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Thousands of people died in Rotterdam during the Second World War in more than 300 German and Allied bombardments. Civil defence measures had been taken before the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940 and these efforts were intensified during the country’s occupation as Allied bombers attacked Rotterdam’s port, factories, dry docks and oil terminals. Residential neighbourhoods were also hit through imprecise targeting and by misfired flak grenades. Inadequate air raid shelters and people’s reluctance to enter them caused many casualties. The condition of the corpses and their post-mortem treatment was thus co-constituted by the relationship between the victims and their material circumstances. This article concludes that an understanding of the treatment of the dead after war, genocide and mass violence must pay systematic attention to the materiality of death because the condition, collection and handling of human remains is affected by the material means that impacted on the victims.
The article will present the findings of ethnographic research into the Colombian and Mexican forensic systems, introducing the first citizen-led exhumation project made possible through the cooperation of scholars, forensic specialists and interested citizens in Mexico. The coupling evolution and mutual re-constitution of forensic science will be explored, including new forms of citizenship and nation building projects – all approached as lived experience – in two of Latin America‘s most complex contexts: organised crime and mass death.
, international peace missions and others who manage dead bodies in ways that overlap or conflict with legally institutionalised state practices. Thus, in general terms, the aim of this volume is to explore how the management of dead bodies is related to the constitution, territorialisation and membership of political and moral communities that enframe lives in various parts of the world. Unlike a previous wave of interest in the history of death 2 which during the 1980s focused on societal attitudes towards death and the effects of death in terms of interpersonal relations
The Afterword positions the book within the contemporary context of the metropolitan city of Santiago, addressing the recent socio-political uprising that hit the country as a whole in October 2019, and the ongoing process of re-writing of the political Constitution that resulted from it. Bringing to the fore a sharp critique of colonial symbols, national identity and neoliberal Chile, the Afterword questions the search for ‘Europeanness’ – in architecture, spatial organisation and urban landmarks – and the related ideology of whiteness embedded in the capital, a city always imagined ‘without indios’. Making a claim instead for a racially mixed and impure city, it highlights the overlapping and exchanges between the MapsUrbe project and the recent ethics and aesthetics of protest enacted during the October 2019 uprisings.
narrative has emerged in which the ‘valorisation’ of the resistance takes a central place and is anchored in the constitution. Among the living, this has meant the payment of pensions and compensation to veterans, public recognition, medals, public holidays and ceremonies. For the dead heroes of the Falintil, national monuments have been erected and a central heroes’ cemetery built. The official narratives stress heroism, sacrifice and above all unity, a term that resonates strongly in a society where various fault lines came violently to the fore in 2006 in a crisis that
of Human Rights,19 but as yet undefined and, moreover, absent from Argentinian law. The national context of this period is even more interesting and richer than in 1994, when a profound reform of the Argentinian constitution was made in a spirit of post-dictatorship ‘democratic consolidation’.20 The latter enabled the principal international instruments for the HRMV.indb 47 01/09/2014 17:28:35 48 Sévane Garibian protection of human rights to be integrated into the Argentinian juridical order, giving them, in addition, a constitutional value in the normative
children at school. Chalk, as the materiality of our performance, has a transitory condition of its own. We scratched the street with it, but its erasure was to be expected. It was the only possible outcome: it would only endure until rain washed it away or until, with a simple cloth, someone was ready to remove the name from the ground. Thus, the ephemeral condition of our exercise, given the impossibility of sedimenting a place of memory in the zones of privilege, found its material constitution
’ (2003: 247). The reason is the shift from the power of death (or of ‘sovereignty’) to the ‘power of life’. The shift coincided with the emergence of clinical medicine and bio-medicine, which permitted the constitution of life and death as biological processes (Rose 1999). Thus, in Foucault’s words (2003: 247–8), bio-power, the power of life, emerged ‘beneath’ the power to take life: Now that power is decreasingly the power of the right to take life, and increasingly the right to intervene to make live … death becomes, insofar as it is the end of life, the term, the
Islam, which would prevent being identified as a target by potential assassins. Without denying the possibility of the blood feuds’ impact on historical migration dynamics, its narrative deployment illustrates an interesting interrelation and mutual constitution of the border and local social formations and systems of value. The border here functions, one could argue, as a way both to comply with and reproduce the local socio-legal organisation and to outwit it by ‘camouflaging’ patrilineal identity. Furthermore, the mutual relation of local social organisation and
multiculturalism; representing through the seed an ‘indigenous re-birth’ as a homage from the Chilean state to its indigenous roots, the same state does not recognise indigenous people in the Constitution, and denies collective rights and processes of self-determination and territorial autonomy to indigenous communities. 14 At the same time, the monument was and is still used as a meeting point for the indigenous movement, a site for protest and manifestation, turning into a reference point for political practices within