The Life of the Corpse
Journal Article
2009
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Authors
Journal Title
African Studies
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Volume Title
Publisher
Taylor and Francis
Publisher
University of Cape Town
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Abstract
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
Description
Reference:
Posel, D., Gupta, P. 2009. The Life of the Corpse. African Studies.