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The appearance of corpses in rubbish tips is not a recent phenomenon. In Argentina, tips have served not only as sites for the disposal of bodies but also as murder scenes. Many of these other bodies found in such places belong to individuals who have suffered violent deaths, which go on to become public issues, or else are ‘politicised deaths’. Focusing on two cases that have received differing degrees of social, political and media attention – Diego Duarte, a 15-year-old boy from a poor background who went waste-picking on an open dump and never came back, and Ángeles Rawson, a girl of 16 murdered in the middle-class neighbourhood of Colegiales, whose body was found in the same tip – this article deals with the social meanings of bodies that appear in landfills. In each case, there followed a series of events that placed a certain construction on the death – and, more importantly, the life – of the victim. Corpses, once recognised, become people, and through this process they are given new life. It is my contention that bodies in rubbish tips express – and configure – not only the limits of the social but also, in some cases, the limits of the human itself.
‘public’ were fashioned.6 The benefits of combined collecting and ownership in addition to (although by no means instead of) private collecting were apparent to the emerging middle classes in urban Britain. In other provincial centres such as Sheffield and Newcastle, literary and philosophical societies began to purchase sizeable private collections. And so it was to members of the Manchester Lit and Phil that Robinson turned when bankruptcy and lack of space prompted him to put the Philips’s collection up for sale once more. In June 1821 Robinson, by now a bookseller
from the same cultural and chronological contexts. In short, to understand the social dimensions of mortuary expression we need to explore difference in terms of ‘social class’, attitude and aesthetics, and not via two-dimensional entities like social status based on wealth. Today, attitudes dictated by background or family might influence someone’s attitudes, determining things like the age when you have children and how to approach books, marriage, student loans, family history or social obligations. For example, the middle classes might move for work, whereas
behind as well as a re-creation of two domestic scenes – one a middle class family, the other working class – packing to leave. The re-creation of the docklands area of London was done by sourcing images from the Illustrated London News. This practice effectively set up a process of recycling images that carried well-known narratives, such as, in this case, leaving desperate circumstances behind. Props such as nautical ropes suggested the journey the people in the images were about to take in search of a better life – the long voyage, by ship, to South Australia (see
that material was managed and stored and who interacted with it. The process of admission has been singled out as a bureaucratic process involving a large number of actors, from the gatekeeper to the patient, and was an essential ritual in the running of the asylum. Asylum designers were heavily influenced by country-house architecture, and the rituals undertaken in the admission process – while akin to those undertaken at workhouses – were also bound up in the hierarchy of the middle-class domestic home. This was reflected in the paternalistic relationship between
administration at the highest levels, so that the asylums could be audited in comparison with each other more effectively and in increased numbers. A concern with efficiency in public administration occurred against the backdrop of a growing number of literate poor at this time (as discussed in Chapter 2 ). An increase in the level of literacy in this later period marks a shift from upper-middle class concern with public institutional provision to an atmosphere of accountability, where lay literacy ensured that public awareness through reading
its construction overseen by local architect Peter Atkinson. The Retreat was arranged with a three-storey central block with sitting rooms and offices, flanked by two two-storey wings for patient bedrooms. The building was constructed of brick. The Retreat’s arrangement of rooms in wings leading towards a central administration, a hidden utility block behind the main structure, and careful control of spaces had a significant impact on the ways in which asylum design developed. The design of the Retreat owes much to the rural, middle-class domestic dwellings
and the built environment have been used throughout time and space to make a visual statement of being in the world. This practice continued in the twentieth century in the form of aspirational country house purchasing, or what Evelyn Waugh called the ‘cult’ of the country house. In the twenty-first century, it is the upper middle classes striving to buy a second home in the country, reflecting ‘a distinct bourgeois culture’ (Ganesh, 2017 ). This can be paralleled with tower house builders striving to improve their position. It is also a
: 20) at the other. One thing is certain, Furtwängler’s influence has been considerable and is still strong, as we continue to build – at times rather uncritically – on his contribution to the discipline. Born to middle-class parents in Catholic Freiburg, Adolf Furtwängler spent four years studying Classical philology and philosophy at Freiburg and Leipzig before turning to archaeology in Munich under the charismatic Heinrich Brunn (e.g. Curtius, (1935) 1958; Schuchhardt, 1956; Straub, 2007: 21–77; Wünsche, 2007; Hansson, 2014). Graduating at the age of 21 with a
Eighteenth-Century Studies, 24 (2001), 1–14; E. Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and their Visitors (London: Routledge, 1994); Hooper-Greenhill, ‘Studying visitors’, in Macdonald (ed.), A Companion to Museum Studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 362–76; K. Hudson, A Social History of Museums: What the Visitors Thought (London: Macmillan, 1975); B. Longhurst et al., ‘Audiences, museums and the English middle class’, Museum and Society, 2 (2004), 104–24; Macdonald, ‘Accessing audiences: visiting visitor books’, Museum and Society, 3 (2006), 119–36. 3 Manchester Natural History