Abstract
This article considers the contexts and processes of forensic identification in 2004
post-tsunami Thailand as examples of identity politics. The presence of international
forensic teams as carriers of diverse technical expertise overlapped with bureaucratic
procedures put in place by the Thai government. The negotiation of unified forensic
protocols and the production of estimates of identified nationals straddle biopolitics and
thanatocracy. The immense identification task testified on the one hand to an effort to
bring individual bodies back to mourning families and national soils, and on the other
hand to determining collective ethnic and national bodies, making sense out of an
inexorable and disordered dissolution of corporeal as well as political boundaries.
Individual and national identities were the subject of competing efforts to bring order
to,the chaos, reaffirming the cogency of the body politic by mapping national boundaries
abroad. The overwhelming forensic effort required by the exceptional circumstances also
brought forward the socio-economic and ethnic disparities of the victims, whose
post-mortem treatment and identification traced an indelible divide between us and
them.
Publisher
Manchester University Press
Cited by
8 articles.
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