Thinking Sites of Trauma & Commemoration
Organizer: Zahira Araguete, (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Invited Speaker:
Organizer: Zahira Araguete, (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Invited Speaker:
Joost Fontein (University of Edinburgh)
Panelist:
Panelist:
Laura Major (PhD Candidate the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Edinburg)
Safet HadžiMuhamedović (PhD Candidate Anthropology at Goldsmiths University of London
Research Assistant, Bosnian Bones Spanish Ghosts)
Zahira Araguete-Toribio (PhD Candidate Visual Anthropology at Goldsmiths University of London and Research Assistant, Bosnian Bones Spanish Ghosts)
Panel description:
Mass graves, unmarked sites where bodies lie after war violence and reburial sites are at the core of important social and familiar practices of remembering and forgetting. Intimate and public forms of mourning and commemoration or collective silence, imbue these spaces where violence occurred, with different uses and works of the imagination. Jay Winter has argued these sites are part of the “cartography of recollection and remembrance” where memory is enacted through speech but also silence. From places of burial and reburial of bodily remains (e.g. Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial Centre (Wagner 2008) or the street unmarked burials of Vietnam (Kwon 2008)), to the ruins found in the places of war (e.g. the battlefields of the Western Front (Filippucci 2009), recent works have attempted to show these spaces are marked in the present by distinct forms of social, cultural and political engagement. They are sites of ritual and interaction but also abandonment, where statist, community and family subjectivities manifest, collide and confer. In this panel we seek to explore novel ways of understanding war and death sites in connection to the performance of collective and private forms of remembrance. In this context, how are these sites of trauma and their materiality used in post-conflict endeavors of historical imagination? In which way do public practices of destruction and reconstruction transform the remains of conflict shaping the way the past is imagined or silenced? How can these “ruins” of conflict be thought of as sites where violence is re-enacted by the families and communities?
Abstracts
The politics of the dead and the power of uncertainty: materiality, rumours and human remains in post-2000 Zimbabwe
Joost Fontein, j.fontein@ed.ac.uk
In 1898, just before she was hanged for rebelling against colonial rule, Charwe Nyakasikana, spirit medium of the legendary ancestor Ambuya Nehanda, famously prophesised that ‘my bones will rise again’. A century later bones, bodies and human remains have come to occupy an increasingly complex place in Zimbabwe’s postcolonial milieu. From ancestral ‘bones’ rising again in the struggle for independence, and later land, to resurfacing bones of unsettled war dead; and from the troubling decaying remains of post-independence gukurahundi massacres to the leaky, tortured bodies of recent election violence, human materials are intertwined in postcolonial politics in ways that go far beyond, yet necessarily implicate, contests over memory, commemoration and the representation of the past. My purpose here is to examine the complex political efficacies of human remains in Zimbabwe’s ‘politics of the dead’. Existing scholarship has become increasingly sophisticated in its analysis of the politics of nationalist historiography, of contested memory, commemoration and heritage, and of the changing significance of ‘traditional’ practices relating to ancestors, chiefs and spirit mediums across the region and beyond. These all turn on contested and contingent processes of (re)constituting the past and the dead. But the political imbrications of human remains as material substances, as well as that of returning spirits, in these highly contested processes is only beginning to be understood, despite a growing recognition of the transforming significance of human corporeality. Based on fieldwork, research and reflection spanning more than a decade, part of my purpose is to redefine the parameters of this emerging scholarship, by exploring how the ‘politics of the dead’ in Zimbabwe is necessarily inflected and imbricated in the changing and indeterminate materialities of human remains. Linking this indeterminacy of human substances to the productive but precarious uncertainties of rumours and spirits, it points to how the indivisibility of the material and immaterial is not only inherently intertwined with but also constitutive of the stylistics of power and incomplete work of postcolonial politics.
The (un)Lovely Bones: exhuming and reburying human remains in Rwanda
Laura Major, l.major@sms.ed.ac.uk
In Rwanda, mass graves deriving from conflict and war and the bodies held within those graves hold great significance, both for the state in their management of formal genocide memorialization programs, and for individuals bereaved and entangled in the violence themselves. The ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front has recently initiated a national exhumation program; an unearthing of thousands of victims of genocide that lie buried within hastily prepared mass graves. The program relies on the assistance of volunteer genocide survivors and local community members who unearth bodies, disarticulate corpses, wash, and lay out the bare bones for re-interment. The destruction and reconstruction of mass graves takes place alongside this process, a transformation into perceived permanent burial and memorial space. This paper draws upon fifteen months of fieldwork, during which I worked alongside groups of volunteers at two mass grave sites in Rwanda. I followed the transformation of both bodies and burial spaces, participating in the exhumation processes and conducting interviews with participants and state stakeholders. Within the proposed text I narrate this process and offer a conundrum; that in as much as this work is a revealing act, making visible the horrors of a violent death, it also conceals narratives of violence, and of the individual subjected to those violent pasts. Explaining the meanings behind these complicated activities requires a delicate unpacking of the everyday presence of uncertainty within Rwanda post-genocide, alongside which attention must be turned to the material properties of the objects and spaces through which these uncertainties and troubling memories are made visible (accidentally and unintentionally) within the Rwandan landscape.
Chronotopes or Elijah’s Pitfall: Sharing Life and Death in the Bosnian Town of Gacko
Safet HadžiMuhamedović, anp01sh@gold.ac.uk
This paper proposes that the field of anthropological inquiry in the south-eastern Bosnian town of Gacko should be found in the complex interplay of historical, mythical and intimate time and place. To make these processes intelligible and indicate the indivisibilities of temporal and spatial arrangements, I employ the notion of chronotopes (timeplaces) (cf Bakhtin 1984; May and Thrift 2001; Ramo 1999). Two overarching collective memories link and dichotomise Gacko’s Serbs and Muslims. One memory speaks about the cycle of life. The other speaks about the cycle of death. In the first memory, the groups share the same ‘time’ in two different places. In the second memory they share the same ‘place’ but relegate it to two different temporalities. The first point in this collective memory is Ilindan or Aliđun, the Day of Saint Elijah, which stands at the end of the harvest period. It commemorates cyclical time and social cohesion, but also a synchronic and diachronic syncretism in the town, which was ‘ethnically’ cleansed during the 1990s. The second memory is Korićka Jama or Jama Dizdaruša, a natural abyss used as a convenient dumpster for corpses of murdered Gacko residents on at least two occasions during the first half of the twentieth century. Ironically, as the loci of St Elijah’s Day celebrations grew further apart, bodies of Muslims and Serbs entered a new, morbid intimacy in a mass grave.
New Cultures of Bereavement: Mass Graves and The Sociopolitics of Remembrance in Extremadura
Zahira Araguete-Toribio, z.araguete@gold.ac.uk
In the last decade, the location and exhumation of mass graves containing the bodies of the Republican defeated during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) have elicited multiple forms of commemoration in and around these mass burial sites. In the regional context of Extremadura, southwestern Spain, fieldwork conducted in the excavation of mass graves revealed the connections between individual mourning and archaeological interventions, disclosing the salient impact of scientific knowledge on distressing feelings of uncertainty of families and others. Though numerous mass burials have been unearthed, many admit that the grand majority of those missing in the region might never be found, as details about their whereabouts are hazy and scarce. Instead, public acts of remembrance organized by families and civil society groups have proliferated in spaces such as cemeteries and war vestiges. In them, shared expressions of transgenerational trauma coexist with activists’ pressing claims for state historical, judicial and moral recognition of past violent episodes. In the absence of the body, the affective potential of the memory of the Republican defeated has powered the hyper production of memorials and other forms of cultural property in Extremadura. Reviewing different memorialisation projects, in a mass grave and a memorial site, this paper follows the way in which these processes are a focus of entanglement between statist, activist and familial desires. In so doing, it explores the intersection between the politics of heritage in the region and vernacular conceptions of rights whilst analyzing how idioms of trauma and justice interlace in the language of contemporary commemoration.
Safet HadžiMuhamedović (PhD Candidate Anthropology at Goldsmiths University of London
Research Assistant, Bosnian Bones Spanish Ghosts)
Zahira Araguete-Toribio (PhD Candidate Visual Anthropology at Goldsmiths University of London and Research Assistant, Bosnian Bones Spanish Ghosts)
Panel description:
Mass graves, unmarked sites where bodies lie after war violence and reburial sites are at the core of important social and familiar practices of remembering and forgetting. Intimate and public forms of mourning and commemoration or collective silence, imbue these spaces where violence occurred, with different uses and works of the imagination. Jay Winter has argued these sites are part of the “cartography of recollection and remembrance” where memory is enacted through speech but also silence. From places of burial and reburial of bodily remains (e.g. Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial Centre (Wagner 2008) or the street unmarked burials of Vietnam (Kwon 2008)), to the ruins found in the places of war (e.g. the battlefields of the Western Front (Filippucci 2009), recent works have attempted to show these spaces are marked in the present by distinct forms of social, cultural and political engagement. They are sites of ritual and interaction but also abandonment, where statist, community and family subjectivities manifest, collide and confer. In this panel we seek to explore novel ways of understanding war and death sites in connection to the performance of collective and private forms of remembrance. In this context, how are these sites of trauma and their materiality used in post-conflict endeavors of historical imagination? In which way do public practices of destruction and reconstruction transform the remains of conflict shaping the way the past is imagined or silenced? How can these “ruins” of conflict be thought of as sites where violence is re-enacted by the families and communities?
Abstracts
The politics of the dead and the power of uncertainty: materiality, rumours and human remains in post-2000 Zimbabwe
Joost Fontein, j.fontein@ed.ac.uk
In 1898, just before she was hanged for rebelling against colonial rule, Charwe Nyakasikana, spirit medium of the legendary ancestor Ambuya Nehanda, famously prophesised that ‘my bones will rise again’. A century later bones, bodies and human remains have come to occupy an increasingly complex place in Zimbabwe’s postcolonial milieu. From ancestral ‘bones’ rising again in the struggle for independence, and later land, to resurfacing bones of unsettled war dead; and from the troubling decaying remains of post-independence gukurahundi massacres to the leaky, tortured bodies of recent election violence, human materials are intertwined in postcolonial politics in ways that go far beyond, yet necessarily implicate, contests over memory, commemoration and the representation of the past. My purpose here is to examine the complex political efficacies of human remains in Zimbabwe’s ‘politics of the dead’. Existing scholarship has become increasingly sophisticated in its analysis of the politics of nationalist historiography, of contested memory, commemoration and heritage, and of the changing significance of ‘traditional’ practices relating to ancestors, chiefs and spirit mediums across the region and beyond. These all turn on contested and contingent processes of (re)constituting the past and the dead. But the political imbrications of human remains as material substances, as well as that of returning spirits, in these highly contested processes is only beginning to be understood, despite a growing recognition of the transforming significance of human corporeality. Based on fieldwork, research and reflection spanning more than a decade, part of my purpose is to redefine the parameters of this emerging scholarship, by exploring how the ‘politics of the dead’ in Zimbabwe is necessarily inflected and imbricated in the changing and indeterminate materialities of human remains. Linking this indeterminacy of human substances to the productive but precarious uncertainties of rumours and spirits, it points to how the indivisibility of the material and immaterial is not only inherently intertwined with but also constitutive of the stylistics of power and incomplete work of postcolonial politics.
The (un)Lovely Bones: exhuming and reburying human remains in Rwanda
Laura Major, l.major@sms.ed.ac.uk
In Rwanda, mass graves deriving from conflict and war and the bodies held within those graves hold great significance, both for the state in their management of formal genocide memorialization programs, and for individuals bereaved and entangled in the violence themselves. The ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front has recently initiated a national exhumation program; an unearthing of thousands of victims of genocide that lie buried within hastily prepared mass graves. The program relies on the assistance of volunteer genocide survivors and local community members who unearth bodies, disarticulate corpses, wash, and lay out the bare bones for re-interment. The destruction and reconstruction of mass graves takes place alongside this process, a transformation into perceived permanent burial and memorial space. This paper draws upon fifteen months of fieldwork, during which I worked alongside groups of volunteers at two mass grave sites in Rwanda. I followed the transformation of both bodies and burial spaces, participating in the exhumation processes and conducting interviews with participants and state stakeholders. Within the proposed text I narrate this process and offer a conundrum; that in as much as this work is a revealing act, making visible the horrors of a violent death, it also conceals narratives of violence, and of the individual subjected to those violent pasts. Explaining the meanings behind these complicated activities requires a delicate unpacking of the everyday presence of uncertainty within Rwanda post-genocide, alongside which attention must be turned to the material properties of the objects and spaces through which these uncertainties and troubling memories are made visible (accidentally and unintentionally) within the Rwandan landscape.
Chronotopes or Elijah’s Pitfall: Sharing Life and Death in the Bosnian Town of Gacko
Safet HadžiMuhamedović, anp01sh@gold.ac.uk
- Epochs make, epochs break (proverb from Gacko) -
New Cultures of Bereavement: Mass Graves and The Sociopolitics of Remembrance in Extremadura
Zahira Araguete-Toribio, z.araguete@gold.ac.uk
In the last decade, the location and exhumation of mass graves containing the bodies of the Republican defeated during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) have elicited multiple forms of commemoration in and around these mass burial sites. In the regional context of Extremadura, southwestern Spain, fieldwork conducted in the excavation of mass graves revealed the connections between individual mourning and archaeological interventions, disclosing the salient impact of scientific knowledge on distressing feelings of uncertainty of families and others. Though numerous mass burials have been unearthed, many admit that the grand majority of those missing in the region might never be found, as details about their whereabouts are hazy and scarce. Instead, public acts of remembrance organized by families and civil society groups have proliferated in spaces such as cemeteries and war vestiges. In them, shared expressions of transgenerational trauma coexist with activists’ pressing claims for state historical, judicial and moral recognition of past violent episodes. In the absence of the body, the affective potential of the memory of the Republican defeated has powered the hyper production of memorials and other forms of cultural property in Extremadura. Reviewing different memorialisation projects, in a mass grave and a memorial site, this paper follows the way in which these processes are a focus of entanglement between statist, activist and familial desires. In so doing, it explores the intersection between the politics of heritage in the region and vernacular conceptions of rights whilst analyzing how idioms of trauma and justice interlace in the language of contemporary commemoration.