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This chapter aims to explore the Duha concepts of proper and improper burial, including how their 'return' to open-air funerals may be conceived as an effort to regain control over local bodies, lives and lands. The traditional funeral practice of the Duha reindeer nomads of northern Mongolia consists in placing corpses on the open ground in the wild forest to be eaten by wild animals. The Duha are a Tuvinian minority group of reindeer herders and hunters, amounting to only around 400 people, living in the forested and mountainous regions of northern Mongolia bordering Russia. Following the collapse of socialism in Mongolia, the Duha have increasingly returned to their traditional open-air funerals. The collapse of socialism have marked the end of the state law on funerals, but also the end of social security, which the Mongolian People's Republic had provided for its citizens.
This chapter examines Zimbabwe's politics of the dead through analytical lenses emergent from theoretical debates about materiality. The politics of the dead in Zimbabwe long predates the grisly events at Chibondo that burst into the public arena in March 2011. In Zimbabwe the politics of heritage, memory and commemoration has been the subject of considerable academic and public debate for a long time. It is likely that some in Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) saw the political usefulness of the uncertainties provoked by the excessive potentiality of the human materials being exhumed from the Mount Darwin mines. The 'indeterminate alterity' of things or 'torque of materiality' indicates that the uncertainty that surrounds how and what human remains do in Zimbabwe's politics of the dead pre-exists or is immanent to questions about the ambivalent agency of bones and bodies as uneasy subject/objects.
The Shining Path have intended the act of looking at human corpses to alter subjectivities, but as a self-proclaimed revolutionary movement its broader goal was to modify collective attachments by announcing and reinforcing political boundaries. Bodily remains could be used to accomplish that, perhaps, since encounters with corpses focus attention on borders of the most basic and experientially immanent kind. They focus attention onto the lines separating one bodily self from another and one human biological life from death. If the primary purpose of political community is to safeguard relations between subjects, time becomes 'weather' precisely when the possibility of property itself is placed in doubt. 'Time as weather' haunts because property itself presupposes temporality, or rather a particular manner in which duration comes to be fused with things.
This chapter explores the process of death and repatriation of a Mexican migrant, Jacinto, from his home in Los Angeles to his native village of San Pedro Yalehua. The village of San Pedro Yalehua is a part of Zapotec Indian community located in the Sierra Juárez mountain range in the southern state of Oaxaca. It argues that the involved authorities in the process of making sovereign claims over Jacinto's dead body concomitantly seek to shape meanings related to membership, belonging and obligation. The chapter illustrates how various authorities seek to exert their sovereignty by inscribing their claims on the deceased migrant body. The importance of death and the corpse as a site for identification of symbolic, national boundaries arises as it not only reinforces the idea of Mexico as a nation but also stresses the importance of Mexico in the lives of the migrants.
Thousands of people died in Rotterdam during the Second World War in more than 300 German and Allied bombardments. Civil defence measures had been taken before the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940 and these efforts were intensified during the country’s occupation as Allied bombers attacked Rotterdam’s port, factories, dry docks and oil terminals. Residential neighbourhoods were also hit through imprecise targeting and by misfired flak grenades. Inadequate air raid shelters and people’s reluctance to enter them caused many casualties. The condition of the corpses and their post-mortem treatment was thus co-constituted by the relationship between the victims and their material circumstances. This article concludes that an understanding of the treatment of the dead after war, genocide and mass violence must pay systematic attention to the materiality of death because the condition, collection and handling of human remains is affected by the material means that impacted on the victims.
On 25 September 1911 the battleship Liberté exploded in Toulon harbour. This tragedy is just one of the many disasters that the French fleet suffered at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries and also represents the peak of these calamities, since it is undoubtedly the most deadly suffered by a French Navy ship in peacetime. The aim of this article is to study how the navy managed this disaster and the resulting deaths of service personnel, which were all the more traumatic because the incident happened in France’s main military port and in circumstances that do not match the traditional forms of death at sea.
The construction of an underground car park beneath the main square of Turin, Italy in 2004 led to the unearthing of the skeletonised remains of twenty-two individuals attributable to the early eighteenth century. At this time the city was besieged during the War of the Spanish Succession in a hard-fought battle that resulted in unexpected triumph for the Piedmontese, a victory that marked a fundamental turning point in Italian history. The current study assesses the strength of evidence linking the excavated individuals to the siege and assesses their possible role in the battle through consideration of their biological profiles, patterns of pathology and the presence of traumatic injuries. This article presents the first analysis of evidence for the siege of Turin from an anthropological point of view, providing new and unbiased information from the most direct source of evidence available: the remains of those who actually took part.
Based on a study of intersecting French archives (those of the Val de Grâce Hospital, the Service Historique de la Défense and the Archives Diplomatiques), and with the support of numerous printed sources, this article focuses on the handling of the bodies of French soldiers who died of cholera during the Crimean War (1854–56). As a continuation of studies done by historians Luc Capdevila and Danièle Voldman, the aim here is to consider how the diseased corpses of these soldiers reveal both the causes and circumstances of their deaths. Beyond the epidemiological context, these dead bodies shed light on the sanitary conditions and suffering resulting from years of military campaigns. To conclude, the article analyses the material traces left by these dead and the way that the Second Empire used them politically, giving the remains of leaders who died on the front lines of the cholera epidemic a triumphant return to the country and a state funeral.