The Political Lives Of Dead Bodies

by Verdery, Katherine

• ISBN13: 9780231112314
• ISBN10: 0231112319
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-09-30
• Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr

Summary

Since 1989, scores of bodies across Eastern Europe have been exhumed and brought to rest in new gravesites. Katherine Verdery investigates why certain corpses -- the bodies of revolutionary leaders, heroes, artists, and other luminaries, as well as more humble folk -- have taken on a political life in the turbulent times following the end of Communist Party rule, and what roles they play in revising the past and reorienting the present. Enlivening and invigorating the dialogue on postsocialist politics, this imaginative study helps us understand the dynamic and deeply symbolic nature of politics -- and how it can breathe new life into old bones.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	xi
Preface and Acknowledgments	xiii
Introduction: Corpses on the Move	1	(3)
A Parade of Dead Bodies	4	(19)
Named and Famous Dead: Statues	4	(9)
Names and Famous Corpses	13	(7)
Anonymous Dead	20	(3)
Dead Bodies Animate the Study of Politics	23	(32)
Why Dead Bodies?	27	(6)
Reordering Worlds of Meaning	33	(22)
Authority, Politics, and the Sacred	37	(1)
Moral Order	38	(1)
Reconfiguring Space and Time	39	(1)
National Identities and Social Relations	40	(15)
The Restless Bones of Bishop Inochentie Micu	55	(40)
Who Was Bishop Inochentie Micu?	58	(7)
Inochentie Begins to Stir	65	(23)
Competition Over Property	66	(6)
Troubles Within Romanian Orthodoxy	72	(2)
Competition Around Romanian Identity	74	(3)
Inochentie's Biography and the Question of Sentiment	77	(2)
Competition in the Religious Market	79	(5)
Reorganizing World Religions	84	(4)
Inochentie Comes Home	88	(7)
Giving proper Burial, Reconfiguring Space and Time	95	(34)
Former Yugoslavia, land of Graves	98	(5)
Reconfiguring Space	103	(3)
The Politics of Territory	103	(1)
Ancestors, Soil, and Nations	104	(2)
Ancestors and Proper Burial	106	(5)
Reconfiguring Time	111	(18)
Accountability and the Past: Rewriting History	111	(4)
Time Compression and the Shapes of History	115	(5)
Reconfigured Temporalities and Alternative Political Projects	120	(9)
Notes	129	(38)
References	167	(10)
Index	177