Extraordinary deathwork: new developments in, and the social significance of, forensic humanitarian action

This chapter investigates critically the current phase of the constitution of the field of forensic activity labelled "humanitarian forensic action". It discusses this phenomenon within the interpretative frame of "deathwork" in order to argue that, although humanitarian forensic action presents a unique and extraordinary form of death management, it also shares characteristics and a social significance with more regular that is, perennial and peacetime- forms of deathwork. The chapter takes the expansion of humanitarian forensic action as an opportunity to align and compares it with more regular forms of deathwork, as well as to define the ways in which it is distinct from the general phenomenon. Public legal rites put forensic anthropologists in a "triadic relationship in which they stand between the dead and the living". In his Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx famously argued that "the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living".