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As a result of the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic, in 2020 forensic institutions in Mexico began using extreme measures in the treatment of bodies of confirmed or suspected cases, due to possible infection. A series of national protocols on how to deal with the virus were announced, yet forensic personnel have struggled to apply these, demonstrating the country’s forensics crisis. This article aims to reflect on two points: (1) the impact that COVID-19 protocols have had on how bodies confirmed as or suspected of being infected with the virus are handled in the forensic medical system; and (2) the particular treatment in cases where the body of the victim is unidentified, and the different effects the pandemic has had in terms of the relationship between the institutional environment and the family members of those who have died as a result of infection, or suspected infection, from COVID-19.
focus on one particular aspect of the search and identification of corpses and human remains, namely the application of technical methods to the examination of bodily remains recovered from mass graves. Why bother with human identification? One of the primary issues to be addressed when investigating these contexts is the question of why to bother making the effort to identify the victims held within a mass grave. The very fact that clandestine mass graves exist means that the circumstances of the death of the victims within this context is evidence that an illicit
that there are dangerous implications to a politics where authority and power derive from extreme human distress and deprivation, where the predominant form of collective human identification is suffering and victimisation, and where the most we aim for is protection from (only) the most extreme forms of cruelty and depravity – a world in which always insufficient security continually erodes and subverts the practice of autonomy. International order is, of course, more than simply rules and institutions: this is the foundational premise of modern inter national
inhumed human remains’, Technical Paper 13 (Reading: Institute of Field Archaeologists, 1993). 65 X. Mallet, T. Blythe and R. Berry, Advances in Forensic Human Identification (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2014); Interpol, ‘Disaster victim identification guide’, 2014. URL: www.interpol.int/INTERPOL-expertise/ Forensics/DVI-Pages/DVI-guide (accessed 21 October 2015); S. Byers, Introduction to Forensic Anthropology (London: Routledge, 2010). 66 Sturdy Colls, Holocaust Archaeologies; Sturdy Colls, ‘Holocaust archaeology’. 67 Sturdy Colls, Holocaust Archaeologies
symbols for human qualities, drives, or unconscious urges. 47 In Animals in Film , Jonathan Burt calls for a more nuanced approach to the problem of human identification with animals, arguing that these do not necessarily carry any fixed assumptions of anthropomorphism or anthropocentrism. 48 Many surrealist depictions of animals indicate fruitful possibilities for employing animal symbolism or totemism in combination with letting animals retain their own identity and agency. Consider Carrington’s frequent depictions of horses. At once reflective of the artist
. 121 Despite his vigorous dismissal of Darwinism, the germinal matter purveyed by Halford posed an analogous ontological threat. Rather than evolutionary progress, however, this rapacious reptilian poison represented a fearful portent of atavism in an era of growing human identification with the ‘brute creation’. Notes 1
provide a foundation for ideas of a regional kind of national territory – introducing the case of Cornwall – while later chapters consider various forms of human identification with rocks (especially Chapters 2 and 5 ). The ‘Celts’ are said to be a ‘primitive race’ like the ‘primitive rocks’ on which they live, for example, and thus to belong essentially to their national territory
the corporeal representation of violence is a multifaceted process, and the memorial effect of Rwanda’s corporeally commemorative strategy relies upon the corpse–human identifications it elicits. These identifications, however, vary enormously. As the following textual interrogations will demonstrate, it is sometimes through the very refusal of any living subject–corpse identification that the corporeal memory embodied by the dead is at its most commemorative. Anonymity and the impossibility of identification Literary analysis of Rwanda’s hundred days of
metals such as radium] is found as a vein in granitic rocks. In no place, at no time, has granite ever been quarried in such proportions as in Egypt during the earlier dynasties.’ 63 Thus Cornwall with its granite on a lesser scale serves as a sort of small-scale, conveniently located Egypt. Further, the ‘life-giving’ properties of granite may begin to enhance the possibilities of human identification with