This special issue has its roots in a research network known colloquially as the 'bones collective' that emerged in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh and grew to encompass scholars, professionals and advocates located throughout the UK and beyond. Initiated by Jeanne Cannizzo, Joost Fontein and John Harries, this has grown into a network of two dozen individuals. Its central, uniting problematic has been to query what it is about human bones and bone that provokes emotional, political, visceral and intellectual responses from those who encounter them.The collective hosted a seminar series at the University of Edinburgh between January and March 2008, inviting a broad range of scholars whose work had already focused on encounters and interactions with human bones in a wide range of different ethnographic and political contexts. 1 This was followed in December 2008 by 'What lies beneath', a two-day workshop involving participants with backgrounds in museums, archaeology, social anthropology, fine art and reburial advocacy. 2 The aim of the workshop was to explore the emotive materiality and affective presence of human bone -an approach that has proved productive as we work both deductively and inductively to generate theoretical approaches that illuminate encounters with bones. Developing out of the fruitful discussions of the workshop, the collective organized a session for the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) conference in Bristol

This article uses ethnographic material collected around Lake Mutirikwi in southern Zimbabwe, to explore how the affective presence of graves and ruins, which materialize past and present occupations and engagements with/in the landscape (by different clans, colonial and postcolonial state institutions, war veterans, chiefs, and spirit mediums, as well as white commercial farmers), are entangled in complex, localized contests over autochthony and belonging, even as they are finely implicated in wider reconfigurations of authority and state‐craft. Situating these highly contested assertions, discourses, and practices in the context of national redefinitions of citizenship and belonging articulated by ZANU PF's rhetoric of ‘patriotic history’, this article explores how these contests are made real through the consequential materiality of milieu. Although the central hook will be the prominent role that graves, both ancestral ‘mapa’ and recent burials, have played in ongoing claims to land and authority, its main perspective will be on how different, overlapping, and intertwined notions of belonging are enabled, constrained, and structured through the materiality of place, thereby emphasizing the proximity of discourses and practices of belonging that derives from the shared nature of material landscapes. In this vein, the ruins and graves of past white occupation and interventions in the landscape comingle and coexist with the resurgent appeals of local clans to ancestral territories on occupied lands. The broader theoretical purpose of the article is to engage with recent debates over materiality and anthropology's so‐called ‘ontological turn’ to make a case for focusing less on ‘radical ontological difference’ and more on material, historical, and conceptual proximities. Résumé A partir de matériaux ethnographiques recueillis autour du Lac Mutirikwi, dans le sud du Zimbabwe, cet article explore la façon dont la présence affective de tombes et de ruines, matérialisant les occupations et interactions présentes et passées avec le paysage (institutions coloniales et postcoloniales, anciens combattants, chefs, spirites et fermiers blancs), s'intrique dans une complexe concurrence locale autour de l'autochtonie et de l'appartenance, tout en relevant d'une reconfiguration plus large de l'autorité et de la force de l'État. Pour situer ces affirmations, discours et pratiques très contestés dans le contexte de la redéfinition nationale de la citoyenneté et de l'appartenance formulé par la rhétorique de « l'histoire patriotique » du ZANU‐PF, l'auteur explore comment ces rivalités se manifestent à travers la matérialité du milieu. Bien que l'argument central soit le rôle éminent des tombes, « mapa »ancestrales aussi bien qu'inhumations récentes, dans les revendications de la terre et de l'autorité, l'article sera principalement consacréà la façon dont des notions différentes de l'appartenance, se chevauchant et s'interpénétrant, sont éveillées, contraintes et structurées par la matérialité des lieux, mettant ainsi l'accent s...

Using ethnographic material alongside newspaper and NGO reports, this article explores popular responses to ZANU PF's devastating Operation Murambatsvina, commonly dubbed Zimbabwe's tsunami, which targeted informal markets and ‘illegal’ housing across Zimbabwe between May and August of 2005, making an estimated 700,000 people homeless and indirectly affecting a quarter of Zimbabwe's population. The article argues that central to experiences of these dramatic events ‘on the ground’ (particularly in Harare's high- and low-density suburbs of Chitungwiza and Hatfield, where most of the ethnographic material was collected) was a profound tension between the resonances evoked by official appeals to a reassertion of ‘order’ and formal planning procedures, and the spectacle of ZANU PF's public demonstration of its ability to deploy state ‘force’ ruthlessly, and indeed ‘arbitrarily’; that is, as, when and how it chose. Although the brutal execution of the programme was widely condemned by observers and victims alike, less reported has been the way in which official justifications for the operation were sometimes recognizable and salient to people living in urban areas across Zimbabwe, resonating with memories of past clearances, or with longstanding and divergent aspirations for respectability, urban ‘order’, and a functioning, bureaucratic state. It is argued that in the ambiguity and uncertainty generated by this tension the political advantages of the operation for the ruling party become most apparent. Relating the plethora of rumours circulating at the time (about the ‘hidden agendas’ behind the operation) to Mbembe's work on post-colonial conviviality, the article argues that like Mbembe's satirical cartoons these rumours did not so much undermine or subvert the authority of ZANU PF as reinforce its omnipotent presence. However, unlike the pessimism of Mbembe's vision of all encompassing power, it is argued that if the rumours that circulated about Operation Murambatsvina are an example of the constant re-making of ‘stateness’ on the margins, then the uncertain ambiguity of such rumours can not only reinforce the omnipotent presence of the ‘state power’, but also illustrate the omnipresence of its fundamental insecurity.

Bones occupy a complex place in Zimbabwe’s postcolonial milieu. From ancestral bones rising again in the struggle for independence, and later land, to resurfacing bones of unsettled war dead or the troubling remains of gukurahundi victims, it is clear that bones are intertwined in postcolonial politics in ways that go far beyond, yet necessarily implicate, contests over memory, commemoration and the representation of the past. As both extensions of the dead (spirit ‘subjects’ making demands on the living) and as unconscious ‘objects’ or ‘things’ (retorting to and provoking responses from the living), bones in Zimbabwe not only challenge normalizing processes of state commemoration and heritage, but also animate a myriad of personal, kin, clan, class and political loyalties and struggles. Recent political violence indicates that it is not only dry bones but also the fleshy materiality of tortured bodies that are entangled in Zimbabwe’s troubled postcolonial milieu. Therefore, the author seeks to explore and contrast the complexity of agencies entangled in the affective presence and emotive materiality of both bones and bodies in Zimbabwe. If bodies inscribed with torturous performances of sovereignty do have substantial, if duplicitous, political affects, how does this contrast with the unsettling presence of the longer dead? What does the passage of time — both the material and leaky decomposition of flesh, but equally the transformative processes of burial — do to the affective presence and emotive materiality of the dead? How do broken bodies become bones?

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