After Monday’s reading, this reading built off of the argument that dead bodies have political weight in our society. In this case, the dead body is used as a source of evidence rather than as propaganda. Josef Mengele is a man who was wanted dead by thousands of people, so his dead body was going to be a very sought after object. In order to avenge all the crimes that he committed, it was imperative that his remains be found and properly identified so that they could represent Josef Mengele and all that he did.
Throughout the entire piece Keenan and Weizman draw our attention to the fact that when observing an individual’s bones, it is imperative that we imagine the living human and think about how this body once functioned with a human soul. Because the bones of Josef Mengele were being used as evidence in a case that prosecuted Mengele and his war crimes, the bones became artifacts that belonged to a man that was once alive. These bones represent “the blurring of life and death, objects and subjects, which manifests itself everywhere within the discourse of and around forensic anthropology” (Keenan and Weizman 65). In this case, it is not Mengele’s body but his bones that represented Mengele throughout the entire prosecution. Although bones are a part of an individual’s dead body, they function very differently when it comes to remembering that person. In this piece the bones of Mengele simply acted as pieces to the larger puzzle that was his identity.
I found this piece to be interesting because I have never truly thought of bones in relation to the person whom they belonged to. This differentiates heavily when you are looking at a corpse in a casket for example. The corpse still appears to be the person, representing all that he or she stood for. However, the bones of that person represent something different. I believe that bones represent the history of that person, and their perception rather than their actual identity.