ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines one domain of scarring—anthrobiological, focusing on several examples of the presentation, and then contested re-presentations, of bodies marked or lost to violence. Several purposes outlined in the opening chapter are pursued here. Anthrobiological scars reveal in the starkest terms the themes of radical contingency and uncertainty in violence. This contingency, and the theme of the fragility of bodies, upends in near-spectacular fashion the ad hoc intentionality one finds in the discourses surrounding violence. Scars also present and then re-present a variety of levels of absence and presence. Further, they enact the agency of those carrying them by demanding an account for this presence-absence. Key also in this chapter is the relationship between two “positional” methods mentioned in Chapter 1——exposition and juxtaposition, and the variance of levels of perseverance and political effort it takes, as seen in the case illustrations of this chapter, to present and re-present scars. The chapter begins by justifying the biased selection of the young who absorb scars—considering the many ways in which their status as being innocent in a (borrowing from Rorty) “practical” sense might be, and even has been, contested or transformed. With this in mind, the chapter then moves to three examples of anthrobiological scarring: the Emmett Till case of 1955 and the more recent (2009) cases of Iranian protestor Neda Agha-Soltan during the Green Revolution and of Hamza al-Khateeb, a 13-year-old boy in Syria. Much of the remaining chapter puts analytical and historical focus on the Second World War German massacre and destruction of the Czech village Lidice, as well as how that community grappled with the scars of that event for decades thereafter, including (especially) the ways in which it memorialized the Lidice children gassed at the Chelmno extermination camp in 1942.
