Waging War on the Dead: The Necropolitics of Sufi Shrine Destruction in Mali

The destruction of Sufi heritage in Timbuktu used and abused heritage to assert sovereignty, terrorize the living, and repudiate materiality. Archeologists have not analyzed how necropolitics relates to the desecration of the dead and the torture of the living in Mali, where “bodies” are becoming prime stages for radical performances of sovereignty, ideology, and materiality. To understand how Sufi shrines are becoming prime ideological battlegrounds, we must consider the affective presence and emotive materiality of the dead “bodies” and “spirits” of the saints being “slayed,” and acknowledge the relationship between the disturbance of the dead and postcolonial violence on the living.     

Human osteoarchaeology in the UK 2001–2007: a bibliometric perspective

Bibliometric analysis of osteoarchaeology publications covering the period 2001–2007 in leading journals was carried out. The aims were two‐fold: firstly, to characterise research in this field in the UK and make comparisons with selected other countries, and secondly, to shed light on the use of skeletal collections. It was found that, since a previous survey of this type,covering the period 1991–1995, isotopic and DNA studies have increased. In the UK, work on biodistance studies is minor compared with other countries, and the proportion of palaeopathology work is high. In palaeopathology, substantial effort continues to be devoted to case studies, particularly in the UK where the frequency of problem‐orientated work directed at understanding earlier populations has not increased since the early 1990s. Although it is argued that the case study still has a place in osteoarchaeology, the balance of work needs to shift further in favour of population studies, particularly in the UK. Skeletal collections are vital for primary osteoarchaeological work, and there was little evidence for any great use of skeletal databases such as the Standard Osteological Database. Skeletal collections from the UK were the most used for the research papers analysed, demonstrating the importance of UK‐held collections for research that leads to high profile publication in the international scientific literature. These observations are pertinent since legal, ethical and practical issues in the treatment of human remains, particularly those connected with retention of skeletal collections, are now coming under closer scrutiny in the UK. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Letting skeletons out of the closet: the ethics of displaying ancient Mexican human remains

In the wake of Native North American activism and moves to decolonize archaeology, some academics have begun to avoid displaying human remains. Though recent World Archaeological Congress accords detail a consent process for ethical display, some journals, museums, and individual scholars have blanket policies covering even those remains whose descendants favour display. This article examines one context affected by these policies: the central Mexican town of Xaltocan. Here, Indigenous residents advocate for archaeological study and exhibition of ancient human remains, yet they have been criticised and censored by North American audiences. We consider two factors behind their desire to display the dead as part of efforts to reclaim Indigenous identities: long-standing Mesoamerican relationships with the dead and the materiality and symbolic capital of bones. We argue that an academic reluctance to display any human remains is problematic – even if it is a well-intentioned acknowledgement of respect for their sensitive nature – because it imposes the wishes of one Indigenous group on another, and may thereby lead to the unwitting perpetuation of colonial practice. We suggest that decolonizing archaeology may sometimes necessitate allowing the exhibition of skeletal remains; ethnographic research in individual communities is needed to ensure respect for descendant perspectives.     

Thinking race through corporeal feminist theory: divisions and intimacies at the Minneapolis Farmers' Market

Race is, in part, made and remade through the practices of growing, selling, purchasing and eating food. Consequently, some food practices are also ‘racial practices’. Drawing on a study in progress of the Minneapolis Farmers' Market, the paper covers two sub-themes of embodiment: racial division and intimacy. The corporeal feminist theory of Elizabeth Grosz offers the view that the body has explanatory power. This framework enables a discussion of the materiality of race rather than its representation or performance. Race emerges through the movement, clustering and encounter of phenotypically differentiated bodies. Through small segregations in which bodies move toward some vegetables and not others and through attractions that propel bodies to touch bitter melon and talk with growers, bodies shape the Market's meaning. This reflection on tendencies connecting phenotype, space and leaves is meant as a step toward a politics of bodily practice.     

BodiesTouchingBodies: Jenny Saville's over-life-sized paintings and the ‘morpho-logics’ of fat,female bodies

Recent work in geography on materiality and embodiment has drawn attention to the ways that the varied materials of bodies, their capacities to leak and flow, to grow and shrink and endure and disappear, are central to an understanding of the spatialities of bodily experience. This article seeks to contribute to this work by considering how bodies touch themselves, or what I have termed ‘intra-body touching’, through an interrogation of two over-life-sized paintings (Branded and Propped) by the artist Jenny Saville. Her paintings present the topographies of a female fleshy body through detailed observations of bodily surfaces and orifices which include breasts hanging, hands grabbing and fat rolling and pressing upon itself. In drawing upon Luce Irigaray's critical engagement with Merleau-Ponty's account of hands touching, the article seeks to utilise her notion of the mucous for highlighting the ‘morpho-logics’ of sexed and sized bodies as they are produced through the example of intra-body touching. A focus upon the embodied spatialities of intra-body touching challenges accounts of the female body that centre upon women being located in a position of estrangement and distance from its varied materialities. Instead it will suggest that Saville's bodies are centred upon distinctly geographical relations of proximity and intimacy in ways which surprise and challenge our understandings of what a fleshy body can do.     

Historical Osteoarchaeology in Iceland

Historical osteoarchaeology has not been at the forefront of archaeological research in Iceland. Large-scale excavations of historical cemeteries did not start until the mid-twentieth century, and all excavations of historical cemeteries until the early twenty-first century were development led. This fact means that many of the projects carried out did not have an osteoarchaeological focus, nor asked specific osteological questions of the material, as well as the fact that the state of the publication of these sites is very varied. This paper presents a summary of the larger excavations of historical cemeteries in Iceland alongside discussions of the various approaches to the presentation of the analysis of the skeletal remains of those sites that have been published from Jón Steffensen??s focus on identifying the individuals at seventeenth-to-eighteenth-century Skálholt and Hólar; to the evidence presented for the hospital in sixteenth-century Skrieuklaustur and the influence of increased urbanization in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Reykjavík on the palaeopathology of those buried there.     

A Declaration of the Responsibilities of Present Generations Toward Past Generations

Historians study the living and the dead. If we can identify the rights of the living and their responsibilities to the dead, we may be able to formulate a solid ethical infrastructure for historians. A short and generally accepted answer to the question of what the rights of the living are can be found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The central idea of human rights is that the living possess dignity and therefore deserve respect. In addition, the living believe that the dead also have dignity and thus deserve respect too. When human beings die, I argue, some human traces survive and mark the dead with symbolic value. The dead are less than human beings, but still reminiscent of them, and they are more than bodies or objects. This invites us to speak about the dead in a language of posthumous dignity and respect, and about the living, therefore, as having some definable core responsibilities to the dead. I argue further that these responsibilities are universal. In a Declaration of the Responsibilities of Present Generations toward Past Generations, then, I attempt to cover the whole area. I identify and comment on four body‐ and property‐related responsibilities (body, funeral, burial, and will), three personality‐related responsibilities (identity, image, and speech), one general responsibility (heritage), and two consequential rights (memory and history). I then discuss modalities of non‐compliance, identifying more than forty types of failures to fulfill responsibilities toward past generations. I conclude that the cardinal principle of any code of ethics for historians should be to respect the dignity of the living and the dead whom they study.     

Brain, mind, and body: interactions with art in renaissance Italy

The Renaissance saw the first systematic anatomical and physiological studies of the brain and human body because scientists, for the first time in centuries, were allowed to dissect human bodies for study. Renaissance artists were frequently found at dissections and their attention to detail can be observed in their products. Scientists themselves were increasingly artistic, and they created astonishing anatomical models and illustrations that can still be studied. The cross-fertilization of art and science in the Renaissance resulted in more scientific analyses of neuroanatomy as well as more creative ways in which such analyses could be depicted. Both art and science benefited from the reciprocal ways in which the two influenced each other even as they provided new ways of explaining the mysteries of the human body and mind.     

Bodies that sweat: the affective responses of young women in Wollongong,New South Wales,Australia

I argue that people's bodily sensations of sweat – smell, touch and sight – can provide insights to the relations between subjectivity and space. I draw on feminist ideas of the body as a physiological, psychological and sociological assemblage out of which spatially situated knowledge, ethics, subjectivities and social relations are forged. Empirical evidence is drawn from self-reflexive accounts of 21 young women living in Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. Their narratives convey how sweat and sweatiness are integral to negotiating everyday life. First, participants' narratives illustrate the way the sweaty body-as-seen is bound up with gendered identities and self-disgust. Second, visceral experiences of the materialities of sweat and sweatiness often give rise to a heightened sense of bodily awareness, self and spatial marginalisation in the course of everyday lives. Third, participants' narratives highlight the tensions of spatial experience of sweat and sweatiness that simultaneously attract and repel bodies. Visceral experiences of sweat and sweatiness are central to better understanding of the spatiality of subjectivity.     

We are never alone: a conversation on bio art with Eduardo Kac

Brazilian-born artist Eduardo Kac’s (Rio de Janeiro, 1962) work has raised eyebrows especially for his ‘transgenic art’ projects, among others: Genesis, 1999; GFP Bunny, 2000; The Eight Day, 2001; Natural History of the Enigma, 2003/08. In all of these, Kac and his scientific collaborators realize genetic interventions into living organisms at the same time as they trigger audience reactions to these from playful kinds of interaction that is integrated into the works’ open and dynamic creative process. Yet whereas the ethical and political challenges Kac’s work poses have sparked lively debates within and beyond the realm of the arts – can and must art engage with the ‘creative’ potentials of biotechnology and genetics? Do these not in fact (as Vilém Flusser and others have suggested) hold the key to realizing the vanguardist dream of merging art and life? Or should the artist, from the vantage point of his own creative practice, not rather warn us against the ethical and political risks involved in genetic engineering? – much less attention has been paid to the way Kac’s art also continues and transforms a particular legacy of post-concretist, ambient and performance art in Latin America.

Kac himself has referred to Brazilian artists Flávio de Carvalho, Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark as informing his interest in open, participative forms, which characterize both his transgenic and his earlier ‘tele-presence’ art projects. Other Latin American artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century have been producing intriguing engagements with living materials, multispecies habitats and organic remains, including such diverse names as Luis Fernando Benedit, Nicola Constantino, Nuno Ramos, or Teresa Margolles. In a conversation with Jens Andermann and Gabriel Giorgi at the University of Zurich’s Center of Latin American Studies on March 12, 2015, Kac addressed the way in which his work might be seen as continuing or challenging long-standing representations of the New World as a repository of ‘nature’, from colonial chronicles of discovery to contemporary discourses of biodiversity and conservation. To what extent is bio art – and the questions it raises about the Anthropocene as a threshold of radical biopolitical convergence between ‘history’ and ‘nature’ – necessarily ‘transcultural’ and planetary in its extension?     

Managing performance in publicly funded museums in England: effects,resistances and revisions

Based on accounts gathered from nine museums and four professional/policy-making bodies, as well as policy analysis, this article maps out and assesses the effects of and ways of experiencing the new managerialist mode of governance within the publicly funded museums in England, focusing specifically on performance management in museums. It will be argued that the performance management regime has impacted local authority museums and national museums in distinct ways, creating different professional/organisational cultures as a result. These impacts pertain specifically to the professional and organisational autonomy of museums, with significant differences between small local authority museums and large national museums. This has serious implications for the way different types of museum relate to new managerialism and their mode of functioning. Some of the negative and unintended impacts of the performance management regime have induced a reappraisal – initially championed by the art world – and a move towards lightening up the new managerialist overload and pressure by introducing some elements of a peer-review model and accommodating in some form the qualitative singularity of museum experience. I will conclude by reflecting on the underpinning assumptions of new managerialism in museums against the backdrop of the project of museum professionalism and the singularity of its creative work.     

The impossible object: Relics,property, and the secular in post‐Soviet Russia (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The article analyzes a recent court case concerning the relics of two 14th‐century Russian Orthodox saints, during which the Russian state ruled to confiscate the relics from the Russian Orthodox Autonomous Church. I examine the church's attempts to fight back, paying particular attention to how the conflicting parties have differently framed the disputed objects' materiality. In doing so, I link the ongoing debates over whether dead bodies can be considered property and who owns the bodies of saints, to the current battles in Russia over the boundaries between the sacred and the secular. The relics affair, I suggest, ultimately points to the issue of how politics itself is constituted through the battles to define these boundaries, who claims the power to draw these lines, and why issues dealing with dead bodies possess a certain affective charge that causes political action. I argue that the case of the Suzdal relics makes visible certain aporias in both secular law and religious discourse, which ultimately make this case impossible for the state to resolve in its favour through conventional judicial means without overruling the law. In this process, the object of dispute itself disappears from the discursive space, becoming buried in a sort of ‘black box’, the interior contents of which are ultimately unnameable and uncategorizable.     

The Curse of Civilised Woman: Race,Gender and the Pain of Childbirth in Nineteenth‐Century American Medicine

Accounts of the easy, painless childbearing of ‘primitive’ non‐white women in comparison to their ‘civilised’ white counterparts were ubiquitous in early modern travel literature. In the nineteenth‐century United States, such narratives were increasingly taken up in medical and scientific literature, catalysing the production of new forms of knowledge about race and bodies. This article analyses several key medico‐scientific theories produced to explain racialised parturient pain and argues that this knowledge dynamically interrelated with both racial ideas and racial practice in nineteenth‐century society. The shifting character of this knowledge implicated changing ways of defining race, including the anchoring of racial identity in the physical body; the role of the physician as an arbiter of racial truth; and the imbrication of gender in racial classifications. Moreover, knowledge produced to explain racialised parturient pain – for instance, about race‐specific sensory physiology, muscular mechanics and skeletal anatomy – circulated within numerous social institutions, among them slavery; gynaecologic and obstetric care; medical experimentation; anti‐abortion crusades invoking the spectre of ‘race suicide’; and eugenic projects. In this way, medical discourse on the gendered body of the parturient was enrolled in the changing articulation of race across the nineteenth century.     

Dead or alive? The holy man as healer in East and West in the late sixth century

A rigid distinction cannot be drawn between the living holy man as healer in Eastern Christendom and the dead man healing from his tomb in the West, since examples of both kinds of healing are found throughout the Mediterranean area. As examples of dead holy men working miracles from their tombs, a comparison is made between Martin, as described in the writings of Gregory of Tours, and Demetrius of Thessalonica. Nevertheless the dead holy man as cult-figure is more common in the West than in the East, because of certain differences between the pre-Christian religious in East and West. Roman law attached great importance of the sacrosanctity of a corpse, whereas in the East there was not always the same distaste for the dismemberment of bodies, though there are many exceptions to this general principle. The cult of the living holy man in the East may be a Christianization of the Greek notion of the hero. At any rate the cultural and spiritual unity of the Mediterranean area was such that the idea of the living holy man as healer could penetrate to Western Christendom.     

Dead or alive? The holy man as healer in East and West in the late sixth century

A rigid distinction cannot be drawn between the living holy man as healer in Eastern Christendom and the dead man healing from his tomb in the West, since examples of both kinds of healing are found throughout the Mediterranean area. As examples of dead holy men working miracles from their tombs, a comparison is made between Martin, as described in the writings of Gregory of Tours, and Demetrius of Thessalonica. Nevertheless the dead holy man as cult-figure is more common in the West than in the East, because of certain differences between the pre-Christian religious in East and West. Roman law attached great importance of the sacrosanctity of a corpse, whereas in the East there was not always the same distaste for the dismemberment of bodies, though there are many exceptions to this general principle. The cult of the living holy man in the East may be a Christianization of the Greek notion of the hero. At any rate the cultural and spiritual unity of the Mediterranean area was such that the idea of the living holy man as healer could penetrate to Western Christendom.     

Ecosystemic politics: Analyzing the consequences of speaking for adjacent nature on the global stage

This article introduces a conceptual framework for analysing and comparing the broader or unintended effects of cooperation anchored in border-crossing ecosystems. The importance of addressing this lacuna in our scholarship on such sub-global cooperation is underscored by research in political geography that has demonstrated how the creation of scale is an important expression of power relations and how interaction with the materiality of different kinds of spaces necessitates distinct political technologies (and thus may have distinct effects). The article introduces three key analytical angles central to policy field studies in international sociology and demonstrates their utility through a case of the Arctic/Arctic Council. These analytical angles – networks (what are the relationships shaping the field?), hierarchies (who leads and how does leadership work?), and norms for political behavior – capture key consequences and dynamics of ecosystemic politics in a concise fashion that lends itself to cross-case comparison. The Arctic case focuses on the changing network positions and roles of non-Arctic actors over time, as an initial exploration of the broader ordering effects of such forms of cooperation. The findings suggest that most non-Arctic actors have experienced a decline in their centrality in Arctic cooperation, even as the Arctic has received intensified global interest and the number of participants in Arctic Council work has increased. Further comparative work along these lines would leave us better equipped to assess whether states speaking for their own immediate environs is better – and if so, in which ways – than seeking common solutions to global challenges.     

From Oblivion to Post-History: Sublime Othering in Rider Haggard and W. E. B. Du Bois

This article addresses the ways in which art and philosophy have been discursively used to conceptualize critical political changes and frame narratives of liberation by including and excluding primitive consciousness simultaneously. More concretely, it analyzes the contribution of art and philosophy to the understanding of history and post-history through different representations of black bodies, black desires, and black agencies in the novels She (1886) by Rider Haggard and The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) by W. E. B. Du Bois. At stake is the question of the archeology of the past as a living memory in the post-historical time. This past is politically relevant especially if its cognitive fossils negate the idea of exhausted primitive consciousness in the modern world and give meanings to incongruous bedfellows such as civilization and slavery, neoliberalism and poverty, democracy and Nazism, globalization, terrorism and racism, liberalism and homophobia. Arguably, the triumph of scientific ideas has left us with a perpetual quest for liberation rather than the actualization of liberation as a world phenomenon. I hypothesize the relation between exhaustible elements of technical consciousness simulating progress and their inexhaustible materiality at critical historical junctures as a struggle for taste and self-determination. Critical in this relation is the sense that not only primitive stages of consciousness are never fully exhausted at historical junctures, but that one never comes close to thinking about genuine liberation without engaging with real world matters both domestic/intimate and foreign.     

Medieval Britain and Ireland in 1982

ARCHAEOLOGY and art history are closely allied disciplines, particularly for the study of the medieval period. This paper seeks to compare and contrast archaeological with art historical approaches to medieval material culture in terms appropriate to an archaeological audience, much as Stanis?aw Tabaczyński examined the relationships between archaeology and history in the pages of this journal only a few years ago.¹ Rather than emphasize the distinctions between archaeology and art history, an attempt is made to focus on where these two disciplines intersect and how art history at the cusp of the new millennium differs from what archaeologists on both sides of the Atlantic often assume. This seeks to bring recent changes in art historical methods and theory to the attention of medieval archaeologists, suggesting that interdisciplinary cooperation between archaeology and the humanistic disciplines, including art history, should be strengthened.     

Managing gendered expectations upon resettlement: the experiences of Iraqi Kurdish Muslim women in the UK

This article discusses research surrounding the migration experiences of Iraqi Kurdish Muslim women migrants who have settled in the UK. Looking at some of the important and influential works by post-colonial feminist writers, what is revealed are arguments that provide some false senses of separation between different women. These writers' concepts provide for a stagnation of extreme oppositionally based models of power that fail to recognise the existence of current and future transgressive, positive and empowering relationships of power which exist between women; and that happen in ways that remake the process, whereby transnational feminisms reach out, speak to, touch and reject each other – often all at the same time – and yet, in fresh and reconstituted forms. Considering both oppressive and transgressive relationships of power revealed complex combinations of often contradictory and simultaneously negative and empowering experiences. The Kurdish women practise strategies of Othering, of distance and of proximity corresponding to a variety of different concepts held within several different forms of feminism; they demonstrate an eclectic approach to their self-determination and to the development of rethinking forms of transnational feminism.     

Bodies as urban infrastructure: Gender,intimate infrastructures and slow infrastructural violence

Drawing from deep longitudinal and ethnographic work, this article interrogates a set of key relationships between bodies, gender and infrastructure in the context of understanding cities such as Bharatpur and Dhangadhi in Nepal as well as Delhi, India. This article seeks to make two contributions. First, utilizing feminist political geography approaches, we examine bodies as infrastructure, referring to how the social and material work of the body helps to build, develop and maintain cities through gendered infrastructures in the everyday. We show conceptualizing bodies as infrastructure reveals important and intimate dimensions of the everyday politics and social and material forms that enable critical resources to flow and integral networks be built in cities. Second, we demonstrate from our comparative case studies the ways that gendered “slow infrastructural violence” accrues through patterns of infrastructural invisibility. Particular bodies act as urban infrastructure in everyday and unremarkable ways, shaping the uneven social and political consequences of embodied infrastructural configurations. We specifically examine slow violence and informal financial infrastructure in Bharatpur and the provisioning of health in Dhangadhi followed by the exploration of slow violence and fragmented water in Delhi. This article thus raises a simultaneous call for theoretical engagement with the socio-materiality of infrastructure and the body, an increased regard for the multiplicity of urban infrastructures, and an interrogation of gender and infrastructural politics in cities where more people will be living in the future and where politics and infrastructure are being actively created.