The area of Germany which became the Soviet Occupation Zone/German Democratic Republic (GDR) bore the brunt of the Soviet offensive of 1945. This last phase of the Second World War on German soil produced a sensational death toll. Yet, a systematic registration of war burials on GDR soil did not take place until the 1970s. This article analyses a particular facet of knowledge production and mass death by turning to the process of accounting for Second World War burials through lists and statistics in the socialist GDR, with a particular focus on key policy changes in the 1970s. Unpacking the reasons which prompted a large-scale registration of war burials some twenty-five years after the end of the war, I argue that the process of accounting for war deaths was shaped by both domestic and foreign politics, and in particular by evolving relations with non-socialist countries. I also demonstrate that international requirements for the visibility and accountability of war burials, as enshrined in the Geneva Conventions, generated tensions with a domestic ‘politics of history’ which required the invisibility of particular categories of dead.
This article intends to shed light on the influence of gas warfare on the management of dead bodies of violence. It shows that this new type of weapon prompted the setting up of new military centres dedicated to forensic research within the French army. This work notably involved carrying out numerous autopsies on the bodies of deceased intoxicated soldiers. By looking at the reports produced and the work of forensic pathologists, the article demonstrates how dead bodies became a site of knowledge production. It also investigates the tensions related to the treatment of dead bodies resulting from this widespread practice of autopsy. The reports produced also provide precise descriptions of the last moments of the soldiers who died in ambulances or hospitals. Finally, by cross-referencing these sources with soldiers’ grave registers, it is possible to grasp the afterlives of autopsied bodies and the diverse fates of soldiers who fell at the front.
This is the first study dedicated to discussing perspectives on proposals to transfuse blood from people killed in conflict zones. It attempts to present a rounded picture of why the idea has apparently failed to translate into practice. Drawing on a range of sources, from scientific research on ‘cadaver’ blood transfusions to discussions around planning for mass casualty events, the article shows how professional interest in the transfusion possibilities of blood taken from the battlefield dead evolved from Soviet research in the 1930s, spread internationally and endured after the Second World War. It then demonstrates that a range of issues, from taboos to practicability, require consideration if past challenges to utility are to be reliably understood. It notes, too, that some early obstacles may, today, be outdated.
This article shows how the medicalisation of death in wartime can be seen as integral to a broader medicalisation of war that it both stems from and sustains. More specifically, it highlights the pivotal role of post-mortem examinations – which were widely performed in French military hospitals during the First Indochina War – in advancing clinical knowledge and monitoring the quality of care, as the only way of providing diagnostic certainty. Pathology procedures also contributed to the introduction of therapeutic innovations, which were largely the result of ongoing interactions both within the armed forces medical service and with the wider military and civilian French and international medical community.
Muslim men are often portrayed in academic and popular discourses as violent patriarchs and/or as terrorists. Against the backdrop of an increasingly hostile environment within the United Kingdom, this book explores the experiences of Muslim migrant husbands in the Pakistani and Kashmiri diaspora. The uncertainties of migrant journeys tethered to cultural and religious marital norms intersect with gendered experiences of masculinity across space and time. In-depth interviews with 62 migrant husbands shed light on the precarity and vulnerability they experience. Their aspirational masculinities often start in the home country with collective familial dreams of migration, but can turn sour through the exposure of domestic and employment power dynamics upon arriving in the United Kingdom. The ethnography highlights experiences of domestic violence experienced by migrant husbands, which supports the notion of an in-between or liminal masculinity becoming a lived reality for these men on the move, ultimately resulting in novel ways in which a reassertion of masculinity is sought through religious Sufi traditions and musical lamentations. The book weaves together transnational dynamics between people and place along the contours of colonial legacies, showing the self and other power dynamics present within a single group identity. Violence is inflicted on incoming migrants by British-born or British citizen counterparts, through the immigration system. The book shows how citizenship can be weaponised as a performance of whiteness, namely White power, resulting in the notion that gender is performed on.
Throughout my fieldwork, migrant husband interlocutors often spoke to me about how skin colour was a factor influencing their marital choice in some way. The connections between ideas of whiteness and marriage and the persistent legacy of colonialism became increasingly glaring. This overlap is further underlined when the type of passport or citizenship held by the prospective bride or groom transacts and determines the success of the rishta. In many ways, citizenship status demonstrated by the colour of one’s passport has replaced the merit of the colour of one’s skin as a vehicle for social status and mobility. What happens when we consider the intersection of skin colour and passport colour in a transnational context? What can we learn about the intricate workings of gender, race, and colonialism? Does marriage migration in any way draw on this relationship and, if so, what role does this play in constructing multiple masculinities for migrant husbands? In this chapter, I consider the interplay between gender, race, and colonialism to understand the experience of Pakistani and Kashmiri Muslim migrant husbands. I also map out what a project focusing on the decolonising of Muslim men entails, and trace both the significance and the implications of such a project.
This chapter is comprised of three sections: ‘Migrant husbands and waithood’, ‘Domestic violence’, and ‘Reworking of gender power’. The first section considers the precarious lives that migrant husband can often lead upon marriage and migration to the United Kingdom, which is largely informed by their waithood, and often results in their emasculation. I show how prolonged waithood is becoming a permanent state that is gradually replacing conventional markers of adulthood. In the second section of the chapter, I consider the subordinate position of migrant husbands in the marriage household, and demonstrate how this can at times lead to forms of domestic violence against the migrant husband, rendering him silent and invisible in diverse social and political fields. The final section considers the changing nature of gender and family dynamics, bringing into question our understandings of honour, patriarchy, and the state. More broadly, this chapter destabilises our current understandings of gender dynamics within Muslim communities and, more specifically, the British Pakistani and Kashmiri communities, as it demonstrates that men can also be victims of oppression and abuse. Drawing on Turner’s work on liminality, the crux of my argument in this chapter is that, due to experiences of precarity and waithood, migrant husbands experience a liminal masculinity that exposes them to being transacted. The chapter concludes with some thoughts on how the insights gained through the case of Pakistani British migrants can apply to other transnational marriage migration journeys elsewhere, in Europe or North America.
At the margins of the dominant social structure, I found migrant husbands engaged in musical lamentations rooted in Sufi musical forms such as qawwali and Sufiyana qalaams. Typically known within the literature as a form of female agency and resistance, the laments enabled the construction of alternative spaces, wherein migrant husbands could perform resistance and agency but, more significantly, initiate, engage, and enact the process of the reworking of the self. I term these musical lamentations ‘Songs of Sorrow’, wherein migration processes invert the social positions of migrant husbands as powerful men in control of their lives and the lives of those around them – typical of patriarchal societies. Their identities were, instead, reconstructed and transacted through the constant encountering, and eventual acceptance, of their weak and vulnerable positions. This chapter is guided by the question: to what extent and in what ways do these songs enable migrant husbands to negotiate and reassert their masculinity, which has become unsettled through their migratory experiences? The chapter illuminates our understanding of emotion in expressions and (re)formations of masculinity through music and resistance in new ways, enriching the field of minority language and music, specifically the anthropology of lamentations. More broadly, the chapter also provides insights into the ways in which aspirations of migrant husbands can be revised and retransacted in and through migration.