X-Message-Number: 33087
From: David Stodolsky <>
Subject: Governing the Dead
Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2010 10:53:50 +0100

http://www.diis.dk/sw102152.asp


Within international studies, the dead would seem to make up an exotic but 
marginal subject of research and policy analysis. So much of international 
relations deal with how to ensure survival, peace, cooperation, and development;
and yet, dead bodies have a significant but rarely recognized presence in 
national and international politics. One thing is the exceptional cases of 
soldiers retuning in body bags, disaster victims being buried in mass graves, 
suicide bombers blowing themselves to pieces, and unaccounted for dead civilians
in counterinsurgency campaigns. But another thing is the significance of death 
in everyday lives, where state and international regulations of dead bodies 
provide a silent but indispensable precondition for senses of order. Moreover, 
dead bodies and human remains often play important roles in the making and 
transformation of political communities, surfacing again and again through 
memorials, exhumations, repatriations, and reburials in times of political 
turmoil.
 

At this seminar, John Borneman will speak about the political significance of 
the bodies of dead leaders, while Antonius Robben will talk about the political 
role of exhumations of disappeared victims of the dirty war in Argentina. 
 

The seminar is organized as part of an international workshop "Shifting Power 
and Sovereignty 
and a PhD course.
 

John Borneman is professor of anthropology at Princeton University where he 
works in fields of the political and legal anthropology, including issues of 
authority, memory and secularism. His extensive list of publications includes 
among many other titles the booksSettling Accounts: Violence, Justice, and 
Accountability in Postsocialist States (Princeton University Press, 1997) and 
Death of the Father: Toward an Anthropology of the End in Political Authority 
(Berghahn Books, 2003).
 

Antonius Robben is professor of anthropology at Utrecht University, working on 
medical, psychological and political anthropology and with special interest in 
political violence, trauma and social reconstruction. His books include the 
edited volume Survival and Cultures Under Siege: Collective Violence and Trauma 
(Cambridge University Press, 2000), Death, Mourning and Burial: A Cross-Cultural
Reader (Wiley-Blackwell, 2004), and Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina 
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).
 


David Stodolsky
  Skype: davidstodolsky

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