The Edge of Humanity: Why Commonsensical Notions about Nature Impede our Understandings of Structural Violence in the Arizona Desert

Summary

Since the 1990’s Border Patrol has employed a strategy known as "Prevention Through Deterrence." This policy emphasizes heightened security around urban ports of entry so that undocumented migrants will attempt to cross the border in more remote areas that are difficult to traverse but easy for law enforcement to patrol. Rather than deterring migration, hundreds of thousands of people each year now spend days in the desert attempting to walk across one of the most extreme environments in North America. Moreover, hundreds die annually during this process. In 2012 and 2013, the Undocumented Migration Project conducted a series of experiments in the desert that used pig carcasses as proxies for the human body. The goals were to understand how unburied bodies decomposed and the political implications of this form of death. Drawing on these data and a historical review of burial treatment, I argue that humans have long employed nature to construct forms of post-mortem violence that I term "necroviolence." I posit that anthropologists working in all time periods can gain new insight by rethinking long-held notions about the nature/culture divide in taphonomic studies and that "natural" post-mortem treatment can be productively added to current anthropological frameworks of violence.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Archaeology of Common Sense   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage