Session Abstract

Historians are reviving and revising their interest in the physical presence of the dead. In part this is due to the discipline’s overall shift to include geographies and populations in which the dead play an integral role in social, cultural, and political formations. Yet it also traces to an increased exchange with disciplines that commonly take such matters as central, and with legal and critical inquiries that demand ethical treatment of the dead as of the living. Building on and yet expanding frameworks of memory, commemoration, and emotion, scholars have begun to concentrate anew on the corporeality of the dead, whether as an epistemological problem, an object of study, an indigenous right, or, indeed, as a method. Central to these investigations is the idea that the dead are not simply symbols imbued with meaning by the living but social agents in their own right.      Increased collaboration between historians and archaeologists, anthropologists, activists, indigenous peoples, physicians and others who regularly deal with material matters have greatly revised some fields (such as early medieval history.) Importantly, however, scholars of the modern era have also been influenced by reflection on the historical dynamics of the twentieth century. Biopolitics and necropolitics; total warfare and hidden wars; mass violence; rapid urbanization and globalization; decolonization; nation-building; looting; projects of repatriation and of truth and reconciliation: each of these informs various strands of study on the social lives of the dead. The impact on modern history has been more gradual than dramatic, perhaps, yet it is nonetheless of critical importance. The purpose of this roundtable is to bring these themes and methods – and their ethical implications -- fully to light.    The session will bring historians together with scholars in such fields as anthropology; geography; history; law; and science and technology studies to speak across disciplines, but also to reflect on the new frameworks for understanding historical change and dynamics that these factors impose upon us. Honor Keeler examines the domestic and international development of the Indigenous Repatriation Movement. Despite domestic breakdowns of institutional racism in museums in the United States, Indigenous peoples worldwide have discovered that the necessity for repatriation extends beyond the borders of their current nation-state or nation-states, leading to an international human rights crisis surrounding international repatriation involving free, prior and informed consent. Cary Karacas focuses on the politics of memory in relation to the issue of coming to an accurate count as to how many people were killed in the firebombing of Tokyo during the Second World War. Rebecca Nedostup will discuss how scholarship on kinship, native-place, and other charitable networks that move the dead over great distances and across borders revises our modern emphasis on the symbolic dead of the nation-state and the work of international aid organizations. Drawing on ethnographic material from Singapore, Ruth Toulson will examine the consequences of forced exhumation, suggesting that the political manipulation of corpses, here through the compulsory destruction of cemeteries, has become a quotidian strategy of political power.