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Title
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Erasing traces with DNA tests : Syrian military security and mass grave politics in post-2005 Lebanon
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Author
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Abstract
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| This article contributes to the emerging subfield of biohistory by exploring the nexus of forensic science and politics through an analysis of a mass grave exhumation in postwar Lebanon. In late 2005, a few months after the Syrian army's withdrawal from Lebanon, the Lebanese army unearthed a mass grave, carried out DNA analysis, and identified the bodies of several soldiers whose families had long claimed that their sons had been abducted in 1990 and subsequently held in detention across the border in Syria. Focusing on the mysterious fate of these soldiers, I use oral history, archival documents, and ethnographic materials to explore how Lebanese national institutions relied on forensic DNA identification to produce hegemonic narratives that sidelined the demands of the victims' families for more investigation and care. I demonstrate the overlap between forensic science, national security, and the army as an organ of the state, and I argue that DNA identification tests helped the Lebanese army erase traces of its decades-long collaboration with Syrian military security by allowing it to present the families' claims of illegal cross-border transfers of abductees and their corpses as examples of irrational or wishful thinking and as a psychological coping mechanism on the part of suffering mothers. The exhumation of the mass grave thus did not promote national solidarity against "foreign occupation," nor did it have a cathartic effect by helping people deal with a silenced past. Instead, forensic science supported a continuation of silence about past violence. |
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Language
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English
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Source (journal)
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Anthropological quarterly
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Publication
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2021
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ISSN
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0003-5491
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DOI
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10.1353/ANQ.2021.0014
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Volume/pages
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94
:1
(2021)
, p. 65-92
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ISI
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000713961100003
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Full text (Publisher's DOI)
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Full text (open access)
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