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5 The disposal of corpses in an ethnicized civil war: Croatia, 1941–45 1 Alexander Korb Introduction In May 1943, an Italian general who was being held prisoner of war was discussing the course of the war with his colleagues. He was describing an incident that had occurred in the territory occupied by Italy in Croatia and, unknown to him, he was overheard by his British supervisors. The incident concerned the recovery of the corpses of murdered Serbs thrown by the perpetrators – Croatian nationalists – into karst caves, which are typical land formations in that
time (see Green 2009). In Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia–Herzegovina (BiH), the shifting urban frontline that united and separated the city’s neighbourhoods was an expression of the violent dispute over borders in the former Yugoslavia. During the 1992–95 war, a process of ethnic displacement meant that the frontline functioned as an ethnic threshold across which Sarajevans experienced (forced) mobility or immobility. In the aftermath of the conflict, the Inter Entity Boundary Line (IEBL), with its administrative separation of Sarajevo and Serb Sarajevo, replaced
then was on the ways women perceived and negotiated their identities as women, and the choices they made in their personal lives (Denich 1974 ; Hammel and Yarbrough 1973 ; Rihtman-Augustin 1982 ; Simic 1972 ). Prior to World War II the ethnic nationality groups that made up what came to be Yugoslavia were largely rural and patriarchal (Erlich 1966 ). Most followed
This article considers the contexts and processes of forensic identification in 2004 post-tsunami Thailand as examples of identity politics. The presence of international forensic teams as carriers of diverse technical expertise overlapped with bureaucratic procedures put in place by the Thai government. The negotiation of unified forensic protocols and the production of estimates of identified nationals straddle biopolitics and thanatocracy. The immense identification task testified on the one hand to an effort to bring individual bodies back to mourning families and national soils, and on the other hand to determining collective ethnic and national bodies, making sense out of an inexorable and disordered dissolution of corporeal as well as political boundaries. Individual and national identities were the subject of competing efforts to bring order to,the chaos, reaffirming the cogency of the body politic by mapping national boundaries abroad. The overwhelming forensic effort required by the exceptional circumstances also brought forward the socio-economic and ethnic disparities of the victims, whose post-mortem treatment and identification traced an indelible divide between us and them.
about entrepreneurial individuals and bridge-actions in the unlikely context of studying the Harvest Ministry, an independent Fijian Pentecostal church. On the surface Harvest Ministry sermons advocated a shift away from the ethnic pluralism and hereditary rank that organize Fijian society toward creating middle-class identities based on professional achievements and facility in the world outside
have been excavated – have sparked social and political debates.4 In marked contrast, the response of the Malaysian general public has been largely muted, except in cases where the reinterment of remains has threatened state-sponsored dominant narratives. The reasons for this seeming ambivalence are manifold. In the first instance, the main ethnic groups in the territory – comprising indigenous Malay and migrant Chinese and Indian minorities – experienced the occupation differently. As such, there is no shared collective memory that 222 Frances Tay can be
difference between two main migratory and hence ‘genealogical trajectories’ connecting Albania and Montenegro: one leading from Shkodra and its surroundings to Ulcinj, and the other one from Shkodra up to Tuzi and Podgorica (see Figure 4.1). While genealogies marked by migration between Ulcinj and Shkodra were clearly mono-ethnic and mono-confessional (Albanian–Muslim), the Sarapa genealogy – which included relations stretching across present-day Albania and Montenegro north of Lake Shkodra – featured an extraordinary diversity and inclusiveness that incorporated
deny that ethnicity patterns health and social inequities – and to frame this denial within a moral rubric of alleged ‘fairness’. Bailey’s ethnography: understanding morality, politics, and cultural change In The Witch Hunt , Bailey focuses on a series of events in the village of Bisipara in the 1950s that he struggled at the time to fully understand
Introduction Human reproduction has been discussed by experts and policymakers in Czechoslovakia since its foundation as an independent state in 1918. Despite the continuity of policy and expert discourse (Rákosník and Šustrová 2016 ), the period following 1948, when the Communist Party became the leading party, differed from the previous era. After the Second World War and the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia in 1945 and 1946, Czechoslovakia's total population decreased by more than three million. In this
The looking machine calls for the redemption of documentary cinema, exploring the potential and promise of the genre at a time when it appears under increasing threat from reality television, historical re-enactments, designer packaging and corporate authorship. The book consists of a set of essays, each focused on a particular theme derived from the author’s own experience as a filmmaker. It provides a practice-based, critical perspective on the history of documentary, how films evoke space, time and physical sensations, questions of aesthetics, and the intellectual and emotional relationships between filmmakers and their subjects. It is especially concerned with the potential of film to broaden the base of human knowledge, distinct from its expression in written texts. Among its underlying concerns are the political and ethical implications of how films are actually made, and the constraints that may prevent filmmakers from honestly showing what they have seen. While defending the importance of the documentary idea, MacDougall urges us to consider how the form can become a ‘cinema of consciousness’ that more accurately represents the sensory and everyday aspects of human life. Building on his experience bridging anthropology and cinema, he argues that this means resisting the inherent ethnocentrism of both our own society and the societies we film.