Mass violence leaves behind a trail of destruction. Similar to people, things also fall victim to displacement and armed conflict. Possessions swap hands, get voluntarily or forcefully relinquished, exchanged for food and shelter, hidden away, entrusted to friends and neighbours for safekeeping, or brought along into forced exile. Objects find their way to mass graves too, in the pockets and bodily orifices of the killed, on the fingers and wrists of the dead. In times of war, things are also made in response to economic scarcity and deprivation. Produced from waste and debris, such objects come to serve as mementoes, reflecting prison or frontline experiences and attesting to the hardships of the time. In the aftermath of war and conflict, things are often rescued by survivors or the families of victims, inherited, retrieved by forensic experts, or looted from war graves. The surviving thing is mobilized in art practices and storytelling, displayed in museums, or called forth to testify in judicial proceedings. Whether as trophies, souvenir, or evidence, things remain imbued with affect, permeated with memories (both actual and constructed), and burdened with conflicting narratives of the past. 1 This special issue investigates the role of objects in European histories and legacies of war, genocide and forced migration. Combining expertise in anthropology, forensic archaeology, cultural geography, history, and cultural and memory studies, the articles explore how rescued, looted, misappropriated, abandoned, found and recovered things live on in the aftermath of mass violence. Based on a broad range of cases and geographical contexts, from Spain to France, Italy to Poland, this issue looks at material, symbolic and political practices around surviving things and traces their trajectories in post-conflict settings. The authors show that personal objects are endowed with various qualities
Transfers of property are an integral part of armed conflicts and instances of mass political violence. Not just the state and the military, but also civilians confiscate, dispossess, loot and redistribute wealth across ethnic, national, class or religious lines, in the process re-enacting and sustaining the boundaries of othering and belonging that stand behind the conflict. In this way, economic violence takes on an essentially political dimension. Although, to date, rarely conceptualized as such, even grave robbery perpetrated at the burial sites of a defeated enemy or a member of othered minority constitutes a practice of alterity and dehumanization. And while, in the aftermath of violence, this very fact has the ability to invest things taken from mass graves with a particularly disturbing potential, this article reflects on the practices and affective dynamics surrounding objects of a distinctively unsettling status: golden teeth and dental bridges in their ambivalent condition between material objects (valuables) and bodily remains of the dead. They are considered in this article through the conceptual lens of ‘atopic objects’, a notion designed to bring to the fore both the out-of-place quality and the at once as-well-as/neither-nor character of those things, suspended on the threshold between human remains and material objects, private possessions and body parts of othered and violently dispossessed people. In this article, the author asks how this uneasy ontological status is experienced, acted upon and negotiated by the new (and rarely rightful) ‘owners’ and offers an insight into the practical, affective, political and also legal framings through which ‘atopic objects’ are being constructed and reconstructed either as things or as body parts and, at the cost of their unsettling quality, become embedded in the postwar orders, both in the intimate order of the body and in the political–economic order of the state.
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