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presented in Ohnuki-Tierney, ‘Brain death’. My focus here is on conceptual issues. Let me first briefly discuss how the new technology represents the concepts of life and death, the body, personhood, etc., that are deeply embedded in a dominant Western intellectual tradition, the Enlightenment tradition. Brain death
The display of human remains is a controversial issue in many contemporary societies, with many museums globally removing them from display. However, their place in genocide memorials is also contested. Objections towards the display of remains are based strongly in the social sciences and humanities, predicated on assumptions made regarding the relationship between respect, identification and personhood. As remains are displayed scientifically and anonymously, it is often argued that the personhood of the remains is denied, thereby rendering the person ‘within’ the remains invisible. In this article I argue that the link between identification and personhood is, in some contexts, tenuous at best. Further, in the context of Cambodia, I suggest that such analyses ignore the ways that local communities and Cambodians choose to interact with human remains in their memorials. In such contexts, the display of the remains is central to restoring their personhood and dignity.
Late eighteenth-century science aimed to render the body transparent; in contrast, gothic novels of the same period often represented the body as an untrustworthy source of information about the self. In these novels, characters may often be reduced to a bodily or facial map, which may give clues as to personal character, motivation and intention. Yet the practice of reading the body – as practiced in sciences such as physiognomy, phrenology or criminology – also comes under intense interrogation. Through disastrous mis-readings, misdiagnoses and misidentifications, gothic novelists demonstrate how conflating body and self is deeply threatening to ideas of ‘unique’ personhood.
In this article we explore the relational materiality of fragments of human cadavers used to produce DNA profiles of the unidentified dead at a forensic genetics police laboratory in Rio de Janeiro. Our point of departure is an apparently simple problem: how to discard already tested materials in order to open up physical space for incoming tissue samples. However, during our study we found that transforming human tissues and bone fragments into disposable trash requires a tremendous institutional investment of energy, involving negotiations with public health authorities, criminal courts and public burial grounds. The dilemma confronted by the forensic genetic lab suggests not only how some fragments are endowed with more personhood than others, but also how the very distinction between human remains and trash depends on a patchwork of multiple logics that does not necessarily perform according to well-established or predictable scripts.
This article focuses on ongoing contestations around burned human remains originating from the Holocaust, their changing meanings and dynamics, and their presence/absence in Holocaust-related debates, museums and memorial sites. It argues that ashes challenge but also expand the notion of what constitutes human remains, rendering them irreducible to merely bones and fleshed bodies, and proposes that incinerated remains need to be seen not as a ‘second rate’ corporeality of the dead but as a different one, equally important to engage with – analytically, ethically and politically. Challenging the perception of ashes as unable to carry traces of the personhood of the of the dead, and as not capable of yielding evidence, I posit that, regardless of their fragile corporality, incinerated human remains should be considered abjectual and evidential, as testifying to the violence from which they originated and to which they were subjected. Moreover, in this article I consider incinerated human remains through the prism of the notion of vulnerability, meant to convey their susceptibility to violence – violence through misuse, destruction, objectification, instrumentalisation and/or museum display. I argue that the consequences of the constantly negotiated status of ashes as a ‘second rate’ corporeality of human remains include their very presence in museum exhibitions – where they, as human remains, do not necessarily belong.
). Schulz , P. ( 2018 ), ‘ Displacement from Gendered Personhood: Sexual Violence and Masculinities in Northern Uganda ’, International Affairs , 2018 , 94 : 5 , 1101 – 19 . Schulz , P. ( 2019 ), ‘ “To Me, Justice Means to Be in a Group”: Survivors’ Groups as a Pathway to Justice in
socio-cultural embeddedness and its restorative and conciliatory potential. 14 The gacaca practice went against the grain of these socio-cultural practices. Other, mainly non-judicial approaches on dealing with the past in Rwanda have demonstrated much more success by imbuing programme activities with the endogenous principles underlying the social construction of personhood in Rwanda, especially in the domains of socio-therapy ( Richters et al. , 2010 ; Richters, Rutayisire and Dekker, 2010 ; Richters, 2010 ) or community-level reconstruction and conflict
This book takes a body of ethnographic data collected in 2001-2, during a year's fieldwork at the Bank of Scotland (BoS) and HBOS, and revisits it from the perspective of the 2014-16 period. It explores the tension between the 'ethnographic present' of the author's original research and the unavoidable alteration of perspective on that data that the economic crisis has created. The original research had been planned to take place in the BoS but in 2001, before the research began, BoS had merged with the Halifax to form HBOS. The book provides a long-term historical perspective on BoS/HBOS, from inception to the 2008 financial crisis, and then a consideration of the nature of historical explanation, under the rubric of 'theory'. The main attempts to explain the proximate causes of the 2008 crisis, as well as more encompassing political economic arguments about the trajectory and dynamics of capitalism are examined. The concept of 'culture' as applied to both national groups, Scots and English, and organizations, BoS and Halifax, are also dealt with. The book examines other governing concepts such as organisational change in the business world and social change, identity and the way Scottish and English experience their own personhood, and comparative nature of ethnographic research. The conclusion reviews and draws together the themes of the book, returning to the overarching question of historical perspective and explanation.
This chapter responds to David Lawton’s recent work on voice and interiority by considering what voice has to do with the ways medieval people thought about personhood. 1 Then, as now, any attempt to understand who is granted full social and legal status as a person leads us to consider who is allowed to speak. Who may speak on their own
important sense, nothing I am about to describe will be entirely new to the reader, for ‘British-Israel Truth’, as it is known by those who follow it, stands as the theological foundation not only of Orange ritual, but also of Orange morality. What comes to be constructed on top of this foundation, I shall go on to argue, is a form of exceptionalism which defines Orange specialness apophatically, producing a version of moral personhood that is said to apply to some, but crucially is also said not to apply to all. I want to begin setting out this argument by returning to