Corpses Of Mass Violence and Genocide

In Europe and all over the world, mass violence and genocides have been a structural feature of the 20th century. Our research programme, Corpses of Mass Violence and Genocide, aims at questioning the social legacy of mass violence by studying how different societies have coped with the first consequence of mass destruction: the mass production of cadavers. What status and what value have indeed been given to corpses? What symbolic, social, religious, economic or political uses have been made of dead bodies in occupied Europe, Soviet Union, Serbia, Spain but also Rwanda, Argentina or Cambodia, both during and after the massacres? Bringing together perspectives of social anthropology, law and history, and raising the three main issues of destruction, identification and (re)conciliation, this research programme conducted by anthropologist Elisabeth Anstett and historian Jean-Marc Dreyfus, will enlighten how various social and cultural treatments of dead bodies simultaneously challenge common representations, legal practices and morality. Programme outputs will therefore open and strengthen the field of genocide studies by providing proper intellectual and theoretical tools for a better understanding of mass violence’s aftermaths in today societies. This research programme, that has started in February 2012 and will develop over four years, is financed through a grant of the European Research Council.

Archaeology of slavery in Guadeloupe and Martinique – Workshop

Workshop posterThis one day event held at the University of Cergy-Pontoise will take place on May 17 2013, covering topics such as the challenges and emerging issues surrounding the archaeology of slavery in the West Indies, patrimonialisation and the development of cultural tourism in the Caribbean, and archaeo-anthropological approaches to slave cemeteries. The workshop, organised by Dr Noura Sahnoune and Professor Jean-Claude Lescure, is funded by the Foundation of the University of Cergy.

Please see here for further information.

Course – Body location and recovery in forensic contexts 10th – 13th June 2013

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This four-day innovative course is an opportunity to study and practice scientific techniques of body location, recovery and analysis. A series of seminars, hands-on laboratory sessions and fieldwork (involving experience of remote sensing techniques and ‘body’ excavation) will see attendees improve efficiency, and crucially, maximise forensic intelligence recovery at relevant scenes of crime.

The course will be delivered by leading academics with practitioner experience from the universities of Teesside and Durham who have complementary and world-leading expertise in bone chemistry, skeletal analysis, excavation and forensic science. The Centre for Forensic Investigation, Teesside University has a long history of excellence in forensic and crime scene teaching and research, and currently provide training and education for police forces, including the MET. The Department of Archaeology, Durham University has an international reputation for archaeological and skeletal research and practice and is the highest ranking archaeology department in terms of research in the UK.

Click here for more information.

Remembering in the Future – ECIA workshop 7th March 2013

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Remembering in the Future – Policies and Practices of Remembrance to Prevent Mass Atrocities, will be held at the European Parliament Room Altiero Spinelli to mark the European Day of Remembrance for the Righteous.

The European Centre for International Affairs (ECIA), MEPs Niccolò Rinaldi and Ivo Vajgl of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, and the European Parliament, with the support of the Budapest Centre for the International Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities, the University of Groningen, the Centre for Global Security and Governance of the University of Aberdeen, have organised a workshop with the intent to reflect on the strategies that the European Union is adopting in the field of remembrance and prevention of mass atrocities.

With the participation of:

-  European Parliament
-  European Commission
- Special Advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations on the Prevention of Genocide
-  European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights
-  United Nations

Please see here for the full programme.

Call for papers: Bodies at Risk

The Institut Catala d’Antropologia is calling for papers for a special edition – “Bodies at Risk” – for the journal Quaderns-e.

The evolution of today’s society, as a whole, has been characterized by the steady increase in threats to the environment and to people, to the point of being characterized as a “risk society”. Marked by excessive activity in the manipulation of nature in the name of progress, the social construction of risk has focused mainly on the phenomena of altered environment, climate change and pollution. But increasingly the human body is at the centre of the production of social and scientific discourse about risk and pollution. Along with the discussion on the environment, biomedical scientific discourse is becoming the main generator of symbols of risk classification and new human diseases.

“Embodied risk” is one of these categories. It refers to the corporal risk of people being diagnosed as “at risk”. These people are more exposed to the risk of developing a disease in the future, needing constant medical supervision, worrying more to seek instruments to understand their situation through scientific and social discourse.

“Toxic corporality” is a new class that derives from “embodied risk” concerning the experience of producing sense and meaning of the toxicity and pollution which endangers health. It is a new social perception of pollution as something that gets embedded in the body and permeates it with toxics coming from air, water and food. Human contamination  is the result of the coexistence of several factors: increased agricultural and industrial production, the development of industry and consumption, the accumulation and the greater volume of waste disposal, transportation patterns and energy consumption. This embodiment of risk is a result of an increase in synthetic chemistry intervention in our habits of consumption and production of food, cosmetics, and cleaning products, etc., that endanger our health.

This edition of E-Journals is a call for an analysis of this emerging reality: the “toxic embodiment” as an experience related to the production of meaning and symbols around the body’s toxicity and pollution in everyday life.

Please send articles to toxicbodyctp@gmail.com by 15th May 2013, or visit www.antropologia.cat for more information.

Just published: “Exhuming the defeated: Civil War mass graves in 21st-century Spain”, by Francisco Ferrándiz

Francisco FERRÁNDIZ, social anthropologist at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Spanish National Research Council), has just published an article in the last issue (Vol 40, n°1, february 2013) of the journal American Anthropologist, dealing with exhumations occuring in Spain. The exhumations of two mass graves in a small Spanish village, conducted eight years apart, illustrate changing attitudes towards and procedures related to Civil War (1936–39) disinterments over the last decade. The sudden public visibility oLink to full-size graphical abstractf skeletons of civilians executed by Francisco Franco’s paramilitary has triggered heated debates both about how to handle these remains in a consolidated democratic state and what to make of related judicial and institutional initiatives.

To read more : see here.

Call for chapters: The Death of the Perpetrator

The Death of the Perpetrator: Execution, suicide, identification, concealment, exhibition will be a new anthology by editor Sévane Gariban to be published with Editions Petra.

This edited volume will seek to radically reverse the terms of the question of the treatment of bodies of mass violence by focusing on another gap in our thinking, a “taboo within a taboo”: the question of the treatment of the bodies of the perpetrators following mass violence and genocide (dictators, mass criminals, genocidaires) in the event of their (being put to) death. This approach may be applied to such diverse situations as the executions of Talaat Pasha, Benito Mussolini, and high-ranking Nazi officials; the deaths of Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot and Slobodan Milosevic; the executions of Nicolae Ceausescu, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi; or, in the distinct context of international terrorism, the hunting-down and elimination of Osama bin Laden.

The analytical and theoretical tools necessary to place the fate of the bodies of criminals (whether infamous or “anonymous”) within a qualitative, comparative and interdisciplinary framework will be developed, with the objective of clarifying the specific questions and issues raised by the (putting to) death of the perpetrator in the context of the need for justice, reparation and reconciliation.

The editor welcomes chapter proposals which must be sent at the latest by 15 April 2013 to the following email: coordinator@corpsesofmassviolence.eu

To view the full Call for Chapters, please see here.

Book release: Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity

Fournet bookGenocide and Crimes Against Humanity: Misconceptions and Confusion in French Law and Practice, by Caroline Fournet, explores the ambiguities of the French law of genocide by exposing the inexplicable dichotomy between a progressive theory and an overly conservative practice. Based on the observation that the crime of genocide has remained absent from French courtrooms to the benefit of crimes against humanity, this research dissects the reasons for this absence, reviewing and analysing the potential legal obstacles to the judicial use of the law of genocide before contemplating the definitional impact of this judicial reluctance and the consequent confusion between the two crimes. Whilst it uses the French law of genocide and related case law on crimes against humanity as its focal points, the book further adopts a more general standpoint, suggesting that the French misunderstandings of the crime of genocide might ultimately be symptomatic of a more widespread misconception of the crime of genocide as a crime perpetrated against ‘a group’.

Caroline Fournet is Associate Professor and Rosalind Franklin Fellow at the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology at the University of Groningen.

For more information and a table of contents, please see here.

Women resisting genocide – rescue efforts in Nazi Germany

Speakers:
Christian Gudehus, Center for Interdisciplinary Memory Research, Flensburg University, Germany
Marten Düring, Radboub University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Susanne Beer, EHESS, Center for Interdisciplinary Memory Research, Flensburg University

The workshop will take place on 14th February at Sciences Po, Paris. Please see more information on the website.

Call for Papers – Corpses: Search and Identification in post-Genocide and Mass Violence Contexts

2nd Annual & International Conference of the Research Programme
CORPSES OF MASS VIOLENCE AND GENOCIDE
Conference to be held at the University of Manchester, UK on 9 – 11 September 2013
Organisers: Elisabeth Anstett (IRIS, France) and Jean-Marc Dreyfus (University of Manchester, UK)

Following a first conference in Paris in September 2012 focusing on the treatment of corpses in the phase of destruction, this second conference of the research programme “Corpses of mass violence and genocide” aims to explore another severe manipulation of bodies after the killings, addressing their search and identification.

The beginning of the 21st Century has already experienced many occurrences of this phenomenon, be it the opening of mass graves from the Spanish civil war, the identification of corpses by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the return of human remains from the Gulag and even the localisation of sites of Jewish massacres from the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. Whether bodies have been destroyed through industrial processes, mutilated, buried individually or collectively or even reburied in secondary or tertiary sites, the search and identification of these victims’ remains are undertaken in various circumstances and raise a range of questions.

The organisers are therefore calling for papers dealing with the search and recovery of bodies in the context of mass crimes. The conference will focus in particular on the twentieth century. Studies may deal with any geographical area and should focus on the methods and processes for identification, as well as the motivations and interests behind these pursuits, taking an instrumental perspective which promises to open up new avenues of research.

Proposals must be no longer than 6000 characters, accompanied by a detailed biography and should be sent either in French or in English by 15 March 2013 to the following email: l.radford@corpsesofmassviolence.eu.

To read the full call for papers, please see here.