This article considers how the reburial and commemoration of the human remains of the Republican defeated during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) is affected by the social, scientific and political context in which the exhumations occur. Focusing on a particular case in the southwestern region of Extremadura, it considers how civil society groups administer reburial acts when a positive identification through DNA typing cannot be attained. In so doing, the article examines how disparate desires and memories come together in collective reburial of partially individuated human remains.
90 4 Exhumations in post-war rabbinical responsas David Deutsch The purpose of this chapter is to offer an insight into post-war Jewish responsa (decisions and rulings made by scholars of Jewish religious law) addressing the issue of exhumation and reburial of human remains stemming from the Holocaust, following research into thirty responsas submitted by ordained and practising Orthodox rabbis.1 The first part of the chapter will provide a brief and general presentation of the jargon found in responsa literature, methodology and reasoning, as well as the
example 176 Nicky Rousseau of what Katherine Verdery calls the ‘political lives of dead bodies’.5 Rather than pursuing either path, this chapter follows the practice of exhumation as it developed and then left the TRC’s door. Such an approach, together with a focus on instrumentalities, interventions, and transformations, works on the borders, rather than situating itself along the dominant and rather well-worn tracks of transitional justice literature. The chapter also looks at the practice of reburial, with a specific interest in how it came to be figured, and how
argues that the meticulous attention to the remembrance activities surrounding the reburial and memorialisation of the Alsatians and the intensity of the vandalism investigation demonstrates that French and Badenese officials were convinced that the local responses contained a symbolic resonance beyond giving eleven more victims of Nazi terror a proper burial. In effect, contemporary Badenese authorities and their French counterparts came 141 Corpses of atonement 141 to view the dead bodies as representative of the larger crimes of the Nazi regime, particularly
properly burying the ‘other’. 74 The sacralisation of the site, which strategically blocks any further polemical intervention, goes hand in hand with a hegemonic rearticulation of its Polish-Jewish past facilitated by the very logic of reburial: human remains are once more animated and radically redefined so that the legacy of their previous material and political posthumous lives can finally be put to rest, without being explicitly problematised. Could this perhaps be one of the reasons for the strong reaction provoked by the sudden emergence of the tooth at the Berlin
2 Final chapter: portraying the exhumation and reburial of Polish Jewish Holocaust victims in the pages of yizkor books Gabriel N. Finder The Jewish population of pre-war Poland numbered about 3.5 million. But only a remnant of this largest Jewish population in Europe survived the Holocaust. The total number of Polish Jewish survivors probably never exceeded 350,000 to 400,000. This rate of mortality – in Poland, around 90 per cent – was higher only in the Baltic states. The majority of Poland’s Jewish population died on Polish soil. The Germans and their
Australian institutions, including museums and universities to amend their own policies.24 19 The unburied victims of the Mau Mau Rebellion 19 Scandinavian countries with Sámi or Greenlander Inuit populations have also begun to address similar issues. In Sweden, the Sámi Parliament made an official demand in 2007 for the compilation of a national inventory of all Sámi human remains held by government- funded institutions and their repatriation for reburial –a call that was eventually taken up by a total of eight national, county and university museums.25 Conflicts
the living through their presence as spirits. Governing the dead thus also needs to be seen in the context of the local understandings of statehood. Verdery (1999) points to the Claiming the dead, defining the nation 99 symbolic power of memorials and reburials, to show how these can be used to legitimise or delegitimise certain narratives, political structures and processes, and how the ‘aura of sanctity’ of the dead can be used to sacralise the otherwise mundane (or even ‘dirty’) world of politics. Similar processes are undoubtedly at play in Timor-Leste as
… during the Tsarist era’. The official report on the cause of death, which should have been released at the end of the inquest, has yet to be made public. In June 2010, meanwhile, a mass grave containing 500 skeletons (3.5 tonnes of bones in total) was discovered by workers building a road on the outskirts of V ladivostok.30 However, human remains can also reappear as a result of intentional excavations carried out to this end by various actors motivated by a dual desire both to bring the long-hidden dead to light and to give victims a proper reburial. Those who are
to their forensic examination. How should this new approach be understood? What does it tell us about the links between politics and forensic practices, and is it possible in this respect to talk of ‘embedded’ forensic anthropology? In order to answer these questions, we will begin by considering the role of Rwandan actors in the exhumation and (re)burial of bodies of victims of the genocide. We will then re-examine the history of the forensic investigations which took place in Rwanda under the auspices of the ICTR. Lastly, we will consider the question of the