The vitality and efficacy of human substances

‘It was maendeleo that removed them’: disturbing burials and reciprocal knowledge production in a context of collaborative archaeology

“…Thus, as in other contexts (e.g. Fontein ; Fontein & Harries ; Novak ; O'Dell ; Williams ), the skeletal remains exposed on Naakedi, the cairns beneath which they lay and within which they were once contained, and the physical and social landscapes in which the cairns and their actual and imagined contents were situated were all enmeshed within overlapping webs of meaning and contemporary necropolitics of memory and identity…”

(Re)politicising the dead in post-Holocaust Poland

“…Consequently, it is not the human/ animal (in)distinction -central to Harrison's analysis of the 'interstitial practice' of robbing the body parts of the dehumanised combat opponents -that is the crucial Jean-Marc Dreyfus and Élisabeth Anstett -9781526129338 Downloaded from manchesteropenhive.com at 06/07/2019 08:42:55PM via free access 48 point here, rather it is that the looting of the camp site was greatly dependent on the perception of the remains of the murdered subjects as mere objects. Thus, the above-mentioned unsettling and irreducible quality of bodily remains, described by Joost Fontein and John Harries as 'uneasy subjects/ objects' , 50 was denied by the actual forms of engagement with victims' flesh, bones and ashes developing at the site of the former extermination camp. 51 This radical 'objectification' of the human remains, which deprived them of the 'human' component, had a dual effect: rendering the mass graves porous, and the Bełz ec dead 'unburiable' .…”

“…Theorised in terms of the 'agency of bones' and dead bo dies, founded both in their 'affective presence' as extensions of once-living human beings and in their materiality as objects or, more recently, in their constantly changing material properties as things, 75 the capability of bodily remains not only to animate but also to 'act back' 76 and subvert the spatially mediated dead-body politics lies, as the case of the Bełz ec tooth exemplifies, in their constitutive excessiveness, symbolic and literal. According to Harries and Fontein, precisely because they are excessive, uneasy objects/ subjects, human remains defy not only political and symbolic endeavours to make them 'appropriately meaningful' , but also 'techniques of subjectification and objectification' , 77 rendering any hegemonic closure of the meaning of the dead, if not impossible, then at least open to contestation. They are, from this perspective, neither entirely mute (Avi Weiss), nor fully containable -their unexpected materialisations, uncontrollable travels and relentless transformations are an integral part of their material, affective and political afterlives.…”

Vital instability: ontological insecurity and African urbanisms

“…These speak to the ontological force and vitalism of material and corporeal substances (cf. Fontein 2010;Fontein and Harries 2013;Major and Fontein 2015). Ontologies may be viewed neither as essences nor as historical epiphenomena, but as sources of vitality and orientation amid the flux of life.…”