Search results
This article examines the ways in which missing persons have been dealt with, mainly in the former Yugoslavia, to show how the huge advances made in the search for, recovery and identification of those who disappeared is positively impacting on the ability of families to find their loved ones. The article surveys the advances made in dealing with the missing on a range of fronts, including the technical and forensic capacities. It examines some of the other developments that have occurred around the world with regard to the search for, recovery and identification of people and makes recommendations on how to make improvements to ensure that the rights of families around the world, as well as a range of other human rights, including truth and justice, are enhanced.
Through an ethnographic study of the Barefoot College, an internationally renowned non-governmental development organisation (NGO) situated in Rajasthan, India, this book investigates the methods and practices by which a development organisation materialises and manages a construction of success. Paying particular attention to the material processes by which success is achieved and the different meanings that they act to perform, this book offers a timely and novel approach to how the world of development NGOs works. It further touches upon the general discrediting of certain kinds of expertise, moving the book beyond an anthropology of development to raise wider questions of general interest.
The author argues that the College, as a heterotopia and a prolific producer of various forms of development media, achieves its success through materially mediated heterotopic spectacles: enacted and imperfect utopias that constitute the desires, imaginings and Otherness of its society.
Founded by the charismatic figure of Bunker Roy, the Barefoot College has become a national and global icon of grassroots sustainable development. With a particular focus on the Barefoot College’s community-managed, solar photovoltaic development programme, this book considers the largely overlooked question of how it is that an NGO achieves a reputation for success.
Conclusion: the frayed edges of the spectacle As Crush has perceptively noted: ‘Development discourse can do without its history but not its geography for, without geography, it would lack a great deal of its conviction and coherence’ (1995: 14). In the movement of development knowledge, the ways and means by which it traverses cultural and spatial geographies, achieving different dimensions of resonance, a great deal of cultural work is needed for it to be both convincing and credible. Development work likewise relies upon particular images, metaphors and
This article will describe the contemporary scientific techniques used to excavate and identify the dead bodies of disappeared detainees from the Uruguayan dictatorship. It will highlight the developments that have led to increased success by forensic anthropologists and archaeologists in uncovering human remains, as well as their effects, both social and political, on promoting the right to the truth and mechanisms of transitional justice.
This article describes the brutalisation of the bodies of Tutsi and Jewish victims in 1994 and during the Second World War, respectively, and contrasts the procedures adopted by killers to understand what these deadly practices say about the imaginaries at work in Rwanda and Poland. Dealing with the infernalisation of the body, which eventually becomes a form of physical control, this comparative work examines the development of groups and communities of killers in their particular social and historical context. Different sources are used, such as academic works, reports from victims organisations and non-governmental organisations, books, testimonies and film documentaries.
Bank reports – to demonstrate to the audience how social messages are delivered the traditional way. His speech elicits a standing ovation. I chose the above speech to introduce this book not only because it highlights the approach and concerns of the Barefoot College but also because it underlines the often-overlooked importance of narrative construction, spectacle and mobilisation to modern-day development organisations. Indeed, Bunker’s rich and arresting speech may serve as an allegory for the themes of this book. Bunker, as the reader can tell even from this
Exhumation may be defined as the legally sanctioned excavation and recovery of the remains of lawfully buried or – occasionally – cremated individuals, as distinct from forensic excavations of clandestinely buried remains conducted as part of a criminal investigation and from unlawful disinterment of human remains, commonly referred to as bodysnatching. The aim of this article is to review the role of exhumation – so defined – in the activities of CEMEL, the Medico-Legal Centre of the Ribeirão Preto Medical School-University of São Paulo, in international, regional and local collaborations. Exhumations form part of routine forensic anthropology casework; scientific research in physical and forensic anthropology; and forensic casework conducted in collaboration with the Brazilian Federal Police; and are carried out as part of humanitarian investigations into deaths associated with the civil–military dictatorship of 1964 to 1985. This article aims to offer a non-technical summary – with reference to international comparative information – of the role of exhumation in investigative and scientific work and to discuss developments in their historical and political context.
, including access to healthcare, education, water and electricity. The ruling alliance famously lost the subsequent general election, with the blame for the defeat partially attributed to the glossy ad campaign that was widely estimated to have cost in the region of US$20 million (Perry 2004). This ill-advised electoral campaign is perhaps an apt introduction for this chapter, for it highlights the stark contrasts within a country on the verge of achieving unprecedented levels of economic development, yet still beset by major social disparities. The idea of an India
the ‘light’ of the urban spaces; the other of backwardness, superstition and want represented by the ‘darkness’ of the rural areas. These contrasting symbolic worlds have played a pervasive role throughout India’s development in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The dichotomy of rural and urban India looms large in the consciousness and imagination of modern India, a land commonly portrayed as one of striking contrasts and polarised social cleavages. On the one hand, the economic ‘miracle’ of modern-day India is predominantly an urban miracle with
replication of the College’s solar programme both domestically and internationally: how knowledge, people and technology move through different orders of translation. I illustrate this via an account of the apparent failure of two Barefoot solar projects, in the process bringing to light the difficulties and labour involved in the generation of replicable development success. I also consider the struggles required in the construction of these new worlds. I describe the technical aspects of replication and technology transfer, and the particularities involved in the