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The appearance of corpses in rubbish tips is not a recent phenomenon. In Argentina, tips have served not only as sites for the disposal of bodies but also as murder scenes. Many of these other bodies found in such places belong to individuals who have suffered violent deaths, which go on to become public issues, or else are ‘politicised deaths’. Focusing on two cases that have received differing degrees of social, political and media attention – Diego Duarte, a 15-year-old boy from a poor background who went waste-picking on an open dump and never came back, and Ángeles Rawson, a girl of 16 murdered in the middle-class neighbourhood of Colegiales, whose body was found in the same tip – this article deals with the social meanings of bodies that appear in landfills. In each case, there followed a series of events that placed a certain construction on the death – and, more importantly, the life – of the victim. Corpses, once recognised, become people, and through this process they are given new life. It is my contention that bodies in rubbish tips express – and configure – not only the limits of the social but also, in some cases, the limits of the human itself.
the gender display within. Indeed, subtle questions like attitudes to gender in the past cannot be understood unless the social context is first explored. In the introductory sections of this volume we discussed the materiality of shoes. This discussion revealed different attitudes towards shoes or dress mediated by class, status, gender, life course and individual or group expression. Indeed, social science understands that our contemporary attitude towards gender, for example, is mediated by generation, personal experience, education, class and regional or
expectations and expressions of gender identity (Reay, 1998 ). Modern Australian, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, English or American societies all have subtly, and not so subtly, different approaches to the body, family, marriage, childbirth, social class, gender and age or education, based on wider cultural contexts like history, religion or law. Most importantly there is not in fact a single approach to these ideas in any of the places described. Indeed, your own attitude to family, for example, might depend on your past, your background and, importantly, the regional or class
1989, students had few texts to consult and, of those, many were repetitive, focussing on a few key names, generally ‘great men’ of archaeology credited with being the ‘father’ of whatever archaeology they espoused. The studies had little to offer more rigorous and theoretical archaeologists, particularly those interested in gender, race or class and how those with more marginal status access archaeology. In this climate, A History of Archaeological Thought quickly became a seminal work, the go-to textbook for students, lecturers and researchers. While it is
: 20) at the other. One thing is certain, Furtwängler’s influence has been considerable and is still strong, as we continue to build – at times rather uncritically – on his contribution to the discipline. Born to middle-class parents in Catholic Freiburg, Adolf Furtwängler spent four years studying Classical philology and philosophy at Freiburg and Leipzig before turning to archaeology in Munich under the charismatic Heinrich Brunn (e.g. Curtius, (1935) 1958; Schuchhardt, 1956; Straub, 2007: 21–77; Wünsche, 2007; Hansson, 2014). Graduating at the age of 21 with a
needed about the fraying of relationships within the archaeological community during this period, but it is in such a context that the flow of knowledge transfer is determined alongside the disciplinary continuum. If such problems are examined with a view to identifying Mannheim’s generations in the sociology of science, it is useful to note that the term ‘generation’ does not refer to a specific social group. Mannheim compares the term ‘generation’ to ‘class’; he states that the force binding the members of a generation is the same as that binding a class – shared
.d. [response to Evans]).7 Many of the respondents, like Evans, were of the ‘educated’ classes in their local community. Doctors, teachers, and attorneys are on the list, as are pharmacists, postmasters, bankers, pastors, judges, civil ROBERTS 9781526134554 PRINT.indd 41 03/12/2019 08:56 42 Communities and knowledge production in archaeology engineers, and one jeweler – Charles Artes, of Evansville, Indiana, whose extensive collection of antiquities was widely commented upon in the era (e.g. W.M. Locke to Baird, January 8, 1879.8 See Wilcox and Hinsley, 2003.) One of
(Sayer, 1992 : 105). This will depend on a chronological context; for example, the early Anglo-Saxons did not have universities and so did not have professors. This equally applies to a multitude of other different types and shapes of institutions which structure society: land ownership, law, fostering, religion, nuclear families, prisons, servitude, class structures, gender attitude or kingship, which may exist in different forms or not at all, depending on the society in question. However, it is the associations between people which are crucial; the relation between
upper-class scholars, clerics, landed gentry, independent gentlemen, doctors and surgeons (Pearce 2007 ). Many of them had an explicit medical interest in the human body. Others were more fascinated by antiquities – collections gleaned from travel abroad or perambulations around their own county, district or country (Trigger 2006 ). Early ‘cabinets of curiosity’ had morphed into more formal collections, to which these individuals were eager to add new novelties (Bennett 1995 ; Pearce 1999 ). Across northern Europe, in their scientific, medical, ethnographic or
incomprehensible, and with a British class society that met its downfall with the First World War. The people of the past are supposed not to have been like us; they were different. They thought differently, and they lived and died differently. The past becomes an enchanted time zone, distinct from the present where the people of the past become “the others”. The rise of modernity is supposed to be what has created a radical, alienating, and disenchanting break with the past. Then we can try to travel to the country of the past to attain knowledge about other forms of life