Abstract
Who owns the dead? Or, to be more precise, who owns the right to control how we deal with the remains of the dead? In most cases the legal and moral answer is clear: the relatives of the deceased. But in acts of mass violence the politics of death become fraught with the competing interests of numerous stakeholders, and the remains of victims come to represent something far beyond the individuals or their grieving families. In the case of September 11th, the dead at the World Trade Center (WTC) symbolized an entire nation perceived as under attack. This made it difficult to answer the question of who had the right to decide the fate of thousands of unidentified and unclaimed remains extracted from the site.
In the kind of painstaking detail with which historians excel, Jay Aronson’s Who Owns the Dead? The Science and Politics of Death at Ground Zero charts how various stakeholders struggled for control of the remains as well as the expensive parcel of city land containing them. This struggle carried into an emotional debate about memorialization, which took more than a decade and nearly $1 billion to transform the site into the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum. This memorial stands out from other cases because the victims’ remains symbolized an attack later used to justify military action.
Further complicating this process was the development of new technologies that made large-scale DNA identification more viable. More than $80 million has been spent on attempts to identify and return to families “every human body part recovered from the site” (p. 2). Families of 1,113 victims are still waiting. For them, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) has committed to continue identification efforts in perpetuity. This means the memorial represents “the physical embodiment of the technological dream that unidentified remains may one day be made personal again” (p. 255). I suspect we are just beginning to see the scope of this “dream,” one that feels like more of a nightmare after reading the anguishing perspectives of 9/11 families.
The book draws on a mix of primary and secondary sources exhaustively documented in the endnotes. Chapter One, “A Tuesday Morning in September,” is a heart-wrenching account of the WTC attack, yet quite possibly the most objective one I have read. Aronson manages to take the reader inside the panic of Lower Manhattan that frightful day without sensationalism. I highly recommend the chapter to any instructor teaching on the subject who needs something to assign to students too young to remember 9/11, or, as will be the dominant case within a few years, too young to have been alive.
The next two chapters deal with the recovery and processing of remains. Here is where the historian of science is at his strongest, taking readers through the steps to find human fragments, first at the WTC site and later at a landfill used for sorting debris. Aronson is gentle in his descriptions of what happened to the bodies, often letting numbers tell the story: of the 2,753 victims, only 293 bodies were left intact. It then fell on forensic scientists to try to identify remaining victims from more than 21,000 fragments. Aronson published an earlier book on DNA profiling and is able to explain in accessible language the science of identification.
After this is a set of chapters on the intense debate over how best to memorialize the victims and the impossible task of adjudicating whose interests should reign. This section could be the best of the book, with so much to interrogate. Who has moral authority over the unidentified and unclaimed? Does this authority vary when death is the result of terrorism as opposed to natural disaster? Unfortunately, these chapters become muddled with excessive detailing of names and acronyms. It would have helped for Aronson to pull back with reminders of how this case matters beyond the particulars, linking to unanswered theoretical questions posed in the introduction.
The pace quickens again in Chapter Seven, “New Finds,” where the discovery of human remains in nearby buildings years after the attack brings home just how difficult it is for families to move forward when their loved ones’ remains are literally stuck in the city’s manholes. In Chapter Eight their grief becomes compounded by the politics of constructing and paying for a museum and memorial. One can’t help but feel outraged that tourists pay admission to the place where remains are stored. Aronson never explicitly states whether he sides with the small number of families who publicly dissented to the final memorial. On the other hand, he devotes considerable attention to their perspectives, leaving one to read between the lines.
The book could appeal to many audiences, provided they are willing to get past the excessive detailing and lack of theoretical exposition. Scholars of mass violence have much to work with in understanding the symbolism attached to victims. Urban sociologists would benefit from reading the pages that deal with the city’s effort to balance memorialization with redevelopment. Here is a case where the needs of residents seem to matter far less than those of other stakeholders, namely families of victims. Aronson’s account of how various local interest groups competed for power also fits in a growing literature on the role of organizations in city politics.
Given how carefully researched the book is, it stands as a striking omission that Aronson does not mention Park51, the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” proposed for construction two blocks away and later scrapped after intense public outrage. According to Aronson, “Nothing could happen at Ground Zero without an unseemly collision of business, politics, and raw emotion” (p. 173). Why then leave out one of the biggest national news stories about the site from 2010? It would have been interesting to know how the families that Aronson interviewed made sense of the controversy, given they were engaged in a heated debate with museum officials that same year. The mosque controversy also would have presented an opportunity to interrogate further the multiple, competing layers of meaning attached to the site. If nothing else, Aronson draws heavily on media reports, and his lack of engagement with those about Park51 makes little sense.
In the end, the biggest contribution of this book will be to the sociology of science, where the ever-evolving science of death enables new identification techniques and thereby extends the mourning process in unexpected ways. The medical examiner’s promise to never give up identification efforts means that the 9/11 memorial is “a storage facility, albeit a dignified one” (p. 255). This makes it hard for the families of victims to move on, knowing that their loved ones are to be held indefinitely in an “active repository” (p. 4) rather than interred in a sealed memorial or grave. Aronson writes, “There should not be a ‘statute of limitations’ on mourning and grief, but it is important to at least consider the implications of an identification effort without end” (p. 254). In other words, at what point do we say enough is enough? Not surprisingly, Aronson is neutral, arguing there is no satisfying answer. Then again, it seems perfectly fair to conclude, as Aronson does, that no memorial would have satisfied everyone.