The Politics of Dead Bodies

The Politics of Dead Bodies, by Katherine Verdery.

In this piece, Verdery examines the practice and significance of exhuming and moving dead bodies of named and famous people, and of unnamed, anonymous people. She also talks about the importance of statues, and how they are more than just a symbol of the person they’re modeled after.

In the past, the practice of traveling with or hosting corpses of famous individuals was common. The travel of bodies was done with popes, priests, authors, poets, and authors. To us today, this practice seems grotesque and abnormal, but in the past, it was a way to  display the person’s body to the public like a wake, in times when travel was not as viable.

In her examination behind the politics of bodies after death, Verdery asks: what is the significance behind the increasingly common handling of dead bodies in the post-socialist time period? We must consider what constitutes a “proper burial,” death rituals and beliefs of the culture, and how this contributes to the retrieving and rewriting of memories associated with the dead person. She breaks her article up into two categories: the named and famous, (consisting of statues, famous people returned from abroad, and celebrated local figures being reburied), and then the unnamed.

Verdery argues that although statues are a representation of the person, they are also more than a symbol–they are the body of the person. By being exempt from the effects of time, they are brought into the “realm of the timeless or sacred, like an icon.” pg 5 The act of tearing down statues of the leaders is a directly political action taken on their “bodies”. By destroying their body, people are making clear their unhappiness with this person.

Many corpses of renowned people were exhumed from their graves where they were originally buried and taken back to the country of their origin, because their countrymen felt they had some sort of ownership over the corpse.  By moving the bodies, a connection was established between treating former heads of state as religious relics as they did in the olden days. Verdery says, “by repositioning [the corpses], restoring them to honor, expelling them, or simply drawing attention to them, their exit from one grave and descent into another mark a change in social visibilities and values…” pg 19

When it comes to unnamed bodies, the dead body politics of nameless people allows direct reevaluation of values into the lives of the families or groups close to the dead person. Visceral processes of reburial, grieving, or vengeance. The exhumation of nameless bodies was common with persecuted people or victims of the ethnic cleansings of WWII. By doing so, these people were returned to their homes.