Governing the Dead

HUMAN REMAINS AND VIOLENCE Governing the dead Governing the dead Governing ‘This is an important, original, diverse collection of studies that the dead broach the boundaries and intersections between the private and the public, between grieving and governing, and between nature, Sovereignty and the politics humanity and the state.’ Ben Kiernan, Director, Genocide Studies Program, Yale University, and of dead bodies author of Blood and Soil Edited by FINN STEPPUTAT In most of the world, the transition from life to death is a time when states and other forms of authority are intensely present. Focusing on the relationship between bodies and sovereignty, Governing the dead explores how, by whom and with what effects dead bodies are governed in conflict and non-conflict contexts across the world, including an analysis of the struggles over ‘proper burials’; the repatriation of dead migrants; abandoned cemeteries; exhumations; ‘feminicide’; the protection of dead drug-lords; and the disappeared dead. Mapping theoretical and empirical terrains, this volume suggests that the management of dead bodies is related to the constitution and membership of states and non-state entities that claim autonomy and impunity. ST This volume is a significant contribution to studies of death, E PPUTAt ( PPUTAt power and politics. It will be useful at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels in anthropology, sociology, law, criminology, political science, international relations, genocide studies, history, cultural studies and philosophy. Ed. Finn Stepputat is a Senior Researcher in Peace, Risk and Violence at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) ) ISBN 978-0-7190-9608-2 9 780719 096082 www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk HUMAN REMAINS AND VIOLENCE Cover design: www.riverdesign.co.uk Governing the dead HUMAN REMAINS AND VIOLENCE Human remains and violence aims to question the social legacy of mass violence by studying how diff erent societies have coped with the dead bodies resulting from war, genocide and state-sponsored brutality. However, rather paradoxically, given the large volume of work devoted to the body on the one hand, and to mass violence on the other, the question of the body in the context of mass violence remains a largely unexplored area and even an academic blind spot. Interdisciplinary in nature, Human remains and violence intends to show how various social and cultural treatments of the dead body simultaneously challenge common representations, legal practices and morality. Th is series aims to provide proper intellectual and theoretical tools for a better understanding of mass violence’s aft er- maths in today’s societies. Series editors Jean-Marc Dreyfus and É lisabeth Anstett ALSO AVAILABLE IN THIS SERIES Destruction and human remains: disposal and concealment in genocide and mass violence Edited by É lisabeth Anstett and Jean-Marc Dreyfus Governing the dead Sovereignty and the politics of dead bodies Edited by Finn Stepputat Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan Copyright © Finn Stepputat 2014 Th e right of Finn Stepputat to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk This electronic version has been made freely available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) licence, which permits non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction provided the author(s) and Manchester University Press are fully cited and no modifications or adaptations are made. Details of the licence can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc-nd/4.0/ British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 978 07190 96082 hardback First published 2014 Th e publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Typeset by Out of House Publishing Contents List of fi gures page vii List of tables viii List of contributors ix Series editors’ foreword xiii Acknowledgements xv Intro 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n 3 Finn Stepputat 2 Governing the dead? Th eoretical approaches 11 Finn Stepputat Part I: Containment and negotiation 3 Th e proper funeral: death, landscape and power among the Duha Tuvinians of northern Mongolia 35 Benedikte M ø ller Kristensen 4 Dead zone: pollution, contamination and the neglected dead in post-war Saigon 53 Christophe Robert vi Contents 5 Travelling corpses: negotiating sovereign claims in Oaxacan post-mortem repatriation 75 Lars Ove Trans 6 Claiming the dead, defi ning the nation: contested narratives of the independence struggle in post- confl ict Timor-Leste 95 Henri Myrttinen 7 Remaking the dead, uncertainty and the torque of human materials in northern Zimbabwe 114 Joost Fontein Part II: Transgression 8 Governing the disappeared-living and the disappeared-dead: the violent pursuit of cultural sovereignty during authoritarian rule in Argentina 143 Antonius C. G. M. Robben 9 Dangerous corpses in Mexico’s drug war 163 Regnar Kristensen 10 Time as weather: corpse-work in the prehistory of political boundaries 179 Richard Kernaghan 11 Governing through the mutilated female body: corpse, bodypolitics and contestation in contemporary Guatemala 203 Ninna Nyberg S ø rensen Outro 12 Abandonment and victory in relations with dead bodies 229 J o h n B o r n e m a n I n d e x 250 Figures 4.1 Refuse on the side of the road through Binh Hung Hoa cemeteries. Photo by C. Robert page 54 4.2 Th e face of the dead, peering out from an abandoned grave. Photo by C. Robert 65 10.1 Crossing over to the left bank. Photo by R. Kernaghan 189 10.2 Th e crates. Photo by R. Kernaghan 191 10.3 Th e warning. Photo by R. Kernaghan 197 Tables 11.1 Homicide rates per 100,000 inhabitants and by sex of victim. Central America page 209 11.2 Homicide rates in Guatemalan departments, 2009 210 11.3 Violent deaths in Guatemala, 2001–2012 211 Contributors John Borneman is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. He has conducted fi eldwork in Germany, Central Europe, Lebanon and Syria, and completed ethnographic projects on the symbolic forms of political identifi cation, the relation of the state to everyday life, kinship and sexuality and forms of justice and accountability. His publications include Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State, Nation (1992); Death of the Father: An Anthropology of the End in Political Authority (2004); Syrian Episodes: Sons, Fathers, and an Anthropologist in Aleppo (2008); Political Crime and the Memory of Loss (2011); and (as co-editor with Abdellah Hammoudi) Being Th ere: Th e Fieldwork Encounter and the Making of Truth (2009). His current research is on secular ritual, focusing on the rehabilitation of child sex off enders in Berlin. Joost Fontein is a social anthropologist at the University of Edinburgh. A committed Africanist, his research explores the political imbrications of landscapes, things and human substances in Zimbabwe and across Southern Africa. His doctoral research (published as a monograph in 2006) explored the politics of heritage around Great Zimbabwe, and won the 2004 ASA Audrey Richards Prize. His second book, Remaking Mutirikwi: Landscape, Water and Belonging in Southern Zimbabwe , is currently under review, and he is working on a third book manuscript entitled Th e Politics of the x List of contributors Dead and the Power of Uncertainty in Post-2000 Zimbabwe. He is editor of the Journal of Southern African Studies , founder-editor of Critical African Studies and co-founder of the Bones Collective research group. Richard Kernaghan is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Florida and author of Coca’s Gone (2009). Currently, he is writing about river and road transportation in Peru’s Huallaga valley as a means for thinking ethnographically about everyday top- ographies of law. Benedikte M ø ller Kristensen is a PhD candidate at the Centre of Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. Her PhD project focuses on shamanism, material culture, kinship, memory, ontology, misfortune, social change and power among the Duha Tuvinian reindeer nomads in Mongolia. She has conducted thirty months of fi eldwork among Tuvinian people (twenty-two months among the Duha Tuvinian reindeer nomads in Mongolia and eight months among the Tuvinians in Siberia) in the period 1998–2012. She has previously carried out research on urban shamanism, post- socialist transition, knowledge and landscape. Regnar Kristensen holds a PhD in social anthropology from the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is currently assistant professor at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies (ToRS) at the University of Copenhagen, where he continues his decade-long research in Mexican law enforcement, crime and religion. He has studied delinquent gangs and their relationship to certain increasingly popular Catholic saints in Mexico City and is currently making a study of delinquency and law enforcement as experienced, coped with and understood within a family living on the edge of life and the law. Henri Myrttinen is currently the Senior Research Offi cer for Gender in Peacebuilding with International Alert in London. He has worked extensively on and in Indonesia and Timor-Leste for various NGOs, think-tanks, research institutions and media outlets. He received his PhD from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, with a thesis on masculinities and violence in the context of militias, gangs and martial arts groups in Timor-Leste. List of contributors xi Antonius C.

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