technologies if they do not have any authority in the culture that they are displaced into. To some, explaining that small fragments of molecules in their bodies were what encoded for their entire body may seem as mystical as myths. This highlights that no matter how hard scientists may try to force closure and healing, those things ultimately happen internally, in the community or individually.

Overall I thought that this reading was an important foil to other readings that we’ve had in the class. For example, in “How Medicine Constructs its Objects” Good asserted that medical students learn to dehumanize their patients into anatomical bodies, but this reading contrasted that with the idea that the DNA identification that was used in Bosnia served to reassign social significance to the corpses. It showed that technology can manifest in many forms, but it is always important to analyze its impact on the communities in which it is utilized.