Still Life With Bones: Field Notes on Forensics and Loss

Anthropologist Alexa Hagerty arrived in South America as a forensic novice, but her work excavating mass graves and attempting to reunite bodies with their loved ones soon illuminates the region's violent political history.

From descending into an industrial well where bodies were disposed of by the truckload, to the tenderness of laying clothes over long-lost bones, she watches families, communities, bureaucrats, and scientists wrestle with how to care for the dead. This devastating work forces Hagerty to excavates her own story too: the death of her father, her affair with the son of one of 'the disappeared', her longing for a child, and her search for solace.

Through excavations, reunions, and rituals, and drawing on extensive field notes and interviews with families of the disappeared in Guatemala and Argentina, Hagerty illuminates the deeply felt aftermath of mass violence on a personal scale.

Smart, dark, confessional, this genre-bending work of literary nonfiction reckons with haunting and healing, the paper-thin boundary between the scientific and the ritual, and what it means to be part of the "tribe of mortality."