Forensic Turning Points: Exhumations, Dignity, and Iconoclasm

Abstract

Between 100,000 and 130,000 people were murdered during the war and dictatorship in Spain from 1936 onward. Thousands of bodies were buried in mass graves which were then monumentalized decades later. Since the year 2000, the commemorative practices surrounding the victims of the war and dictatorship changed radically: hundreds of exhumations took place and the rhetoric on human rights and dignity was generalized in the discourses. This phenomenon is associated with the idea of the “forensic turn”. However, the situation presents a double crisis: that of the popular forms of memorial based on honour and the monument, threatened by the scientific paradigm, and the lack of social recognition of the victims, of which the exhumations are not part of a judicial process, and how the ratios of identifications are low in the current model. Therefore, by means of an interdisciplinary approach to the context, this article contributes to the debate on the current crisis of the memory policies in the Kingdom of Spain demonstrating the limits of the “forensic turn” and the exhumation-based model promoted by the government of Spain.