“The Dead Speak” Necrolife, or Killing the Dead in the Colombian Morgues

• In Event: Science from Elsewhere: Thinking from Where We Think - I

Abstract

Erupting analytically from concerns around the materiality and the making of death and the dead, here I interrogate the practice of doing necropsies as they are performed in the morgues of the National Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences of Colombia (INML). Its usual to hear morgue workers, and beyond, circulate the idea that “the dead speak”. And statement that would be disconcerting for those who are foreign to the morgues. How can the dead speak? What do they say when they say, and how? Who can know what they say? But, for morgue workers it’s a well-known motto and logic: The dead do speak. Here I question the modes in which medico-forensic practices in Colombia engage in relational encounters of practice that become with the dead and death, and their speaking, in order to produce forensic knowledge. This challenges our common understanding of how facts, evidence, and scientific knowledge is produced. Based empirically on 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I illustrate how these practices are an entanglement of complex relations among human and other than human actors. Death in this scenario is both and event and a process, and as such it is always conditioned to the relational encounter of doing a necropsy. In this way, for instance, a fatal fire arm injury becomes such at the morgue only through a particular encounter in practice between the dead, the fatal injury, legal documents, doctors, morgue aides, books of forensic pathology, expertise, the dissecting table, biosecurity uniforms, medical students, the anthropologist that is observing, and so forth. This work reflects upon the cultural determinacy of scientific and medical practices in the Colombian context. It connects with, and contributes to, discussions about state managing of the dead through biomedicine; knowledge production; materiality; and human-nonhuman relations.

Author

• Julia Morales Fontanilla, UC Davis