Mass Fatalities and their Forensic Management: The Interactions of Medicolegal Work with the Local Cultural and Religious Funerary Norms: Presentation of preliminary fieldwork results

International audienceLarge-scale disasters such as the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami and the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami have produced large quantities of fatalities whose bodies had to be searched for, recovered, identified, and returned to their families. The care and management of these bodies have many implications, including the legal and administrative requirements of accounting for the missing and the dead and the social need to mourn for the dead individually and collectively. For the first aspect, forensics plays a central role in applying scientific methods and techniques to recover and identify the dead, enabling, for example, the issuance of a death certificate required by the victim's family to claim succession and insurance money. And for the latter, religion has played a traditional role in organising and prescribing the funerary practices and norms used to mourn. Moreover, religion can largely influence how a disaster is experienced and made sense of (fatality, punishment). The present research project focuses on the issues that arise from the interaction between religious and cultural funeral practices and the scientific and legal forensic management of the dead. To what extent do the internationally elaborated forensic protocols for handling and caring for the dead effectively adjust to, negotiate with, or oppose local funerary norms and prescriptions