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.