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This chapter employs a neoclassical realist approach to unravel the dynamics of Saudi-heightened tensions with Iran. It argues that Saudi foreign policy is at the intersection of international, regional and domestic conditions. Rising Saudi tensions with Iran are the result of structural conditions, exemplified in the multipolarity of the regional structure and the decline of US hegemonic control of the region. These structural conditions were compounded with the rise of a nascent top-down Saudi nationalism presenting the Kingdom as destined to play a leading role in rolling back Iranian expansion in the Arab world. Firstly, it presents the tenets of neoclassical realism. It then sets out the structural conditions that Saudi elites were facing during the decade following the 2011 uprisings. Thirdly, the chapter examines the rise of Saudi nationalism at the domestic level, which shaped Saudi elites’ responses to the structural conditions leading to tensions and escalation in its rivalry with Iran.
Stereotyping cannot be adequately understood in terms either of escalation or containment. Another aspect worth critical attention is the co-existence within society and within one individual of contradictory stereotypes – what social psychologists call cognitive polyphasia. This chapter explores this aspect of stereotyping by diving into the world of metropolitan sociability and cultural distinction, as recorded in copious diaries by one wealthy individual: Samuel Pepys. Pepys’s diaries recorded all things French, music, language, clothing and people. These were mentioned far more frequently than the Dutch, Scottish and other nationalities. This chapter demonstrates that Frenchness carried greater ambiguity than hitherto appreciated. While French Catholicism was linked with absolutism and arbitrary government (as discussed by both Harris and Morton), Frenchness was also associated in Pepys’s world with prestige, refined taste and distinction. It was possible for individuals like Pepys to embrace contradictory stereotypes, invoking different aspects of them depending on context. This understanding of dispositions towards French things, people and France itself complicates our understanding of ‘public opinion’ in this period, too often cast as a shift from anti-Dutch to anti-French positions. Transnational interactions then – as now – often gave prompted repulsion and ethnocentrism as well as emulation of the 'others'.
There are many factors at work in the iconography of human remains. Some of those frequently discussed are aesthetic criteria, iconographic traditions and specific contingencies, whether political (for example in war paintings), symbolic (essential for transi images) or cultural. There is, however, one factor that is rarely mentioned, despite its centrality: the regime of value associated with corpses. Christ’s body is not painted in the same way as that of a departed relative or that used in a human dissection. Artists choose a suitable iconography depending on how the remains are perceived. This criterion became absolutely crucial in contexts such as nineteenth-century France, when attitudes to corpses underwent major changes.
This edited transcript of conversations between an Apache cultural heritage professional, Vernelda Grant, and researcher Bridget Conley explores the knowledge that should guide the repatriation of human remains in the colonial context of repatriating Apache sacred, cultural and patrimonial items – including human remains – from museum collections in the United States. Grant provides a historical overview of the how Apache elders first grappled with this problem, following the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990) in the US Congress. She explains how and why community leaders made decisions about what items they would prioritise for repatriation. Central to her discussion is an Apache knowledge ecology grounded in recognition that the meaning of discrete items cannot be divorced from the larger religious and cultural context from which they come.
Both historical and contemporary records of mass contagion provide occasions for visibility to persons who otherwise remain little recognised and even less studied: those who bury the dead. While global reports attest to self-advocacy among cemetery workers in the current COVID-19 pandemic, the psychological complexities of their labour go virtually unseen. Findings on the experiences of those doing such work reveal a striking contrast. While societal disavowal often renders their task as abject and forgettable, those who inter the remains frequently report affective connections to the dead that powerfully, and poignantly, undermine this erasure. Acknowledging such empathic relationality allows us to look at this profession in areas where it has never been considered, such as psychoanalytic work on ‘mentalisation’ or in contemporary ethics. The article concludes with an example from the accounts of those who have buried the dead in the massed graves on New York’s Hart Island.
This article focuses on ongoing contestations around burned human remains originating from the Holocaust, their changing meanings and dynamics, and their presence/absence in Holocaust-related debates, museums and memorial sites. It argues that ashes challenge but also expand the notion of what constitutes human remains, rendering them irreducible to merely bones and fleshed bodies, and proposes that incinerated remains need to be seen not as a ‘second rate’ corporeality of the dead but as a different one, equally important to engage with – analytically, ethically and politically. Challenging the perception of ashes as unable to carry traces of the personhood of the of the dead, and as not capable of yielding evidence, I posit that, regardless of their fragile corporality, incinerated human remains should be considered abjectual and evidential, as testifying to the violence from which they originated and to which they were subjected. Moreover, in this article I consider incinerated human remains through the prism of the notion of vulnerability, meant to convey their susceptibility to violence – violence through misuse, destruction, objectification, instrumentalisation and/or museum display. I argue that the consequences of the constantly negotiated status of ashes as a ‘second rate’ corporeality of human remains include their very presence in museum exhibitions – where they, as human remains, do not necessarily belong.
This article describes some of the techniques museums use to represent the suffering body in exhibitions. Some display human remains, but much more common, especially in Western museums, are stand-ins for the body. Manikins take many forms, including the wax museum’s hyperrealistic representations, the history museum’s neutral grey figures and the expressionistic figures that represent enslaved people in many recent exhibits. Symbolic objects or artefacts from the lives of victims can serve as counterweights to telling the story of their deaths. Photographs can show horror and the machinery of death, focus attention on individual lives or recreate communities. The absence of the body can call attention to its suffering. All of these techniques can be useful for museums trying to display and teach traumatic histories, but must be used with care and caution.