Premium
Inhabiting Death in the Presence of the Body: Challenges of Exhumation in the Case of the Malvinas War
Author(s) -
Panizo Laura M.
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
bulletin of latin american research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.24
H-Index - 33
eISSN - 1470-9856
pISSN - 0261-3050
DOI - 10.1111/blar.13165
Subject(s) - agency (philosophy) , perspective (graphical) , resistance (ecology) , history , criminology , sociology , ethnology , art , social science , ecology , visual arts , biology
This article explores how a group of relatives of fallen soldiers of the Malvinas War inhabited death from the immediate aftermath of the conflict to the identification of the bodies in 2017. From a perspective borrowed from the anthropology of death and the body, it discusses how the status of these bodies shaped their relatives' representations of these deaths, understood as holy, heroic and sacrificial and inhabited through the performance of various mourning rituals. Finally, it demonstrates how the prospect of exhumation provoked resistance and fear, due to the unpredictable agency of the ‘corporeality of the dead’ in social life.