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bodies would shed light on the origins of the species or on racial typologies of human difference. They were particularly interested in the bodies of Indians, who, they believed, had been metaphorically frozen in time since the Stone Age, and whose remains therefore were thought to hold the key to ‘secrets of human origins’, as well as provide physical evidence for claims about European superiority and Native degeneracy. This perspective 20 Tony Platt was anchored in the scientific racism that dominated American eugenics.35 In widely read treatises – such as Samuel
twentieth-century totalitarian states that were characterised by both a highly developed politics of disciplining and improving the body and the species, and an unprecedented will to exterminate populations in order to defend, protect and purify the political community – nation, society or people – often defined in racial or ethnic terms (Foucault 2003). Thus, central concepts of the power of death such as blood, fatherland and nation were reinscribed in bio-political discourses of hygiene, eugenics, etc. (Dean 2004). The bodies of those who died in these systematic