Layla Renshaw. Exhuming Loss: Memory, Materiality and Mass Graves of the Spanish Civil War. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2011. 259 pp. $89.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-61132-041-1; $34.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-61132-042-8.

Reviewed by David A. Messenger (University of Wyoming)
Published on H-Memory (April, 2012)
Commissioned by Catherine Baker (University of Hull)

Spain's confrontation with its civil war (1936-39), and in particular with the repression and violence against Republicans by the Nationalist side of Francisco Franco, has been one of the more dramatic stories of collective memory politics in the 2000s. Historians have documented 350,000 deaths, mostly of civilians, during the conflict; another 214,000 killed between 1940 and 1942; and a further 100,000 who died later in Francoist prisons (p. 22). Only in the last fifteen to twenty years have these numbers become common knowledge, for the transition to democracy in Spain after the death of Franco in 1975 was premised on a "pact of amnesia" and a broad amnesty for perpetrators of past political crimes (p. 25). All of this changed in the new millennium and was given official sanction with the passage of the Law on Historical Memory in 2007 that provided government funds and support for a variety of memory-related work. This law and the issues related to the civil war and political repression were brought to public attention largely through coverage of the exhumation of mass graves of victims of Francoism in towns and villages across Spain. These efforts were championed by a variety of groups, but none as important as the Association for the Recuperation of Historical Memory (ARMH). 

Layla Renshaw's book is an attempt to examine the role of exhumation in the contemporary memory landscape in Spain and to further study "the political and symbolic power of exhumation" more generally (p. 11). While most of the public sees the role of forensic anthropologists and exhumation projects as beneficial to understanding and accounting for state-sponsored violence, civil war, and mass murder, Renshaw's work at exhumation sites in Spain convinced her that the material aspects of exhumation complicate the situation. Using contemporary anthropological theory, she attempts to understand not only the political issues that arise at exhumation sites but also other factors that come along with the "materialization" of the dead. In particular, Renshaw draws on the work of Parker Pearson and Ewa Domanska, who argue that the bodies of the dead are physical traces of the past used by the living to make representations about the past, present, and future. In this light, what Renshaw hopes to do is change our focus on mass grave exhumation from an outcome-oriented process to one that emphasizes how different actors at different stages of the exhumation process interact with and represent the dead.

Renshaw's research involved interviews, observation, and participation at two exhumation sites in small villages of Castile-Léon. She focused on three groups during the exhumation process: relatives of the victims (both their children [now elderly] and grandchildren); ARMH activists and to a lesser degree other groups; and the forensic anthropologists providing the necessary expertise at sites of exhumations. One of the most significant findings of this study is that, despite all three groups generally being in support of exhumations, considerable tension arises among them once the process is embarked upon. Forensic specialists emphasize the individual, as they are trained to prioritize identification; ARMH activists, although seeking permission of relatives before opening a site, nonetheless have an emphasis on the collective nature of victimization; other groups, such as the more leftist-oriented Foros por la memória (Forums for Memory), assert that the collective identity of victims as political victims is primary; and finally, relatives, especially the children of these victims killed in the 1930s, came of age under Franco during an atmosphere of intimidation that was followed by the pact of forgetting. The result is a generation who did not share memories of their lost relatives and who thus became "atomized" (p. 78). This is apparent to Renshaw when she hears relatives talk about the murder of their family members not as a result of Francoist or fascist political action but because of "fascist thieves" or "fascist criminals," a reference that "depoliticizes" the nature of the deaths and perhaps was necessary in the years following the civil war because the perpetrators still lived among them in the same village (pp. 94-96).

How do these different foci of each group play out at the sites of mass grave exhumations? This is where Renshaw draws on a number of anthropological thinkers whom she links together through use of the concept of "materialization" (p. 30). When forensic anthropologists find personal belongings in a mass grave, those belongings become part of the evidence required to eventually make a positive identification of the victim. ARMH activists led workshops and held meetings in the villages that Renshaw visited to solicit memories, photos, and other corroboratory stories to assist in this process. Yet relatives of the victims had few photos and almost no memory of objects that would identify their kin, partially due to the passage of time, some sixty-five or seventy years, but also because they had known under Franco that a display of such photos or the passing of stories about their relative was risky. Now, when faced with the need to present such evidence, they cannot. This results, for some, in not wanting to admit that they had relatives in these graves; Renshaw records the story of one man who visits the mass grave site during the village siesta, traveling by bus so no one he knows will see him (p. 76). The result is that the body, the objects found in the grave, and the photograph are all necessary to use in the process of identification and all are complicated in the way that they come to represent the victim.

The most striking assessment that Renshaw provides is from the perspective of the relatives. Many are uncomfortable with the process of being open about their relatives' pasts and involving themselves directly in identification. Thus Renshaw concludes that, even though we on the outside might see Spain as being able to confront its past through exhumation, the reality is that contemporary Republican memory is still shaped and conditioned by the previous Francoist discourse on the past and the pact-of-forgetting era. The relatives of those executed are still conditioned to be ashamed of their personal stories and family's past, despite the fact that many aspects of civil war Republicanism are now taken as political and social givens in contemporary Spain. Yet this is a process. Examining the ceremony of collective reburial in one of the villages where she worked, the author reflects on a ceremony that largely ignores the politics of the victims yet has references to current events that hint at the nature of what the victims shared. The emphasis that the ARMH gives to families to decide how to commemorate their relatives means that self-censorship still exists. However, the more this happens, the more the families come to identify, in an empathetic manner if not a political one, with the "unknown dead from other parts of Spain" (p. 175). Renshaw's work is a thought-provoking piece from the field that has relevance for anyone interested in the impact that memory politics has on the individual and the community, on the role that exhumations play beyond establishing evidence for war crimes, and on the material nature of the mass grave.

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Citation: David A. Messenger. Review of Renshaw, Layla, Exhuming Loss: Memory, Materiality and Mass Graves of the Spanish Civil War. H-Memory, H-Net Reviews. April, 2012.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=34575

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