Anstett, Elisabeth and Jean-Marc Dreyfus (2016) Human remains in society. Curation and exhibition in the aftermath of genocide and mass-violence

Publication Date Title Edited by Type
 2016
 Human remains in society. Curation and exhibition in the aftermath of genocide and mass-violence Elisabeth Anstett and Jean-Marc Dreyfus Book

 

 

Whether reburied, concealed, stored, abandoned or publicly displayed, human remains raise a vast number of questions regarding social, legal and ethical uses by communities, public institutions and civil society organisations. This book presents a ground-breaking account of the treatment and commemoration of dead bodies resulting from incidents of genocide and mass violence. Through a range of international case studies across multiple continents, it explores the effect of dead bodies or body parts on various political, cultural and religious practices. Multidisciplinary in scope, it will appeal to readers interested in this crucial phase of post-conflict reconciliation, including students and researchers of history, anthropology, sociology, archaeology, law, politics and modern warfare.

 

 

 

EDITORS:

Jean-Marc Dreyfus is Reader in Holocaust Studies at the University of Manchester, UK and a director of the Corpses of Mass Violence and Genocide programme funded by the European Research Council.

Élisabeth Anstett is Researcher in Social Anthropology at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France and a director of the Corpses of Mass Violence and Genocide programme funded by the European Research Council.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Introduction. Corpses in society: about human remains, necro-politics, necro-economy and the legacy of mass violence – Élisabeth Anstett and Jean-Marc Dreyfus
1. The unburied victims of Kenya’s Mau Mau Rebellion: where and when does the violence end? – David M. Anderson and Paul J. Lane

2. (Re)politicising the dead in post-Holocaust Poland: the afterlives of human remains at the Belzec extermination camp – Zuzanna Dziuban

3. Chained corpses: warfare, politics and religion after the Habsburg Empire in the Julian March, 1930s-70s – Gaetano Dato

4. Exhumations in post-war rabbinical responsas – David Deutsch

5. (Re)cognising the corpse: individuality, identification and multidirectional memorialisation in post-genocide Rwanda – Ayala Maurer-Prager

6. Corpses of atonement: the discovery, commemoration and reinternment of eleven Alsatian victims of Nazi Terror, 1947-52 – Devlin M. Scofield

7. ‘Earth conceal not my blood’: forensic and archaeological approaches to locating the remains of Holocaust victims – Caroline Sturdy Colls

8. The return of Herero and Nama bones from Germany: the victims’ struggle for recognition and recurring genocide memories in Namibia – Vilho Amukwaya Shigwedha

9. A Beothuk skeleton (not) in a glass case: rumours of bones and the remembrance of an exterminated people in Newfoundland – the emotive immateriality of human remains – John Harries

Index

Edited by  Manchester University Press

Baer, Alejandro and Natan Sznaider (2017) Memory and Forgetting in the Post-Holocaust Era

PUBLICATION

DATE

 TITLE AUTHORS TYPE
 2017
 Memory and Forgetting in the Post-Holocaust Era Alejandro Baer and Natan Sznaider Book

 

To forget after Auschwitz is considered barbaric. Baer and Sznaider question this assumption not only in regard to the Holocaust but to other political crimes as well. The duties of memory surrounding the Holocaust have spread around the globe and interacted with other narratives of victimization that demand equal treatment. Are there crimes that must be forgotten and others that should be remembered?

In this book the authors examine the effects of a globalized Holocaust culture on the ways in which individuals and groups understand the moral and political significance of their respective histories of extreme political violence. Do such transnational memories facilitate or hamper the task of coming to terms with and overcoming divisive pasts? Taking Argentina, Spain and a number of sites in post-communist Europe as test cases, this book illustrates the transformation from a nationally oriented ethics to a trans-national one. The authors look at media, scholarly discourse, NGOs dealing with human rights and memory, museums and memorial sites, and examine how a new generation of memory activists revisits the past to construct a new future. Baer and Sznaider follow these attempts to manoeuvre between the duties of remembrance and the benefits of forgetting. This, the authors argue, is the “ethics of Never Again.”

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

List of figures

Acknowledgments 

1 The Ethics of Never Again: global constellations

2 Nunca Más : Argentine Nazis and Judíos del Sur

3 Francoism reframed: the disappeared of the Spanish Holocaust

4 Eastern Europe: exhuming competing pasts

5 Beyond Antigone and Amalek : toward a memory of hope

Bibliography 

Index

 

Edited by Routledge

Hilbink, Lisa y Ofelia Ferrán – editors- (2017) Legacies of Violence in Contemporary Spain Exhuming the Past, Understanding the Present

Publication Date Title Edited by Type
 2017
 Legacies of Violence in Contemporary Spain.
Exhuming the Past, Understanding the Present		 Lisa Hilbink y Ofelia Ferrán Libro

 

This book provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary study of the multiple legacies of Francoist violence in contemporary Spain, with a special focus on the exhumations of mass graves from the Civil War and post-war era. The various contributions frame their study within a broader reflection on the nature, function and legacies of state-sanctioned violence in its many forms. Offering perspectives from fields as varied as history, political science, literary and cultural studies, forensic and cultural anthropology, international human rights law, sociology, and art, this volume explores the multifaceted nature of a society’s reckoning with past violence. It speaks not only to those interested in contemporary Spain and Western Europe, but also to those studying issues of transitional and post-transitional justice in other national and regional contexts.

 

 

PODCAST:

Francisco Ferrándiz along with the publishers, Lisa Hilbink and Ofelia Ferrán, discusses the content of the book in the following podcast of University of Minnesota – Department of Spanish & Portuguese Studies

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Prologue:Opening Graves to Restore Memory   [José Antonio Martín Pallín]

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Legacies of Violence in Contemporary Spain  [Ofelia Ferrán and Lisa Hilbink]

Part I: Mass Graves: “Unearthing” the Memories of Violence

1. Afterlives: A Social Autopsy of Mass Grave Exhumations in Spain [Francisco Ferrándiz] 

2. The Spanish Civil War Forensic Labyrinth [Luis Ríos and Francisco Etxeberria]

3. Executed Women, Assassinated Women: Gender Repression in the Spanish Civil War and the Violence of the Rebels  [Queralt Solé]

4. Beyond the Mass Grave: Producing and Remembering Landscapes of Violence in Francois Spain [Alfredo González-Ruibal]

 

Part II: Political, Legislative and Judicial Responses to Past Violence

5. Rude Awakening: Franco’s Mass Graves and the Decomposition of the Spanish Transition Dream  [Ignacio Fernández de Mata]

6. Unsettling Bones, Unsettling Accounts: Spanish Perpetrators’ Confessions to Violence [Paloma Aguilar and Leigh A. Payne

7. Knocking on the Spanish Parliamen]t’s Door: The 2007 Law of Historical Memory and Its Aftermath [Rafael Escudero]

8. When You Wish Upon a Star: Baltasar Garzón and the Frustration of Legal Accountability for Franco-Era Crimes [Lisa Hilbink]

 

Part III: Cultural Representations of Violence

9. Poets of the Dead Society: The Cultural History of Francoist Mass Graves in the Pre-Democratic Poetic Archive [Germán Labrador Méndez] 

10. Pasts in Conflict: Stylized Realism and its Discontents in Historical Memory Film [Carmen Moreno-Nuño]

11. Regarding Past Violence [Ofelia Ferrán]

 

Part IV: Interview with Baltasar Garzón

Truth, Reparation and Justice: Interview with Baltasar Garzón, Then Magistrate of the National High Court of Spain, Conducted 26 April, 2011, Minneapolis, MN [Ofelia Ferrán and Lisa Hilbink]

 

Epilogue: Memory Walks, Justice Awakes [Emilio Silva]

 

Edited by Routledge

Anstett, Élisabeth and Jean-Marc Dreyfus – editors-(2015) Human remains and identification Mass violence, genocide, and the ‘forensic turn’

Publication Date Title Edited by Type
 2015
 Human remains and identification
Mass violence, genocide, and the ‘forensic turn’		 Élisabeth Anstett and Jean-Marc Dreyfus Libro

 

Human remains and identification presents a pioneering investigation into the practices and methodologies used in the search for and exhumation of dead bodies resulting from mass violence. Previously absent from forensic debate, social scientists and historians here confront historical and contemporary exhumations with the application of social context to create an innovative and interdisciplinary dialogue, enlightening the political, social and legal aspects of mass crime and its aftermaths.

Through a ground-breaking selection of international case studies, Human remains and identification argues that the emergence of new technologies to facilitate the identification of dead bodies has led to a “forensic turn”, normalising exhumations as a method of dealing with human remains en masse. However, are these exhumations always made for legitimate reasons?

Multidisciplinary in scope, this book will appeal to readers interested in understanding this crucial phase of mass violence’s aftermath, including researchers in history, anthropology, sociology, forensic science, law, politics and modern warfare.

The research program leading to this publication has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / ERC Grant Agreement n° 283-617.

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Introduction – Elisabeth Anstett and Jean-Marc Dreyfus

Part I: Agents
1. Bitter legacies: A war of extermination, grave looting, and culture wars in the American West – Tony Platt
2. Final chapter: Portraying the exhumation and reburial of Polish Jewish Holocaust victims in the pages of yizkor books – Gabriel Finder
3. Bykivnia: How grave robbers, activists, and foreigners ended official silence about Stalin’s mass graves near Kiev – Karel Berkhoff
4. The Concealment of Bodies during the Military Dictatorship in Uruguay (1973-84) – Jose Lopez Mazz

Part II: Methods
5. State secrets and concealed bodies: exhumations of Soviet-era victims in contemporary Russia – Viacheslav Bituitcki
6. A mere technical exercise? Challenges and technological solutions to the identification of individuals in mass grave scenarios in the modern context – Tim Thompson and Gillian Fowler
7. Disassembling the pieces, reassembling the social: the forensic and political lives of mass graves in Bosnia and Herzegovina – Sari Wastell and Admir Jugo

Part III: Stakes
8. ‘The political lives of dead bodies’ and ‘the disciplines of the dead’: a view from South Africa – Nicky Rousseau
9. Bury or display? The politics of exhumation in post genocide Rwanda – Remi Korman
10. Remembering the Japanese occupation massacres: mass graves in post-war Malaysia – Frances Tay
Index

 

Edited by Manchester University Press

Crossland, Zoë and Rosemary A. Joyce -editors- (2015) Disturbing Bodies Perspectives on Forensic Anthropology

Publication Date Title Edited by Type
 2015
 Disturbing Bodies Perspectives on Forensic Anthropology Zoë Crossland and Rosemary A. Joyce Libro

 

 

As bodies are revealed, so are hidden and often incommensurate understandings of the body after death. The theme of “disturbing bodies” has a double valence, evoking both the work that anthropologists do and also the ways in which the dead can, in turn, disturb the living through their material qualities, through dreams and other forms of presence, and through the political claims often articulated around them. These may include national or ethnic narratives that lay claims to bodies, personal memories and histories maintained by relatives, or the constitution of the corpse through performative acts of exhumation, display, and analysis. At the center of this work are forensic anthropologists. Although often considered narrowly in terms of its technical and methodological aspects, forensic practice draws upon multiple dimensions of anthropology, and this volume offers a range of anthropological perspectives on the work of exhumation and the attendant issues.

 

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

  1. Anthropological Perspectives on Disturbing Bodies: An Introduction
    Zoë Crossland and Rosemary A. Joyce
  2. Forensic Anthropology and the Investigation of Political Violence: Notes from the Field
    Luis Fondebrider
  3. Unearthing Ongoing Pasts: Forensic Anthropology, State Making, and Justice Making in Postwar Peru
    Isaias Rojas-Perez
  4. Deconstructing the Ideal of Standardization in Forensic Anthropology
    Tim Thompson
  5. Identification Versus Prosecution: Is It That Simple, and Where Should the Archaeologist Stand?
    Hugh Tuller
  6. Writing Forensic Anthropology: Transgressive Representations
    Zoë Crossland
  7. Creating the Biological Profile: The Question of Race and Ancestry
    Heather Walsh-Haney and Serrin Boys
  8. Hybrid Lives, Violent Deaths: “Seminoles” in the Samuel G. Morton Cranial Collection
    Pamela L. Geller
  9. Excavating for Truths: Forensic Anthropology and Bioarchaeology as Ways of Making Meaning from Skeletal Evidence
    Debra L. Martin
  10. Grave Responsibilities: Encountering Human Remains
    Rosemary A. Joyce

Edited by SAR PRESS

Hristova, Marije (2016) Reimagining Spain: Transnational Entanglements and Remembrance of the Spanish Civil War since 1989

Publication Date Title Author Type
 2016
 Reimagining Spain: Transnational Entanglements and Remembrance of the Spanish Civil War since 1989 Marije Hristova Libro

 

Since 1989, Spain has gone through a process of re-emergence of the memories of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and Francoism (1939-1975). These newly produced memories challenge the official reading of the civil war, as established during the transition to democracy, as a “collective insanity.” As part of this process, the last three decades have produced numerous novels, documentaries, and journalistic accounts that have brought to the fore the untold stories of the repression during the civil war and its aftermath.

This dissertation offers an analysis of the influence of transnational frameworks on the reconfiguration of the cultural memory narratives of the Spanish Civil War. The selection of post-Cold War Spanish cultural texts – narrative fiction, documentary film, photography and journalism – being analyzed in this dissertation, is framed by three emblematic “spaces of transnational memory.” These are: the wars in former Yugoslavia; Forced Disappearance in the Southern Cone; and the remembrance of the Holocaust. Each of these spaces highlights a different contemporary site of agency in the production of memory, namely contemporary civil war, mass grave exhumations, and testimony. In addition, this dissertation posits affect and emotion as important mechanisms in the production of transnational memories.

This research argues that these transnational contexts of remembrance serve to reimagine Spain, proposing alternative and more “inclusive” forms of national memory and identity, often in opposition to the current Spanish “constitutional patriotism.” Transnational memory is located within the margins of the nation-state, a space of entanglement between the national and the transnational, and inhabited by those who were excluded from Spanish national identity through the forging of the Spanish nation-state.

 

Edited by Universitaire Pers Maastricht

Ferrándiz F. & Robben, A. -editors- (2015): Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights

Publication date
 Title Author(s) Type
June 2015, in press
 Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights Francisco Ferrándiz & Antonius Robben – editors -. Zoë Crossland, Francisco Ferrándiz, Luis Fondebrider, Iosif Kovras, Heonik Kwon, Isaias Rojas-Perez, Antonius C. G. M. Robben, Elena Lesley Rozen, Katerina Stefatos, Francesc Torres, Sara Wagner, Richard Ashby Wilson. Book

Abstract: “This excellent and timely volume . . . opens up new avenues of global comparison and investigation. As if understanding the past was not daunting in itself, the chapters in this collection provide fascinating accounts of the political and legal struggles surrounding exhumations, and these often include popular mobilizations that are both intensely local and globally connected. I know of no other volume that addresses the topic of exhumations as profoundly, and in as many disparate cases in Latin America, Africa, Europe, and Asia.”—From the Foreword by Richard Ashby Wilson.
The unmarked mass graves left by war and acts of terror are lasting traces of violence in communities traumatized by fear, conflict, and unfinished mourning. Like silent testimonies to the wounds of history, these graves continue to inflict harm on communities and families who wish to bury or memorialize their lost kin. Changing political circumstances can reveal the location of mass graves or facilitate their exhumation, but the challenge of identifying and recovering the dead is only the beginning of a complex process that brings the rights and wishes of a bereaved society onto a transnational stage.
Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights examines the political and social implications of this sensitive undertaking in specific local and national contexts. International forensic methods, local-level claims, national political developments, and transnational human rights discourse converge in detailed case studies from the United States, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Spain, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Greece, Rwanda, Cambodia, and Korea. Contributors analyze the role of exhumations in transitional justice from the steps of interviewing eyewitnesses and survivors to the painstaking forensic recovery and comparison of DNA profiles. This innovative volume demonstrates that contemporary exhumations are as much a source of personal, historical, and criminal evidence as instruments of redress for victims through legal accountability and memory politics.
Editorial: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Faces and Traces of Violence: Memory Politics in Global Perspective

Publication date
 Title Editors Type
Dicember 2014
 Faces and Traces of Violence: Memory Politics in Global Perspective Francisco Ferrándiz, Marije Hristova, Lee Douglas, Zoé de Kerangat Dossier

Faces and Traces of ViolenceAbstract: “This dossier displays a selection of the work presented during the last six years in the permanent international seminar Faces and Traces of Violence/Rastros y rostros de la violencia held monthly at ILLA-CCHS-CSIC. […] Since its beginning, the seminar has been a space for public and academic debate, and its main objective has been the development of critical, comparative and interdisciplinary analyses of different manifestations of violence (especially political and war-related violence) both historically and in the present moment, as well as the development of careful reflections regarding the intricate memory politics that have emerged as a result the contingent reactivation of these violent acts, both in the past and the present. […] The seminar sessions have witnessed lively debates on topics including the following: militaristic representations of the world; memory and mourning in Argentina and Chile; the role of forensic science in the investigation of political violence; the connections between memory, philosophy and theater; the cinematographic recycling of political violence; the forms and meaning of poetry in post-war contexts; the “transnationalization” of forced disappearances and other victimhood models; the use of media in peace-building; the gray areas of the Gypsy Holocaust; the effects of transitional justice policies in post-war Bosnia; the structural violence affecting border crossings in Northern Mexico; how material objects elicit memory in traumatic contexts; the evolution of contemporary memory politics in Spain and Latin America; transnational memory practices and identity politics in contemporary El Salvador; the social and political effects of confessions of perpetrators in the framework of truth commissions; the development of a memory “market” in Latin America; the relationship between human rights and copy rights; the painful re-elaboration of Nazism and the horrors of the Second World War in Austria and Germany; the role of the new media in the creation of new modalities of witnessing and victimhood; the contemporary management of the corpses of mass violence; the role of ruins in the making of national memories; the bureaucratic aftermath of massacres in Colombia; and the memorial processes linked to exiles, diasporas and genocides. Or, as displayed in this dossier’s selection of articles, the seminar has also touched upon other equally diverse topics such as the configuration of cosmopolitan memories on a global scale after the Holocaust; the critical analysis of the tropes and narratives used both in historiography and public debates to define Europe’s violent twentieth century; the shocking aftermath of the experience of the Soviet Gulag for some Bolshevik loyalists; the emergence of global memoryscapes in France; the politics behind the non-remembrance of the Holocaust in Hungary; the attempts to deal with the legacy of the dictatorship in Portugal; the impact of mass grave exhumations from the Spanish Civil War in the reactivation of conflicting memories of the conflict; the difficulties in accessing and making sense of the archives of violence in the aftermath of Spanish dictatorship; the tensions between memorial places and national heritage in post-Pinochet Chile; and the enormous power of forced disappearances to disrupt the social fabric in contemporary Mexico. […]”

Francisco Ferrándiz (ILLA-CCHS, CSIC)

Culture & History Digital Journal

 

Poster gallery

 

F. FERRÁNDIZ (2014): El pasado bajo tierra

Fecha de publicación
 Título Autor(es) Tipo
27 de mayo, 2014
 El pasado bajo tierra Ferrándiz Martín, Francisco Libro

El Pasado Bajo TierraResumen : Las exhumaciones de fosas comunes de la Guerra Civil han sido uno de los temas más delicados y controvertidos de la primera década del siglo XXI en España. El pasado bajo tierra propone una autopsia social del impacto de la apertura de fosas comunes en la sociedad española contemporánea. No es por lo tanto un ensayo sobre el pasado, para el que existe una historiografía muy extensa, sino más bien sobre las múltiples repercusiones contemporáneas de estas excavaciones. Se basa en un trabajo de campo etnográfico multisituado de más de diez años en diversos escenarios de investigación: exhumaciones de fosas comunes, laboratorios forenses, reinhumaciones, actos conmemorativos, asambleas y actividades de diversas asociaciones, archivos, medios de comunicación, procesos judiciales, presentaciones de libros, inauguración de exposiciones, obras de teatro, o conferencias académicas, entre otros.

Editorial: Anthropos Editorial.
Ciudad: Barcelona
ISBN: 978-84-15260-79-0
Páginas: 331

 

Recursos relacionados con el libro:

Memoria de las cenizas

DEL RÍO, A. -Coord.- (2014): Memoria de las cenizas. Andaluces en los campos de concentración nazis

Fecha de publicación
 Título Autor(es) Tipo
2014
 Memoria de las cenizas. Andaluces en los campos de concentración nazis Ángel del Río(Coord) Rosa Torán, María Cabilla y Eduardo Montero Libro

Memoria de las cenizasResumen : A pesar de la abundante literatura existente sobre las víctimas del nazismo, el drama de la deportación de los republicanos y antifascistas andaluces a los campos nazis sigue siendo un tema muy desconocido. Todavía es predominante la idea de que los campos de concentración fueron ideados para el exterminio del pueblo judío en exclusividad. Y genera contrariedad, estupor y sorpresa que en esos siniestros recintos hubiera personas vestidas con raídos trajes a rayas que hablaban con acento andaluz y soñaban con sus pueblos.
La obra ofrece un impactante documental y una serie de textos de carácter divulgativo donde se desgrana, desde distintas disciplinas, la trayectoria de estos republicanos andaluces y españoles y la perversa naturaleza del universo concentracionario nazi. El testimonio desgarrador, tanto de los deportados supervivientes, como de los familiares, especialmente de las mujeres, que quedaron sumidos en la más absoluta incertidumbre y desolación ante la falta de noticias de sus seres queridos, adquiere un valor fundamental como herramienta pedagógica que favorezca el debate y la enseñanza de ese episodio de nuestra historia para la promoción social de los valores éticos y la cultura de paz.

Editorial: Aconcagua Libros.
Ciudad: Sevilla.
ISBN: 978-84- 96178-93-9
Páginas: 224