Towards a critical Otziography: inventing prehistoric bodies (original) (raw)
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An Iconography of the Flesh: How Corpses Mean as Matter
communication +1, 2013
The structuring relationship between the material world and the world of culture is variously embodied in the figure of the corpse. To ask how corpses mean as matter is to attend to them as “things themselves”—by bracketing the freighted assumptions and naturally mixed feelings we have when we encounter something that cannot but remind us of our own mortality. Corpses force us to think of putrefaction—and allow us, via a complex system of cultural and representational practices, to just as quickly disavow this unpleasantness. Wherever the corpse appears, then, it brings with it ideas about the relationship between representation and the real, or, more precisely, about the matter of subjectivity. This materiality also crucially constitutes the corpse’s difference from the identity of the deceased, and it is here where the corpse may thus do more than simply reference the past. The end point of the argument, then, is to work towards a vocabulary that allows this difference—this material remainder—to figure meaningfully in practices of grief and mourning that may not point exclusively back towards the deceased (and inevitably a particular version of that person’s legacy) but towards the future and towards polysemic, even conflicting ideas of the responsibility placed upon us by this death. This paper opens a discussion of corpses as “vibrant matter” (to borrow Jane Bennett’s provocative term) whose materiality is an equal partner to their cultural significance. My reading opens a conversation about the very real work of corpses as things capable of organizing diverse affect that in turn may become considered action. Following Bennett’s reading of Deleuze and Latour, I account for the corpse as both deceased subject and material object by framing it as a kind of assemblage. As remains, the corpse is essentially referential, the remains of someone. But remains are also material, matter that functions as an actant in concert with the processes of decomposition, with the interventions of photography and embalming, with the cultural practices of disposal that ritually encounter and resolve this “remaining.” The corpse diversely and dynamically organizes the cultural, the representational, the biological, the subjective and the objective, the ritual and the metaphysical. I argue that lingering with the corpse as a dynamic assemblage allows for the development of a nuanced and materialistic notion of agency. I further suggest that this kind of reading provocatively develops Bill Brown’s question, “What might scholars accomplish through a materialist analysis of media?” Corpses are unique objects in that they already suggest themselves as figures of the material, thus literally embodying the question of what a materialist media studies might look like. Corpses communicate something to us about the flesh; they are the not-so-passive objects of technological, ritual and representational practices; they are the perfect starting point for a materialist communication and media studies.
Between Shadow and Substance: The Post-Mortem Agency of the Corpse-Object
2019
This thesis (submitted towards an MFA Fine Art) explores the uses, representation and embodiment of the corpse as an object, imbued with its own sense of post-mortem agency as distinct from that of the inhabitant person. The corpse acts as a unique object bearing a special relationship to subjectivity, this relationship is fundamentally referential in that it gestures towards something other than itself. Each chapter explores a different intended reference to be found in the presentation and representation of the corpse. In assessing various historical examples, the role of the corpse as a container for selfhood is examined within the context of Ancient Egyptian royal mummification processes. An examination of the corpse as the physical point of intersection of the identity of the nation features in the examples of Eva Peron and Vladimir Lenin. The representation of the body as an abstracted political tool, and questions of ownership of this body-object-image is then studied in the examples of Emmett Till and the works of artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg.
Abandonment and victory in relations with dead bodies
Governing the dead, 2020
Katherine Verdery was the fi rst to make some systematic observations about the accelerated movement of dead bodies in East-Central Europe following the collapse of the Soviet Empire. She noted that, in this period of political transformation, the corpses of political leaders and cultural heroes accrued certain powers leading to a struggle over appropriating those powers, and to the exhumation and displacement of their bodies (Verdery 1999). Here I wish to consider the modes of appropriation of the power of corpses and off er an explanation for their widespread movement in postsocialist states. Th is movement, I will argue, is a manic reaction to the death of political regimes and to the sense of abandonment that accompanies this end. Although people may understand this reaction as asserting sovereignty over the dead, it in fact demonstrates the inverse: that the dead govern the living. How and why is it that humans deny being governed by the dead and instead claim victory over their losses? What is the connection between the experience of regime end and the attempts to declare victory through the exhumation and reburial of corpses? I Th e death of other humans is an omnipresent threat and experience in all cultural landscapes, and aft er the death, landscapes are marked
The remembrance of dismembered bodies
Body and Religion
For nearly three decades, the United States has pursued a border security strategy that has precipitated the deaths of thousands of migrants. Most of these deaths transpire unseen in remote stretches of the Sonoran Desert, where individuals are reduced to disarticulated bones. Endeavoring to overcome political indifference to these deaths, religious leaders, artists, and activists have joined in public works of mourning. These works strive to lend visibility to an otherwise invisible crisis and to grieve otherwise ungrieved lives. Thus, they usher the dead back into the polis and confound the boundaries between insiders and outsiders. However, the effort to re-present the dead runs the risk of making a spectacle out of the violence perpetrated against migrant bodies, inuring us to their witness or, worse, eliciting a perverse enjoyment. This article seeks first to offer a theological justification for political acts of mourning, before going on to articulate a strategy for resisting...
History and its Dead: Review Essay on Thomas Laquer’s "The Work of the Dead”
History & Theory, 2017
Thomas Laqueur has brought together half a century of research on modern European mortuary culture into an impressive narrative of how the Christian churchyard was replaced by the modern cemetery, how interment was partly replaced by the technology of cremation, and how writing and preserving the names of the dead coincided with democratization and social reform. Beyond the grand narrative of the history of modern burial, he also shows how the modern culture of history and memory is intertwined with the transformation of mortuary practices. On a deeper level, he points toward new ways of conceptualizing the relation between the living and the dead, leading up toward, if not fully confronting, the challenge that propels his own endeavor, namely the existential-ontological predicament of living after those who have been and the nature of spectrality. In the preface to this 700-page magnum opus by one of the leading cultural historians of our time, Thomas Laqueur recalls as one of its earliest moments a research question that he posed to a number of British archives more than three decades earlier, requesting material of relevance for the question of the " meaning of death in Post-Reformation Britain. " But long before having been formulated as this hyperbolic historical quest, the fascination with the cultural meaning of the dead body had been triggered in the young Laqueur when growing up as the son of a pathologist who would regularly be called in to perform autopsies at the local morgue. To his ancestry also belongs a family of German-Polish rabbis, whose graves in Breslau/Wroclaw he visits at the outset of the book. This personal background, including the fact that he himself for a time studied medicine, is important for taking in the conceptual-aesthetic scope of this study, which moves seamlessly between the colder gaze and comportment of the physician, engineer, and undertaker, to the imagination of the poet, philosopher, and priest in its differing approaches to the dead body in European culture over the last three centuries. The amount of material gathered for this study is staggering, as it brings together half a life's work of searching for the significance and truth of this most ambiguous, frightening, and compelling of material configurations and the history of its changing cultural responses: the dead human body. This generic dead body is not only conceived as an unusually multi-semiotic entity, generating a changing and diverse spectrum of cultural responses. It is also
In this chapter I consider how human remains are thematized as agentive within the field of forensic anthropology. The flourishing popular literature on forensic science commonly summons the image of the corpse that speaks or testifies. Here I explore how the corpse's agency is imagined in these texts, and how the forensic anthropologist's agency is positioned relative to the corpse. How might these common claims of corpse agency prompt us to think more critically about the agentive aspects of the dead?