Where the Waters Flow
“Down beside where the waters flow,” confesses the speaker about the place where he murdered his sweetheart, “down by the banks of the Ohio.” He explains why he did it—she wouldn’t marry him and promise to be only his—and I presume he laments his act. But he doesn’t say so, so the song would not […] The post Where the Waters Flow appeared first on The American Scholar. There are mass graves all over Latin America, but the concentration of dead and disappeared in Guatemala and Argentina is staggering: more than 200,000 killed by the state in Guatemala’s 36-year conflict, known simply as “La Violencia;” up to 30,000 disappeared by the Argentine military dictatorship over the course of its reign of terror in the 1970s and ’80s. How does a country reckon with crimes against humanity? How do the families of the missing find the truth? “Forensic exhumation is practiced at the crossroads of two ways of thinking about the body,” anthropologist Alexa Hagerty writes, “as a scientific object to be analyzed for evidence of crimes against humanity, and as a subject, an individual, someone loved and mourned.” In her new book, Still Life with Bones, Hagerty documents her training