Governing the dead Sovereignty and the politics of dead bodies Edited by Finn StEpputat Human Remains and Violence Governing the dead HUMAN REMAINS AND VIOLENCE Human remains and violence aims to question the social legacy of mass violence by studying how different societies have coped with the dead bodies resulting from war, genocide and state-sponsored brutality. However, rather paradoxically, given the large volume of work devoted to the body on the one hand, and to mass violence on the other, the question of the body in the context of mass violence remains a largely unexplored area and even an academic blind spot. Interdisciplinary in nature, Human remains and violence intends to show how various social and cultural treatments of the dead body simultaneously challenge common representations, legal practices and morality. This series aims to provide proper intellectual and theoretical tools for a better understanding of mass violence’s after- maths in today’s societies. Series editors Jean-Marc Dreyfus and Élisabeth Anstett ALSO AVAILABLE IN THIS SERIES Destruction and human remains: disposal and concealment in genocide and mass violence Edited by Élisabeth Anstett and Jean-Marc Dreyfus Governing the dead Sovereignty and the politics of dead bodies Edited by Finn Stepputat Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan Copyright © Finn Stepputat 2014 The right of Finn Stepputat to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 978 07190 96082 hardback First published 2014 T he publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Typeset by Out of House Publishing This electronic version has been made freely available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) licence, which permits non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction provided the author(s) and Manchester University Press are fully cited and no modifications or adaptations are made. Details of the licence can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc-nd/4.0/ Contents List of figures page vii List of tables viii List of contributors ix Series editors’ foreword xiii Acknowledgements xv Intro 1 Introduction 3 Finn Stepputat 2 Governing the dead? Theoretical approaches 11 Finn Stepputat Part I: Containment and negotiation 3 The proper funeral: death, landscape and power among the Duha Tuvinians of northern Mongolia 35 Benedikte Møller Kristensen 4 Dead zone: pollution, contamination and the neglected dead in post-war Saigon 53 Christophe Robert vi Contents 5 Travelling corpses: negotiating sovereign claims in Oaxacan post-mortem repatriation 75 Lars Ove Trans 6 Claiming the dead, defining the nation: contested narratives of the independence struggle in post- conflict Timor-Leste 95 Henri Myrttinen 7 Remaking the dead, uncertainty and the torque of human materials in northern Zimbabwe 114 Joost Fontein Part II: Transgression 8 Governing the disappeared-living and the disappeared-dead: the violent pursuit of cultural sovereignty during authoritarian rule in Argentina 143 Antonius C. G. M. Robben 9 Dangerous corpses in Mexico’s drug war 163 Regnar Kristensen 10 Time as weather: corpse-work in the prehistory of political boundaries 179 Richard Kernaghan 11 Governing through the mutilated female body: corpse, bodypolitics and contestation in contemporary Guatemala 203 Ninna Nyberg Sørensen Outro 12 Abandonment and victory in relations with dead bodies 229 John Borneman Index 250 Figures 4.1 Refuse on the side of the road through Binh Hung Hoa cemeteries. Photo by C. Robert page 54 4.2 The face of the dead, peering out from an abandoned grave. Photo by C. Robert 65 10.1 Crossing over to the left bank. Photo by R. Kernaghan 189 10.2 The crates. Photo by R. Kernaghan 191 10.3 The warning. Photo by R. Kernaghan 197 Tables 11.1 Homicide rates per 100,000 inhabitants and by sex of victim. Central America page 209 11.2 Homicide rates in Guatemalan departments, 2009 210 11.3 Violent deaths in Guatemala, 2001–2012 211 Contributors John Borneman is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. He has conducted fieldwork in Germany, Central Europe, Lebanon and Syria, and completed ethnographic projects on the symbolic forms of political identification, the relation of the state to everyday life, kinship and sexuality and forms of justice and accountability. His publications include Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State, Nation (1992); Death of the Father: An Anthropology of the End in Political Authority (2004); Syrian Episodes: Sons, Fathers, and an Anthropologist in Aleppo (2008); Political Crime and the Memory of Loss (2011); and (as co-editor with Abdellah Hammoudi) Being There: The Fieldwork Encounter and the Making of Truth (2009). His current research is on secular ritual, focusing on the rehabilitation of child sex offenders in Berlin. Joost Fontein is a social anthropologist at the University of Edinburgh. A committed Africanist, his research explores the pol- itical imbrications of landscapes, things and human substances in Zimbabwe and across Southern Africa. His doctoral research (pub- lished as a monograph in 2006) explored the politics of heritage around Great Zimbabwe, and won the 2004 ASA Audrey Richards Prize. His second book, Remaking Mutirikwi: Landscape, Water and Belonging in Southern Zimbabwe , is currently under review, and he is working on a third book manuscript entitled The Politics of the x List of contributors Dead and the Power of Uncertainty in Post-2000 Zimbabwe. He is editor of the Journal of Southern African Studies , founder-editor of Critical African Studies and co-founder of the Bones Collective research group. Richard Kernaghan is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Florida and author of Coca’s Gone (2009). Currently, he is writing about river and road transportation in Peru’s Huallaga valley as a means for thinking ethnographically about everyday top- ographies of law. Benedikte Møller Kristensen is a PhD candidate at the Centre of Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. Her PhD project focuses on shamanism, material culture, kinship, memory, ontology, misfortune, social change and power among the Duha Tuvinian reindeer nomads in Mongolia. She has conducted thirty months of fieldwork among Tuvinian people (twenty-two months among the Duha Tuvinian reindeer nomads in Mongolia and eight months among the Tuvinians in Siberia) in the period 1998–2012. She has previously carried out research on urban shamanism, post- socialist transition, knowledge and landscape. Regnar Kristensen holds a PhD in social anthropology from the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is currently assistant professor at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies (ToRS) at the University of Copenhagen, where he continues his decade-long research in Mexican law enforcement, crime and religion. He has studied delinquent gangs and their relationship to certain increasingly popular Catholic saints in Mexico City and is currently making a study of delinquency and law enforcement as experienced, coped with and understood within a family living on the edge of life and the law. Henri Myrttinen is currently the Senior Research Officer for Gender in Peacebuilding with International Alert in London. He has worked extensively on and in Indonesia and Timor-Leste for various NGOs, think-tanks, research institutions and media outlets. He received his PhD from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, with a thesis on masculinities and violence in the context of militias, gangs and martial arts groups in Timor-Leste. List of contributors xi Antonius C. G. M. Robben is Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Cultural Anthropology, Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and past President of the Netherlands Society of Anthropology. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and has been a research fellow at the Michigan Society of Fellows, Ann Arbor, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, New York, and the David Rockefeller Center, Harvard University. His books include the ethnography Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina (2005 and 2007), which won the Textor Prize from the American Anthropological Association in 2006, and the edited vol- umes Death, Mourning, and Burial: A Cross-Cultural Reader (2004); Iraq at a Distance: What Anthropologists Can Teach Us about the War (2010); and Ethnographic Fieldwork: An Anthropological Reader (2007 and 2012; co-edited with Jeffrey Sluka). Christophe Robert is a cultural anthropologist (PhD, Cornell University, 2005) working on colonialism, nationalism, war- time and post-war Vietnam and Southeast Asia. He has taught at Princeton University’s PIIRS, Yale University’s Council on Southeast Asian Studies and City University of Hong Kong. His ethnographic research focuses on poverty, crime, corruption and media in Saigon. He is Director of the CET Vietnam Program and teaches socio-cul- tural anthropology at Loyola University Chicago – Vietnam Center in Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City. Ninna Nyberg Sørensen is a Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen. She worked in Central America between 2005 and 2009. With a background in cultural sociology and social anthropology, and an interest in the intersection of mobility, conflict and governance, her research has focused on international migration and the social transformations population mobility gives rise to. Her publications include Work and Migration: Life and Livelihoods in a Globalizing World (2001); Living across Worlds: Diaspora, Development and Transnational Engagement (2007); and The Migration Industry and the Commercialization of International Migration (2013). Finn Stepputat is a Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies with a background in economic geography and cultural sociology at the University of Copenhagen. He has pub- lished extensively in the field of forced migration and conflict-related xii List of contributors issues but has increasingly moved towards more general issues of state formation, sovereignty and security, with an interest in devel- oping ethnographic approaches to these. He is co-editor of a num- ber of anthologies, including States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State (2001) and Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World (2005), both with Thomas Blom Hansen. Lars Ove Trans , anthropologist, is a PhD candidate at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies (ToRS), University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His research focuses on indigenous migrants from the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, and their communities of origin, and builds on extensive fieldwork in Mexico and the United States. His thematic interests include issues of transnational migration, governance and citizenship. He has, among other things, recently published chapters in Diaspora for Development in Africa (2011) and A Comparative Ethnography of Alternative Spaces (2013). Series editors’ foreword The birth of a series is an editorial, intellectual and human adventure. We took the initiative of creating the ‘Human Remains and Violence’ series following our encounters with researchers work- ing in genocide and Holocaust studies, as well as those in the field of forensic science, having in common with them an interest in the twentieth century’s legacy of extreme violence. We share their aston- ishment at the lack of attention paid to the fate of the dead bodies and human remains within these unique contexts, given that this fate reveals political, ethical, religious, social and legal issues, an understanding of which is fundamental to these societies’ survival. Governing the Dead is the second volume in this series, suitably capturing the scope and vigour of these research aims and ambi- tions. It is the result of a workshop organised in December 2010 by Finn Stepputat at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) in Copenhagen, which brought together political scientists, philosophers, social anthropologists and historians to address the issue of the governance of dead bodies. The event’s dynamic success means that it is quite right and proper for Governing the Dead to find its place within the ‘Human Remains and Violence’ collection. The Copenhagen workshop was indeed one of the first intel- lectual points of contact for us, followed by several others, first in Paris in 2011 and 2012, and then in Manchester in 2013 and 2014. xiv Series editors’ foreword Each of these meetings contributed to conceptually strengthening our research and establishing an academic community on an inter- national level that continues to grow. From an intellectual perspective, there is no doubt that the con- tribution made by Governing the Dead to understanding the salient biopolitics at play in the governance and handling of bodies, both within democratic regimes and in extreme contexts, is an essential one. In studies on extreme violence it will no longer be possible to eschew an examination of the actors, the rationale behind the actions and the ideologies that shaped the practices applied in the handling of dead bodies. And on a human level, the truly interdisciplinary character and spirit of integrity, openness and intellectual rigour that presided over the workshop in Copenhagen are also qualities that we wish to instil in our collection. We are therefore more than happy to include Finn Stepputat’s Governing the Dead , convinced that there could be no better ambassador for both our research enquiries and approach. Acknowledgements The idea and title for this volume appeared in 2007 in the wake of a stay at Yale University, where I benefited from a post-doctoral grant from the Program in Agrarian Studies, as well as a grant from the Danish Research Council for Social Sciences. Most of the chap- ters in the volume were presented in a first version at a workshop in Copenhagen in 2010, which was funded by the Danish Institute for International Studies. All the way, colleagues and friends have received the idea with a warming enthusiasm and inspiring anec- dotes. I owe particular thanks to Richard Kernaghan, Christophe Robert and Regnar Kristensen for the first push; to James Scott, Claudio Lomnitz, James Siegel, Darius Rejali, Pamila Gupta, Thomas Blom Hansen and Sharika Thiranagama for inspiring conversations on the way; to Joost Fontein, Yehonathan Alsheh, the series editors and two anonymous readers for their thorough comments on draft versions; to Élisabeth Anstett, Jean-Marc Dreyfus, Ravinder Kaur, Henrik Rønsbo, Robin May Schott, Filip de Boeck and the rest of the participants for their contributions to the workshop; and not least to the authors who contributed to this volume with patience, hard work and inspiring ideas. Finally I would like to thank Ellen-Marie Bentsen and Susanne Kolodniziajcyk Knudsen at DIIS, Laurence Radford from the Corpses and Mass Violence programme, as well as the staff of Manchester University Press, for gently assisting in the finalisation of the volume. Intro