Anthropology’s Annual Visiting Lecture Series - Legacies of War

Talk: Deep Forensics: Addressing layered violence through community-led technologies in Mexico

Abstract: In Mexico, where more than 130,000 people are missing and over 72,000 bodies remain unidentified, extraordinary violence has become woven into the fabric of everyday life. Calderón’s Guerra Contra el Narco, alongside the entanglement of state institutions and organized crime, has produced a prolonged forensic crisis. Affected communities simultaneously demand forensic identification while expressing deep distrust in its implementation, which they experience as insufficient and ineffective in practice. Drawing on ten years of ethnographic research with community activists, forensic scientists, and families, this talk examines the discordant temporalities of forensic work, justice, and everyday practices of social repair. I introduce the concept of deep forensics as a set of community-embedded practices that attend to layered and sedimented forms of harm, engaging with violences that accumulate slowly across time and terrain. I demonstrate how emergent socio-forensic assemblages can provide complementary registers to state-led processes of identification and justice, enabling communities to address systemic and enduring forms of harm while cultivating possibilities for more just futures.