" Genetics is a Study in Faith " : Forensic DNA, Kinship Analysis, and the Ethics of Care in Post-conflict Latin America (original) (raw)
nombre no es XX. " Throughout Guatemala, on postcards, calendars, bookmarks, and posters, the dead are speaking. Fifteen years after the signing of the peace accords, and thirty years after the burned earth campaign, where the military slaughtered 200,000 people to stamp out the manufactured threat of a Marxist takeover of the Guatemalan highlands, the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG) launched a public awareness campaign about the violence of the past. Rendered liminal, between voice and void, Los Desaparecidos make claims on the present: " My name is not XX. Your DNA can identify me. " Linking an ethical claim about personhood—I have a right to a name, even in death—and a practical intervention based in cutting-edge methods in forensic genetics, the FAFG exhorted the public to participate in their growing DNA databank. In this paper, I trace the development and use of forensic genetics in post-conflict Guatemala and Argentina to elucidate contemporary formations of life and death that fuse scientific legibility with political transition and memorialization. Through a close attention to the material practice of DNA identification in post-conflict settings, I complicate the understanding of these technologies as primarily concerned with knowledge production, truth, and surveillance. Instead, I highlight the affective and sacred dimensions of genetic practice. Although racialization and genetic essentialism remain important features, forensic practices have, at the same time, been imbued with an ethic of care through social movements, solidarity practices, and family-based organizing. I argue that through laboratory practices of purification and a scientific methodology of kinship as praxis, forensic science can be understood to occupy an important ritual role in post-conflict Latin America: the social and political care of the disappeared.