Mondada2024e
| Mondada2024e | |
|---|---|
| BibType | ARTICLE |
| Key | Mondada2024e |
| Author(s) | Lorenza Mondada, Fernanda Miranda da Cruz, Talita Maximo Carreira Ribeiro |
| Title | The indexicality of measuring: Osteometric practices in the forensic lab |
| Editor(s) | |
| Tag(s) | EMCA, Michael Lynch |
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| Year | 2024 |
| Language | English |
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| Journal | Ethnographic Studies |
| Volume | 20 |
| Number | |
| Pages | 209-245 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.26034/lu.ethns.2024.6920 |
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Abstract
Measuring is a practice that characterizes both everyday and professional activities, and that relies on the skilled situated use of tools, materialities, language and embodied conducts. This paper deals with practices of measuring in a forensic laboratory, in which experts measure bones as part of their ordinary work, consisting in the detailed examination of human remains for establishing the bio-anatomical profile of the individual to whom they belong to. The paper adopts an EMCA approach inspired by the work of Mike Lynch on scientific laboratories and legal settings, and offers a video and multimodal analysis of expert interactions in a forensic laboratory in Brazil, specialized in the identification of disappeared activists during the dictatorship of 1964–1988. In particular, the study shows how measuring of bones, as part of post-mortem inquiries, constitutes a local and collective accomplishment, possibly generating disagreements and controversies. It also discusses how the experts engaging in measuring bones encounter practical problems that reveal the indexicality of measuring practices and their situated contingencies. In this way, the paper offers an EMCA contribution to studies of the production of scientific knowledge and forensic evidence, the situated embodied use of artefacts, and the multimodal and multisensorial engage-ment with human remains.
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