A Companion to the Anthropology of Death

Antonius C. G. M. Robben, Antonius C. G. M. Robben

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119222316
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Death in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

A thought-provoking examination of death, dying, and the afterlife

Prominent scholars present their most recent work about mortuary rituals, grief and mourning, genocide, cyclical processes of life and death, biomedical developments, and the materiality of human corpses in this unique and illuminating book. Interrogating our most common practices surrounding death, the authors ask such questions as: How does the state wrest away control over the dead from bereaved relatives? Why do many mourners refuse to cut their emotional ties to the dead and nurture lasting bonds? Is death a final condition or can human remains acquire agency? The book is a refreshing reassessment of these issues and practices, a source of theoretical inspiration in the study of death.

With contributions written by an international team of experts in their fields, A Companion to the Anthropology of Death is presented in six parts and covers such subjects as: Governing the Dead in Guatemala; After Death Communications (ADCs) in North America; Cryonic Suspension in the Secular Age; Blood and Organ Donation in China; The Fragility of Biomedicine; and more. A Companion to the Anthropology of Death is a comprehensive and accessible volume and an ideal resource for senior undergraduate and graduate students in courses such as Anthropology of Death, Medical Anthropology, Anthropology of Violence, Anthropology of the Body, and Political Anthropology.

• Written by leading international scholars in their fields
• A comprehensive survey of the most recent empirical research in the anthropology of death
• A fundamental critique of the early 20th century founding fathers of the anthropology of death
• Cross-cultural texts from tribal and industrial societies
• The collection is of interest to anyone concerned with the consequences of the state and massive violence on life and death

Part I
Mortuary Rituals

CHAPTER 1
Governing the Dead in Guatemala: Public Authority and Dead Bodies

Finn Stepputat

One day in 1995, toward the end of the civil war in Guatemala, an army patrol shot and killed a member of the guerrilla organization Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional de Guatemala in a skirmish close to the Mexican border. Following orders from the army command, the soldiers took the dead body to the nearest road, where local civilian authorities met them to perform a procedure called levantamiento de cadaver (“elevating the cadaver”).¹ Under “normal” war conditions, the soldiers would have left or interred the guerrillero in the mountainous forest where he was killed, but in the context of ongoing peace negotiations, a signed accord on human rights, and the presence of a UN verification mission (MINUGUA), the army command insisted on following civilian peacetime procedures. The procedures and institutional responsibility had recently been revised, so the judge and his secretary muddled through the prescribed procedure while meticulously writing the levantamiento report, in four copies, on their portable typewriter. The report recorded witness testimonies and described the dead body, the belongings and clothing – in some detail including the color of the underpants – and the location where the body had been found. This was to allow for a postmortem identification of the dead person, as well as to help identify the cause and circumstances of his death.

When the judge had finalized the reporting, the soldiers took the dead guerrillero to the nearby village cemetery for interment. However, observers from MINUGUA who were present on the occasion overruled the local authorities with reference to Guatemalan law, according to which the body had to be taken to a morgue for autopsy. Since nobody else had a suitable vehicle for transporting the dead body, the judge ordered the present researcher to transport the guerrillero to the morgue, four hours’ drive away. After the autopsy, the dead body would continue its journey to a designated cemetery and be buried in a grave marked XX, to indicate an unidentified dead body.

According to Guatemalan law, state officials are to perform this procedure every time a dead body is found under circumstances that may involve a suspicion of crime. If the homicide rates of the mid‐2010s are used as an indicator, the levantamiento de cadaver was performed more than 100 times each week in Guatemala.² In the context of the broader state machinery, the procedure is a minor detail but, because it is linked to issues of the legitimate use of armed force, justice, inheritance, and identity, it is an important detail. However, the procedure cannot be taken for granted. As this chapter shows, it has a history, and its performance depends on specific circumstances. This case from 1995 also pointed toward the future as some of the procedures regarding dead bodies were reformed following the end of the civil war.

My main interest here is to analyze how these procedures have developed as a contested part of the emerging modern state in Guatemala since the eighteenth century. The chapter focuses on the formative decades of the nineteenth century, when basic regulatory frameworks were put in place; the civil war in the late twentieth century as a period when state security forces became the main actor in transgressing state regulations regarding dead bodies; and the 2000s, which saw the most recent reforms of the state regulation of dead bodies.

Before following this historical trajectory, I shall briefly sketch the underlying approach to dead bodies as objects of political analysis that inform this study. As Verdery (1999), Lomnitz (2005), and others have reminded us, the ways in which dead bodies are dealt with is a deeply political issue. And, as Hertz ([1907] 1960) has also suggested, there is much variation in how (political) communities treat the dead bodies of friends, enemies, members, and nonmembers.

BIOPOLITICS, NECROPOLITICS, AND THE POWERS OF THE DEAD

As Foucault ([1997] 2003: 247) famously suggested, the modern state is a biopolitical state, focused on the improvement of life, while a “gradual disqualification of death” has taken place since the late eighteenth century. Then, death was a spectacular ceremony manifesting the transition from one power to another, from “the sovereign of this world” to “the sovereign of the next world.” Now, in contrast, death has become “something to be hidden away” (Foucault [1997] 2003: 247). The reason is the shift from the power of death (or of “sovereignty,” in Foucault’s terms) to the “power of life,” a shift that coincided with the emergence of clinical medicine and biomedicine. This permitted the constitution of life and death as biological processes to be governed (Rose 1999). As Foucault writes:

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 limit, or the end of power too. Death is outside the power relationship. In the right of sovereignty, death was the moment of the most obvious and most spectacular manifestation of the absolute power of the sovereign; death now becomes, in contrast, the moment when the individual escapes all power, falls back on himself and retreats, so to speak, into his own privacy. Power no longer recognizes death. Power literally ignores death.

(Foucault [1997] 2003: 248)

Under the sign of biopolitics, death became a “scandal that we have been unable to prevent,” and which therefore had to be ignored, marginalized, and silenced (Aries [1977] 1981: 613). However, such silencing requires work or governance. Thus, modern states tend to establish a range of laws, institutions, and codified practices to take control of the transition from life to death including the whereabouts of dead bodies in terms of their “proper disposal.” In many cases, state institutions have a limited reach or capacity, so either families have to deal with their dead on their own or state representatives have to negotiate regulation with other forms of authority, in particular religious ones. However, even though state entities, at will or by default, delegate specific responsibilities and faculties to private, social, and religious authorities, they usually claim the ultimate authority to define and to govern the dead within their jurisdiction through legislation and institutionalized procedures.

In this perspective, we may take issue with Foucault’s claim in the sense that the dead bodies, even in modern states, are still within the field of modern (bio)power. As can be seen in the case of Guatemala, much of the regulation of dead bodies has been developed in the name of public health. Dead bodies appear as dangerous matter that should be separated from the living in order to avoid the spread of disease.

However, dead bodies are more than just matter. They may be associated with what we could call the powers of the dead because of their particular qualities. Dead bodies have potentially disruptive effects for people, society, and political authority. They remind us that everybody is going to die and they articulate questions of ontology. The immanent decay of the body, as well as its ambiguous being – as both subject and object, pure and impure, and sacred and profane – endows the dead body with a curiously disturbing and affective sort of agency. As many anthropologists and other scholars have observed, dead bodies lend symbolic and political efficacy to rituals, a transformative effect that scholars describe in terms such as “alchemy” (Bloch 1982), “sacralization” (Kaufman and Morgan 2005), “transgression” (Taussig 2006), “catharsis” (Kristeva 1982), and “animation” (Verdery 1999). Across many approaches, dead bodies are associated with an excess of meaning and affect, as something that cannot entirely be controlled.

The materiality and the “thereness” of the dead body (Verdery 1999) marks its territorial location and demands some kind of action. Inaction – leaving the dead body exposed – can have effects that go beyond or against the control of the authorities. However, leaving the body can also be a politically efficacious statement in particular circumstances; for example, it may perform a crude political pedagogy, as Kernaghan (2009) has demonstrated in the case of Peru’s Shining Path. This Maoist movement left killed persons on the road with signs attached that signaled a new legal and political order. The bottom line is that the human remains and dead bodies, depending on the specific context, can be both a political asset and a liability, but the authority in charge cannot always control whether the dead body is one or the other. Fontein (2014) has given an example of this dilemma in his analysis of the leaking dead bodies that were found in an abandoned mineshaft in Zimbabwe. While Robert Mugabe’s party exposed the remains as a testimony of colonial violence, oppositional voices claimed that the remains, rather, belonged to victims of Mugabe’s own regime. Likewise, the decisions to disappear the dead body of Osama bin Laden in the Indian Ocean and of Muammar Gaddafi in the Libyan desert speak of this kind of uncertainty.

However, even dead bodies that are stripped of political significance – the “bare death” equivalent to Agamben’s “bare life” (Agamben 1998; O’Neill 2012) – produce senses and atmospheres of (dis)order, which are of significance for the production of authority. Willis (2015) gives an example from São Paulo, where the dead bodies of “killable” young and often black men in certain neighborhoods can lie in the street for a long time. People call them presunto (ham). The police are reluctant to pick up the dead, and families often do not dare to take action; when the police finally arrive, they undertake the levantamientoprocedure hurriedly. These presuntos produce a sense of abandonment and that state security forces are not in charge in these districts.

Returning to Foucault’s juxtaposition of biopower and necropower (Mbembe 2003) and his observation that modern power ignores death, I would say that Mbembe and others have forcefully argued that necropower as the “old” form of sovereignty remains alive as a dark underside of modern political communities. However, these analyses focus on the killing (the necropolitical tak...