To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for Srebrenica’s Missing

by Sarah E. Wagner

In the aftermath of the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, the discovery of unmarked mass graves revealed Europe's worst atrocity since World War the genocide in the UN "safe area" of Srebrenica. To Know Where He Lies provides a powerful account of the innovative genetic technology developed to identify the eight thousand Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) men and boys found in those graves and elsewhere, demonstrating how memory, imagination, and science come together to recover identities lost to genocide. Sarah E. Wagner explores technology's import across several areas of postwar Bosnian society―for families of the missing, the Srebrenica community, the Bosnian political leadership (including Serb and Muslim), and international aims of social repair―probing the meaning of absence itself.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction

351 pages, Paperback

First published September 2, 2008

About the author

Sarah E. Wagner is Associate Professor of Anthropology at George Washington University. She has written widely on war and its devastations, focusing in particular on forensic efforts to recover and identify the victims of violence in both the United States and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and is the author of two previous books, To Know Where He Lies and, with Lara J. Nettelfield, Srebrenica in the Aftermath of Genocide. She has received a number of awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Reviews

[versarbre · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good ethnography about a rather technical project; it lays out its macro and micro contexts as well as the political stakes.

[Rebecca]

I met Dr. Wagner and saw her speak this week at a forensic genetics conference, and am really looking forward to reading this. Dr. Wagner is a social anthropologist who examined the effects of the ICMP identification efforts in the former Yugoslavia on the families of the genocide victims of Srebrenica. I think that Dr. Wagner's previous and ongoing work and the resulting sociological perspective will prove to be a valuable and significant contribution to future disaster and mass victim identification efforts.