No abstract
As academics, we strongly believe in the free circulation of thoughts and ideas. This journal is thus the outcome of a research programme that lasted for several years, during which the overarching objective was to generate dialogue between academics and practitioners with various expertise on human remains in contexts of mass violence all over the world. We launched this journal with the aim of pursuing this dialogue, and this issue perfectly illustrates this objective.As editors of Human Remains and Violence. An Interdisciplinary Journal, we are aware that this issue marks an important milestone in the existence of our journal since it is the first one to be published straight away in open access, that is, without fee or subscription. We are convinced that this initiative will increase the journal's impact and worldwide readability and generate even more editorial projects.This fifth issue shows perfectly how rich is our scope. Written by expert authors, the six scientific articles contained herein address the issue of exhumations of human remains from a diversity of angles and with a variety of geographical focuses, thereby prompting a comparative assessment of the issues raised and of the solutions adopted by different states faced with human remains.Looking at the past through a historical lens, Queralt Solé and Jacques Gersternkorn respectively explore, on the one hand, the building of the Valle de los Caídos (the Valley of the Fallen) -a huge cenotaph assembling Franco's tomb and the remains of the Spanish Civil War's soldiers, and, on the other, the fate of an eighteenth-century Jewish cemetery recently discovered in the French city of Lyon. The convergence between those two case studies is fascinating: while one illustrates the distant consequences of a civil war and the on-going process of coming to terms with a difficult, violent and still polemical past, the other reveals how Holocaust memory nowadays influences the treatment of ancient but 'ordinary' Jewish graves unrelated to mass violence. Both contributions highlight the persistence of human remains that do not rest until properly buried, as well as they do the long-lasting aftermaths of irregular inhumations. Linking the past to the present and focusing on the case of victims of Brazilian dictatorship, forensic anthropologist Marco Aurélio Guimarães argues that exhumation -although a social and historical event -can be properly understood only when the routine and technical work conducted in mortuaries is taken into account.
From 1945 until around 1960, ceremonies of a new kind took place throughout Europe to commemorate the Holocaust and the deportation of Jews; ashes would be taken from the site of a concentration camp, an extermination camp, or the site of a massacre and sent back to the deportees country of origin (or to Israel). In these countries, commemorative ceremonies were then organised and these ashes (sometimes containing other human remains) placed within a memorial or reburied in a cemetery. These transfers of ashes have, however, received little attention from historical researchers. This article sets out to describe a certain number of them, all differing considerably from one another, before drawing up a typology of this phenomenon and attempting its analysis. It investigates the symbolic function of ashes in the aftermath of the Second World War and argues that these transfers – as well as having a mimetic relationship to transfers of relics – were also instruments of political legitimisation.
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