Destruction and Human Remains: Disposal and concealment in genocide and mass violence

263 Pages·2014·2.286 MB·English

by  Elisabeth Anstett (editor), Jean-Marc Dreyfus (editor)

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Human Remains and Violence
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Destruction and human remains r
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human remains
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Destruction and human remains investigates a crucial question frequently t
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neglected in academic debate in the fields of mass violence and o
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genocide studies: what is done to the bodies of the victims after they
are killed? In the context of mass violence, death does not constitute a Disposal and concealment in
the end of the executors’ work. Their victims’ remains are often treated n genocide and mass violence
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and manipulated in very specific ways, amounting in some cases to true

social engineering with often remarkable ingenuity. To address these h
seldom-documented phenomena, this volume includes chapters based u Edited by ÉlisabEth anstEtt
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on extensive primary and archival research to explore why, how and by
and JEan-Marc DrEyfus
whom these acts have been committed through recent history. a
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The book opens this line of enquiry by investigating the ideological, r
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technical and practical motivations for the varying practices pursued
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by the perpetrator, examining a diverse range of historical events from
throughout the twentieth century and across the globe. These nine a
original chapters explore this demolition of the body through the use in
of often systemic, bureaucratic and industrial processes, whether by s
disposal, concealment, exhibition or complete bodily annihilation, to
display the intentions and socio-political frameworks of governments,
perpetrators and bystanders.
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Never before has a single publication brought together the extensive
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amount of work devoted to the human body on the one hand and to t
mass violence on the other, and until now the question of the body in E
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the context of mass violence has remained a largely unexplored area.
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Interdisciplinary in scope, Destruction and human remains will appeal to n
readers interested in the history and implications of genocide and mass d
violence, including researchers in anthropology, sociology, law, politics D
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and modern warfare.
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Élisabeth Anstett is a Researcher in Social Anthropology at the Centre National de f
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la Recherche Scientifique, France, and a Director of the Corpses of Mass Violence
and Genocide programme funded by the European Research Council s
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Jean-Marc Dreyfus is Reader in Holocaust Studies at the University of Manchester, d
and a Director of the Corpses of Mass Violence and Genocide programme funded s
by the European Research Council )
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ISBN 978-0-7190-9602-0 o.u
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www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk de
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Destruction and human remains
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HUMAN REMAINS AND VIOLENCE
Human remains and violence aims to question the social legacy of
mass violence by studying how different societies have coped with
the dead bodies resulting from war, genocide and state-sponsored
brutality. However, rather paradoxically, given the large volume of
work devoted to the body on the one hand, and to mass violence on
the other, the question of the body in the context of mass violence
remains a largely unexplored area and even an academic blind spot.
Interdisciplinary in nature, Human remains and violence intends to
show how various social and cultural treatments of the dead body
simultaneously challenge common representations, legal practices
and morality. This series aims to provide proper intellectual and
theoretical tools for a better understanding of mass violence’s
aftermaths.
Series editors
Jean-Marc Dreyfus & Élisabeth Anstett
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Destruction and
human remains
Disposal and concealment in
genocide and mass violence
Edited by
Élisabeth Anstett & Jean-Marc Dreyfus
Manchester University Press
Manchester and New York
distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan
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Copyright © Manchester University Press 2014
While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University
Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no
chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in
writing of both author and publisher.
Published by Manchester University Press
Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK
and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk
Distributed in the United States exclusively by
Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York,
NY 10010, USA
Distributed in Canada exclusively by
UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall,
Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for
ISBN 978 07190 9602 0 hardback
First published 2014
The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for
any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does
not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or
appropriate.
Typeset in Minion and Helvetica by R. J. Footring Ltd, Derby
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Contents
List of contributors page vii
Acknowledgements xii
Introduction: the tales destruction tells 1
Élisabeth Anstett & Jean-Marc Dreyfus
Part I: Actors
1 ‘As if nothing ever happened’: massacres, missing
corpses, and silence in a Bosnian community 15
Max Bergholz
2 A specialist: the daily work of Erich Muhsfeldt,
chief of the crematorium at Majdanek concentration
and extermination camp, 1942–44 46
Elissa Mailänder
3 Lands of Unkultur: mass violence, corpses,
and the Nazi imagination of the East 69
Michael McConnell
Part II: Practices
4 Earth, fire, water: or how to make the Armenian
corpses disappear 89
Raymond H. Kévorkian
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vi Contents
5 Sinnreich erdacht: machines of mass incineration
in fact, fiction, and forensics 117
Robert Jan van Pelt
6 When death is not the end: towards a typology of
the treatment of corpses of ‘disappeared detainees’
in Argentina from 1975 to 1983 146
Mario Ranalletti
(with the collaboration of Esteban Pontoriero)
Part III: Logics
7 State violence and death politics in post-revolutionary Iran 183
Chowra Makaremi
8 Death and dismemberment: the body and counter-
revolutionary warfare in apartheid South Africa 204
Nicky Rousseau
9 The Tutsi body in the 1994 genocide: ideology, physical
destruction, and memory 226
Rémi Korman
Index 243
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Contributors
Élisabeth Anstett has been a social anthropologist and tenured
research scholar at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
(CNRS) in Paris since October 2009, and is a member of IRIS
(Interdisciplinary Research Institute on Social issues). Her area
of expertise covers Europe and the post-socialist world, on which
she has published extensively. Her recent works focus on the way
post-Soviet societies are dealing with the traces left by the Soviet
concentration camp system, among which are mass graves, and
more broadly on the legacies of mass violence in Eastern Europe,
especially in Russia and Belarus. She has published, among other
works, Une Atlantide russe: anthropologie de la mémoire en Russie
postsoviétique (Paris: La Découverte, 2007) and co-edited with
Luba Jurgenson Le Goulag en héritage, pour une anthropologie de la
trace (Paris: Pétra, 2009).
Max Bergholz is the James M. Stanford Professor in Genocide
and Human Rights Studies at Concordia University in Montreal,
Canada. Trained as a historian, he is an expert on the Balkans and
Eastern Europe, with a special focus on the history of the countries
of the former Yugoslavia. His research interests include the micro
dynamics of communal peace and discord, mass violence, and
post-conflict remembrance. He has conducted extensive fieldwork
in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia, where he researched
in central and provincial archives and conducted oral history
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viii List of contributors
interviews in small towns and villages. His research has been
funded by grants and fellowships from Fulbright, the International
Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), and the American Council
of Learned Societies (ACLS), among others. He is currently working
on a book entitled None of Us Dared Say Anything: Mass Killing in a
Bosnian Community During World War II and the Postwar Culture
of Silence. Based in Concordia University’s Department of History,
he is the Associate Director of the Montreal Institute for Genocide
and Human Rights Studies.
Jean-Marc Dreyfus is Reader in Holocaust Studies within the
Department of History at the University of Manchester. His
research interests include: Holocaust studies; genocide studies and
the anthropology of genocide; the history of the Jews in Europe in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in France; the
economic history of France and Germany; Holocaust memory
and the politics of memory; the modern history of Alsace; and the
rebuilding of post-war societies. He is the author of four monographs,
including Pillages sur ordonnances: La confiscation des banques
juives en France et leur restitution, 1940–1953 (Paris: Fayard, 2003),
with Sarah Gensburger, Nazi Labor Camps in Paris (New York:
Berghahn Books, 2012) and Il m’appelait Pikolo: un compagnon de
Primo Levi raconte (He Called Me Pikolo: A Companion of Primo
Levi Tells His Story) (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2007). He is the co-
editor of the Dictionnaire de la Shoah (Dictionary of the Holocaust)
(Paris: Larousse, 2009).
Raymond H. Kévorkian is a director of research emeritus at the
University of Paris 8-Saint-Denis. Of Armenian origin, he has
written extensively on both the medieval and the modern history
of Armenia, and is the author of eighteen books. He is a foreign
member of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia and a
board member of the International Association of Armenian
Studies. He is also the curator emeritus of the Nubarian Library in
Paris. Raymond Kévorkian is one of the leading specialists on the
Armenian genocide and his book on the subject has been published
both in French and in English: Le Génocide des Arméniens (Paris:
Odile Jacob, 2006); The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History
(London: I. B. Tauris, 2011). He has also published Les Yeux
brûlants – mémoire des Arméniens, with Antoine Agoudjian (Arles:
Actes Sud, 2006).
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List of contributors ix
Rémi Korman is a doctoral candidate in history at École des
Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. His PhD focuses on
the politics of memory of the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda and more
particularly on memorial processes. Through working on his PhD
he has also developed a strong interest in preserving the archives of
the genocide, and accordingly has recently established the website
www.rwanda.hypotheses.org. He is currently working for the
‘Reseau Memorha’ in Lyon, an organization focused on museums
and memory issues, and has recently published ‘La politique de
mémoire du génocide des Tutsi au Rwanda: enjeux et évolutions’
in Droit et Cultures: Revue Internationale Interdisciplinaire (2014).
Elissa Mailänder is Associate Professor in Contemporary History
at the Centre d’Histoire de Sciences Po, Paris. She gained her PhD at
the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the University
of Erfurt in 2007. Her research and teaching interests are in the
history and theory of violence, gender, and sexuality, material
culture, and the history and theory of the every day. An English
edition of her book Gewalt im Dienstalltag: Die SS-Aufseherinnen
des Kon zentrations- und Vernichtungslagers Majdanek 1942–1944
(Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2009) is forthcoming (Workday
Violence: Female Guards at Lublin-Majdanek, 1942–1944). She has
published several articles on the history of Nazi perpetrators and
the structures, mechanisms, and dynamics of violence in German
concentration and extermination camps.
Chowra Makaremi is a social anthropologist and tenured research
scholar at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in
Paris. She has been a visiting scholar in Princeton, McGill, and
Columbia Universities and has completed ethnographic fieldwork
and published on issues of migration, asylum, racism, and youth
delinquency. Since 2010 she has worked on memories of violence
and the post-revolution era in Iran, publishing Le Cahier d'Aziz: au
coeur de la révolution iranienne (Paris: Gallimard) in 2011.
Michael McConnell is a doctoral candidate at the University
of Tennessee. His work focuses on examining how the merger
of German counter-insurgency practices developed in Nazi-
occupied Europe with domestic policing encouraged violence
in side Germany at the end of the Second World War. The project
was featured in an article published in the spring 2012 issue of
the journal Central European History, and his research has been
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