Rachel Ceasar | University of the Witwatersrand (original) (raw)

ARCHAEOLOGY & HUMANITARIANISM by Rachel Ceasar

Necropolitics chronicles the sociopolitical conditions of exhuming clandestine mass graves and th... more Necropolitics chronicles the sociopolitical conditions of exhuming clandestine mass graves and the impact this has on the management of the dead and traumatic memory. This edited volume complements a rising number of contemporary books appearing in the social sciences and humanities stimulated by growing concerns related to humanitarianism, crimes committed against humanity, truth and reconciliation commissions, and memory politics. The volume is unique in that it uncovers an unexamined part of the medical humanitarian aid landscape— exhumation. Ethnographically rich, the volume explores the challenging ways in which everyday people alleviate suffering and work toward closure in the form of exhuming the dead. In doing so, the authors put forth a framework for studying political violence and repression
beyond just a local analysis of poverty. Instead, they offer an examination of the histories, political economies, and global discourses that are socially constructed and mutable in post-conflict Africa, Asia, and Latin America as well as in Western Europe.

This article analyses the human technology of affect in excavation work in contemporary Spain. Wh... more This article analyses the human technology of affect in excavation work in contemporary Spain. While the government continues to avoid addressing crimes committed during the Civil War and the subsequent dictatorship, many Spaniards have taken it upon themselves to address the past. The setting is in Abánades, a right-wing pueblo destroyed in battle that rebuilt itself through the collecting and selling of battlefield scrap metal. Whereas some archaeologists and heritage managers view the pueblo's obsession with bombs and bullets as strange, I show how the pueblo's deep affection (cariño) for war materials challenges singular narratives of understanding the past. By examining the discovery and care of these materials through sensorial tools – what I call salvage technologies – we can probe the affective mechanics involved in how knowledge of the past is intimately produced and actively challenged in Spain today.

The Routledge Handbook of Medical Anthropology, 2016

New advances in science and technology are increasingly used in post-conflict countries to protec... more New advances in science and technology are increasingly used in post-conflict countries to protect heritage, promote reconciliation, and bring justice to victims of human rights violations. The current exhumation of mass graves in Spain is one example of how everyday citizens negotiate knowledge and memory in the aftermath of conflict, and through exhumation, people seek a sense of justice and peace. But what happens when bodies are exhumed?

For 17 months, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork and explored the archives related to the current exhumation of mass graves that date from the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the Francisco Franco dictatorship (1939-1975). During and after the Civil War, the institutions of Church and political regime went hand in hand: “Religion and the army,” explained Luisa of San Pedro, Spain, “were the two pillars of Francoism.” People who were suspected of resistance were arrested, interned in concentration camps, and executed; over the course of the war, 130, 000 civilians and Republican partisans were killed. Most were buried anonymously in unmarked mass graves, their deaths denied or suppressed by those who lived nearby. Because the Catholic Church had legitimized the Francoist regime, these mass graves of Republican partisans were often located in or around church cemeteries. For this reason, I spent much of my time in Spain at graveyards in churches.

In post-conflict countries, caring for the dead challenges how family kinship and national histor... more In post-conflict countries, caring for the dead challenges how family kinship and national history are organised. The exhumation of unmarked mass graves following decolonisation, civil war, and other forms of violence and oppression is one way by which heritage managers reconfigure kinship and history in the aftermath of conflict. Where governments fail to identify and acknowledge the dead, archaeologists and other heritage managers use exhuming to negotiate how the dead and their familial and political ties are remembered. In Spain, the exhumation of anti-Francoist guerrillas killed after the 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War serves to restore broken kinship lines and give the dead a proper burial. Yet the symbolic and material recovery of their bones obligates families – and the nation – to confront the political past and their relationship with the anti-Francoist dead. Drawing on ethnographic data from Teilán, Spain, I examine how the material presence of the anti-Francoist dead resurfaces competing kinship responsibilities and ongoing political legacies in contemporary Spain. I conclude by drawing from these lessons to reflect on the exhumation process in other countries, drawing out the inferences especially for countries across Africa.

Anthropology News , 2011

For families and forensics, the exhumation process has become a particular form of remembering in... more For families and forensics, the exhumation process has become a particular form of remembering in Spain today. Exhumed objects may voice their own truth through data and DNA, but the living human factor of the exhumation is an important part of the picture; what is made to speak matters and in Spain, this knowledge is not produced by artifacts (Shapin and Schaffer 1985) or expertise (El-Haj 2001) alone. What is lost when living subjectivities are cut out of the sciencemaking process, and what can an ethnographically informed focus on subjectivity together with science and technology studies (STS) offer us?

Based on 17 months of ethnographic field work on the current exhumation of mass graves from the S... more Based on 17 months of ethnographic field work on the current exhumation of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and subsequent Francisco Franco dictatorship (1939-1975), the dissertation examines the practice of exhuming as a death ritual animated by emotions. A large wealth of literature on the anthropology of death centers on funerary rituals as a way to
reveal a people’s social structures and cultural meanings. Yet what happens when the living are
denied from performing the rituals surrounding death? What happens to those dead, such as
Spanish Republicans killed and left in mass graves, who escape the boundaries of ritual? Never
before
have Republicans been recognized as victims worthy of reburial until 2000 when
a team
of experts conducted the first professional exhumation of a Republican mass grave. While the
rituals associated with exhuming have had an important impact on Spanish society in that it promises recognition and reburial to Republicans, the Spanish exhumations also project a perspective of the recent past as being resolved through the creation of Republican victims. Underlying the exhumations is the use of the dead body to narrate a particular version of the Spanish past through exhumation practice and ritual. The conditions under which exhuming produces new hierarchies of knowledge via its evaluation of the dead is driven not just by practice, but also emotion. Such feelings of love and loss ultimately determine which remains are excavated (i.e., Republicans), and which are not (i.e., Moroccans and Nationalists). In my ethnography on the Spanish experience of death rituals and emotions, I examine the microcosm of exhumations in relation to a larger framework that situates: (1) exhumation practice as a tool to provide meaning of the violent past in post-dictatorship Spain, and (2) the use of such practices to create knowledge in the aftermath of conflict worldwide. The dissertation concludes with possibilities for understanding how emotions and interests drive the production of knowledge that is more open to personal ways of knowing—an invitation for a critical medical anthropology and science studies approach to exhumation practices.

Cultural Anthropology Online, Jan 21, 2013

PUBLIC HEALTH by Rachel Ceasar

(Note: Co-authors include: Jamie Chang, PhD, Kara Zamora, Emily Hurstak, MD MPH, Margot Kushel, M... more (Note: Co-authors include: Jamie Chang, PhD, Kara Zamora, Emily Hurstak, MD MPH, Margot Kushel, MD, Christine Miaskowski, RN PhD FAAN and Kelly Knight, PhD)

Background: Guideline recommendations to reduce prescription opioid misuse among patients with chronic non-cancer pain include the routine use of urine toxicology tests for high-risk patients. Yet little is known about how the implementation of urine toxicology tests among patients with co-occurring chronic non-cancer pain and substance use impacts primary care providers’ management of misuse. In this paper, we present clinicians’ perspectives on the benefits and challenges of implementing urine toxicology tests in the monitoring of opioid misuse and substance use in safety net healthcare settings.

Methods: We interviewed 23 primary care providers from six safety net healthcare settings whose patients had a diagnosis of co-occurring chronic non-cancer pain and substance use. We transcribed, coded, and analyzed interviews using grounded theory methodology.

Results: The benefits of implementing urine toxicology tests for primary care providers included less reliance on intuition to assess for misuse and the ability to identify unknown opioid misuse and/or substance use. The challenges of implementing urine toxicology tests included insufficient education and training about how to interpret and implement tests, and a lack of clarity on how and when to act on tests that indicated misuse and/or substance use.

Conclusions: These data suggest that primary care clinicians’ lack of education and training to interpret and implement urine toxicology tests may impact their management of patient opioid misuse and/or substance use. Clinicians may benefit from additional education and training about the clinical implementation and use of urine toxicology tests. Additional research is needed on how primary care providers implementation and use of urine toxicology tests impacts chronic non-cancer pain management in primary care and safety net healthcare settings among patients with co-occurring chronic non-cancer pain and substance use.

CONFERENCES by Rachel Ceasar

New advances in science and technology are increasingly being used in post-conflict countries to ... more New advances in science and technology are increasingly being used in post-conflict countries to protect heritage, promote reconciliation, and bring justice to victims of human rights violations. The exhumation of mass graves in Spain, for example, is a case of how everyday citizens negotiate knowledge and memory in the aftermath of conflict. While exhumation work has garnered the attention of the Spanish government, scholars, and the media worldwide, little research has examined the disparities involved in exhuming. Through a feminist engagement of the science of dead bodies, my research examines structured inequalities produced in exhumation practices and technologies in contemporary Spain. By examining how knowledge is negotiated by diverse voices and strategies, I aim to better understand narratives of violence and exclusion in the treatment of human bodies and remains.
Video: https://ehutb.ehu.es/es/video/index/uuid/54d0f02a0830d.html

"Religion, Secularism, and Reburial Technology" (4S roundtable) The production of scientific kno... more "Religion, Secularism, and Reburial Technology" (4S roundtable)
The production of scientific knowledge is a political process, one not exempt from the emotions, beliefs, and opinions of people and nations. This subjective “stuff” is embedded in science and becomes imprinted in the knowledge and technology that science produces. Yet these affective commitments to knowledge production are often blurred, ignored, or deemed incompatible with modern scientific practices. Through this roundtable discussion, I will explore the current use of exhumation technology to make historical and political claims in post-dictatorship Spain, and the affective, ethical, religious, and secular engagements involved in the exhumation process. With a focus on the secular/religious commitments of a people and nation to try to understand the past through science, I will consider: what kind of Catholicism functions at the exhumation? How are bones, human remains, personal objects, and DNA identification reconfigured through reburial technology? What can an ethnographically-informed study of STS tell us about how religion, secularism, and science function together?"

(AAA roundtable) Our belief systems and scientific networks co-constitute one another, promoti... more (AAA roundtable)

Our belief systems and scientific networks co-constitute one another, promoting a curious interdependency and practical ethics between what we believe in and what happens in our world. Spirits, dogmas, and religious ideologies contribute to how we
understand science and medicine, generating knowledge and innovatively shaping the politics of where we live. How are personal and collective doctrines, practices, and beliefs
an effective technology in nation-building politics, particularly in the fields of science, technology, and medicine? What role does sacredness and secularism play in science, technology, and medicine politics? This roundtable aims to provoke a conversation on how various belief systems, including organized religion, spirituality, and metaphysics, are instrumental in nation-building projects. Going beyond a dichotomy of “modern” political goals and “traditional” religious ones, the roundtable will open up a discussion of where beliefs collide or harmonize in various secular sacred domains with an emphasis in the area of science, technology, and medicine.

For example, how does American Indian metaphysics sometimes articulate with and challenge scientific ways of apprehending the natural world? Whose bioethics decides abortion and artificial contraceptive policies in the US? What is “Jewish archaeology” and how does it function in Israel/Palestine? In exploring the application of sacredness and secularism to science, technology, and medicine politics, the roundtable aims to create a dynamic dialogue on the power of belief in nation building as well as touch on larger theoretical and methodological debates in anthropology, such as the role of science in anthropology and
the ethnographic positionality of the anthropologist and how it effects our research.

This session will be organized as a roundtable. Each of the presenters will make a short 5-7 minute presentation followed by an open discussion.""

(AAA conference panel) Eighty thousand Moroccan soldiers (Madariaga 2002; 2009), many of them ... more (AAA conference panel)

Eighty thousand Moroccan soldiers (Madariaga 2002; 2009), many of them Berbers from Northern Morocco, fought for the fascists during the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939. Today, these soldiers’ bodies are strewn over the Spanish countryside, forgotten by both Spain and Morocco. How did these soldiers get there, and what do their remains reveal about the civil war and the historical and current strains between the three cultures—Spanish, Moroccan, and Berber?

Drawing on current research in medical anthropology, STS, and archaeology of conflict, this paper will explore the presence of “Muslim corpses” in Spain from the Spanish Civil War as a window into current and historical Spanish-Moroccan-Berber tensions.

The physical and metaphysical presence of Morocco in Spain today elicits a larger discussion of religion, history, colonialism, politics, and race as it is embodied in the figure of the Moroccan
corpse: (1) as foreign mercenaries who fought for nationalist and fascist Spain, they are excluded from the contemporary leftist exhumation movement to identify graves of the defeated; (2) as Berbers or amazigh, there is little incentive to investigate their case because they are an ethnic minority and a potential risk to Moroccan nationalism, and finally, and finally, (3) as Muslim remains, they did not fit the Spanish national-catholic historical
trajectory of the civil war and postwar.

Unexhumed and nameless, these multiple, transforming bodies represent the iconic yet indexical figure of the uncanny “moro”: a
haunting, unknown Other but at the same time, an enduring familiar enemy.

(4S conference roundtable) Rather than propose implementations that strive to universally enga... more (4S conference roundtable)

Rather than propose implementations that strive to universally engage the communities we work in, I suggest examining what already matters to people and how this engagement shapes science. I will be looking at exhumations as a scientific model Spaniards are using today to reproduce, dismantle, and engage the silenced historical unconscious of the Civil War and dictatorship into new publics. Understanding how people ascribe meaning to and engage with science is not just a methodology, but also an ethnographic and theoretical exercise that can provide scholars/practitioners innovative ways to apply person-driven science to multiple contexts and wider audiences.

The egalitarian engagement surrounding the Spanish exhumations can take on many forms (physical, spiritual, therapeutic, pedagogical) depending on one’s professional and/or personal investment in an exhumation/exhuming group (e.g., teaching this history at a local high school, digging out bodies, presenting articles for the media). This process is not always perfect, but it allows for multiple voices to gain currency and credibility in new publics.

I draw on this anthropological example to illustrate that it is not enough for scholars/practitioners to simply pursue why science matters, but to engage with what matters to the people they study/work with and how this significance drives participation in knowledge-making practices. Social scientists have studied how science can occur outside the lab and by various social actors, and while there has been a move to resituate science at the peripheries, few works have centered on how science is engaged and created by what actually matters to people.

(XII Congreso de Antropología conference panel) The profession should wholeheartedly accept it... more (XII Congreso de Antropología conference panel)

The profession should wholeheartedly accept its fullest responsibilities as members of the community of mankind and society (Kroeber, 1962: 93).

In 1962, Alfred Kroeber along with other prominent anthropologists such as Claude Levi-Strauss and Eric Wolf, came together at the Wenner-Gren symposium on “Anthropological Horizons” to hash out the current problems and goals of their field. Nearly 50 years later, we find ourselves revisiting many of these same doubts and aspirations on both sides of the Atlantic.

Drawing on my own experiences in anthropology at UCB-UCSF
and in Spain where I conduct research on the current exhumations, I will be exploring the role of anthropology and how its circulation into the everyday flows back and impacts the
discipline: What role can anthropologists play and what expectations do we have for the discipline? How do we draw anthropology out of the periphery and into new publics? What and where are our boundaries?

I will begin by looking at the current critiques and solutions proposed by anthropology itself, particularly George Marcus’ interview (2008) on the end of ethnography and Joao Biehl and Peter Locke’s (2010) response and suggestion of where anthropology can go from here. Next, I propose to rethink anthropology as a revolutionary discipline,
constantly reframing and reinventing itself. Finally, I draw on the exhumations in Spain as a way for anthropology to learn how to engage in new publics.

Teaching Documents by Rachel Ceasar

In the aftermath of war, illness, and tragedy, individuals and communities must decide what to do... more In the aftermath of war, illness, and tragedy, individuals and communities must decide what to do about their dead. Heritage and memory matter in these discussions of the dead. Both past and present, material and representational, human and object, the dead body provokes a reflexive examination of the structured, professional, and personal ethics at stake in defining heritage and memory. Heritage and historical memory engage a network of stewards who influence how the recent past will be remembered: archaeologists uncover bodies, local and descendant communities negotiate burial, and nations instruct legacies. But this trajectory of the dead body is hardly the case: the fate of HeLa cells, Israeli Ashkenazi soldiers, Scandinavian bog bodies, cryopreserved indigenous tissue, Hanford nuclear bodies, and the HIV/AIDS corpse come to mind.
What role do states and institutions play in determining which bodies are allowed to be remembered?
How are historical and contemporary conflicts articulated through human remains?
What new forms of heritage and memory do the dead offer the living?
This body-centered undergraduate writing seminar draws upon current events, literature, and social theory to examine how the dead body shapes heritage and memory, and how the past stakes a claim on the dead. We will be examining feminist, postcolonial, subaltern, and indigenous developments in archaeology, medical anthropology, and science studies. Using an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, our objective is to approach the dead as never really dead, but reconstituted into multiple (and often conflicting) representations and spatiotemporal forms.

Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishm... more Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess. Margaret Mead, American anthropologist

Other Writing by Rachel Ceasar

Special Issue: The University in Crisis, Issue, 2010