Corpses, dead body politics and agency in human geography: following the corpse of Dr Petru Groza

Abstract

This paper follows the mobilities between 1958 and 1990 of the dead body of Dr Petru Groza , a significant political figure in post-World War II socialist Romania, to explore the implications for human geography of engaging with the dead. Although there has been a considerable interest in 'geographies of the body' and 'deathscapes', human geography has had relatively little to say about dead bodies. The paper draws on literatures from death studies and dead body politics, as well as research in memory studies, history, anthropology and law, to develop an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the role of the corpse in society, and argues that human geography should do more to consider how dead bodies contribute to the formation of contemporary geographies. To illustrate these points the analysis first explores how the treatment of Groza's corpse and the 'deathwork' associated with it is an example of 'dead body politics'. Second, the analysis draws out the agency of the corpse and its role in a variety of 'deathscapes'. The conclusion considers the implications for human geography of engaging with 'corpse geographies' more generally.

Missing geographies

“…In the context of work on death and grief (Maddrell, 2009;Maddrell and Sidaway, 2010;Rose, 2009;Young and Light, 2012), there is currently rich comment on the relations surrounding endof-life and some of this work has uncannily brought grief-worlds to light. Maddrell's (2009: 677) moving commentary on the liminal spaces of grief, for example, serves to highlight how grief involves the animation of the absent dead in various ways.…”

The Bioarchaeology of Postmortem Agency: Integrating Archaeological Theory with Human Skeletal Remains

“…Their analysis focuses on how dead bodies haunt places as well as political debates. This haunting they argue produces deathscapes (Maddrell & Sidaway 2010;Young & Light 2013), spaces where the dead remain social actors who shape the outcomes of political struggles amongst the living. Their attempt to focus attention towards how the dead are thus mobilized in place-making seeks to demonstrate how the dead can live quite lengthy social afterlives in which they may be refashioned as the living contest the 'truth' of their former lives.…”

“Over our dead bodies”: Placing necropolitical activism

“…Though several scholars have analyzed different dimensions of the Mamilla conflict (Makdisi, 2010;Reiter, 2011;Larkin and Dumper, 2012), the clash over the authenticity of the rehabilitated gravestones remains largely overlooked and under-theorized. This focus on the gravestone as a critical geopolitical signifier, almost detached from the body of the dead it marks, sets this discussion apart from other debates that place their analytical focus on the dead body as the pivotal object of geopolitical mobilization (Young and Light 2012;Verdery 1999). After hundreds of years of layered burial in Mamilla, most of the tombstones no longer function as the markers of individual death, but as designations of the site's cultural and religious significance.…”