Oral Presentation Session

Reviewed by: American Ethnological Society

Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists, Teachers of Anthropology in Community Colleges, Students

Primary Theme: Science

Secondary Theme: The Political

(3-0780) Bureaucratic Bodies: Managing the Dead and Other Matters Out of Place

From their political lives to their ethical care, as potent sites of memory work and scientific inquiry, dead bodies have consistently captured the anthropological imaginary, inviting us to think about the generative force of death and its corporeal traces. This panel shifts the gaze away from the body per se, with all its affective materiality and symbolic valence, and instead focuses on the infrastructures, industries, even economies that manage bodies and, by extension, death and its attendant ruptures. Whether in times of crisis, conflict, or its aftermath, or as part of more quotidian, life-course events, we explore how bureaucratic systems of processing bodies can discipline states of mourning, requiring and channeling capital to superimpose order on the ultimate “matter out of place.” How do bureaucracies arise and infrastructure flourish around the dead? What happens when capital dries up or when certain bodies expose failures in protocol, management, and governance? These systems exist within larger social structures and in studying them we see too how certain lives (certain bodies) garner more investment; in this sense, how dead bodies are managed, processed, and disposed often reflects the inequities and hierarchies the deceased themselves faced in life.

Organizer(s)

• Sarah Wagner

  George Washington University

Presenter(s)

• Sarah Wagner

  George Washington University

Chair(s)

• Adam Rosenblatt

  Associate Professor of the Practice in International Comparative Studies
  Duke University

Presenter(s)

• Adam Rosenblatt

  Associate Professor of the Practice in International Comparative Studies
  Duke University

• Lindsay Smith

  University of New Mexico

• Maria Lopez

  The University of Tennessee

Discussant(s)

• Andrew Bickford

  Georgetown University

Presentations:

• 2:15 PM - 2:30 PM

  Discussion
  Andrew Bickford – Georgetown University
• 2:30 PM - 2:45 PM

  Upping Quotas, Raising Expectations: The Expanding Mandate of U.S. Military MIA Accounting Efforts
  Sarah Wagner – George Washington University
• 2:45 PM - 3:00 PM

  The Racial Politics of Reclamation Efforts at Two Neglected U.S. Cemeteries
  Adam Rosenblatt – Duke University
• 3:00 PM - 3:15 PM

  DNA Pilgrimages: The Mexican migration crisis, affective economies, and the business of DNA databases
  Lindsay A. Smith – University of New Mexico
• 3:15 PM - 3:30 PM

  Accounting for ‘the Disappeared’: Transitional Justice and Forensic Intervention in Colombia
  Maria Alexandra Lopez – The University of Tennessee