Department of social anthropology seminar with Joost Fontein

The Department of Social Anthropology has the pleasure to invite you to a seminar with Joost Fontein from the University of Edinburgh. He will present the following paper:

"Re-making the dead, uncertainty and the torque of human materials in northern Zimbabwe"

Abstract
In March 2011 news reports emerged of massive war veteran-led exhumations taking place at a disused mine in Northern Zimbabwe where the remains of hundreds of people apparently killed by the Smith regime during the 1970s had been (re)‘discovered’. This paper considers how the controversies provoked by these exhumations offer key insight into Zimbabwe’s ‘politics of the dead’. Apart from the crude politicking & grotesque displays involved, perhaps the most striking aspect of these events was the way that the qualities of the human materials themselves animated the heated debates that ensued. This paper explores how fraught questions about the identity of the dead, the manner of their deaths, and who has sovereignty over them – i.e. by whom and how they should exhumed and reburied – were provoked by the excessive potentialities of the human substances being exhumed; by their profoundly evocative and affective, yet unstable, uncertain, and ultimately indeterminate materialities. It argues that the Mt Darwin exhumations and the responses they provoked, illustrate how human remains can exemplify what Chris Pinney has called ‘the torque of materiality’; and how the ‘alterity of an enfleshed world’ makes possible the very politics of uncertainty and (un) becoming in which they are entwined.

Bionote
Fontein is a social anthropologist interested in the political imbrications of landscape, materiality, water and human remains in southern Africa. His first book, entitled The Silence of Great Zimbabwe: Contested Landscapes & the Power of Heritage, was published by UCL Press in 2006. He is currently writing a second book entitled Graves & Water: Belonging, Sovereignty and the Political Materiality of Landscape, and am developing a new research project exploring the Materialities of Death in Southern Africa (MODISA). I am an editor of the Journal of Southern African Studies, and co-founder of a new Africanist journal called Critical African Studies.



All interested are welcome!

Best regards
BSAS Comittee