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- Convenors:
-
Timothy Cooper
(University of Cambridge)
Vindhya Buthpitiya (University of St Andrews)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- 6 College Park (6CP), 0G/007
- Sessions:
- Friday 29 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
If political order is a form of organizing death, what does mourning bring about in the social world? Bringing together the study of mourning with the study of mediation, we explore what role empathy, condolement, and arbitration play in the material, visual, digital, and sonic cultures of loss.
Long Abstract:
If, following Achille Mbembe, political order is a form of organizing death, what does mourning bring about in the social world? Anthropologists have long engaged with the funerary and the commemorative as rites of transformation that re-assert social order and political legitimacy. In the aftermaths of political violence, atrocities, and human rights violations, the publicity of mourning also underpins demands for truth, justice, and accountability. The extent to which mourning or grieving might serve as a call for justice owes much to doctrines of redemptive suffering inherited from Roman Catholic theology. Should the pursuit of justice, as the ultimate end to mourning, simply mean asserting normativity in the righting of wrongs? Can redemption promise more than vindication or the clearing of a debt?
In the context of politicised or ritualised grief, this panel seeks to think beyond the doctrine of redemptive suffering to ask how and to what ends mourning is mediated and made present to those outside of its communities of shared sentiment? We consider how mourning unfolds in a broad repertoire of sensations, interfaces, and affects that strives to mediate emotional and political solidarity through mediums for their circulation. Expressed through media aesthetics and sensational forms, mourning can challenge existing conditions of sociality and conflict rather than reproduce them. Bringing together the study of mourning with the study of mediation, we explore what role empathy, condolement, and arbitration play in the material, visual, digital, and sonic cultures of loss.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 29 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This paper takes a close look at Ghanaian obituary banners. It gives ethnographic context about their production, design, and usage, asking what functions they perform and how their aesthetics and materiality achieve these before the background of colonial history and changes in mortuary practices.
Paper long abstract:
This paper takes a close look at Ghanaian obituary banners as a commemorative format that has become widely popular in the Ghanaian south in the past couple of years. It gives ethnographic context about the production, design, and usage of funeral banners, asking what functions they perform for the community and how their aesthetics and materiality help to achieve these, also before the background of colonial history and changes in mortuary practices. Focusing on the materiality of these image-objects, the paper unpacks the intertwined relationship between the sculptural but flexible representations of the dead and the image-like but inflexible qualities of dead bodies.
Building on Alfred Gell’s theory of the art nexus, this paper shows how the dead in a Ghanaian Ewe town are made into art-like objects, which serve as indices of various intentions invested into them by the living. To that avail, understanding how the transformation of images, the transformation of dead bodies, and the transformation of the dead into new kinds of ancestor-persons are linked is crucial. By reading material processes of transformation alongside processes of transforming significations and social transformation, the paper suggests that obituary banners are in fact ‘more than images’, due to their material properties and their incorporation into active practices of commemoration and mourning.
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks at forensic work in Somalia and Peru. I argue that the lack of sensitivity toward the particularities of dealing with death in different local communities, undermines the often publicly stated humanitarian intensions of forensic anthropologist.
Paper long abstract:
Forensic anthropology has become part of endeavors to deal with the violent past in Latin America (since the 1980s) and, more recently, in Africa. My presentation looks at forensic work in northern Somalia and the highlands of Peru. From a social anthropological perspective, it looks at forensic specialists and their claim that their work is also 'humanitarian'. Forensics in my field sites argued that their work would bring peace to mind of the relatives of the dead. They saw their work also as serving the 'rights of the dead' (e.g., to a dignified burial). During field research, I found that many locals viewed forensic anthropological work with suspicion. The culturally embedded notion of death and hereafter in combination with the economic and political realities of long-term marginalized communities in both locales created tensions with the humanitarian approach of forensic specialists. Additionally, forensic anthropological endeavors are often politicized. This was certainly the case in northern Somalia, which again put the humanitarian claims related to the work there into doubt. I argue that the lack of sensitivity toward the particularities of dealing with death (including mourning, conceptions of justice and eventually also forgetting the dead) in different local communities, undermines the often publicly stated intensions of forensic anthropologist to 'reunite the living and the dead' and bring 'peace of mind' to local communities.
Paper short abstract:
Suggesting that politicised rituals of grief can shift existing narratives to create new geographies of affect and action, this paper explores the live-streamed funeral of Zanzibari opposition leader Maalim Seif Sharif Hamad, who died of Covid-19 on February 17, 2021 in Tanzania.
Paper long abstract:
Suggesting that politicised rituals of grief can shift existing narratives to create new geographies of affect and action, this paper explores the live-streamed funeral of Zanzibari Vice-president and opposition leader Seif Sharif Hamad, who died of Covid-19 on February 17, 2021. Commonly known as 'Maalim', teacher, Hamad had galvanised Zanzibari and mainland opposition for over forty years, first within the government, then as the beloved leader of the Civic United Front, an opposition party that would for several decades be the strongest in the country. To the ruling powers, Maalim was a constant irritant; worse, he came from – and his support was strongest in – Pemba, a remote, impoverished island the existence of whose people, while frequently written out of history, threatens the origin myths of both Zanzibar and Tanzania. Winning the presidency in every election since 1995 but consistently prevented from taking office by the joint military forces of Zanzibar and Tanzania, Maalim persisted. To his supporters, Maalim was nearly saint-like, and thousands stood by him despite the extreme state violence directed at them for doing so. His death marked the end of a political era, sending cataclysms of despair across oppositional Zanzibar and Tanzania. Unexpectedly, the televised ritual of his funeral offered the nation a new script for the future, defining a new political geography in which the interests of mainlanders and islands, including Maalim’s remote and systematically marginalized home island of Pemba, might be effectively enfolded in a new vision of the state.
Paper short abstract:
How often does it happen that the trauma of a collective identity no more haunts its present rather becomes a vehicle of emancipation for them and the process of ‘othering’ as evidence of their authenticity? The paper indulges in the thematics of trauma by bringing to fore the event of death.
Paper long abstract:
Trauma and suffering as subjects of psychic apprehension have changed the semantics of pain questioning the need to repair or fix the transitions that occur in the subliminal spaces of every day. The alterable composition of every day causes the ‘othered’ individual to endure a range of experiences leading to the ‘inexpressibility of pain.’ The social setting becomes violated by the crisis of their existence and the burial of their dead. Thus, the expression of grief manifests in a performative character by the marginalized subject. Can we, then, say that the process of mourning is transversal to the process of being granted acclamation to such suffering.
The second question seeks to discuss mourning during death. While Mbembe emphatically explains the exercise of sovereignty to dictate who may live and who must die, the proposed argument adjoins this very statement by further asking, who decides whether the dead are sacred or profane. Denying the ritualistic departure to the dead requires a careful approach in understanding the phenomena that facilitate the social for collectivities who are socially boycotted and alienated owing to their belief system. The proposed paper discusses a case study of Ahmadi Muslims in Kashmir, who are socially outcasted by the larger Muslim domain, by highlighting the patterned negotiations they make to be able to mourn and grieve over their dead. What happens when the victims refuse to be identified as victims instead they demand integrity and acknowledgment for their living as well as dead. Therefore, death, here, becomes a means of retribution as opposed to redemption.
Paper short abstract:
Based on the analysis of Fragmentos, a memorial designed by the artist Doris Salcedo and inaugurated in November 2018, this paper explores how contemporary art mediates mourning and memory after the Peace Accords in Colombia (2016).
Paper long abstract:
How does contemporary art allow us to rethink the practices of mourning and memory in Latin America? Can art operate as a form of symbolic reparation? If so, how does it do so? These are some of the questions I explore in this paper, based on the analysis of Fragmentos, a memorial designed by the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo and inaugurated in Bogotá in November 2018.
This place marks the consecration of the Peace Accords in Colombia (2016) and constitutes the first counter-monument dedicated to the memory of the armed conflict's victims. Fragmentos is composed of a floor made of 1288 sheets of metal from the smelting of 37 tons of weapons surrendered by the former FARC guerrillas and the marks of the hammer blows made by women victims of sexual violence during the conflict. The floor locates in a space surrounding the ruins of a building presumably dating from the 17th century.
Through the historical, visual and spatial analysis of the site, as well as through the study of the testimonies of visitors to the site and the audiovisual material linked to it, this paper argues that in a historical context in which the paradigm of the victim has been strongly installed in different spheres of Colombian and Latin American society, Salcedo's Fragmentos performatively unfolds the possibilities of reconciliation and reparation of the social bond through the agency of materialities, spaces and images.