Cate A Morley

CATE MORLEY, then a graduate student at Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, was award funding to aid research on “Partial Remains: Forced Disappearance and Humanitarian Forensic Intervention in Mexico,” supervised by Dr. Elizabeth A Davis. Ethnographers working in contexts of mass grave exhumations and missing dead have long argued that uncertainty about whether the disappeared are dead or alive, and the absence of human remains, complicates traditional death practices and mourning rituals. This project extends that argument by considering how that ambiguity becomes the grounds for staking out new political claims. Through apprenticeship to multiple teams of independent forensic experts and collectives of relatives of the disappeared, and through direct participation in exhumations of mass graves in northeastern Mexico, the researcher examines how those relatives and experts profess distrust in the State, while appealing to notions of divine and democratic justice that transcend or bypass its authority. Attending to the material practice of human remains recovery, the project illuminates their efforts to reorient forensic intervention away from the state project of identification and explores how, in the process, they force us to reckon with forensics as a theory of who owes what to whom.