About the project
Measuring and examining the body has a long and politically charged history, particularly in the context of criminology and forensics. Today, we witness the increasing use of biometrics in public and private domains, alongside entirely new ways of rendering the body into data. At the same time, local applications of cultural and ritual knowledge demonstrate alternative ways in which bodies are made (in)visible in the aftermath of violence and in struggles for justice. It is at this junction that Bodies of Evdience has contributed to a widening the fields of critical forensics, embodied knowledge and socio-legal studies.
Empirically, Bodies of Evidence focused on mapping forensic practices that examine the relationship between data and bodies across different cultures. It brought Eurocentric and African perspectives into dialogue by identifying technologies of vision as common ground for discussing how bodies of evidence are invisible, but are also rendered visible in different settings.
Activities
Mass violence and bodies as evidence
Whether in the form of scars, skeletons, DNA, ghosts, or hauntings, the body and embodied harm were key to collecting evidence in the aftermath of violence. This roundtable brought together international experts from South Africa and Europe to interrogate embodied violence and consider pathways to repair after atrocity.
The roundtable took place on October 28, 2025, from 5:30 to 8:00 PM, Mandela Room, the Nobel Peace Center.
About the seminar
Whether in the form of wounds, scars, skeletal remains, DNA, corpses, or trauma, the body and embodied harm were key to collecting evidence in the aftermath of violence.
How bodies became part of investigations was influenced by social and political questions of justice, resolution, and closure. State-sanctioned forensic science played a central role in the aftermath of violence. Critical forensic studies and socio-legal research had made clear that this approach was not the only way in which bodily evidence emerged and violence within communities was processed.
The Bodies of Evidence project focused on South Africa as a key site of embodied violence, where generations of conflict had left communities ruptured by violent acts. Communities were haunted by izipoki – restless spirits – and a range of techniques, including forensic excavations and spiritual intercession, were used in attempts to lay ghosts to rest.
The participation of citizens in forensic science and necropolitics – the state’s power to dictate who lived and died, and who might become the 'living dead' – demonstrated how different actors engaged with both the production of evidence from the physical body and the techniques associated with making bodily evidence visible or invisible. This event explored how different actors engaged with ways of seeing the body, both politically and literally, to generate corporeal evidence that offered specific perspectives on harm, injustice, and the nature of violence.
The roundtable discussion brought together experts with experience in truth recovery, repair after atrocity crimes, death studies, and policy frameworks for investigating corporeal (in)visibility. Through dialogue and discussion, the event foregrounded the diversity of knowledge creation concerning 'what counted' as bodily evidence. The panel grappled with the physical presence and absence of bodily evidence, which were tied to different ways of seeing, ranging from highly digitalised forensic practices to spectral hauntings addressed through ritual specialists. The evening’s discussions brought further depth and critique to ongoing conversations around violence, harm, truth, and justice.
In addition, the renowned South African theatre director and artist Eliot Moleba contributed an artistic intervention that invited participants to contemplate fundamental questions about the relationship between the body, evidence, and justice.
Opening speech
- Professor Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Stellenbosch University, South Africa
Roundtable discussants
- Professor Rebekah Lee, Oxford University
- Professor Grażyna Baranowska, UN Working Group on Involuntary and Enforced Disappearances / University of Erlangen-Nuremberg
- Elisabeth Anstett, Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France
Results
Several of the project’s contributions complicate the notion that a body needs to be present to speak about bodily harm by discussing missing persons, empty graves, unsuccessful exhumations and sham inquests. Having focused on the aftermath of the South African apartheid regime and the Marikana massacre, the project suggests an extended chronology of harm that accounts for transgenerational trauma and the harms that arise from inadequately addressing accountability for historical harms. A different case study focused on South African culture, cosmology and indigenous knowledge systems to understand their role in the problem of missing bodies of evidence. The project finds that spectral visions of bodies and the embodiment of trauma emerge at times in dialogue with forensic techniques and at times as alternative pathways to repair.
Exploring bodies of evidence (and their absence) as a matter of data studies, the project also turned to facial recognition technologies for identifying corpses. It involved interviews with three C-Suite level representatives of the most central companies in the market for dead body identification. Based on this data, the project coined critical notions such as “restless data bodies” and “posthuman biovalue” to extend current research on biometrics and facial recognition, as well as theoretical concepts such as bio-, thanato-, and necropolitics.
Both these findings, namely how bodies produce and occlude the production of evidence and how the very notion of the body changes through somewhat contrasting perspectives of cosmological context and datafication, also offer accessible insights for those who engage with these practices and related policies in their everyday work.
Advisory board
- Pascal Adalian, Prof. at the Faculty of Medicine, Aix-Marseille Université & President of the Forensic Anthropology Society of Europe (FASE), Judiciary Forensic Expert.
- Nils Anfinset, Prof. and Vice Dean at the University Museum in Bergen, Department of Cultural History, University of Bergen.
- Elisabeth Anstett, Researcher in Social Anthropology at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique & Director of the Corpses of Mass Violence and Genocide programme funded by the European Research Council.
- Kathleen Hardy is an Advocate at the South African Bar, where her main areas of practice and interest include constitutional and administrative law, general commercial and contractual law, employment and labour, mining and environmental law.
- Claire Moon, Professor at the Department of Sociology, The London School of Economics and Political Science.
- Athandiwe Saba, freelance journalist currently working with Code for Africa; previously Deputy Editor at the Mail and Guardian.
- Joelle Vailly, Research Director in Sociology and Anthropology at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).
- Welmoet Wels is a lecturer at the University of Groningen, Faculty of Law. Her research focuses on the international law on dead bodies in armed conflict, peacekeeping, protection of civilians, human rights & humanitarian law, and gender.
