Browsing by Author "Gupta, Pamila"

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    The Life of the Corpse
    (Taylor and Francis, 2009) Posel, Deborah; Gupta, Pamila
    This collection of six articles draws on contributions presented to the international symposium on The Life of the Corpse, convened by the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) in August 2008. The symposium in turn was the culmination of a thematic study group on the same topic. 1 The intellectual animus for both was an interest in considering the cultural politics of death, from the specific vantage point of the corpse and the challenges in meaning-making and regulation that the dead body presents. In particular, as organisers of these forums, 2 we wanted to foreground what we deemed the dualistic life of the corpse: as a material object, on one hand, and a signifier of wider political, economic, cultural, ideological and theological endeavours, on the other. The moment of death produces a decaying body, an item of waste that requires disposal – simultaneous with an opportunity, sometimes an imperative – to recuperate the meaning of spent life, symbolically effacing the material extinction that death represents. Every society, then, has had to face the question: how to reconcile the quest for a dignified end of human life, with a putrefying piece of flesh indistinguishable from other animals? This resource is a postscript of the final published articel, available through Taylor and Francis here: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00020180903381248