To aid research on 'The Bodies and the Archive: Bureaucratization of Violence and Communal Exhumation in Mexico'

MARINA ALAMO-BRYAN, then a graduate student at Columbia University, New York, New York, was awarded funding in April 2018 to aid research on 'The Bodies and the Archive: Bureaucratization of Violence and Communal Exhumation in Mexico,' supervised by Dr. Nadia Abu El-Haj. This research project attempts to understand what it means to find a murdered body in Mexico today, and what it means for it to become evidence. Building on anthropological scholarship on bureaucracy and forensic evidence, this doctoral dissertation project examines the encounters of communities searching for the disappeared and state authorities. Through an exploration of existing regimes of justice and their evidentiary practices, it interrogates how bodies in the ground are translated into terms legible to the law, and how their existence as evidence is transferred to documents and forms of representation within archives. Thus, the project looks at social processes of public truth production by bringing into conversation forensic and humanitarian exhumations, alongside recent critical perspectives on bureaucracy, bearing in mind longstanding approaches to the anthropology of death and the anthropology of the state, to address how dead bodies become evidence and how truth claims circulate around and through them.