FREE
for Members
The Dead Body and its Evidential Traces
Monday, February 23, 2009
Presented By
Presented by the Anthropology Section
Speakers
Zoe Crossland (Columbia University) and Victoria Sandford (CUNY Graduate Center)
This presentation takes as its subject the modes through which anthropological exhumation acts to bring its subjects—the dead--into being both as dead and as objects of study. Outlining the popular rhetorical tropes within which evidentiary claims are situated, I will explore how the agency of people after death is understood within the framework of present-day forensic anthropological practice, and how this is underwritten by a particular heritage of anatomical analysis.
The Academy's Anthropology Section is the crossroads for four-field anthropology in the greater New York area. The Section has a long history of sponsoring events and publications that have become landmarks in the discipline. All the subfields of anthropology are represented in the Section's program: social/cultural anthropology, archaeology, biological anthropology, and anthropological linguistics. The program combines talks about broad disciplinary and public concerns with state-of-the-art presentations in specialized areas of research.