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This article considers how the reburial and commemoration of the human remains of the Republican defeated during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) is affected by the social, scientific and political context in which the exhumations occur. Focusing on a particular case in the southwestern region of Extremadura, it considers how civil society groups administer reburial acts when a positive identification through DNA typing cannot be attained. In so doing, the article examines how disparate desires and memories come together in collective reburial of partially individuated human remains.
90 4 Exhumations in post-war rabbinical responsas David Deutsch The purpose of this chapter is to offer an insight into post-war Jewish responsa (decisions and rulings made by scholars of Jewish religious law) addressing the issue of exhumation and reburial of human remains stemming from the Holocaust, following research into thirty responsas submitted by ordained and practising Orthodox rabbis.1 The first part of the chapter will provide a brief and general presentation of the jargon found in responsa literature, methodology and reasoning, as well as the
example 176 Nicky Rousseau of what Katherine Verdery calls the ‘political lives of dead bodies’.5 Rather than pursuing either path, this chapter follows the practice of exhumation as it developed and then left the TRC’s door. Such an approach, together with a focus on instrumentalities, interventions, and transformations, works on the borders, rather than situating itself along the dominant and rather well-worn tracks of transitional justice literature. The chapter also looks at the practice of reburial, with a specific interest in how it came to be figured, and how
argues that the meticulous attention to the remembrance activities surrounding the reburial and memorialisation of the Alsatians and the intensity of the vandalism investigation demonstrates that French and Badenese officials were convinced that the local responses contained a symbolic resonance beyond giving eleven more victims of Nazi terror a proper burial. In effect, contemporary Badenese authorities and their French counterparts came 141 Corpses of atonement 141 to view the dead bodies as representative of the larger crimes of the Nazi regime, particularly
properly burying the ‘other’. 74 The sacralisation of the site, which strategically blocks any further polemical intervention, goes hand in hand with a hegemonic rearticulation of its Polish-Jewish past facilitated by the very logic of reburial: human remains are once more animated and radically redefined so that the legacy of their previous material and political posthumous lives can finally be put to rest, without being explicitly problematised. Could this perhaps be one of the reasons for the strong reaction provoked by the sudden emergence of the tooth at the Berlin
2 Final chapter: portraying the exhumation and reburial of Polish Jewish Holocaust victims in the pages of yizkor books Gabriel N. Finder The Jewish population of pre-war Poland numbered about 3.5 million. But only a remnant of this largest Jewish population in Europe survived the Holocaust. The total number of Polish Jewish survivors probably never exceeded 350,000 to 400,000. This rate of mortality – in Poland, around 90 per cent – was higher only in the Baltic states. The majority of Poland’s Jewish population died on Polish soil. The Germans and their
Australian institutions, including museums and universities to amend their own policies.24 19 The unburied victims of the Mau Mau Rebellion 19 Scandinavian countries with Sámi or Greenlander Inuit populations have also begun to address similar issues. In Sweden, the Sámi Parliament made an official demand in 2007 for the compilation of a national inventory of all Sámi human remains held by government- funded institutions and their repatriation for reburial –a call that was eventually taken up by a total of eight national, county and university museums.25 Conflicts
The church as sacred space places the reader at the heart of medieval religious life, standing inside the church with the medieval laity in order to ask what the church meant to them and why. It examines the church as a building, idea, and community, and explores the ways in which the sanctity of the church was crucial to its place at the centre of lay devotion and parish life. At a time when the parish church was facing competition for lay attention, and dissenting movements such as Lollardy were challenging the relevance of the material church, the book examines what was at stake in discussions of sanctity and its manifestations. Exploring a range of Middle English literature alongside liturgy, architecture, and material culture, the book explores the ways in which the sanctity of the church was constructed and maintained for the edification of the laity. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary theoretical approaches, the book offers a reading of the church as continually produced and negotiated by the rituals, performances, and practices of its lay communities, who were constantly being asked to attend to its material form, visual decorations, and significance. The meaning of the church was a dominant question in late-medieval religious culture and this book provides an invaluable context for students and academics working on lay religious experience and canonical Middle English texts.
the living through their presence as spirits. Governing the dead thus also needs to be seen in the context of the local understandings of statehood. Verdery (1999) points to the Claiming the dead, defining the nation 99 symbolic power of memorials and reburials, to show how these can be used to legitimise or delegitimise certain narratives, political structures and processes, and how the ‘aura of sanctity’ of the dead can be used to sacralise the otherwise mundane (or even ‘dirty’) world of politics. Similar processes are undoubtedly at play in Timor-Leste as
This book examines the relationship between environmental justice and citizen science, focusing on enduring issues and new challenges in a post-truth age. Debates over science, facts, and values have always been pivotal within environmental justice struggles. For decades, environmental justice activists have campaigned against the misuses of science, while at the same time engaging in community-led citizen science. However, post-truth politics has threatened science itself. This book makes the case for the importance of science, knowledge, and data that are produced by and for ordinary people living with environmental risks and hazards. The international, interdisciplinary contributions range from grassroots environmental justice struggles in American hog country and contaminated indigenous communities, to local environmental controversies in Spain and China, to questions about “knowledge justice,” citizenship, participation, and data in citizen science surrounding toxicity. The book features inspiring studies of community-based participatory environmental health and justice research; different ways of sensing, witnessing, and interpreting environmental injustice; political strategies for seeking environmental justice; and ways of expanding the concepts and forms of engagement of citizen science around the world. While the book will be of critical interest to specialists in social and environmental sciences, it will also be accessible to graduate and postgraduate audiences. More broadly, the book will appeal to members of the public interested in social justice issues, as well as community members who are thinking about participating in citizen science and activism. Toxic Truths includes distinguished contributing authors in the field of environmental justice, alongside cutting-edge research from emerging scholars and community activists.