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? If this is the case, would it raise another more supernatural reason for the Mexican state and the soldiers to watch over the corpse of Beltrán Leyva? What if the forensic staff did desecrate his corpse for a joke and later made the military afraid of the cosmological consequences of their act? Or, to put it differently, what if the symbolic ‘force’ of his corpse, which shows his and his rivals’ ‘will to kill and be killed’, was closely interlinked with the material life of the dead corpse? The substance of dead bodies To approach this line of investigation of the
not related to the fear of spiritual contagion as in Hertz’s case, but rather to the fear of contagious violence. Obsessed as he is with ‘the fine line between repulsion and desire’ (Posel and Gupta 2009), Bataille notes that the violence of death constitutes ‘a supernatural peril which can be “caught” from the dead body’ and that the ‘desire to kill may take hold of us’ (Bataille 2006: 46–7). Therefore the dead body is subjected to taboo. Within the community, but less so when the dead body belongs to a stranger, the ‘taboo which lays hold on the others at the
their demarcated enclosures. They domesticate and sublimate it in ritual. I ask Lam and other people who have placed their parents’ urns in Buddhist temples why they did so. Echoing what others said, Lam replies: ‘I travel a lot for work. I worry that I may miss important dates in the ritual calendar.’ She means that monks’ prayers and the supernaturally potent milieu of the Buddhist temple provide ritual protection to her mother’s remains, even if she is absent. Her recently widowed father joins in the conversation and adds, ‘I worry about the neglect and abandonment
arrest him, he summoned the spirit of Dom Boaventura, leader of the 1912 Manufahi uprising against the Portuguese colonial power. With the aid of the spirit, Reinado gained invisibility and escaped past the SAS (Agence France-Presse 2007; Nygaard-Christensen 2011: 220–1). Various other groups, such as the martial arts groups (MAGs) and ritual arts groups (RAGs) that have mushroomed in the country but also allegedly the Sagrada Familia, regularly use ancestral worship in rituals to give them supernatural strengths and skills (Myrttinen 2010; Scambary et al. 2006). The
-existing cultural model – in line with Hinton’s analysis of genocide in Cambodia18 – that belonged to the nineteenth century, but was successfully adapted to the context of the Cold War in Argentina. The Argentine military sphere was a social space in which Catholicism had a significance of its own,19 which went beyond its own particular domain20 (namely a belief in the supernatural). For the Argentine military, religion upheld a sense of social and political order, and created a historical teleology. Thanks to the persistent and prolonged work of the indoctrinators, the