Jessica Auchter is a full professor and research chair in visual culture in international studies at Université Laval in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada. She explores the management of dead bodies after mass violence and how institutions grapple with this challenge. 

In this episode we talk about:

Find more about Jessica Auchter through her websites:

and the following:

Notes from the start

Clea Koff’s 2004 book The Bone Woman: Among the Dead in Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo.

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Transcript

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right, thank you very much for responding to my email, number one. And talking about dead people is always a conversation-ender. And here we’re actually going to have a conversation about dead people. Yay. So, Jessica, please introduce yourself and tell us where you are and what you do.

Jessica Auchter: Thank you so much. So I’m Jessica Auchter. I’m a full professor and research chair in visual culture in international studies at Universite Laval in Quebec City, Canada. so before that I worked at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga for 10 years before moving up to Quebec. So my background is mostly in international studies. My degree is in global politics. But for a long time, I’ve been working with issues of memory, memorialization and its representation and the larger kind of dynamics of the politics of violence and how we think about the aftermath of violence, its effects and those sorts of dynamics. So, I have a wide-ranging interest in those kinds of issues that ultimately led me to this focus on dead bodies, which as you said, is often more of a conversation ender than a conversation starter. So, I’m really excited to get the chance to talk about it at length today.

Yvonne Kjorlien: That is quite a change. I mean, not just from Tennessee to Quebec, but also from what you were studying to now. How are you dealing with, I mean, I guess both culture shifts?

Jessica Auchter: Yeah, it’s interesting. So, the move up here was sort of a natural move because I’ve been working for a long time in the dynamics of kind of visual representation. And so, when the position opened up where I am now for an opportunity to work directly with the kind of dynamics of visual representations of violence and human rights violations, it was kind of a no-brainer to make the move.

But I think for a long time I’ve been interested in the dynamics of violence. Originally it started with an interest in genocide and the aftermath of genocide and the larger politics of memory. But I think over time what I started to realize is that many people who were interested in these kinds of issues were focused a lot on the institutional dynamics of reconciliation after atrocity, after genocide. So it was a lot about peace processes, political reconciliation, institutional mechanisms of justice, but that in many of these instances you were dealing with a very material aftermath of dead bodies. So after genocide, yes, you do have all these issues of political reconciliation and institutional dynamics and rebuilding of state structures and governments, but you also have a lot of dead bodies that are sort of scattered around on the ground. And there is the kind of problem of: How do you deal with them? How do you bury them according to local traditions? How are these understandings contested? What are the involvement of international actors in the kind of dynamics of the materiality of dead bodies after atrocity?

And it started with the genocide context but kind of broadened over time. But also how do you reckon with some of the dilemmas associated with these dead bodies who are often articulated in the context of truth narratives. So I think it started with an interest in violence and its aftermath. But I started to realize that for a lot of people, their immediate experience of political violence had a lot more to do with the materiality of dead bodies or the loss of loved ones and some of these narratives than the kind of attention that academics were paying to these kind of larger scale political and social reconciliation processes.

So that’s where it began is with this interest in kind of bottom up, I’ll say, dynamics of the materiality of dead bodies and just the reality that this is often a management problem. You just have a lot of dead bodies. Sometimes they’re in mass graves, sometimes we don’t know what happened to them, sometimes they’re disappeared. And so at the beginning it was a lot about the way this was framed as a management problem and also the connection between dead bodies and their integration into memorial sites, like memorial museums and that sort of thing. 

And then over time I started to think a lot more about how the reality of modern conflict, warfare, human rights violations was that we don’t see the kind of whole body in the way that is often kind of idealized. You’re not just excavating a mass grave and uncovering an entire person, identifying that person, returning them to their loved ones. That isn’t really– and then being able to kind of describe a narrative of what happened to them. That’s not really how it works. You have suicide bombings where body parts are integrated in urban sort of spaces. You have terrorist attacks like September 11th where you have bodies and body parts being combined with rubble. And then you also have governments that are deliberately trying to disaggregate bodies in order to hide what happened to them, especially in the context when governments are perpetrators of human rights violations. So I think over time my interest in dead bodies also led me more recently to this kind of interest in body parts and the questions of bodily integrity that emerge in the article that I recently wrote that was published in the Journal of Death Studies on bodily integrity.

Yvonne Kjorlien: There’s a lot there. So, just we’re going to unpack some of that. I mean, it’s all fabulous, but yeah, let’s start to unpack some of that.  So, I find it interesting that you took up the position at Laval, in this Canadian structure where we’re going through this truth and reconciliation with how Canada has treated its indigenous people and everything that’s come of that, including possible burial sites at residential schools and how we’re all coping with that, through investigations, through management, and if we leave them in the ground? Do we investigate? Do we dig them up? And even just involving indigenous community in that, how does that all look like? So, I find that very interesting that you’ve moved back to Canada during that time.

Jessica Auchter: Yeah, it is interesting. So, living in the US, there’s a big struggle with sort of engaging with some of its own of sordid history. In Canada, you see a lot more of a deliberate effort to try to sort of engage this conversation, but the conversation is still quite fraught. And there’s a lot of sort of contestation. And I think some of that comes from assumptions about what should happen that often govern our interaction with mass grave sites or with historical memory more broadly.

But I think also some of it comes from the idea that dealing with mass graves is a problem for them over there or it has become something that we think of as being associated with a post-conflict context in, for example, the developing world rather than in the developed world. Canada is the country that sends its military to engage in humanitarian missions in post-conflict.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, we don’t have that problem here. right?

Jessica Auchter: Yes. So I think that there’s this sort of disjuncture in our sense of who Canada is and then this kind of sorted historical memory that emerges at some of these sites. And so the conversation immediately begins with this fracture in the sort of sense of identity of who we are. And I think immediately from that comes this sort of desire to manage and govern that: Oh, my goodness, there’s this significant trauma. What can we do about it? And so management of trauma — and this is something that I’ve found quite extensively throughout my research trajectory –is that management of trauma is often kind of the first response, especially by government actors but often by communities as well. This trauma has emerged, now we have to manage it, because our goal is to try to end it and it has sort of ruptured up.

I think for a lot of victim communities the opposite is sort of true. That they are trying to find ways to live with that trauma or, in the Canadian case, they have already been living with the trauma that emerged out of the context of these residential schools. In some cases there was awareness of what was going on. In some cases there might not have been knowledge of the extent to which these sorts of things were happening even within the communities that were affected by it. But in a lot of cases the trauma was already a lived experience for some of these communities. And now you see this complicated set of circumstances where you have the material after effects of this atrocity that are emerging.  You have questions of what to do with it, but you have this sort of almost automatic response by a lot of actors to kind of try to manage trauma out of the public sphere and into the private sphere. And that’s often what we see for burials or reburials is that it is the burials occur as a mechanism to mobilize dead bodies out of the public sphere, where they’re not supposed to be, back into the private sphere, where they can be managed within certain communities.

There are some exceptions to this of course, but I think often that can put institutions at odds with local communities who are trying to live with that trauma or sort of sit with it, rather than overcome it or manage it. And I think it can also contribute to the sense that these stories are trying to be mobilized out of the public eye at the same time that we’re trying to reckon with the complex stories of these trauma.  So I think in a lot of my research what I found is dead bodies kind of emerge as a problem and that’s often how they’re situated. And of course when people are violently killed or killed through deprivation or sort of other sources, it is a problem, no doubt. But I think there’s a difference between thinking of this as an issue the causes of these deaths and then thinking of it as a problem that needs to be managed in terms of grave management, excavations, reburials, which is often what we see as the institutional response.

And one thing that we’re seeing a lot in the context of forensic efforts kind of worldwide is that there are tensions between local communities and international actors or national actors or these kind of systems of management because they’re not always coherent with one another and sometimes local communities have different senses. 

So I think my initial sense especially of the Canadian case but of others is always that it is up to local communities to decide kind of like what mechanisms of justice, reconciliation, and all of that, should be sort of privileged and it is the opening of the conversation rather than the closing of it that often allows for these kind of complex working-throughs of some of this trauma. So dead bodies are the initial opening into that conversation if we allow them to function in that way, or at least they can be.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I find this very interesting in that I’m seeing a kind of parallel with just death in general in North America. I’ve had conversations on this podcast and outside of it with people in the funeral industry in where, the funeral industry has sort of a hold on how we deal with death. The dead body is taken away, it’s put into a place. It’s taken care of in a coffin and you never see it again. And it’s very disconnected from the family. And if there’s any cultural tradition or family closure ceremony that they want to do, traditionally historically it wasn’t really included in the funeral industry and now they’re beginning to open it up to where the individual can, I guess, reconnect with the dead and say goodbye and do their ceremony and whatever the individual needs to do. So that management is becoming, I guess, less controlling, less encompassing. And so I just find that an interesting parallel that we’re also seeing that at a very high level institutional, like national, international governance and management level as well versus the community or sometimes even the individual.

Jessica Auchter: Yeah. Yeah. I think that for a long time we’ve made assumptions about, especially in the west, especially in North America, that certain types of management of the dead are sort of appropriate and we’ve connected those with larger narratives of who is civilized and who isn’t. So civilized countries, death is not in the public sphere. Death is in the private sphere. And even for family members of the dead, it’s often sort of mobilized out of particular spaces, like the home into the kind of funeral management kind of industry. And so it has often been seen as a marker of civilization that someone dies, they do not remain in the public sphere. They most certainly are not, for example, burned on a funeral pyre in public, and then their bodies are buried in graves and it’s fine for family members to come visit them in particular spaces. But they don’t stay in the home. There’s no period of observance where family members are with the corpse aside from potentially viewings in funeral homes which are very heavily managed, not like in the space of a home that we see in some other cultural contexts.

So I think for a long time it wasn’t just cultural differences. It was those cultural differences were perceived in a hierarchical manner from a values-laden perspective: like you’re civilized if you mobilize death outside of the public sphere. And it’s only places that are uncivilized that have these sorts of practices. So there’s a hierarchy of values attributed to how people engage with the dead. 

But I think from a global perspective and from the context of political violence, which is a context that I’m interested in from a research perspective, what one thing that we see is that there’s often an assumption made that certain parts of the world are more prone to having these sort of deaths and dead bodies publicized. It’s no surprise if there are dead bodies in the streets in Iraq, but in the US that’s an identity rupture. So there’s this kind of naturalization of death in the public sphere.

Several years ago I wrote a book chapter called Death in this Country is Normal which is drawn from a quotation by a doctor that was talking a little bit about these sort of quiet deaths from disease in the global south and the normalization of death and  how we envision which deaths count and which deaths don’t count.  But I think in many cases death has become normalized and public deaths have become normalized to the extent that political violence is assumed to be the norm in some places and then those deaths enter the public sphere. And that’s why it’s then seen as perfectly appropriate for western entities or international entities to come in and assist with that management of dead bodies, because it’s sort of necessary to re-civilize these contexts where they are so uncivilized that they have to have their death in the public sphere and they can’t manage their death on their own.

So I think there’s a kind of a larger international dynamic when it comes to political violence where two things happen.  First, death in certain places is sort of seen as normalized. And then, second, that kind of justifies international intervention in the context of death management. But one of the other effects of it is that when we do see dead bodies in the public sphere in the west, it is seen as sort of sufficiently jarring that it is not only like a wound to governance, sovereignty, management, all of these things, but it’s kind of a wound to identity. And a lot of people have suggested that September 11th sort of posed this for the United States. That you had dead bodies, body parts in the public sphere and immediately there was this huge concern as to how we manage it and this tension between the sort of national dimensions and the family members of the dead. But you have authorities in New York saying we’re going to identify every single piece of human remains that emerge out of that, which ,of course, is physically and forensically not possible.  But you see increasingly these kind of cases where bodies are combined with rubble. And I think the September 11th case is one of the ones that got me interested in this dynamic of body parts, not just dead bodies, because you have this huge challenge to resuscitating the body for burial, for family members.

And you see that also at this similar time period, suicide bombings, and that pose similar challenges, increased forms of urban warfare where you see, people being killed in environments where their bodies are more likely to combine with sort of urban rubble and that sort of thing on a global scale. So there’s kind of an interesting dynamic under which these deaths are being normalized in certain places and then they appear to us as more exceptional in the contexts that we are more familiar with or the contexts that global leaders sort of tend to reside in, like the west.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Let’s talk about that, the body parts because that’s the article that kind of got me in touch with you, in Death Studies: “Missing Pieces and Body Parts: On Bodily Integrity and Political Violence”. In it, you talk about ,I guess, the tendency for us to look at body parts as not human or the human being as less than when they are not whole, and how to make a whole human being and what do we consider whole. And I found that very interesting and since September 11th, as you mentioned, there’s  been, documentaries and articles and stories come out about, yeah, how do we navigate that? How do we reconcile our definition of what is a whole human being with what we’re finding from the rubble? And not just from a personal individual, family standpoint that very grounded in the now, but also, from insurance purposes? If somebody has lost a leg in an accident, insurance companies have costs for how much a leg is and therefore how much they should compensate the person for losing that leg. This all has, I think, a bigger scope than just the 911, but I think, as you said, it brought it really to the forefront. Let’s talk about this concept of wholeness and how body parts just does not fit into that.

Jessica Auchter: Yes. Yes. I mean, I think for a long time, I’ve been interested in human remains, dead bodies, and the aftermath of violence. And one thing that I realized is that in a lot of the conversations that were being had about this, especially in academic circles, the body was being envisioned as sort of and defined in one particular way as this sort of whole thing, human remains. It’s sort of like our traditional understandings. It’s a body inside a grave or it’s a body that should be buried inside a grave.

And that was, in a substantive way, a mismatch with a lot of what was happening in the human rights practice realm where you see for forensic efforts to resuscitate the body. but the reality of what we were dealing with is very much body parts, not whole bodies.  But the more I started to think about the goal of a lot of these forensic efforts, the more I realized that it very much was the resuscitation of the bodily whole. And the idea was we need to get all these parts and gather them together and give them to the family members. And that was being situated very heavily within narratives of justice. Sort of like what brings justice to the family, returning their loved one, but not just returning their loved one, returning their loved one whole.

And that was connected often with these sort of narratives of truthtelling. We won’t know what happened unless or until we can return the whole body of the victim to their family member. So it’s kind of like this complex intersection of these narratives of justice and truthtelling with also these narratives of sort of loved ones interactions with the bodies of their family members. And I think, as you said, it was highlighted quite significantly in the post-911 kind of context but it has been something that was being navigated in the kind of couple of decades preceding that.  You have even the sort of classic case of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, the Argentina desaparecidos, you have this demand, and they demanded the return of their loved ones whole. There is this kind of language of wholeness situated within a lot of these demands. You have in the 1990s the sort of post-Bosnia era where you see these forensic excavations and the attempt is to kind of reaggregate body parts that have been disaggregated. I think Rwanda is also an interesting case because you don’t have the financial commitment from international partners to engage in extensive forensic excavation. But as I mentioned in the Death Studies article, even when I visited Rwanda in 2011 on a research trip, they were still undergoing excavation of mass grave sites. and they were disaggregating body parts.

And in Rwanda, the politics of reburial is quite interesting because the government has reburied dead bodies often in some cases several times as a mechanism of sort of I’ll call it grave management, which I think is kind of interesting because we often think of forensic excavation as being completely apolitical but in many cases governments are using it connected with some of these narratives of reconciliation and truthtelling.  But you have this sort of long history then of the reality on the ground being body parts, and different actors reckon with it in different ways. But one thing that I started to realize over time is that you can see a consistency that there is a desire to resuscitate the whole and that’s connected with these narratives of truthtelling and justice for family members especially, even when that may not necessarily be connected directly with what family members want.

And then also that in cases where the resuscitation of the whole body was just forensically impossible, there was this sort of discursive effort to kind of resuscitate the whole. How can we do so through narratives, through storytelling? How can we tell a story about the body part standing in a way that makes us recall this sense of wholeness?

So there was this privileging of bodily integrity and when it was materially not possible, it was done through kind of storytelling and discursive mechanisms often by governments to try to sort of resuscitate this sense of wholeness.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Can you give an example for that?

There’s been several cases where governments or entities have sort of decided that it’s practically impossible to have the whole body. So instead, they’ll set thresholds of the quantity of human remains that are needed in order to refer to something as a full body. So even as far back as World War II, when they would resuscitate sets of human remains, over time guidelines were put in place that suggested as long as you had 3 kilograms of human remains, that was labeled a whole body that could be returned to family members for burial.  Here is the body of your loved one that went away to war and died. And in that case, it wasn’t a full body, but the sort of labeling of what counts as a body in a discursive sense labeled those parts as a whole body, even though from a scientific perspective, they most certainly were not.

And the same thing in Bosnia over time. At first, they would return body parts to family members sort of as they found them and identified them. Here are the remains of your loved one. But then the family members would get a phone call six months later. We have the remains of your loved one. We’ve already received the remains of our loved one and buried them. Well, we have more. and so sometimes they would receive more and more over time. And as a result, the International Committee on Missing Persons also has a threshold in the Bosnian case.  And the threshold has shifted and changed over time and by context, but a threshold of what percentage of a body has to be there for it to be a whole body. I believe it’s 75% in the Bosnian case or it became 75% at a certain point in time.

And the same thing, September 11th, people were getting phone calls. We found the human remains of your loved one. And then they would receive another phone call. We found another part and another part and another part. And they started to consider whether or not they should wait to inform family members or wait to give over the remains until they had a certain percentage. So you have in some sense this factual scientific definition of a whole body. We were resuscitating the whole body.  We found all the body parts and then you have this kind of discursive sense of what wholeness means. And in some cases it can be parts of a body that are labeled a whole body, but in other cases it can be bodies that were not able to be found at all. Missing persons and that sort of thing. And in these kinds of cases sometimes the truthtelling mechanisms take the place of the presence of the body. We don’t have the whole body, but here’s the story of what happened. And in some cases, you see burials of empty coffins. In some cases, you see people taking parts of rubble from September 11th and burying it as if it was their family member, even though there has been no identification.  In the article, I tell a story of a suicide bombing attack where there was mingled human remains and some whole bodies that were found but no ability to identify individuals. So they started to give out sets of remains to family members. And when they ran out of whole sets of remains, they just started giving out body parts. How many family members did you lose? Okay, here’s sort of two people. And that kind of dynamic.

So I think there’s a whole host of ways in which there is kind of compensation for missing pieces or compensation for lack of bodies. And at this point you often see governments or institutions kind of step in and they tell the story that they’ve managed to resuscitate the whole but that doesn’t always map on to the reality from a forensic perspective of what has actually happened. 

So what I find interesting is that bodily integrity is our goal. Why is it so difficult for us to admit when it’s simply sort of impractical, infeasible, or impossible in to resuscitate the whole body? Why do we refer to 3 kg of human remains as a whole body when it isn’t? And I think that fundamentally it’s underpinned by this kind of fear of the body part. The body part isn’t the whole body. The whole body we can justify its retention of human characteristics.

So this is where I look at kind of the sociocultural underpinnings of this assumption of bodily integrity.  And while I do think it differs by context, especially religious context or cultural context, I still think there is this kind of, at least an assumption that makes claims to being universal about bodily integrity, where already we have to justify that human remains are human rather than objects. They’re objects in some ways, but they’re also not objects in other ways. So human remains occupy this sort of liminal space where they’re sort of a thing but they’re also sort of a person but they’re also not a person but they’re also not a thing. I think that when that set of human remains retains human characteristics, a face, a complete body, it’s much easier to justify its sort of lingering humanness and its worthiness of dignity.  But a body part doesn’t resemble a human being very effectively. And so I think that’s one of the reasons why body parts are so jarring and why it’s so difficult to fit body parts into our narratives of kind of what counts as human and of dignity of the dead and all of that sort of thing.

And the other reason is that body parts are often treated as objects in other contexts. We can transplant body parts from one person to another. We can harvest them from dead bodies and those don’t pose, at least significant ethical issues in the same way that treatment of human remains raises. Also we amputate body parts all the time and those sorts of dynamics.

It’s kind of interesting because some of these understandings have changed over time. So during the civil war in the United States they would bury amputated limbs the same way you would bury dead bodies. People who were still living but had limbs amputated. And there were quite a lot of amputations but they would bury them with dignity. We don’t see that kind of understanding to the same extent anymore.

But I think also disability studies scholars have pointed to some of the issues with the privileging of bodily integrity that because we…if you think about it, when children start to learn how to draw human beings, they start with a stick figure. It sort of has a whole head. It has two arms. It has two legs. It has a torso. And over time they might add, features, a nose, two eyes.  So what about the person that doesn’t have two arms? What about the person that doesn’t have two legs or the body that looks different? So I think there is this kind of default human from a visual perspective and that default colors our interactions with the dead. That the whole human is the human. So if you don’t have the whole human, what does that mean for our understanding of what counts as human?

And it’s one of the reasons why in the article in Death Studies I asked the question: what counts as a body, and what counts as a body part? Because I think some of these questions don’t have as easy answers as we might think. And it also helps us think through some of the assumptions that we often come to the table with that color our perceptions of other things, like people with disabilities soldiers with amputated limbs or some of these kinds of dynamics. And also how we think about the solution to some of these problems.

So if you have soldiers with amputated limbs, for example, and the solution is prosthetics, this kind of mechanical solution where they become superhuman. Then what does that say about people who don’t have prosthetics either who don’t have access to it or who choose not to utilize them? People who are born with disabilities or become disabled through other reasons? Does that make them neither human nor superhuman? What does that mean? And the sort of subhuman ways in which people with incomplete bodies have often been situated in both a historical and contemporary context. So it has a lot of implications that are wider ranging than just the post-conflict context too.

But once I started thinking through it, I found all these contexts in which bodily integrity was not only privileged but also considered the default. And I was interested in not only what implications that has for kind of our sociocultural understandings of what counts as a body, but also what that means for the privileging of certain techniques of resuscitation of the whole body after conflict, like forensics.  If the body part is a problem, then how do you fix that problem? It has to be through forensic identification. But what happens if local communities don’t want forensic identification? Or what happens if the spiritual and cultural beliefs of particular communities are that when someone dies, their spirit infuses all of the rocks and trees in that sort of environment?  And so it isn’t about the bones and the sort of tissue, that doesn’t retain the sense of who that person was any longer. So what does that mean? That we continue to hold forensics as sort of the end- all be-all for resuscitating the whole human when that might be at odds with some of these other understandings of what counts as a body or what happens to people’s bodies after they die or how bodies interact with their surroundings, like urban rubble or natural landscapes, and those sorts of dynamics. So what does it mean that forensics has become the default answer to the problem of body parts?

When our assumptions are that bodily integrity is something that we absolutely like must have in order to have some kind of justice or dignity.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, we’ve talked a lot about sort of the rehumanization through wholeness, through regaining that bodily integrity and how organization, institutions, governments try to help with regaining that body integrity and rehumanization of the dead, not just for their national identity, but also for the family and the individual. So let’s take a moment to look at the flip side.  How do groups, governments dehumanize by focusing on the body parts? You mentioned earlier about deaggregating on purpose. So let’s talk a little bit about that because it gives a nice contrast to show just how deeply we are connected with this sense of wholeness as a human being.

Jessica Auchter: Yeah, I mean I think it’s no coincidence that dismemberment of bodies even after their death is considered a crime in many jurisdictions. But also from the perspective of international human rights law, bodily dismemberment is a human rights violation. So I think that’s no coincidence that that exists. I think one of the cases I find most interesting is that after the Bosnian genocide when you still had some of the Bosnian Serb militias that were roaming these areas even after the peace agreement, in a lot of cases they would return to sites where bodies were buried and literally take pieces of human remains and take them elsewhere and bury them because they knew that forensic excavations were coming. And some forensic anthropologists suggest this would happen even while forensic excavations were ongoing. Clea Koff’s book, The Bone Woman, where she talks about her involvement in some of these forensic excavations, she shares the story of this happening in the Bosnia context, where people would come in the middle of the night and they would take parts and ransack the graves. They wouldn’t take all of the human remains. So, it wasn’t an attempt to remove all of the evidence, but rather an attempt to both disrupt the evidence and remove the ability for people to resuscitate whole bodies.

Part of that is to sort of continue to hurt family members of those loved ones that wanted the whole bodies of their family members. Part of it was to disrupt the ability for forensic anthropologists to be able to tell the truth of what had happened.  Because if you don’t have the whole body then can you tell the story about how that individual died, it may be more difficult. So there’s a connection too with this kind of truthtelling. If you don’t have the whole body how can you tell the truth of what had happened?

You still can in many cases, but I think just the fact that there was this deliberate attempt to kind of move around these bodies testifies to the extent to which there are certain actors that acknowledge that deliberate dismemberment is a human rights violation, but a deliberate dismemberment is a direct attempt to hurt victim communities and family members of those victims.  And you see this a lot in authoritarian regimes also. I mean, I think the Jamal Khashoggi case was a very well-known case of a Saudi journalist who was killed in the inside the Saudi embassy, and then his body was dismembered so that there would be no evidence of the crime and also because it’s more practical to take somebody out in body parts rather than as an entire corpse from an embassy if you’re trying to cover up the crime that was committed.

But I think you starting to see this more as sort of a tactic, these kinds of forms of dismemberment. And one of the narratives that underpins this is actually a narrative of a gendered narrative where the whole body is seen to be masculine in its strength, and the dismemberment of the body is sort of emasculating in significant ways.  And you see this a lot in the context of soldier communities or of classic warfare where soldiers who are injured are considered to be emasculated until their parts are resuscitated through prosthetics and that sort of thing.

But you also see this as a deliberate tactic of belligerent forces in an attempt to kind of emasculate the forces of other communities is you see dismemberment of soldiers but you also see dismemberment of civilian communities especially women in some cases. And you often see mutilation of bodies as a tactic because it demonstrates that the community wasn’t able to properly protect their vulnerable. So, it’s not uncommon to see in cases of genocide women’s breasts be sliced off or something like that. So, you have to ask what does that tactic achieve in the context of a genocide? If your goal is to exterminate a victim group, why would you mutilate a body like that? And I mean there’s another conversation about the role of sexual violence in the context of genocide. But I think mutilation which often partners with sexual violence but can also exist separate from it, but mutilation of the body or removal of particular body parts can often be seen as a direct attack on the identity of particular communities. And often an attempt to emasculate what are often seen as being the male authorities in a particular community by their inability to protect the women in their communities. So you often see female victims of this kind of violence in the context of genocide. If we think about sort of mutilation as a performance in many ways in the context of these cases of political violence, it often doesn’t serve any tactical purposes, like it doesn’t make it easier for that group to win to carry out this kind of mutilation. An attack on bodily integrity is a purposeful attack on the identity of a community group. It has both sort of symbolic and physical dimensions. That’s one of the things that I think is so interesting.

And then in the aftermath you have this sort of struggle to re-envision what counts as a body, how do we navigate it?  And in some contexts, that’s where you see the advent of technology to come into play, like prosthetics for soldiers who have lost limbs and that sort of thing. You don’t typically see that to the same extent obviously in communities that have been victims of this kind of mutilation that I was talking about in the genocidal context, just because you don’t have the funds that you see in a case like you see in the US Army.

But you still see this kind of struggle to reckon with these narratives of what it means to be whole, what it means to be a real woman or a real man or a real member of that community. So, it’s no coincidence that groups take up some of these tactics toward that end.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Right. And it’s not new either. I mean, even in archaeological contexts, we see that too. Desecration of graves, desecration of the dead, for an enemy to come in and do that sort of thing. And it helps demoralize and it’s a different type of I guess battle. It’s a different type of conquering or an attempt to conquer. But yeah, it’s not new.

Jessica Auchter: Yes. Yes. Exactly. But I think the fact that we see it as that communities see it and historically have seen it as sort of a valid or a viable tool for dehumanizing the enemy shows how much our sense of humanizing or human is bound up with this kind of bodily whole, the bodily integrity sort of idea.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Absolutely.

Jessica Auchter: This narrative works like these actions work precisely because of the assumptions we hold about the whole human body. Which exists in different ways across a variety of religious traditions, cultural traditions, so I don’t want to say it exists everywhere and is universal, but it seems to be fairly universalized at least across many different contexts despite some of these kind of cultural variations.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely. All right. You talked a little bit about how forensic investigations particularly, in mass conflicts, or terrorism, like 9/11, have had to reassess what wholeness is and body integrity and how we kind of come to terms with that. What other, I guess, shifts or perspective changes have you seen or do you predict might come with body integrity, especially in Canada now with the graves and residential schools and the expectation that they want to find bodies in the graves, but of course they don’t want to dig up the graves to find the bodies because that would be disturbing them. So, is there a whole body under there? I don’t know. And that expectation that we want the whole body, but we can’t have it. So, how do… future perspectives on how we kind of deal with that?

Jessica Auchter: Yeah, I think that one thing over the last years that I’ve seen that I think we will probably see more of is what I think of as technological solutions to this sort of problem. So I mentioned previously the technologies of prosthetics and that sort of thing and this idea of the of superhuman, the sort of transformer kind of thing. I think that forensics is often already posited in many ways as a technological solution to the problem of the post atrocity context.

And some of the recent emergence of this kind of narrative of the human right to know. That there has been this kind of the idea that not knowing is itself a human rights violation in many ways or a violation of the human right to know which has been kind of discussed in human rights legal circles, this kind of human right to know and codified in various ways as I understand it. That isn’t my area of expertise but as I understand it there has been this emergence of this human right to know. I think this kind of idea reinforces is a kind of scientific expertise that already exists in the context of forensics, but I think we will become even more technological and even more dominant in the years to come. So, it’s like if you can’t excavate mass graves for cultural reasons at residential schools, you can acquire sophisticated earth scanning tools that will sort of enable you to be able to tell what’s under the ground.

So I think we’re trending in a direction more and more towards technical dimensions of scientific authority in ways that reinforce some of the narratives that already existed about scientific authority. Like the dominance of forensics that I talked about that sometimes you see even forensic excavations even when local communities don’t want them.

The reason for that is this dominance of scientific authority. You don’t know what’s good for you, but we do and we’ll get you the truth.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right?

Jessica Auchter:  I think that forensic excavations have given family members knowledge of what happened, have allowed for legal prosecution. So it’s not that I’m necessarily critical of the tools of forensics. I think they’re incredibly useful in a post conflict context. And in many cases, victim communities do want them and there isn’t, enough money to support these kinds of tools. I don’t mean to suggest that, they’re not wanted more broadly by victim communities, but I think in some instances, they’re not wanted, but yet they emerge in some context because of this set of politics of scientific authority.  So I suggest I would suggest that kind of in years to come we’re going to see that scientific authority continue but it will manifest in more technological ways. I think I’ll say it has interesting implications for how we think about bodily integrity and whether or not bodily integrity can itself be technological.

There are some scholars of media that have suggested that the idea of what counts as human is already being re-envisioned by not only artificial intelligence tools and all of that but also by our existence as data doubles in a variety of systems. That for governments you are yourself as a material person but you’re also your data double as it exists in a whole host of bureaucratic systems. So what it means to be human in the eyes of the state or the governments, or something like that, may have already sort of shifted and changed from the materiality of human beings a bit.

I’m not an expert in some of those technologies, but I think that one of the trends that I’m seeing and especially in some of my other research on the visualization of war and how we visually represent human rights violations is that we’re increasingly seeing reliance on technological tools and technological forms of scientific authority. So I think that will have an interesting impact in bodily integrity and some of these debates. 

But the other thing that I think we might be witnessing is a move away from the body as the key representative of human rights violations, for example. So I’m currently working on a project that thinks through how the media represented the Bucha massacre in Ukraine because you have media reports on a massacre. It was widely characterized as such. But in very very few of the images that emerged, you see dead bodies at all. You see a lot more of destruction of property, environmental destruction, and that sort of thing. And even though there have been some incredibly iconic images coming out of Gaza also of dead bodies, the majority of images emerging out of that case also are of urban rubble, destruction and that sort of thing.  So if you look on the whole at some of these: what does a massacre look like? What does an attack look like? These sorts of things, it looks like destruction of property, not necessarily destruction of human beings, even though we know that that is occurring.

So I think there’s something interesting there also about the extent to which we are directly engaging with the destruction of human beings and whether or not the human is still the central ,I’ll say, thing that is being destroyed in some of these contexts from the perspective of how we interact with images coming out or reports coming out of these types of incidents.  So I do wonder also, like I said, I raised the question like what counts as a human body. I wonder whether or not and to what extent human bodies will still be the most relevant indicator of conflicts going forward. And maybe that is sort of more of a turn towards some of these technological representations. Or maybe it’s also something to do with the fact that people are sort of war-weary. and there’s just sort of too many human rights violations in the world, and so dead bodies no longer have the salience as images that they used to. Although I’m not convinced they used to have that same degree of salience that we often assume. I think that that’s also an interesting question to think about with regards to the role that dead bodies play in our sensitization for human rights violations or for conflict in the sort of contemporary era.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s an interesting point and something sticks in my mind that the death toll in conflicts has gone down too. During World War II there are how many millions of people died in a span of time and if we look at the same sort of span of time and in other conflicts since the death toll has decreased. So it’s almost like we’ve become more efficient in our conflicts. I don’t know so maybe we just don’t have the numbers we used to?

Jessica Auchter: Yeah, it’s going it’s becoming more technological that sort of war is a video game so to speak.

I mean I say that, but I think the other interesting trend that we’re seeing in addition with lower death toll is the death toll burden is shifting more towards civilians than it did World War II. The preponderance of people who died in war were soldiers, in the contemporary context, the preponderance of people who die in war are civilians.

I think it also raises questions about which lives and death matters. This kind of dynamics of necropolitics, the governance of life and death, the politics of life and death, is also a politics of which lives and deaths matter.

I think there’s an interesting dynamic here. I raised the question earlier about or the dynamic earlier that we think of dead bodies as human sort of, they’re sort of human, they’re not things  but they sort of are  but they’re sort of not that they occupy this sort of in between space. I think there is important context in which dead bodies sort of are valued in particular ways equivalent to or more than live humans.  So on several occasions Israel has traded live terrorists, so to speak, or those that they refer to as such, for the dead bodies of Israeli soldiers that were held. So it’s like we will take the dead body of our comrade back and here’s several live individuals that we’re trading for them. So this kind of valuation like it isn’t to pass judgment on whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing or whatever, but just to say that in different contexts different dead bodies have different degrees of value.

The amount of money that’s spent on identifying every piece of human remains after 911 when there was almost no forensic identification after the Rwanda genocide. These sorts of questions. And like you said even in the insurance industry the valuation of particular limbs. There’s also been some research on the amount of money that the US government has paid out for coalition air strikes that hit civilians. If you kill a civilian, then you pay the family members for the loss of that person but how much are they valued at? Apparently it depends, based on the context. Those numbers are not set and they change over time.

So I think there’s also this kind of larger necropolitics underpinning a lot of it. That we strive towards bodily integrity. It is this default but at the end of the day some bodies are still considered to be more worthy of bodily integrity than others. Some bodies are still considered to be accorded a higher value than others. And the same is true for body parts.  Some body parts are valued higher than others. And the effort put into the reaggregation of bodies is worth it in some cases and not worth it in other cases. And who has the power to sort of make some of these decisions also.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Fascinating. I feel like we could talk for days on this, but we’re out of time. So, thank you very much, Jessica, for coming on and talking about this very, I’m just gonna say, interesting. Hopefully we’ve started a number of conversations instead of stopped them and that people are intrigued and they’ll go look at your articles and your books and book chapters and read some more and learn about this.

Jessica Auchter: Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to talk about a topic that I don’t get a chance to talk about that often because, as I said, for most people it is a conversation ender. But I really appreciate it. It’s been so interesting.

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