Toward the Archaeontology of the dead body

Domańska, Ewa

doi:10.1080/13642520500307602

Cited by 36 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…The body is politicised, it becomes an institution, and death itself turns out to be more of a political fact than an individual experience. (Domanska 2005, 403)…”

Section: Geography ‘Dead Body Politics’ and The Agency Of Corpsesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Corpses, dead body politics and agency in human geography: following the corpse of Dr Petru Groza

Young

Light²

2012

Trans Inst British Geog

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This paper follows the mobilities between 1958 and 1990 of the dead body of Dr Petru Groza , a significant political figure in post-World War II socialist Romania, to explore the implications for human geography of engaging with the dead. Although there has been a considerable interest in 'geographies of the body' and 'deathscapes', human geography has had relatively little to say about dead bodies. The paper draws on literatures from death studies and dead body politics, as well as research in memory studies, history, anthropology and law, to develop an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the role of the corpse in society, and argues that human geography should do more to consider how dead bodies contribute to the formation of contemporary geographies. To illustrate these points the analysis first explores how the treatment of Groza's corpse and the 'deathwork' associated with it is an example of 'dead body politics'. Second, the analysis draws out the agency of the corpse and its role in a variety of 'deathscapes'. The conclusion considers the implications for human geography of engaging with 'corpse geographies' more generally.

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“…The body is politicised, it becomes an institution, and death itself turns out to be more of a political fact than an individual experience. (Domanska 2005, 403)…”

Section: Geography ‘Dead Body Politics’ and The Agency Of Corpsesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Corpses, dead body politics and agency in human geography: following the corpse of Dr Petru Groza

Young

Light²

2012

Trans Inst British Geog

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“…19 As Ewa Domanska argues, the dead body acts both as evidence of a crime and as a reference point for the work of mourning. 20 When I was in Rwanda, conducting interviews for a previous book project, many of the survivors I spoke with seemed to have a sense that genocide denial was a pervasive issue, and thus that material evidence was the best, and indeed only, way of literally showing the world what had happened in an irrefutable manner. Thus a tension existed immediately a er the genocide in trying to resolve the 'problem' of the dead body: whether to treat it according to traditional burial customs, or as a literal body of evidence.…”

Section: The Politics Of Human Biomatter In Rwandamentioning

confidence: 99%

Displaying dead bodies: bones and human biomatter post-genocide

Auchter¹

2018

Human Remains and Violence: An Interdisciplinary Journal

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The after-effects of mass atrocity – bodies and bones – struggle to be defined within memorial projects. This article seeks to examine the politics at play in displaying dead bodies to interrogate the role of materiality in efforts to memorialise and raise awareness about on-going violences. It focusses on the nexus between evidence, dignity, humanity and memory to explore bone display in Rwanda. It then takes up two artistic projects that play on the materiality of human remains after atrocity: the art of Carl Michael von Hausswolff, who took ashes from an urn at the Majdanek concentration camp and used them as the material for his painting, and the One Million Bones Project, an installation that exhibits ceramic bones to raise awareness about global violence. In thinking about the intersections between human biomatter, art and politics, the article seeks to raise questions about both production and consumption: how bones and ashes of the dead are produced, and how they are consumed by viewers when placed on display in a variety of ways.

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“…Contradictory and anomalous theoretical possibilities abound and some may co-exist. Examples include mimetic casts (see Feldman 2006), khoratic receptacles (see Domanska 2005), interobjective indexical signs of a hyperobject (see Morton 2013), hauntological im/possibilities (see Barad 2010), and residual memories (Lucas 2012). Their status has profound ethical implications to their subsequent treatment (see also Feldman 2006, Ouzman 2006, Lazer 2009.…”

Section: Suspended Momentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Palimpsests of Immaterial Assemblages Taken out of Context: Tracing Pompeians from the Void into the Digital

Reilly

2015

Norwegian Archaeological Review

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This paper explores some ontological aspects of archaeological voids and enclosures together with their translations and substitutions, and considers the nature of spaces within material archaeological deposits and artifacts. The dematerialized and rematerialized bodies of the victims of Vesuvius in C.E. 79 are reappraised as a case study. By problematizing the voids we are able to think critically about the ontological status of the victims' persistent traces and residues. Specifically, using Gavin Lucas's grid of forces models, we explore how these traces and residues have been transformed into different kinds of objects, including, most recently, rematerializations in the digital, through their on-going intra-actions within the domains of archaeology, museology and additive manufacturing. Through this analysis the ambivalent nature of these traces and residues becomes more sensible.

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Toward the Archaeontology of the dead body

Cited by 36 publications

References 15 publications

Corpses, dead body politics and agency in human geography: following the corpse of Dr Petru Groza

Corpses, dead body politics and agency in human geography: following the corpse of Dr Petru Groza

Displaying dead bodies: bones and human biomatter post-genocide

Palimpsests of Immaterial Assemblages Taken out of Context: Tracing Pompeians from the Void into the Digital

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