Testifying Absence in the Era of Forensic Testimony

Commenting on the significance of his work at a mass grave in Vukovar, Croatia, 1993–1995, anthropologist Clyde Snow predicted that the application of forensic scientific methods in the documentation of mass atrocity would help prevent the future denial of atrocities. A couple of years later in nearby Kosovo, others would follow forensic scientific investigators only to report what they never saw or never found leading many commentators and tertiary witnesses to doubt that atrocities had occurred. As absence and lack arise against the backdrop of forensic discourse, we are called upon to weigh the stakes of negative evidence witnessing and its implications for cultural memory. This article contends that the semiotic and positional peculiarity of negative evidence in an era of forensic testimony has its analogue in the paschal figure of Jesus’ empty tomb. Analyzing the rhetoric of denial that accompanied the forensic investigations of Kosovo in the late 1990s, the author suggests that the empty tomb is a paradigm that renders intelligible the interdiction implicitly placed on the forensic presencing of the body as well as the problematic with which memory is met in a world where forensic scientific testimony grows in importance.