The Political Lives of Dead Bodies
Bankston, Carl L. III
BOOKS Lively corpses The Political Lives of Dead Bodies Reburial and Postsocialist Change Katherine Verdery Columbia Univercity Press, $21.50,208 pp. Carl L. Banhston III When I went to work...
...In 1989 Romanians seeking to reinterpret their history brought Inochentie's remains home...
...Verdery looks in detail at two sets of competing postsocialist claims of dead bodies...
...World War II saw massacres of Serbs and Communist partisans by Croatian Fascists...
...That silence gives bodily remains an ambiguity that enables groups and factions to claim them as emblems for competing causes...
...and of Muslims, Croats, and Communists by Serbian royalists...
...Corpses have power...
...Verdery gives readers a new angle of vision on this troubled region...
...They are (or were) people, with claims on the emotions of others...
...With the end of communism and movement toward the break-up of Yugoslavia, exhumations and reburials became part of the historical claims of the competing factions...
...Even socialist-era statues, which Verdery sees as stone or bronze corpses, were marched away from their pedestals...
...Nationalism, ethnicity, and religion were among the prime props used in constructing new definitions of the self and the world...
...In modern times, as in ancient times, struggles over the meaning of history often become rivalries for the possession and patronage of the dead...
...Commonweal 2 4 June 4,1999...
...This nation was, in Verdery's telling phrase, "a land of graves...
...Communism was more than an economic system...
...By selectively recognizing victims, the factions could make statements about responsibility and accountability...
...Carl L. Banhston III When I went to work in the Philippines in the summer of 1985, Ferdinand Marcos appeared to be firmly in control of the country...
...Burial unites the community of the living and the dead with the land...
...The formerly forgotten or despised dead were called upon to further the causes of these frequently competing allegiances...
...Bodies, Verdery argues, are potent vehicles for political meaning...
...For example, in Hungary Prime Minister Imre Nagy was shot in 1958 and buried facedown in an unmarked grave for his attempts to reform communism...
...Verdery's work reminds us that history is largely concerned with the dead and with negotiating the relationship between the living and the dead...
...His opponents were numerous but divided among themselves...
...The movement toward a postsocialist Central and Eastern Europe became, in Verdery's phrase, "a parade of dead bodies...
...With the passing of the Communist regimes, the populations of Europe sought new moral orders and new identities...
...During the Tito regime the dead were collectivized as "victims of fascism" or "traitors," and there was no mention of slaughter by Communist partisans...
...Verdery, an eminent anthropologist and an authority on socialist Eastern Europe, considers the role of the dead in Eastern Europe's current and continuing political transformation...
...When he was reburied in a public ceremony attended by thousands in 1989, the anti-Communists, the Communists, the nationalists, and young reformers all claimed him as one of their own...
...However, Eastern Orthodoxy had been greatly strengthened by its official religious monopoly during the Communist period and there was a bitter debate over the return of Greek Catholic churches and properties that had been converted to Orthodox use...
...However, I think the value of the book goes beyond current events, important as those events may be...
...Katherine Verdery's The Political Lives of Dead Bodies is an absorbing meditation on that power...
...Katherine Verdery makes a convincing and intriguing case for seeing the corpses of heroes and victims as vehicles of political meaning for post-Communist Europe and for the rest of the living world...
...Burials and reburials served to make territorial as well as historical claims...
...Yugoslavia provides Verdery's second example of how dead bodies can be focal points of competing moral orders...
...The artificial bodies of statues and real bodies, such as that of Lenin, literally embodied that order...
...Heroes like Bishop Inochentie serve as emblems of social groups...
...As material objects with definite locations in space, bodies connect the past to the present...
...They are heroes and victims...
...A few months later, the dead body of Benigno Aquino became a symbol of opposition that led the anti-Marcos forces to coalesce behind the leadership of Aquino's widow...
...it was a moral order...
...He also championed the political rights of all Romanians against their Hungarian and German rulers, and he became a national hero to both Greek Catholic and Orthodox Christians...
...The Political Lives of Dead Bodies is a timely book...
...Different groups claimed the dead as victims of the Fascists, the Communists, or the Serbs...
...This is one of the first books on the dead as sacred objects in modern times, to be read along with Patrick Geary's Furta Sacra (Princeton University Press, 1990), which deals with the theft of holy relics in the Middle Ages, and Peter Brown's books on the body and the cult of saints in late antiquity...
...It should be regarded as a classic work on the meaning of death and the dead for human views of time and space...
...After the collapse of communism in 1989, the remains of political leaders, artists, and national heroes began returning from abroad or were relocated from ignominious domestic graves to honored places of burial...
...The examples Verdery chooses illustrate two of the primary symbolic functions of the dead...
...Victims like the unnumbered dead of former Yugoslavia create claims of collective responsibility and collective righteousness...
...Of course, unlike living people corpses do not speak for themselves...
...D Carl L. Bankston III teaches in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Southwestern Louisiana...
...Marcos himself subsequently died in exile and his own well-preserved body became a focal point of controversy and an object of pilgrimage for his former followers...
...Inochentie was claimed as a hero specifically of the Greek Catholic cause and as Commonweal 2 3 June 4,1999 an Orthodox Christian who had turned to Rome only for the sake of his nationalist goals...
...Inochentie was a clergyman of the Greek Catholic church, which followed the Eastern Orthodox ritual and liturgy but had united with Rome...
...The affairs of Eastern Europe, and especially those of the lands that were once Yugoslavia, now hold the attention of the entire world...
...In Romania, she considers the case of Bishop Inochentie Micu-Klein, a Transylvanian who died in Rome in 1756...
...When the earthly remains of Marcos were finally returned to his homeland, the debate over his legacy became a heated one over where and how he would be buried...
...of Fascists and others by Communists...
Vol. 126 • June 1999 • No. 11
