Articles by Sarah Wagner
The Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery has long served as a site of instruction ... more The Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery has long served as a site of instruction about national sacri ce, but its lessons in mourning war’s costs and honoring its combatants have changed with time and shifting political currents, as re ected in the reordered space, the sentinels’ altered rituals and the public’s increasingly disciplined engagement with the site. Tracing these changes, this article argues that the gradual distancing of the monument and its sentinels from the visiting public mirrors the sharpening sense of civilian-military division within American society itself, revealing the exclusionary politics of obligation that help shape contemporary political discourse about war and its costs.
Amid its human and material tolls, the Vietnam War has given rise to a curious enterprise—the com... more Amid its human and material tolls, the Vietnam War has given rise to a curious enterprise—the complex process of recovering and repatriating the remains of U.S. service members Missing In Action (MIA) and presumed dead. In this trade, the bones that “count” are American and the aims underwriting the forensic efforts to return them are rooted in an ideology of national belonging.The resultant exchange of both knowledge and physical remains has developed through two historically intertwined ventures: state-sponsored casualty resolution efforts; and the much smaller, informal trafficking of skeletal remains, identification media, and information about American MIAs. This article examines how these sought-after bones tack between roles as objects of recovery, sale, or barter, scientific study, ritual burial, and public commemoration. Through their mutable worth, MIA remains illustrate the dynamic symbolism of war dead that evokes differing sensibilities about familiar or foreign soil, about care and belonging. Like the reliquiae of medieval Christianity, remains of missing service members, even in the most fragmentary form, are replete with the suggestion of power. Their pursuit depends on reciprocity. Indeed, more than just powerful symbols, these bones manifest and confer power itself, as caring for war dead demonstrates authority, and such authority falls to those who control access to the desired object, whether through formal or informal channels. Furthermore, power requires authentication, and the remains of missing American war dead become, in this system of circulation and exchange, a means to demonstrate knowledge, perform certainty, or exploit ambiguity.
For 18 years, from 1984 to 1998, the Vietnam crypt of the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington Natio... more For 18 years, from 1984 to 1998, the Vietnam crypt of the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery housed the remains of a soldier whose anonymity helped shoulder a nation’s grief and fuel its memory. They were those of First Lieutenant Michael J. Blassie, an Air Force pilot shot down over hostile territory in southern Vietnam in 1972. On 14 May 1998, Blassie’s then-unrecognized remains became the only set at the memorial to be disinterred and identified – an act that signaled an important shift in forensic practice and the state’s means of commemorating its missing and unknown members of the military. Tracing the story of the Vietnam Unknown’s (de)identification, this article examines the gradual though foundational reframing of the connection between national memory and identity expressed through care for those who ‘made the ultimate sacrifice’. Whereas memorials of the past, such as the Tomb of the Unknowns, emphasized collective or anonymous groupings of war dead in articulating national identity, the changing technology of identification, particularly brought about by advances in DNA testing, has enabled individuated memorializing. Naming each dead soldier, returning each set of remains to surviving families, no matter how partial or delayed, personalizes the ideals of sacrifice and honor embodied in the fallen soldier and invites localized, communal remembrance. The shifts in technology and memory that have rewritten the story of the Vietnam Unknown not only altered modes of national commemoration, but also lay bare the connections between how war itself is waged, death justified, and a nation defined through its care for war dead.
Conference Papers & Lectures by Sarah Wagner
A talk delivered at the "Disasters, Displacement, and Human Rights" symposium at University of Te... more A talk delivered at the "Disasters, Displacement, and Human Rights" symposium at University of Tennessee, Knoxville, on Sept. 26, 2015. Based on a forthcoming book chapter with Sarah Wagner, the talk examines two contemporary examples of what Benedict Anderson called “sacrilege of a strange, contemporary kind”: the disinterment and identification of the Vietnam Unknown Soldier (whose remains were thus made both “known” and particular) and the recent exhumation of Chile’s socialist icons Pablo Neruda, Salvador Allende, and Victor Jara. The paper explores the sociopolitical consequences of a state’s attempts to account for its past through the recovered body of a renowned figure. It sheds light on the publicly sacred status of these bodies and the relationship—
for both the state and society—between the iconic dead and the larger populations of the “ordinary” missing and disappeared.
Books by Sarah Wagner
Harvard University Press, 2019
For many families the Vietnam War remains unsettled. Nearly 1,600 Americans—and more than 300,000... more For many families the Vietnam War remains unsettled. Nearly 1,600 Americans—and more than 300,000 Vietnamese—involved in the conflict are still unaccounted for. In What Remains, Sarah E. Wagner tells the stories of America’s missing service members and the families and communities that continue to search for them. From the scientists who work to identify the dead using bits of bone unearthed in Vietnamese jungles to the relatives who press government officials to find the remains of their loved ones, Wagner introduces us to the men and women who seek to bring the missing back home. Through their experiences she examines the ongoing toll of America’s most fraught war.
Every generation has known the uncertainties of war. Collective memorials, such as the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery, testify to the many service members who never return, their fates still unresolved. But advances in forensic science have provided new and powerful tools to identify the remains of the missing, often from the merest trace—a tooth or other fragment. These new techniques have enabled military experts to recover, repatriate, identify, and return the remains of lost service members. So promising are these scientific developments that they have raised the expectations of military families hoping to locate their missing. As Wagner shows, the possibility of such homecomings compels Americans to wrestle anew with their memories, as with the weight of their loved ones’ sacrifices, and to reevaluate what it means to wage war and die on behalf of the nation.
The fall of the United Nations “safe area” of Srebrenica in July 1995 to Bosnian Serb and S... more The fall of the United Nations “safe area” of Srebrenica in July 1995 to Bosnian Serb and Serbian forces stands out as the international community's most egregious failure to intervene during the Bosnian war. It led to genocide, forced displacement, and a legacy of loss. But wartime inaction has since spurred numerous postwar attempts to address the atrocities' effects on Bosnian society and its diaspora. Srebrenica in the Aftermath of Genocide reveals how interactions between local, national, and international interventions – from refugee return and resettlement to commemorations, war crimes trials, immigration proceedings, and election reform – have led to subtle, positive effects of social repair, despite persistent attempts at denial. Using an interdisciplinary approach, diverse research methods, and more than a decade of fieldwork in five countries, Lara J. Nettelfield and Sarah E. Wagner trace the genocide's reverberations in Bosnia and abroad. The findings of this study have implications for research on post-conflict societies around the world.
In the aftermath of the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, the discovery of unmarked mass graves revealed Eur... more In the aftermath of the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, the discovery of unmarked mass graves revealed Europe's worst atrocity since World War II: the genocide in the UN "safe area" of Srebrenica. To Know Where He Lies provides a powerful account of the innovative genetic technology developed to identify the eight thousand Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) men and boys found in those graves and elsewhere, demonstrating how memory, imagination, and science come together to recover identities lost to genocide. Sarah E. Wagner explores technology's import across several areas of postwar Bosnian society—for families of the missing, the Srebrenica community, the Bosnian political leadership (including Serb and Muslim), and international aims of social repair—probing the meaning of absence itself.
Essays and op eds by Sarah Wagner
Washington Post , 2018
Co-authored with Michael Dolski
Books & Articles by Sarah Wagner
Known and unknown, celebrated and reviled, dead bodies, as anthropologist Katherine Verdery has s... more Known and unknown, celebrated and reviled, dead bodies, as anthropologist Katherine Verdery has so eloquently written, have political lives. In the context of post-conflict societies, dead bodies demand response and urge action. They are hard to ignore - for communities of survivors and mourners, if not for the state itself. The politics surrounding these dead are also rarely static, despite best efforts by surviving kin, fictive and real, to fix identity and with it narratives of loss, sacrifice, and redemption. In this chapter, through the examples of high-profile historical cases in the USA and Chile, we examine the effects of forensic science, this most powerful source of evidence, in attaching such narratives to the bodies of persons deemed sacred to the nation-state.
Papers by Sarah Wagner
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Articles by Sarah Wagner
Conference Papers & Lectures by Sarah Wagner
for both the state and society—between the iconic dead and the larger populations of the “ordinary” missing and disappeared.
Books by Sarah Wagner
Every generation has known the uncertainties of war. Collective memorials, such as the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery, testify to the many service members who never return, their fates still unresolved. But advances in forensic science have provided new and powerful tools to identify the remains of the missing, often from the merest trace—a tooth or other fragment. These new techniques have enabled military experts to recover, repatriate, identify, and return the remains of lost service members. So promising are these scientific developments that they have raised the expectations of military families hoping to locate their missing. As Wagner shows, the possibility of such homecomings compels Americans to wrestle anew with their memories, as with the weight of their loved ones’ sacrifices, and to reevaluate what it means to wage war and die on behalf of the nation.
Essays and op eds by Sarah Wagner
Books & Articles by Sarah Wagner
Papers by Sarah Wagner
for both the state and society—between the iconic dead and the larger populations of the “ordinary” missing and disappeared.
Every generation has known the uncertainties of war. Collective memorials, such as the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery, testify to the many service members who never return, their fates still unresolved. But advances in forensic science have provided new and powerful tools to identify the remains of the missing, often from the merest trace—a tooth or other fragment. These new techniques have enabled military experts to recover, repatriate, identify, and return the remains of lost service members. So promising are these scientific developments that they have raised the expectations of military families hoping to locate their missing. As Wagner shows, the possibility of such homecomings compels Americans to wrestle anew with their memories, as with the weight of their loved ones’ sacrifices, and to reevaluate what it means to wage war and die on behalf of the nation.