Short Abstract

Long-term military occupation is a brutal case of polarization in the contemporary world. This panel explores how this doctrine is enacted and contested through a specific aspect of human existence, namely death and dying.

Long Abstract

Under long-term military occupation a doctrine of supremacy structures politics and governance making it a brutal case of polarization in the contemporary world.

Anthropology is uniquely positioned to examine how this order affects occupied peoples’ lives and how dominance is accommodated and contested in the mundane as well as the extraordinary. In this panel, we will focus on death and dying as an aspect of human existence well suited for the exploration of these processes.

While occupying powers try to impose their polarizing doctrine in an effort at staving off the means of social reproduction of the occupied group, death and the afterlife function as alternative sites of social reproduction. Because death and the afterlife are unstable sites of governance, they threaten to undo the polarization on which occupation regimes rely by creating ambiguity, dilemmas and anxieties. People living under occupation (or in exile due to occupation) therefore often use their bodies, their deaths and their rituals to create counter-narratives and assert belonging and sovereignty.

We invite presentations that explore death and dying in contexts of military occupation. Examples include looking at death as a site for asserting or contesting claims to sovereignty; exploring dead bodies as symbolic loci for the (re-)ordering of political authority, morality and identity; examining how death relates to the geographies of occupation by defying borders; or focusing on how the governance of death and afterlives intersects with forms of capitalist extraction through the exploitation of occupied people’s material, affective and spiritual life force.

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