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Europe is increasingly defined by who is granted and who is denied access as potential members of its political communities. While hundreds of thousands risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean and are detained in their desperate attempt to seek asylum within the EU, the rich are fast-tracked and welcomed with open arms. Accelerated naturalisation of the global elite has
punishments meted out for transgressions of Party rules. Through a ritualised practice of revolutionary justice called ‘People’s Trials’ (juicios populares), the Party regularly sentenced to death those deemed political or social enemies. Rural communities under Sendero control served as prime locations for staging the juicios where residents were expected to participate in the executions to show their loyalty and subjection. People’s Trials were a technique for forming a revolutionary public: both in the sense of creating a political community and transforming the people
entities within the nation-state. Lars Ove Trans follows the repatriation of the corpse of a dead Mexican migrant worker from his home in the USA to his community of origin in the state of Oaxaca. As a recent phenomenon, the federal Mexican state supports the repatriation of corpses for burial in Mexican soil, once more showing how burial may be taken as the ‘ultimate test of belonging’ (Geshiere 2005). However, migrants have multiple sites of belonging and often uphold partial membership of several political communities. Therefore the repatriation of the migrant corpse
, Bataille points to the fear of death and the attempts of authorities to ameliorate and control the powers of abjection of dead bodies as constitutive elements in relation to political communities. Unlike many other attempts at identifying the defining traits of sovereignty, Bataille understands sovereignty as an effect of practice rather than seeing a sovereign will as the source of sovereignty. He may easily be criticised for the unmistakably vitalist tenor of his fascination with the decision, excess and (disregard of) death, and his corresponding critique of the dull
the police, political parties and the district administration; in short, the encapsulating structures. Situational analysis as demonstrated in Bailey’s ethnographies of politics abstracts specific situations from reality to understand the contingency of rules and practices within political communities. 6 This can be understood through the ways in which two political
suggests that this project maintains a very “traditional” anthropological attention: it focuses on a community when talking about a state . The Gesellschaft of the Greek Cypriots has tragically imploded after the solidification of division post-1974, into a Gemeinschaft. This shift from a political community to a state society coagulates and completes itself in the state of the Republic of Cyprus
in the diasporic imagination. Nevertheless, the numbers of posthumous repatriations are significant with an estimated annual average of 8,000–9,000 cadavers in recent years (Lestage 2008: 210).2 Not only do the high rates of post-mortem repatriations in themselves merit attention, the contention of this chapter is that the subject also provides a unique prism for studying the politics of identity, membership and obligation in relation to political communities. Taking my cue from Foucault’s description of the body as ‘the inscribed surface of events’ (1977b: 148
mass graves and legal persecution of the perpetrators, are important historical contexts, while small arms proliferation, organised criminal networks, drug trafficking, human trafficking and the infiltration of the state by parallel, clandestine structures are highly significant contemporary contextual factors. For this reason, the analysis here relies on the significance and gendered meanings of mutilated female bodies in the present process of state formation in Guatemala, on the role they play in the making and territorialisation of political communities and on
towards conviction and criminal punishment, or moved to detention and deportation. They can have their pre-existing perceptions of (police) authority – and sense of felt belonging to a political community – affirmed, denied, or in some way positively or negatively altered. But police–minority encounters also have wider cultural resonance. Having drawn upon a system of racialised
escalation. However, the latter part of the story involving reconciliation and restoration of the hourglass model also provides interesting insight to understanding, in a transactional perspective, the conditions wherein wider parts of the political community may choose to accept this potential for a massive centralization of power. Pragmatic alignments and the fight over schools