Jeremy Kessler

  • culture July 03, 2012

    Mengele's Skull: The Advent of Forensic Aesthetics by Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman

    Clyde Snow, a cigar-sucking Texan anthropologist, once remarked that “bones make good witnesses . . . they never lie and they never forget.” Snow rose to something like prominence in the mid-1980s when two South American exhumations linked the morbid skills of forensic anthropology to the increasing prestige of international human rights. In the wake of Argentina’s 1982 defeat in the Falklands War, human rights activists opened the graves of several desaparecidos—men and women “disappeared” by the military governments that had ruled the country from 1973 to 1983. A year later, Brazilian