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- Convenors:
-
Noa Vana
(Tel Aviv University)
Yana Feldman (Ashkelon academic college)
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- Stream:
- Morality and Legality
- Sessions:
- Monday 29 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Few ethnographies explored the everyday life in cemeteries. We invite contributions that engage in ethical, political, social, and cultural queries in these social sites. We aim to expand the anthropological gaze and initiate a discussion that blurs the boundaries between life and death.
Long Abstract:
Anthropology considered the "end-of-life" and the relation between death, dying, and society since its earliest days (e.g., Durkheim, 1915). Places associated with death and dying have long been the focal of academic research (e.g., Sudnow, 1967). There is also a considerable body of work on cemeteries, their definition, types, purposes and uses, design, mourning behavior, and so forth (e.g., Mosse, 1991). However, there has been only a handful of scholarly work that situated its projects as ethnographies of the everyday life in cemeteries (e.g., Nielsen & Groes, 2014). We invite contributions from researchers who are interested in presenting papers that engage with cemeteries as an intersection between the dead and the living. We specifically encourage authors to submit papers that explore cemeteries as urban public spaces, cultural and political landscapes, and meeting points where the state and community share a mutual responsibility for the dead and the living. For example, we would like to ask how political, legal, and moral actions are taking place in cemeteries? How exclusion and inclusion practices in cemeteries (e.g., a burial outside the cemetery gates or in a special section) depict identity-making processes? How affect and transformation are performed in cemeteries? Etc. We aim to advance a discussion that will blur the "social line of demarcation separating the 'dead' from the 'living'" (Baudrillard, 1993, p. 127). Thus, expanding the realm of anthropological studies by asking questions regarding ethics, responsibility, exclusion, political protests, etc. in a field in which they were rarely discussed and researched.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 29 March, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
In recent years, taking and circulation of selfies at the death sites of Auschwitz have become common and have raised controversy. Are selfies a desecration of the dead, an act of witnessing that takes responsibility for the memory of the Holocaust, or a new form of engagement with traumatic memory?
Paper long abstract:
As death-factory, memorial, and mass cemetery, Auschwitz-Birkenau has become the iconic Holocaust site. Over the last fifteen years, visitors increasingly remember the site by taking selfies at Auschwitz, and circulating and posting these photos on various social media platforms.
In this presentation, we will ask: Do such selfies debase the memory of the Holocaust dead, or do they enable members of a younger generation socialized in social media to propagate their experience? Could selfies be considered an act of witnessing that seeks to take responsibility for the memory of the Holocaust? How do gatekeepers of memory react to these selfies? What role do they play in popular culture's collective memory, and how do they interact with previous representations, such as photos, postcards, and films?
To this end, we examine selfies in the context of the digitalized transmission of the memory of the Holocaust. Given the pervasiveness of digital and social media and the demise of the last of the eyewitnesses, selfie-takers may see themselves as secondary witnesses. This is a role already prepared by pre-digital representations- such as the national narrative developed in Israeli youth voyages to Poland - that position young visitors' bodies as the redemptive answer to the Holocaust. Our question then is: are selfies a narcissitic indulgence, a continuation of a tradition or a new form of engagement with the memory of the Holocaust?
Paper short abstract:
I will discuss end-of-life _in_ Kalaupapa (Hawai'i) through one of its long-time inhabitants affected by leprosy, Ambrose Hutchison, as well as _of_ Kalaupapa, from a place of incarceration that became a home for many to a place of memory, contemplation, and celebration of resourcefulness.
Paper long abstract:
Kalaupapa’s destiny as a place of exile of people affected by leprosy has been always been linked to end-of-life, and its many cemetaries are reminders. Kalaupapa also developed into a place where life became very central, and a sense of home and community prevailed. Nowadays, the end of life of this community is however prevailing.In this paper I will discuss end-of-life in Kalaupapa through the case of one of its most prominent inhabitants, Ambrose Hutchison, who left a rich manuscript detailing important events of his life in the Kalaupapa community, a grave in memory of his wife (but no grave of himself), and a memory of some of the finest oranges to be found. His afterlife can be placed next to many more who left traces in the landscape, in the cemetery, and in their biographical writings. His afterlife is also opening up the social lines of demarcation between the living and the dead, the colonized and the colonizers, the administrators and the administered, as well as the potential for memory, ritual, and reconciliation.I will also discuss the end-of-life of Kalaupapa itself, namely three phenomena that accompany the end-of-life, as a process of museology, concentrating on the lands, infrastructures, and rules/policies. In particular, I will focus on (1) the building of a memorial at Kalaupapa; (2) the building of a Damien & Marianne of Moloka’i Education Center; and (3) the policies of transition towards a future without any (former) patients.
Paper short abstract:
This presentation examines how the exhumation of bodies from Spanish Civil War mass graves has generated new mortuary practices, and forms of individual mourning, collective memorialization and community ritual within the space of the cemetery.
Paper long abstract:
Spanish cemeteries have become the locus of unprecedented social mobilization for the recognition of mass crimes committed against left-wing groups during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the Franco dictatorship. Since the year 2000, families, civil society associations, forensic teams, historians and neighbours from different communities have come together, often without state support, to locate, exhume, identify and rebury the over 114,000 corpses still buried in mass graves today. Often created outside of cemeteries, on the side of roads or in the middle of the countryside, mass graves materialized Franco’s will to excise those considered by his regime as the “anti-Spain” from the social fabric of the country. The recent move to search for the remains of those killed in extrajudicial executions aims to counter the dictator’s deed by returning these bodies to the communities of death from which they were excluded. Moreover, since some of these mass graves are contained within the walls of cemeteries in the present, due to the extension work that many have undergone over the years, exhumation practices often coexist with everyday social uses of the graveyard. This presentation analyses how dealing with Civil War-related violent death has affected everyday dynamics in contemporary Spanish cemeteries. In so doing, it examines how the recovery of these unatoned dead (Kwon 2017) has generated new mortuary practices, and forms of individual mourning, collective memorialization and community ritual, which are sometimes acknowledged and others contested within the space of the graveyard.