The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change

Legvold, Robert; Verdery, Katherine

doi:10.2307/20049499

Cited by 109 publications

(47 citation statements)

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“…For Rainey and Hanson (2021: 266), the specter of Engels points to "the need for a return to the grounded political analysis of Engels." Verdery (1999) reinforces this point in her analysis of the political lives of dead bodies (including statues):…”

Section: Theoretical Considerationsmentioning

confidence: 77%

Communicating Friedrich Engels's return to Manchester: Arts and cultural event, history lesson, or call to action?

2022

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There is increasing interest by academics and mainstream media in the relevance of Friedrich Engels's writings for understanding contemporary economic and political issues. Still, Engels's writing about the adverse effects of the capitalist economic system on the health and well-being of workers, the environment, and society in general remains marginalized. Two recent art projects which saw the installation of statues of Engels in Manchester, the city in which he lived and wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England, have created avenues by which Engels and his writings can be communicated to a larger audience. In this paper, we explore how filmmaker Phil Collins's finding and placement of a Soviet-era statue of Engels in Manchester has been communicated as an arts and cultural event, a history lesson, and a call to action to right the injustices generated by the capitalist economic system. The greatest number of communications were reviews and notices of the installation or documentary as arts and cultural events. The arts and cultural and historical aspects of Engels's return to Manchester were dominant across all communications while calls for action were common in the mainstream news reports and blogs. References to capitalism and its effects were seen in mainstream news reports and reviews and arts notices. We conclude that the involvement of the arts and cultural community in political work may be an important means of promoting responses to increasingly intolerable economic, political, and social environments.

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Section: Theoretical Considerationsmentioning

confidence: 77%

Communicating Friedrich Engels's return to Manchester: Arts and cultural event, history lesson, or call to action?

2022

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“…In these cases, the colonial bodies move from the category of "a skull" to "the skull" through the biohistorical analysis and have tremendous social value in the present through the nature of their relationship to a recent colonial past. They are politicized bodies in every sense of the word (Kearl and Rinaldi, 1983;Verdery, 1999).…”

Section: 2mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The body is the focal point for this transfer, but we argue that assigning postmortem agency to the body misappropriates that term. The body can cause people to act and react, it may continue to reflect ongoing processes of embodiment, and certainly personhood may extend past the bounds of biological life and death, but it no longer is able to act independently with intent and free, independent choice (see Hallam, 2010;Hallam and Hockey, 2001;Harper, 2010;Hockey et al, 2010;Hoskins, 2006;Krmpotich et al, 2010;Verdery, 1999;Young and Light, 2013). There is a deep irony to this primary goal of identification, however.…”

Section: 2mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is not the age or anonymity that matters, but rather the stories and meanings generated from a body's materiality or, as also shown in this chapter, its missingness that theorizes it (see also . Leveraging Verdery's (1999) well-known concept of politicized bodies, Wagner and Rosenblatt discuss the role of DNA and its relationship to state-framed narratives of history and restitution. Unlike other chapters, however, the recentness of these histories generates immediate connections; individuals living today are deeply affected by the stories told.…”

Section: Volume Rationale Goals and Organizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Studies in Forensic Biohistory

Stojanowski¹,

Duncan

2017

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The lives of kings, poets, authors, criminals and celebrities are a perpetual fascination in the media and popular culture, and for decades anthropologists and other scientists have participated in 'post-mortem dissections' of the lives of historical figures. In this field of biohistory, researchers have identified and analyzed these figures' bodies using technologies such as DNA fingerprinting, biochemical assays, and skeletal biology. This book brings together biohistorical case studies for the first time, and considers the role of the anthropologist in the writing of historical narratives surrounding the deceased. Contributors theorize biohistory with respect to the sociology of the body, examining the ethical implications of biohistorical work and the diversity of social theoretical perspectives that researchers' work may relate to. The volume defines scales of biohistorical engagement, providing readers with a critical sense of scale and the different paths to 'historical notoriety' that can emerge with respect to human remains.

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“…See also Cinquegrani (2018) who discusses a broader range of Polish documentaries concerning Polish violence against Jewish citizens. 5 Posthuman explorations of the material agency of the dead body intersect at various points with necropolitics, that is, "the political lives of dead bodies" (Verdery 1999). Burials and exhumations are often exploited for political ends.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Earth After Death: Posthumous Cinematic Ecologies in Holocaust Documentary Film

Mroz

2023

Stud. World Cine.

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Recent environmental turns in research on the Holocaust and the moving images produced in its aftermath have suggested the potential of earth to bear “eco-witness” to atrocity and signal sites of mass burial through alterations to the topsoil and vegetation. However, the conjunction between the elemental and the human that occurs when a violated body decomposes in the earth to become ‘humus’ indicates a particularly distressing point of “trouble” for non-anthropocentric frameworks that focus on the material agencies involved in composting processes (Haraway) and trans-corporealities (Alaimo). This article examines how three documentaries (Shtetl, Neighbours and Birthplace) frame sections of Polish earth that have been re-shaped by Holocaust atrocity and human decomposition. While indicating a vaster posthumous network in which humus becomes entangled in rural soil-based activities such as cattle grazing, the article argues that human decomposition triggers attempts to cinematically recompose active earth as readable archive and fixed landscape.

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The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change

Cited by 109 publications

References 0 publications

Communicating Friedrich Engels's return to Manchester: Arts and cultural event, history lesson, or call to action?

Communicating Friedrich Engels's return to Manchester: Arts and cultural event, history lesson, or call to action?

Studies in Forensic Biohistory

Earth After Death: Posthumous Cinematic Ecologies in Holocaust Documentary Film

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