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- Convenors:
-
Julia Morales
(University of Virginia)
Anne Allison (Duke University)
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- Chair:
-
Sylvia Tidey
(University of Virginia)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Sessions:
- Thursday 25 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
In this panel, we think with mortal remains and practices that engage them to open up questions regarding how death and the dead come to be. We interrogate the techno-material, intersubjective and temporal processes and practices through which the dead take shape and death gains certainty.
Long Abstract:
In this panel, we think with mortal remains and practices that engage them to open up questions regarding how death and the dead come to be. Far from considering death to be a “done” deal – a self-evident and uncontested cessation of life and absence of liveliness– we interrogate the techno-material, intersubjective and temporal processes through which the dead take shape and death gains certainty. From a decolonial, feminist, and queer standing, we want to take seriously the materiality of the dead, death, and the practices that are called upon when tracing and managing them. This involves the undoing of established cultural traditions (Allison: 2023), medico-legal and forensic practices (Pardo Pedraza & Morales-Fontanilla: 2023), and Western liberal conceptions of personhood (Tidey 2022), among many, towards novel and unexpected ways to bring death and the dead into material, technological, and cultural existence —human and nonhuman. We are interested in thinking about the political work that is done by these practices and how they open possibilities for new ways of being, conceptualizing, and rendering death. We welcome papers that delve into the multiple emerging registers that account for how death and the dead are made to hold amidst changing social orders and structures, socio-environmental devastation, the temporalities of late capitalism, and deep rooted violence. We encourage academic works that engage with exploring new and experimental research methodologies and narrative sensibilities that bring about emerging understandings of what death and the dead come to be.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 25 July, 2024, -Sabina Cvecek (Field Museum, Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Paper short abstract:
This paper addresses the evidence of the dead during the Neolithic in south-eastern Europe and western Asia by shifting perspective away from individuals to persons. This methodological shift offers an alternative interpretation of the dead, beyond the Eurocentric notions of kinship and family.
Paper long abstract:
With a few notable exceptions, most of the existing literature on death in Neolithic southeast Europe and western Asia considers the death remains through individualistic Euro-American hegemonic understandings of burying the dead in (nuclear) family graves. The dead are also considered as individuals who can be counted, measured, examined, and compared to each other with the latest natural science techniques. These techniques include the extraction of ancient DNA, which allows scholars to infer the sex of the dead and biological relatedness between “individuals” recovered from archaeological sites, among others. In the central European Neolithic, several recently published studies reconstructed kinship trees of persons related to each other up to seven generations. Those serve as the evidence of (matrilineal or patrilineal) nuclear families burying their dead in family graves.
In contrast, the prehistoric record from southeastern Europe and western Asia can be less neatly piloted on kinship trees. The dead, often buried underneath the house floors, are not necessarily biologically related to each other. This evidence poses new questions about the death rituals, kinship, and social organization of these groups that will be addressed in this paper. By considering the dead not as individuals but as persons, which shifts focus away from western hegemonic understanding of the dead, the funerary record will be reconsidered. Combined with cross-cultural ethnographic evidence, it becomes evident why burying a “new kid on the block” next to a biologically unrelated adult person may not be as exceptional and strange as currently portrayed in archaeogenetic literature.
Aminata Ndow (Harvard University)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I present a case study of how death came to be for a daughter whose father, a victim of enforced disappearance, torture and extrajudicial killing in the Gambia, was reburied and given a state burial seven years after his death in government custody.
Paper long abstract:
Human remains are central to the politics of “truth”, “reparation” and “reconciliation” in the era of human rights (Ferrándiz and Robben 2015). Katherine Verdery (1999) insisted that the corpse and the material and symbolic objects that accompany it (bones, bodies, graves, urns) carry political, cultural and social issues that are reinforced in moments of political transition. It is indeed around the control of human remains and the dead that contemporary necropolitical issues are now articulated (Ferrándiz and Robben 2015). As Rojas-Pérez (2017) points out, the possibility of localization (whereness), however imperfect and dubious it may be, insures the ineluctable temporality of enforced disappearance. The state funeral of Solo Sandeng, which I attended in January 2023 and the conversations I had with his 22-year-old daughter, reveal how the reburial ceremony, however symbolic it may be, opened a space-time of mourning, memory, and the coming to be of death. Forensic and humanitarian exhumation has been recognized as "a necessary step in the completion of the funeral ritual" as funeral rituals play a central role in the process of "making" death (Crossland 2015: 242). Not respecting prescribed funerary practices – which is all too common in conflict situations – is a way of “killing” the dead by denying them a hypothetical post-mortem life. In this paper I offer a reflection on Sandeng’s daughter’s experience of the state funeral and how the ritualized treatment of her fathers remains, as a concrete form of symbolic justice, impacted her mourning process.
Marlene Schäfers (Utrecht University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the labour involved in commemorating the dead, suggesting that social reproduction is not only a question of maintaining life but also of sustaining afterlife. Commemorative labour has the potential to foster new social imaginaries, gendered orders, and temporal horizons.
Paper long abstract:
What kind of labour is involved in keeping the dead alive? Drawing on ethnographic research with members and followers of the Kurdish freedom movement, who spend much time and energy commemorating those who have fallen in the forty-year-old armed struggle for Kurdish autonomy, this paper proposes to regard their efforts as a form of reproductive labour. In a context where the dead and their memories are under constant, violent assault by state authorities, I suggest that social reproduction entails not just the making and maintenance of life, but also the sustenance of afterlife. For the Kurdish movement, commemoration is thus also a form of genealogical labour that seeks to establish fallen guerrillas as collective ancestors of a body politic yet to come. This labour questions established principles of filiation and establishes new, revolutionary forms of “lateral necrosociality” (Kim 2016) that challenge not only patrilineal privilege but also question the biopolitical horizon of social reproduction as inherently future-oriented. But maintaining the afterlives of the dead also involves work on the self. Focusing on narrative and visual forms of commemoration circulating both on and offline, I show how those engaged in the labour of producing a revolutionary ancestry perform intense affective labour to regulate their emotions in the face of violent loss. As such, the necrolabour of caring for the dead becomes a site where the challenges and contradictions of the Kurdish revolutionary endeavour are worked through.
Nikki Mulder (Leiden University)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I consider haunting as a metaphor for the ways that African Americans in New Orleans relate to the future deaths of their kin. I explore how, in the face of urban violence, death acquires a ghostly presence: not yet fully present but already effective in anticipatory actions.
Paper long abstract:
While the city of New Orleans is a haunted place, specters of death do not manifest equally for all residents. Patterns of mortality reflect enduring histories of racialized inequality and intersect closely with socioeconomic class. In Black and underfunded neighborhoods, most deaths occur slowly, manifesting as the outcome of poverty-related ill health. Yet since the rise of urban violence in the 1970s, Black and poor residents have also had to increasingly deal with sudden, untimely deaths in their families. This situation has upturned normative expectations about the timing of death and about who will have to care for whose remains. Based on ethnographic fieldwork (2017-2018), I describe how African American parents and grandparents find themselves confronted with the need to reckon with the (future) deaths of their children and grandchildren. They do so, importantly, by securing finances to mourn not yet deceased kin through the consumption of life insurance policies. In this paper, I consider the ways that people relate to the future potentiality of untimely death in terms of haunting. While haunting tends to be used as a metaphor for the lingering presence of systemic injury from the past (Gordon 1997; Holloway 2003), some scholars have suggested that ghosts may come from the future as well (Zeitlyn 2020). I use this notion of haunting—of absent-presences and morbid dreads—to draw out how future death, and the urgent demand to orient oneself to it, may take shape in the face of urban violence.