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Bodies of Lenin: The hidden science of communist sovereignty
Abstract
This essay analyzes the project of maintaining the body of V. I. Lenin in the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow for the past ninety years. It focuses on the materiality of this particular body,the unique biological science that developed around the project, and the peculiar political role this body has performed
... The body's own animation, and its capacity for agency, for "doing" in the world, were likewise altered. January 23rd of 1924 brought fresh change, as the body underwent an autopsy and a basic embalming (which saw incisions cut not only into the flesh but also across the major arteries and blood vessels, as well as the removal of brain and organs) by Alexei Abrikosov so that it would survive-or, at least, not visibly deteriorate-over the three days of public viewing prior to the funeral planned for January 27 and the body's anticipated burial (Getty 2013: 71;Yurchak 2015Yurchak , 2017. ...
... His recognition of preservation as perpetual process rather than static state is compelling. 1.56 The decision to preserve Lenin's body in perpetuity was not a decision made at or even soon after Lenin's death; Yurchak (2015Yurchak ( , 2017 recounts the slow process whereby the period of preservation was (repeatedly) extended before it became a long(er)-term goal. 1.57 ...
... Si la maintenance au sens strict, c'est-à-dire au sens des réparateurs et agents d'entretien des objets techniques, a été au coeur des premières études du courant des Repairs and Maintenance Studies (Dant & Bowles, 2003 ;Dant, 2005 ;Denis & Pontille, 2014), les auteurs de ce courant ont encouragé, à de nombreuses reprises, l'adoption d'une définition large de l'activité de maintenance (Henke, 2007(Henke, , 2017(Henke, , 2019Sims & Henke, 2012), constatant qu'une grande partie du corps social était en réalité impliquée dans des activités visant à maintenir l'ordre technique comme l'ordre social (Barnes, 2016 ;Edgerton, 2006). En s'intéressant aussi bien à la maintenance du corps de Lénine (Yurchak, 2015) qu'au maintien de la crédibilité de la dissuasion nucléaire américaine (Sims & Henke, 2012), les études appartenant au Repairs and Maintenances Studies ont mis en avant la variété de formes que prennent cette activité et sa dépendance fondamentale à l'objet et/ou à la situation qu'elle vise à maintenir. C'est ce que Christopher Henke, une figure importante de ce courant, appelle la « relational ontology of repair » (Henke, 2019). ...
... Dès lors, il devient essentiel de maintenir la robustesse dans le temps. De nombreuses études traitant de la maintenance ont mis en avant deux caractéristiques fondamentales de cette activité : d'une part, elle est ontologiquement dépendante de l'objet qu'elle vise à maintenir (Denis, 2018 ;Henke, 2019 ;Yurchak, 2015) ; d'autre part, elle est loin d'être une activité neutre qui se limite à l'entretien des infrastructures, mais est au contraire un lieu d'expression très actif des oppositions sociales et politiques (Barnes, 2016 ;Graham & Thrift, 2007 ;Henke, 2000). Ces études encouragent alors à être attentif à la fois aux formes que prennent la maintenance -particulièrement au choix de ce qui est maintenu et de ce qui ne l'est pas et avec quel objectif (immuabilité, fonctionnalité, authenticité, etc.) -ainsi qu'à la manière dont ces formes sont le résultat d'un jeu de pouvoir entre différents collectifs qui défendent des intérêts particuliers, et dans le but de gagner ou de pérenniser une position sociale. ...
Cette thèse prend comme point de départ l'étonnement de voir les centrales nucléaires tenir sur la durée. En effet, malgré le vieillissement des installations, malgré l'obsolescence de certains équipements, malgré l'immense évolution des connaissances scientifiques et techniques depuis l'époque où ces technologies ont été développées, malgré des accidents qui ont remis en cause la capacité de prévenir totalement les risques, les centrales nucléaires françaises sont encore débout, encore en fonctionnement et, en 2020, il est plus que jamais question d'étendre leur durée de vie au-delà de leur limite initiale. Ce parcours de vie d'ouvrages industriels dangereux, qui s'étend sur 70 ans, incite à poser la question des risques technologiques sur une temporalité longue et à examiner comment la sécurité de ces installations a pu être construite puis maintenue de sorte à pouvoir fonctionner aussi longtemps. Cette thèse propose d'aborder ce sujet en étudiant l'histoire de la robustesse des installations nucléaires françaises face à la menace sismique. Par une sociologie embarquée et grâce à un accès privilégié aux archives de la sûreté nucléaire en France, ce travail propose une plongée dans le monde des experts, scientifiques et ingénieurs, qui oeuvrent depuis 60 ans pour instaurer la robustesse des installations nucléaires en France. Cette instauration se décompose en quatre épisodes qui structurent l'analyse : l'élaboration de la robustesse autour du site nucléaire de Fessenheim, la réalisation de la robustesse à l'échelle industrielle à partir du cas du site de Tricastin, la maintenance de la robustesse face à l'évolution des connaissances et enfin la réparation de la robustesse après l'accident de Fukushima Daiichi. Ce que met en exergue ce travail c'est que la robustesse, loin d'être une donnée objectivable, intrinsèque aux objets, est en réalité une qualité subjective fondée sur une conviction partagée au sein d'une arène spécifique. Dans notre cas, cette conviction est entièrement fondée sur une série de conventions d'équivalence (Desrosieres, 1993) qui lie entre eux différents modes d'existence du risque : comme sujet politique, comme objet scientifique et comme propriété d'un objet technique. La robustesse dépend alors de la pérennité de ces conventions d'équivalence et le travail des experts peut alors être vu comme celui de mainteneur de leur validité. En étudiant l'élaboration et le maintien de la conviction dans le caractère robuste des installations nucléaires, ce travail invite à poser un regard nouveau sur les risques en étant attentif à la fois à leur histoire et à leurs multiples modes d'existence.
... It is a construct that helps in identifying and understanding the divide between ideological, authoritarian, and autocratic enunciations of the rulers in the Soviet Union of the 1960s -1980s. Absurd ideologies, practices and measures thrive on fantasy (Žižek, 1989) to create safe spaces for their internalization, materialization (Yurchak, 2015) practicalization and securitization in individuals in society and workplaces (Mitzen, 2006). When such hypernormalization is attained, it paradoxically creates a fundamental gap between the official rhetoric/enunciation on EDI, for example, (e.g., organizations' strategic value statements on treasuring equality, diversity, inclusion, and wellbeing) and the practical realities of how staff and potential employees experience EDI interventions (e.g., lack of access to promotion, to career development, to employment access, to the entrenchment of inequality). ...
Research background Recent grand challenges around the world ranging from the Coronavirus health pandemic to the socio-political and economic disruptions (Caligiuri et al., 2020) affecting people's and organizations' sense of 'normalcy' highlight that the world is already in a new state of the 'hypernormal'-a construct that makes meaning of the disconnect between authoritative and often authoritarian discourse on reality and people's mutative, experienced understandings of that reality. This study focuses and problematizes how the official, traditional, and authoritative discourse of Equality Diversity and Inclusion highlights absurdities of inequality experienced by marginalized groups such as autistic jobseekers in workplaces and society. I focus on the absurd irrationality felt by autistic jobseekers when they encounter hiring and retention practices that are significantly paradoxical to the authoritarian rhetoric of principles of libertarianism, equality, diversity, and inclusion in Equality Diversity and Inclusion discourse Caligiuri et al. (2020) among others. Research goals and why the work was worth doing • To investigate how the authoritative and authoritarian EDI discourse has paradoxically created/entrenched a hypernormalized state of workplace, work and worker inequality and an ethics of injustice and authoritarianism in contemporary workplaces and society. • To reimagine workplace and worker inequality from the foundational paradigm of EDI by showing what a less authoritarian and autocratic discourse of autistic jobseekers' perspectives could offer in addressing organizational and societal inequalities and insecurities. • To problematize hypernormalization of the absurd EDI and HRM practices of hiring and retention within a post socialist Soviet Union and a postcolonial world where emerging digitalization and the flexibilization of work, the workplace and the worker pose renewed challenges to equality of opportunities and possibilities. • To propose a contemporary and more meaningful framework to EDI and the UN SDGs to help in meaningfully addressing the current hypernormalized state of irrationality of workplace and worker inequality. Whilst previous studies have normalized the benefits of the Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion perspective, I highlight the need for a new normal of EDI, by problematizing the disconnect between the enunciated EDI benefits and their re-conceptualized realities from marginalized communities. The proposed reconceptualization and reimagination examine how renewed calls
... The latter is the affectionate titles for the series of web-based seminars, open to all project participants, conducted as part of the project's literature review. Each week a reading was chosen that was then used to inform larger discussions relevant to ongoing project, such as exhibition and design critique (Keramidas, 2015;Weber, 2016), intangible heritage practices (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 2004;Rosner et al, 2018), and concerns relating to object integrity and authenticity (Agar, 1998;Domínguez Rubio, 2016;Yurchak, 2015). This process helped inform the workshop series conducted during the fieldwork stage. ...
This research report presents the findings of a series of practice-based research workshops that constituted the bulk of Circuits of Practice’s research. This project, funded by AHRC, has leveraged a plurality of approaches, theories and methods to conduct interdisciplinary practice-led research at the intersection of the fields of museum studies and media studies. Taking up the metaphor of the electronic circuit, where electrical connections between diverse components enable complex operations to be performed, the project aims at establishing a ‘circuit’ of practice-based, situated reflections through which museum-based and university-based researchers collaborate to address the following overarching question: how do museums narrate modern computing?
... This had its serious philosophical function; socialism/communism was to replace the old religious promises by showing that is able to fulfill them (Kohonen, 2017). Even in such a literal field as ensuring the specific immortality of Lenin's body (Yurchak, 2015). Of course, science in the USSR and satellite countries was involved in the arms race, and scientists were useful to industry, but it remained an important element of legitimacy, of a certain universal promise (Vasilyeva, 2012). ...
By the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, in most parts of Eastern Europe, high expectations associated with postsocialist transition have been substituted by disillusionment. After 1990, Eastern Europe has been internationally treated with a low-interest acknowledgement of what was understood as a slow and erratic, but unquestionable process of integration in a Western-dominated world order. In the context of today’s geopolitical reorganization, East European examples of authoritarian politics once again become discussed as significant reference points for Western and global politics. This book represents a contribution to this debate from a distinctive East European perspective: that of new left scholars and activists from the region, whose lifetime largely corresponds to the transformations of the postsocialist period, and who came to develop an understanding of their environment in terms of its relations to global capitalist processes. A both theoretical and empirical contribution, the book provides essential insights on topics conventionally associated with East European transition from privatization to the politicized slogans of corruption or civil society, and analyzes their connection to the newest reconfigurations of postsocialist capitalist regimes. As a contribution to contemporary debates on the present global socio-political transformation, this collection does not only seek to debate analytical statements, but also to change the field where analytical stakes are set, by adding perspectives that think Eastern Europe’s global relations from within the regional context and its political stakes.
Agnes Gagyi works on East European politics and social movements from the perspective of the region’s long-term global integration. She is researcher on East European social movements at the University of Gothenburg, and member of the Working Group for Public Sociology “Helyzet” in Budapest.
Ondřej Slačálek is a political scientist and journalist, he focuses on East European politics, nationalism and social movements. He works at Charles University, Prague. He is a regular collaborator of Czech new left journal A2/A2larm.
... This had its serious philosophical function; socialism/communism was to replace the old religious promises by showing that is able to fulfill them (Kohonen, 2017). Even in such a literal field as ensuring the specific immortality of Lenin's body (Yurchak, 2015). Of course, science in the USSR and satellite countries was involved in the arms race, and scientists were useful to industry, but it remained an important element of legitimacy, of a certain universal promise (Vasilyeva, 2012). ...
This chapter analyses the causes of the crisis of democracy in the Czech Republic and the possibilities of a chronological analysis of the transformation decades. The crisis of democracy is manifested in the Czech Republic above all by mass disillusionment with democratic politics, and by the open access of oligarchs to political power. Unlike approaches that see this turn as a discontinuity, the chapter describes it as one of the possible and logical results of the whole transformation process. This process is reconstructed as a competition between two capitalist factions and respective political projects: neoliberal nationalism and liberal globalism. The chapter presents a chronological analysis of the three post-communist decades based on the three periods of rule of various factions (1992–1998 neoliberal nationalist rule, 2002–2010 globalist rule, 2013–? oligarchic rule), and three interregna (1990–1992, 1997–2002, 2008–2013). The chapter describes the interests and composition of the factions which competed for power in the transformation decades, analyses the main problems they dealt with during the interregna (economic transformation, democracy, economic dependence) and then looks at the characteristics of the main competing discourses (the naturalness and morality of the market, civil society, democratic majoritarianism, discourse of colony, discourse of corruption).
... This had its serious philosophical function; socialism/communism was to replace the old religious promises by showing that is able to fulfill them (Kohonen, 2017). Even in such a literal field as ensuring the specific immortality of Lenin's body (Yurchak, 2015). Of course, science in the USSR and satellite countries was involved in the arms race, and scientists were useful to industry, but it remained an important element of legitimacy, of a certain universal promise (Vasilyeva, 2012). ...
The concluding chapter discusses five nodes of postsocialist ideological struggles that the book’s authors addressed: anticommunism, Westernism, nationalism, irrationalism and antipolitics (through its three aspects of anti-corruption, civil society and technocratism). Slačálek characterizes these as discourses that are applied to obscure real social conflicts, but which at the same time rely on elements of real experience which can be critically reconstructed, and which can contribute to left-wing analyses and programs. He addresses anticommunism’s paralyzing effect on the local left together with the traps Ostalgia presents for new left politics; speaks of nationalist ideology as a means of autocratic and xenophobic politics, yet also a prism through which essential global power relationships become visible in popular politics; and investigates irrationalism as a powerful tool of neoliberal and neonationalist politics, yet also a ground of conflict that makes visible the political usages of reason and the need for the Left to develop a dialectical and self-critical rationality as a basis for its politics.
... However, like the corpses of other leaders who have been embalmed for indefinite display, the restoration of Marcos's body does not so much forestall the lethal force of time as assert its conquest. Set against the very work of mourning that death demands, it empties the threat of disappearance by turning the dictator's corpse, the very sign of his finitude, into an image of immortality-an incorruptible mask, a body turned effigy (Yurchak, 2015). ...
In 1993, the body of former Philippine dictator, Ferdinand E Marcos, was moved from Honolulu, Hawaii, where he died in exile, to a private mausoleum attached to his ancestral home in Batac, Ilocos Norte. Preserved and placed in a refrigerated coffin while his wife, Imelda, lobbied for his burial at the Heroes’ Cemetery, Marcos’s body remained on display until 2016, when permission for his interment was granted by the newly elected president, Rodrigo Duterte. Drawing on fieldwork conducted at the Marcos Mausoleum prior to the controversial burial and at the protests that came in its wake, this essay examines the sense of loss and longing that has animated the rise of authoritarian nostalgia. Banished yet unburied, the dictator’s embalmed corpse, I suggest, speaks to what remains unmourned under democracy and which thus always threatens to return—namely, a figure of unfettered freedom and authority, whose power might be said to extend over life, death, and time itself. I argue that it is this figure—the figure of a sovereign gone missing—that authoritarian nostalgia takes as its object and which grows more seductive in light of the hollowing out of popular sovereignty that has come to define the post-revolutionary experience.
... c Hình Sự 2011). This sanctioning of the marriage between science and (traditional) religion, while similar to developments in other communist countries (Palmer 2007;Yurchak 2015), plunged Vietnamese society into a feverish telepathic search for bones and spirits connected to all the dead throughout the country's history. ...
Bones of contention: Situating the dead of the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese border war A B S T R A C T Postcolonial Vietnam is characterized by the interplay between necropolitics and necrosociality, as practiced respectively by the militarized state and a society that traditionally maintains relations with the dead. This interplay is key to understanding conflicts in Vietnam over the bones of unidentified war dead. On the one hand, such bones can challenge the state's sovereignty when it assumes the responsibility of taking care of them. On the other hand, they exert strong power over the living, prompting quests to place them in the right kinship and sociopolitical orders-or to erase their memory. This was made dramatically evident in 2011 by one set of human remains, allegedly belonging to a fallen soldier of the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese border war-a conflict that both sides' governments prefer to forget. These remains illuminated the contention in the governing of war dead in postwar Vietnam. Moreover, they made evident the tension in anthropological inquiry about the ontology of human remains. [human bones, unidentified war dead, Sino-Vietnamese border war, necropolitics, necrosociality, Vietnam] Việt Nam thời hậu thuộc đia được đặc trưng bởi sự tương tác ràng buộc giữa chủ nghĩa chính tri. "độc quyền sinh sát" của một chính thể quân sự hóa và một xã hội có truyền thống nhấn ma. nh mối quan hệ giữa người âm với người dương. Sự tương tác này là mấu chốt quan tro. ng để làm rõ những mâu thuẫn xung quanh vấn đề hài cốt vô danh do chiến tranh để la. i. Một mặt, những bộ hài cốt này, nếu thuộc về liệt sĩ, có thể thách thức chủ quyền quốc gia khi chính thể cầm quyền thực hiện trách nhiệm chȃm sóc chúng. Mặt khác, những bộ hài cốt vô danh mang theo chúng một sức ma. nh tiềm ẩn khiến người sống phải lập tức thực hiện nghĩa vu. đi. nh danh và đi. nh phận theo đúng trật tự quan hệ huyết thống, ho. hàng và chính tri. xã hội-hoặc phải tìm cách xóa bỏ những ký ức về chúng. Nȃm 2011, những nghi. ch lý này được làm sáng tỏ qua câu chuyện về một bộ hài cốt ta. i Yên Bái được cho là thuộc về một người lính tử trận trong cuộc chiến tranh biên giới Việt-Trung nȃm 1979, một cuộc chiến mà cả chính quyền Trung Quốc và chính quyền Việt Nam đều muốn quên đi. Không chỉ tiêu biểu cho những tranh chấp chính tri. và xã hội thường xảy trong việc quản lý tử sĩ ở Việt Nam trong thời hậu chiến, trường hợp của bộ hài cốt này còn là một ví du. điển hình cho mối mâu thuẫn trong lý luận nhân ho. c về bản thể ho. c của hài cốt con người. [hài cốt, hài cốt vô danh do chiến tranh để la. i, chiến tranh biên giới Việt Trung, chính tri. độc quyền sinh sát, quan hệ ràng buộc giữa người sống và người đã mất, Việt Nam]
... c Hình Sự 2011). This sanctioning of the marriage between science and (traditional) religion, while similar to developments in other communist countries (Palmer 2007;Yurchak 2015), plunged Vietnamese society into a feverish telepathic search for bones and spirits connected to all the dead throughout the country's history. ...
Postcolonial Vietnam is characterized by the interplay between necropolitics and necrosociality, as practiced respectively by the militarized state and a society that traditionally maintains relations with the dead. This interplay is key to understanding conflicts in Vietnam over the bones of unidentified war dead. On the one hand, such bones can challenge the state's sovereignty when it assumes the responsibility of taking care of them. On the other hand, they exert strong power over the living, prompting quests to place them in the right kinship and sociopolitical orders—or to erase their memory. This was made dramatically evident in 2011 by one set of human remains, allegedly belonging to a fallen soldier of the 1979 Sino‐Vietnamese border war—a conflict that both sides’ governments prefer to forget. These remains illuminated the contention in the governing of war dead in postwar Vietnam. Moreover, they made evident the tension in anthropological inquiry about the ontology of human remains. [ human bones , unidentified war dead , Sino‐Vietnamese border war , necropolitics , necrosociality , Vietnam ]
... Which does not exclude the importance of nonpolitical sovereignty. On this, please readYurchak (2015). ...
This paper is based on an analysis of the concept of sovereignty as promoted by contemporary sovereigntists. I argue that although the sovereigntists vary greatly from country to country, they are united around a specific interpretation of the concept of sovereignty. Based on an analysis of Trumpism and Putinism, the sovereigntist ideologies of the core old democracy and the new autocracy, I argue that the sovereigntists define sovereignty as the supremacy of the people, the imagined majority; deny the sovereignty of the human person; and promote distrust of international organizations and treaties that support cosmopolitan norms of justice. I propose further that Trumpism and Putinism represent two cases of the sovereigntist turn in different political contexts; however, Putinism is a more radical ideological position and has had a deeper impact on the political and constitutional systems of Russia than Trumpism has had on those systems in the United States.
... Investigating the maintenance of Egypt's irrigation infrastructure, Barnes (2017) shows how the dramatic maintenance operations on a canal in the province of Fayoum were key in reinforcing a specific material and social order, putting aside illicit practices, attributing specific places to farmers own maintenance activities and reasserting the engineers' authority and control over the infrastructure. In his study of the transformation of Lenin's body into a long-term living sculpture, Yurchak (2015) points out how far the material and physical orders involved in these preservation practices had been tightly articulated to the political order, notably the canonization of the Leninism. In a very different setting, Shaw (2014) documents the urban reordering process at stake in the street-cleaning practices in downtown Newcastle at night, progressively transforming some varied elements of the lively nightlife center into waste that disappears from the public space of the city by daytime. ...
OPEN ACCESS Version : https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-03186104/document
Taking part in the growing concern for repair and maintenance in STS, this article investigates epistemic dimensions of maintenance. Drawing on an ethnographic study of graffiti removal in Paris, it highlights the different objects of knowledge involved in this specific setting of urban maintenance and documents their relationships. It shows that, inspired by the 'broken windows' thesis, the anti-graffiti program that emerged in Paris at the turn of 2000 articulates three objects of knowledge - public order, graffiti and the city - whose intertwined definitions root a restorative maintenance epistemology. Such epistemology unfolds in an assemblage of policy documents, regulatory texts, contracts, technical specifications and procedures, information infrastructures and categories, removal techniques, tools and situated gestures, which take place in municipality's offices, contractors' workshops and during each intervention in the streets. The Paris graffiti removal program instantiates a preservationist approach which focuses on recurrent visual signs of disruption occurring on the façades and rests on both a distributed attention and a particular pace for interventions. It involves three main operations: measuring surfaces, identifying public expressions and composing with materials. None of these operations are neutral. Aimed at preserving a specific order, they also participate in the daily transformation of urban reality. The heterogeneous knowledge at play in maintenance practices intricately takes part in the becoming of the things whose stability it strives to ensure.
... Since these early appeals, maintenance and repair have been of growing interest in various areas of research, and more and more scholars have brought to light an incredible variety of hitherto neglected objects and practices. In the last years, studies have documented maintenance and repair activities in ICTs (Cállen & Sánchez Criado, 2015;Houston & Jackson, 2016;Jackson, Pompe & Krieshok, 2012;Rosner & Ames, 2014), Arts (Domínguez Rubio, 2016), large infrastructures (Barnes, 2017;Ureta, 2014), software and information systems (Cohn, 2016;Fidler and Russel, 2018), urban settings (Denis & Pontille, 2014Strebel, 2011), legacy buildings and heritage sites (Edensor, 2011;Jones & Yarrow, 2013), domestic consumption (Gregson, Metcalfe & Crewe, 2009;Rosner, 2013) and even corpse preservation (Yurchak, 2015). In the following sections, we propose to give hints on these emerging maintenance and repair studies by articulating, beyond their variety, two of their main contributions. ...
The text is available here: https://hal-mines-paristech.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02172939v2/document
... Since these early appeals, maintenance and repair have been of growing interest in various areas of research, and more and more scholars have brought to light an incredible variety of hitherto neglected objects and practices. In the last years, studies have documented maintenance and repair activities in ICTs (Cállen & Sánchez Criado, 2015;Houston & Jackson, 2016;Jackson, Pompe & Krieshok, 2012;Rosner & Ames, 2014), Arts (Domínguez Rubio, 2016), large infrastructures (Barnes, 2017;Ureta, 2014), software and information systems (Cohn, 2016;Fidler and Russel, 2018), urban settings (Denis & Pontille, 2014Strebel, 2011), legacy buildings and heritage sites (Edensor, 2011;Jones & Yarrow, 2013), domestic consumption (Gregson, Metcalfe & Crewe, 2009;Rosner, 2013) and even corpse preservation (Yurchak, 2015). In the following sections, we propose to give hints on these emerging maintenance and repair studies by articulating, beyond their variety, two of their main contributions. ...
Open Access version : https://hal-mines-paristech.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02172939/document
... In their outdated homilies, the Benedictines still pray daily for the "unity of Spain" and the blood shed by Civil War martyrs. While Jose Antonio's tomb has lost prominence with time, Franco's grave-and more specifically his bodily remains-have increasingly become the ultimate bastion of his regime's protracted but decaying sovereignty (Yurchak 2015). ...
This paper is based on a 16-year-long ethnography of mass grave exhumations in contemporary Spain and deals with the tortuous, painful, much-disputed, and incomplete unmaking of a concrete and massive militaristic inscription of Spain: that related to its last internal war (1936–1939) and subsequent dictatorship (1939–1975). To understand this process and its historical roots, the paper first dissects the formation of a “funerary apartheid” in the country since the end of the war. Second, it analyzes the impact on the social fabric of the mass grave exhumations of Republican civilians that started in the year 2000. Third, it traces how these disinterments have intersected with Spain’s most prominent Francoist stronghold, the Valley of the Fallen, and threaten the dictator’s burial place. Finally, it discusses the parallel dismantling of the dictatorship’s official statuary that once presided over prominent public spaces in many cities and some military quarters. It argues that rolling back militarization by dismantling war-derived cartographies of death, challenging military burial arrangements, or degrading statues of generals necessarily involves a certain level of remilitarizing by other means. I call this mirroring and deeply embodied memorial backfiring “phantom militarism.”. © 2019 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.
... Belonging to Soviet society was constructed and reaffirmed by spectacular rituals -televised parades and celebrations -in which participation was obligatory, although citizens privately joked about the hollow ritual forms they themselves repeated in public, not necessarily seeing a contradiction therein (Yurchak 2006). Certain subjects, slogans and symbols were rendered hypervisible in Soviet media, for example the figure of Lenin whose appearance was nearly ubiquitous, although in the form of highly orchestrated and selective representations that fluctuated with changes in official ideology (Yurchak 2015). If the media provide the moral framework within which Others appear to us (Silverstone 2007), Soviet media did indeed constitute a space for negotiating sameness and difference, by contrasting the idealized Soviet society to various Others. ...
The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the role of visibility in the production and contestation of belonging to political communities. On the basis of an empirical enquiry of Russian media during the 2010s, a theoretical conceptualization of the relation between visibility and belonging is suggested, starting in the idea that what becomes visible to publics and how, and what is rendered invisible, are the objects of constant political regulation and contestation. The suggested theory seeks to move beyond both an exclusively speech-oriented approach to belonging, and a binary view on visibility as either emancipatory or repressive. In three case studies, the thesis explores aspects of the problem of belonging and visibility. In all cases – each of which focuses on a specific project of belonging as enacted in contemporary Russian media – gendered, sexualized and ethnicized conceptions of community are at the center of the contestations. First, by analyzing narratives in Russian media about the 2013 ban on “homosexual propaganda”, the thesis shows that as projects of belonging produce specific gendered and sexualized conceptions of community, they seek to regulate the visibility of undesired, non-normative subjectivities. However, those regulatory efforts contain tensions that may serve as starting points for contestation. Second, by studying media narratives about the 2014 Sochi Olympics, the thesis shows that spectacular media events may serve to depoliticize particular notions of community by making them hypervisible and producing them as natural and inevitable, but such events may also serve as sites of repoliticization. Third, by analyzing how the Russian state-promoted narrative on the war in Ukraine 2014-15 was challenged, by Russian internet satire and by the media exposure of how Russian soldiers who had died in Ukraine were secretly buried, the thesis shows that contestations of dominant projects of belonging draw on invisibility, and often have an ambivalent, inside/outside relation to dominant narratives. The central claim of the thesis is that projects of belonging, aimed at (re)constituting political communities and their boundaries, seek to produce particular arrangements of visibility regulating what can be seen and how it can be seen in the public sphere, and what cannot be seen. Moreover, as visibility cannot be fixed entirely, precisely those arrangements become the target of political contestation. On a more analytically useful level, it is suggested that politics of belonging involves efforts to contain, amplify and contest visibility.
This chapter focuses on a 20‐year‐long ethnography of mass grave exhumations in contemporary Spain and deals with the tortuous, painful, much‐disputed, and incomplete unmaking of a concrete and massive militaristic inscription of Spain, which related to its last internal war and subsequent dictatorship. It analyzes the shocking impact on the social fabric of the mass grave exhumations of Republican civilians that started in the year 2000, as part of a broader social movement, challenging the impunity of Francoist crimes. The Spanish Civil War, originating in a military rebellion against the democratically elected Republican government on July 18, 1936, lasted for almost three years, leaving around 500000 Spaniards dead. A 2003 exhumation of a mass grave in the province of Ávila turned the Valley of the Fallen into a very uncomfortable hotspot, directly connected to the emerging unburial process.
This Handbook examines the study of failure in social sciences, its manifestations in the contemporary world, and the modalities of dealing with it – both in theory and in practice. It draws together a comprehensive approach to failing, and invisible forms of cancelling out and denial of future perspectives.
Underlining critical mechanisms for challenging and reimagining norms of success in contemporary society, it allows readers to understand how contemporary regimes of failure are being formed
and institutionalized in relation to policy and economic models, such as neoliberalism. While capturing the diversity of approaches in framing failure, it assesses the conflations and shifts which have
occurred in the study of failure over time.
Intended for scholars who research processes of inequality and invisibility, this Handbook aims to formulate a critical manifesto and activism agenda for contemporary society. Presenting an integrated
view about failure, the Handbook will be an essential reading for students in sociology, social theory, anthropology, international relations and development research, organization theory, public policy, management studies, queer theory, disability studies, sports, and performance research.
Why does Mao's embalmed corpse continue to arouse powerful religious feelings among contemporary Chinese writers after the end of his rule, from fantasies of resurrection to yearnings for redemption? While extant scholarship focuses on the sociopolitical aspects of Mao's posthumous cult, this essay reveals the crucial role that literary narrative plays in the (un)making of Mao's quasi-religious appeal. Drawing on literary genres such as diary, memoir, science fantasy, and satirical fiction, I argue that the political theology of Mao can be read as a grand “political fiction” that linked the doubling of Mao's immortal body with the perpetual sovereignty of the Chinese Communist Party. However, even as literary narrative authorizes the political mythology of Mao, contemporary Chinese literature also demonstrates its capacity for ideological critique. My narrative begins with the party's controversial effort to sacralize Mao's biological remains, from the ritualized display of political sovereignty to the ambiguous allusion to religious miracle. Then I look at the bizarre resurrection of Mao's flesh in Liu Cixin's 劉慈欣 1989 science fiction novel China 2185 . The story features a cybernetic uprising in the distant future, when a computer engineer breaks into the Mao mausoleum and “uploads” Mao's mind into cyberspace. Lastly, I draw on the satirical fictions of Yan Lianke 閻連科 and Chan Koonchung 陳冠中 to reveal the desacralizing impacts of neoliberal capitalism on the Maoist political religiosity.
In the following chapter, I offer an analysis of the concept of sovereignty as promoted by contemporary sovereigntists. I argue that although the sovereigntist ideology varies from country to country, it is consolidated around a specific interpretation of the concept of sovereignty. Taking as examples Trumpism and Putin- ism, the sovereigntist ideologies in an old democracy and a new post-Soviet autocracy, I show that sovereigntists define sovereignty as the supremacy of the people as an imagined majority, a perspec- tive that denies the sovereignty of the human person and the legit- imacy of cosmopolitan norms of justice.
The article explores grotesque forms of post-socialist memory and representations of state socialist lieux de mémoire in Pavel Pepperstein’s novel Prazhskaia noch′ (A Prague Night, 2011) and Jáchym Topol’s novel Citlivý člověk (A sensitive person, 2017). Both novels can be classified in the genre of “magical historicism,” which processes the legacy of past traumatic events. Pepperstein’s novel satirizes the contradictions of post-socialist memory culture. The Gottwald mausoleum in Prague, a central site of Czechoslovak memory politics between 1953 and 1962, appears in the novel as a place where socialist personality cult and pan-Slavic rituals merge. In Topol’s novel, a Soviet tank that was destroyed by Czech resistance fighters during the Prague Spring is being restored. This tank not only reactivates the memory of the socialist system and its dissenters, it also becomes a symbol of the new threat emanating from Russia in the post-socialist Czech Republic. Topol’s novel thus enables a reflection on the differences and similarities between old and new historical narratives and their implications. By pointing to the instability (Pepperstein) and ambiguity (Topol) of assigned meanings, the grotesque helps elucidate the continued role that state socialist lieux de mémoire play in sustaining changing and conflicting post-socialist historical narratives.
The article traces the alterations of the “harmful statue” motif as it was conceptualized by Roman Jakobson. In the present research the author draws upon a number of representative verses by Russian 20 th century poets – V. Bryusov, I. Selvinsky, B. Slutsky. The theoretical juxtaposition of the metaphoric nature of a monument and strategies of overcoming this nature has been put in focus of this work. These strategies are represented in the convergence of sculpture and body (the reinforcement of iconicity), in implicating the metonymic, substitutional character in new monuments. The author shows how the practice of establishing the new “political” tombs (unknown soldiers, mausoleums) proliferating since 1920s was reflected in verses’ rhetoric and affected these texts’ genre poetics. As a first collection of examples the “Pompeian” plots of Russian “ekphrastic” poetry are studied. Here Russian poets rethink the technology invented by mid-nineteenth century Italian archaeologists who were the first to introduce the sculptural reconstruction of human bodies preserved by volcanic soil in area of 79 a.d. Vesuvius eruption. The first step on this way of rethinking the “living statue” motif was the intrinsic to modernism and openly exposed problematizing of the relationships between body and its representations in stone or metal. Having begun its “own” life, the sculpture is currently observed as a direct, “drawn on a contour” replica of an organism, unprecedented in unicity of its physical existence. This semiotic discovery has formed the receptive “niches” of expectations – prior to the emergence of the next commemorative practice, the creation in 1924 Vladimir Lenin’s “living sculpture” (A. Yurchak) or “self-icon” (J. B. Platt). However one difference here was of specific significance: the “Pompeian” plaster reconstructions were anonymous whereas the Bolshevik leader’s name was in contrast not just commonly known but also as strongly mythologized as his remains kept in mausoleum were. The semiosis taking place within a triangle body – monument – name had formed a perspective for the forthcoming of a new social commemorative practice, memory place and poetic image – the tomb of an Unknown Soldier. The author illustrates the interaction of the two political and memory cults on the level of official rhetoric and in the sphere of literary motifs.
This article addresses the complex role of mushrooms, particularly that of the fly agaric (Amanita muscaria) [Russian: Mukhomor], in the art of Moscow conceptualism in a broad setting. This paper explores the mythopoetic theme of mushroom-induced beliefs, which influenced the Moscow conceptualists, and employs background historical scholarship by R.G. Wasson, V.N. Toporov, T.J. Elizarenkova, and others. Aside from the mushrooms per se that were particularly important for Moscow conceptualism, this article also mentions various ethno-botanical entheogens (i.e. biochemical substances such as plants or drugs ingested in order to undergo certain spiritual experience, or “generating the divine within”). Apart from analyzing the ethnobotanical historical background of manifesting hallucinogenic mushrooms on the Russian soil (including Siberia), this article focuses on Pavel Peppershtein’s novel Mifogennaia Liubov’ Kast (The Mythogenic Love of the Castes), which was co-authored with Sergey Anufriev. As the narrative of the novel unfolds, its main character, the Communist Partorg (Party Organizer) Dunaev, is wounded and shell-shocked at the very beginning of the Great Patriotic War (World War II). Partorg Dunaev finds himself deep in a mysterious forest, where he inadvertently snacks on unknown hallucinogenic mushrooms. He subsequently transforms into an exceptionally strong wizard who is capable of fighting spectral enemies both on earth and in heaven. The reader discovers the so-called “parallel war” sweeping over the Russian territory where legendary Russian/Soviet fairy heroes are locked in combat with their opponents, the characters of the Western children’s tales, and books. A heroic mushroom-eater, Partorg Dunaev joins one of the sides in this fight and gradually reaches the “utmost limits of sacrifice and self-rejection.” This article contextualizes the fungi-entheogenic episodes of Moscow conceptualism into a broader sphere of constructed visionary/ hallucinogenic reality by focusing on psilocybin fungi, particularly the fly agaric/Amanita muscaria/Mukhomor, and their cultural significance.
This article addresses the complex role of mushrooms, particularly that of the fly agaric ( Amanita muscaria ) [Russian: Mukhomor ], in the art of Moscow conceptualism in a broad setting. This paper explores the mythopoetic theme of mushroom-induced beliefs, which influenced the Moscow conceptualists, and employs background historical scholarship by R.G. Wasson, V.N. Toporov, T.J. Elizarenkova, and others. Aside from the mushrooms per se that were particularly important for Moscow conceptualism, this article also mentions various ethno-botanical entheogens (i.e. biochemical substances such as plants or drugs ingested in order to undergo certain spiritual experience, or “generating the divine within”). Apart from analyzing the ethnobotanical historical background of manifesting hallucinogenic mushrooms on the Russian soil (including Siberia), this article focuses on Pavel Peppershtein’s novel Mifogennaia Liubov’ Kast ( The Mythogenic Love of the Castes ), which was co-authored with Sergey Anufriev. As the narrative of the novel unfolds, its main character, the Communist Partorg (Party Organizer) Dunaev, is wounded and shell-shocked at the very beginning of the Great Patriotic War (World War II ). Partorg Dunaev finds himself deep in a mysterious forest, where he inadvertently snacks on unknown hallucinogenic mushrooms. He subsequently transforms into an exceptionally strong wizard who is capable of fighting spectral enemies both on earth and in heaven. The reader discovers the so-called “parallel war” sweeping over the Russian territory where legendary Russian/Soviet fairy heroes are locked in combat with their opponents, the characters of the Western children’s tales, and books. A heroic mushroom-eater, Partorg Dunaev joins one of the sides in this fight and gradually reaches the “utmost limits of sacrifice and self-rejection.” This article contextualizes the fungi-entheogenic episodes of Moscow conceptualism into a broader sphere of constructed visionary/ hallucinogenic reality by focusing on psilocybin fungi, particularly the fly agaric/ Amanita muscaria / Mukhomor , and their cultural significance.
To this day, the robed remains of mummified monks are venerated as ‘living Buddhas’ in northeastern Japan. Widely believed to have mummified themselves through strict adherence to ascetic regimen, temple patrons claim that these living Buddhas are capable of transmitting telepathic messages and curing disease, even of saving lives in the real time of disaster. In this article, I examine the ontological and symbolic basis of their purported immortality. Also, its politics, which emerge in contested historical narratives and assertions of authenticity about which mummified monks are real, true immortals and which are forgeries, curated corpses on display. As I demonstrate, such narratives are grounded in competing historicities of the automummification process. They are also situated in a competitive tourism industry. I argue that the bodies of these saintly figures are multi-temporal, semiotically charged, and political. Enduring faith in their posthumous vitality is not just a matter of theological exegesis. It is sustained by the interpretations of human suffering, history, and salvation that their anachronistic presence conjures for the living.
Anthropologists have long reminded us that mythological cosmologies are regularly recruited to help make sense of the present. But how key mythologies perform such labour is remarkably less attended to in many studies. In this article I take up the long life of Medea, one of the principal female characters of Greek mythology surrounding the Argonauts, who is very much alive today in the Republic of Georgia. The character of Medea mediates contradictory imaginations, affects, and narratives attendant upon Georgia's recent political changes. For some varied sections of Georgian society, the Medea mythology conveys Georgia's connection to Europe, but it also channels the experiences of economic dispossession associated with postsocialist transformation and revolution. By exploring Medea as a profoundly flexible figure who can move across narrative and media forms, this article proposes new ways of conceptualizing contemporary mythological cosmologies that threaten to exceed and sometimes even overwhelm their political intentions, generating ambivalent outcomes.
The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on the specific historical development of heritage’s conceptualisation within Soviet Russia from the October Revolution in 1917 to its 50th anniversary in 1967. More particularly, it intends to elicit a debate on the relation between heritage as a concept and the new understanding of space and time introduced with the October Revolution. It stresses not only the stakes of integrating, assimilating and appropriating the past, but also the ones that reside in the will to build a communist future thanks to a heritage dedicated to last for eternity. The paper thus intends to shed light on the Soviet concept of heritage and examines its peculiarities.
In their research on the skeletal remains of human populations, bioarchaeologists can face formidable ethical challenges when they attempt to balance the concerns of descendant groups against the important information skeletal studies provide on the history of our species. To appreciate the complexities of the ethical issues surrounding human skeletal research, it is necessary to understand the social context in which beliefs about the treatment of the dead evolved, as well as how the practices of acquiring, analyzing, and curating human skeletal remains have changed since the beginning of systematic attempts to use human remains in scientific research. The idea that a person's soul resides in their body and persists after death has deep roots in many religious traditions. With the rise of Western scientific approaches to understanding the natural world, such beliefs increasingly came in conflict with a desire to obtain anatomical data relevant to solving medical problems and to understanding the history of our species. The decline in the power of established churches and the increase in tolerance for a diversity of value systems in many modern societies have resulted in a search for shared values that people can use to guide them ethically as they increasingly work in multicultural environments. The need for such a set of shared values is especially acute in bioarchaeology, because of the way in which it integrates the scientific values of biomedicine and the cultural relativism of anthropology. Among the shared values emerging from such discussions are a belief in the importance of respect for human dignity, acceptance of the right of descendants to decide the disposition of the remains of close kin, and the preservation ethic. Although the subjective, culture‐dependent aspects of the ideas these ethical principles are based upon provide a fertile ground for alternative interpretations and conflict, they nevertheless can serve as a basis for helping us to more clearly comprehend the social dimensions of our professional activity.
In the autumn of 2015, Star Wars once again rattled the world with a new episode, The Force Awakens. The first movie of the series was released in 1977, and ever since the 1980s emerging new episodes have turned this epopoeia into a recognizable mass cultural text that is well-known all over the world nowadays and which has been transformed into a wide range of forms such as series, comic strips, video games, toys, stickers and other forms of mass culture. However, what happens when a mass cultural text gets fused into a new context of political discourse? What kinds of unpredictable clashes of meanings might be evoked on the threshold of mass culture and ideology, dominative hierarchy and democratic masquerade, or even communist and capitalist semiosphere? What mythological meanings appear when a fictional hero acquires a real body and becomes a politician? The present paper puts forward a semiotic analysis of the eccentric performance of Darth Vader the politician in the contemporary Ukrainian political life. The case employs the concepts of text and transmedial world, as well as notions of remediation and resemiotization, in order to make sense of how political masquerade appears in the semiosphere of the Ukrainian spectator. In addition, the paper introduces the examples of semiotic interaction between the contemporary fictional character Darth Vader, his namesake politician, and the collective memory of both: the traditional culture and the Soviet ideological past.
Michel Foucault inspired by Ernst Kantorowicz once said we have to “cut off the head of the king” in political analysis. By that metaphor he meant approaching political power not as an embodied figure or sovereign, but as a set of technologies smoothly and anonymously enveloping an individual. Could he imagine that this motto would be even over-realized? Hugely influenced by Foucault’s later works it had deconstructed the views on power not only in the political analysis, but it echoed in the distant regions of Humanities. Among them the studies of Foucault’s oeuvre itself became dislodging his real biographical figure and replacing it with the ‘life of a saint’ that bestowed his followers with reliable sayings. This process could be traced in works adapting Foucault’s theory for the needs of the contemporary globalized Anglosphere and to its demand for the critical analysis of (neo)liberalism. Starting from Colin Gordon’s "Power/knowledge" reader (1980), we could notice the tendency to read Foucault selectively. “An aleatory, open-ended collage,” in Gordon’s words, became the most cited book (viz. Google Scholar stats) presenting both Foucault works themselves and his interpreted image reflecting “1968 Mai” events. Another image of Foucault as “quintessential embodiment of hyper intelligence and frustratingly difficult ‘French thought’” (Clare O’Farrell) thus had been pushed to the margins of literary and historical studies. Step by step the dominant community of Anglophone scholars started to exhibit itself as a solid and formulated their own approach to Foucault’s theory rhetorically justified by the aim to detect the "Foucault effect" (1991). This collective work in governmentality by today has become the most cited work inspired by Foucault (viz. Google Scholar stats), and its main ideology was formulated as a social-political criticism strengthened with the thought of Foucault that is to develop and expand his theory in the unexplored subject matters. Such kind of studies grew exponentially during the last 20 years and even the journal "Foucault Studies" appeared in 2004. Initiated by the Anglophone community of foucauldians, it encourages “scholars to depart from conventional disciplinary strictures while still performing their own rigorous research. Foucault's name serves here as an invitation, not the name on the door of a closed club” (Focus and Scope). Thus Foucault’s thought has become here not a self-sufficient framework or central subject of study, but a ‘tool’ to analyze the present social-politic problems of European societies.
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Без знания и цитирования Мишеля Фуко трудно представить себе современную гуманитарную науку. Доминирующая в ней англоязычная традиция исследований даже породила особую междисциплинарную область Foucault Studies, представители которой используют теорию Фуко при анализе широкого круга актуальных социокультурных и политических феноменов. Настоящая статья рассматривает процесс становления и характерные черты Foucault Studies, уделяя особое внимание механизмам, с помощью которых фукольдианцы как корпорация последователей Фуко перешли от толкования его текстов к их выборочному прочтению и инструментализации основных концептов мыслителя.
In this essay I explore the reaction, in Western media commentary, to the announcement of North Korean premier Kim Jong-il's death in December 2011. I focus in particular on responses to the widely circulated images of crowds crying on the streets of Pyongyang. These responses obsessively returned to a single question: Do they really mean it? I do not attempt to answer this question. Rather, by considering a series of subsidiary questions that clustered around it (Can these tears be real? Are these people insane? Why are they such good/such bad actors? Is mass crying something that Asians are particularly likely to engage in?), I ask in turn why the sincerity of the North Korean crying crowds came to seem at once so necessary and so impossible to Western observers. I argue that the obsessive return to the question about whether they really meant it expressed a deep liberal anxiety—not, as one might suppose, an anxiety that North Korean totalitarianism would continue indefinitely, but a much more profound worry that it would come to a sudden end.
Plastination provides a new method, governed by medical technique rather than religious ritual, by which human remains may be transformed from unstable/wet to stable/dry. In the Körperwelten/Body Worlds exhibition, the public pay to view plastinated bodies, and are invited to donate their bodies for plastination after death. This article addresses the question of whether Body Worlds visitors accept plastination for display as a legitimate form of disposal. Three sources of data are drawn on: the ethnographer's account of his first visit to the exhibition in Brussels; the written comments of visitors to the London exhibition; and the stated motives of some donors. Plastination as final disposal is accepted by the vast majority of visitors; they perceive the dry, odourless body interiors within the clinical, scientific framework encouraged by the exhibition, and are often fascinated by what they see. This is complicated, however, by certain surface features and modes of display which enable the problematic reinsertion of personhood. So, plastination itself is accepted, but not all forms of display.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, a controversial school of Russian thinkers emerged, convinced that humanity was entering an advanced stage of evolution and must assume a new, active, managerial role in the cosmos. This book offers a dynamic and wide-ranging examination of the lives and ideas of the Russian Cosmists. Although they wrote as scientists, theologians, and philosophers, the Cosmists addressed topics traditionally confined to occult and esoteric literature. Their writings explored the extension of the human life span to establish universal immortality; the restoration of life to the dead; the regulation of nature so that all manifestations of blind natural force were under rational human control; the effect of cosmic rays and other particles of energy on human history; and practical steps toward eventual human control over the flow of time. Suppressed during the Soviet period and little noticed in the West, the ideas of the Cosmists have in recent decades been rediscovered and embraced by many Russian intellectuals. The book offers a sympathetic analysis of the ideas of the Cosmists within the contexts of Russian philosophy, Russian religious thought, and Western esotericism.
Communism, or as Ken Jowitt prefers, Leninism, has attracted, repelled, mystified, and terrified millions for nearly a century. In his brilliant, timely, and controversial study, "New World Disorder", Jowitt identifies and interprets the extraordinary character of Leninist regimes, their political corruption, extinction, and highly unsettling legacy. Earlier attempts to grasp the essence of Leninism have treated the Soviet experience as either a variant of or alien to Western history, an approach that robs Leninism of much of its intriguing novelty. Jowitt instead takes a 'polytheist' approach, Weberian in tenor and terms, comparing the Leninist to the liberal experience in the West, rather than assimilating it or alienating it. Approaching the Leninist phenomenon in these terms and spirit emphasizes how powerful the imperatives set by the West for the rest of the world are as sources of emulation, assimilation, rejection, and adaptation; how unyielding premodern forms of identification, organization, and action are; how novel, powerful, and dangerous charisma as a mode of organized identity and action can be. The progression from essay to essay is lucid and coherent. The first six essays reject the fundamental assumptions about social change that inform the work of modernization theorists. Written between 1974 and 1990, they are, we know now, startlingly prescient. The last three essays, written in early 1991, are the most controversial: they will be called alarmist, pessimistic, apocalyptic. They challenge the complacent, optimistic, and self-serving belief that the world is being decisively shaped in the image of the West - that the end of history is at hand.
Ralph E. Giesey (Institute for Advanced Study) is at present revising for publication his doctoral dissertation entitled The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France (University of California, 1954). Following is a summary of the study:
The funeral ceremony of the French kings during the Renaissance was compared by contemporary writers to that of the ancient Roman emperors, and modern historians have believed that the French were copying the Roman customs described by ancient historians. However, the history of French royal funerals from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries shows that the elaborate ceremonial which developed had its own rationale. Of primary importance was the rise of the abbey of Saint-Denis as the royal necropolis. In the thirteenth century it became the custom to display the body of the dead king during the funerary ceremony, which lasted only a few days, because the crude methods of embalming would not allow a longer display of the deceased.
In Buryatia, the imperishable body of Dashi‐Dorzho Etigelov, a prerevolutionary Buddhist monk, is said to be a “scientifically proven miracle” endowed with healing powers. I argue that this claim provides a focal point for the renegotiation of Soviet discourses on science and religion. I demonstrate that Soviet modernist discourse produced religion and science as mutually constitutive categories. Although subsequent political transformations have shifted the valences of religion and science, this mutually constitutive relationship remains central to understanding health, healing, and religious practices in post‐Soviet Russia. [religion, science, postsocialism, healing, Buddhism, Buryatia, Russian Federation]
A common feature of authoritarian regimes throughout history has been the creation of an elaborate mystique around the leader. This has consisted, in general terms, of the building up of the leader into a figure of superhuman dimensions dwarfing all the lesser mortals who surround him. Although such a cult often pandered to and was inflated by the egoism of its principal, its presence across millennia and cultural differences suggests a systemic basis for its development. Leader cults have rarely been the result simply of a desire for personal glorification or public worship on the part of a leader, significant though such factors may be in any particular instance, but have resulted in large part from structural features of the political system in question. The Soviet political system is clearly relevant in this regard, having been characterized by the existence of exaggerated cults of the leader for much of its sixty-two-year history. By analysing two of these cults, those of Stalin and Brezhnev as embodied in the images of the two leaders projected through the party press, it will be possible to isolate those structural aspects of the Soviet political system which encourage the emergence and growth of a leader cult.
In September 2002, Buddhist lamas of the Ivolginsk monastery in the post-Soviet Republic of Buryatia in southern Siberia accompanied by independent forensic experts performed an exhumation of the body of Dashi-Dorzho Itigelov, the last head lama from the time of the Russian empire, who died in 1927. The body of the lama, found in the lotus position, allegedly had not deteriorated, and soon rumors spread that the lama was alive and had returned to Buryatia, as he had promised he would. According to the stories told by senior monks, before his death Itigelov asked to have his body exhumed thirty years after. He was first exhumed in 1955 (a little short of thirty years) by his relatives and lamas, in secret for fear of being discovered by the Soviet authorities. As expected, the body was intact, so they reburied him. It was only after the final exhumation in 2002 that the lamas installed the body in a glass case in the Ivolginsk monastery, which very soon became an international and domestic sensation, with articles appearing in The New York Times , and Russian politicians and oligarchs rubbing shoulders with droves of pilgrims and tourists to catch a glimpse of the lama.
Center for Scientific Research and Teaching Methods in Biochemical Technologies) has functioned since the 1990s under the auspices of VILAR (Russian Institute of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants)
- Administratively
Administratively, this institute (Center for Scientific Research and Teaching Methods in Biochemical Technologies) has functioned since the 1990s
under the auspices of VILAR (Russian Institute of Medicinal and Aromatic
Plants).
Istoriia odnoi bolezni,'' 20. 39. ''A Word About Lenin
- Ravdin
Ravdin, ''Istoriia odnoi bolezni,'' 20.
39. ''A Word About Lenin,'' 1.
Fel'shtinskogo 'Taina smerti Lenina,''' [Response concerning Fel'shtinsky's article ''the enigma of Lenin's death
- A I Zevelev
- G 'po Povodu Stat'i Yu
A. I. Zevelev, ''Po povodu stat'i Yu. G. Fel'shtinskogo 'Taina smerti Lenina,'''
[Response concerning Fel'shtinsky's article ''the enigma of Lenin's death''],
Voprosy Istorii 8 (1999).
Letter to the CongressIstoriia raboty Lenina 'Pis'mo k s''ezdu'. Spravka
- Ria Novosti
For a description of the ''Letter to the Congress,'' see RIA Novosti, ''Istoriia
raboty Lenina 'Pis'mo k s''ezdu'. Spravka,'' December 16, 2010, http://ria.
ru/history_spravki/20101216/309403217.html.
Trying to protect herself, a few days later Fotieva wrote a note to Lev Kamenev, explaining that she was not told by Lenin's transcriber about his will to keep the letter sealed
Trying to protect herself, a few days later Fotieva wrote a note to Lev Kamenev,
explaining that she was not told by Lenin's transcriber about his will to keep the
letter sealed. See Izvestiya TsK KPSS 12 (1989): 157.
Istoricheskoe rassledovanie
- L E Gorelova
L. E. Gorelova, ''Istoricheskoe rassledovanie'' [Historical investigation], Russkii
meditsinskii zhurnal 13, no. 7 (April 2005), http://www.rmj.ru/articles_3695.
htm.
Formirovanie kul'ta Lenina v Sovetskom Soiuze [The Formation of Lenin Cult in the Soviet Union
- Benno Ennker
Benno Ennker, Formirovanie kul'ta Lenina v Sovetskom Soiuze [The Formation of
Lenin Cult in the Soviet Union] (Moscow, 2011), 73.
24. Ibid., 66.
According to Tumarkin the term However, in 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union), argued that ''Leninism'' was used even earlier-it was coined by the Mensheviks to ridicule Lenin's ideas
According to Tumarkin the term ''Leninism'' was first used publicly on January
3, 1923; Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge,
MA, 1997), 120. However, in 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the
CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union), argued that ''Leninism'' was used
even earlier-it was coined by the Mensheviks to ridicule Lenin's ideas; ''A Word
About Lenin, by the President of the USSR, the General Secretary of the Central
Committee of the CPSU, M. S. Gorbachev,'' Pravda, April 21, 1990, 1.
Formirovanie kul'ta Lenina v Sovetskom Soiuze, 191. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid
- Ennker
Ennker, Formirovanie kul'ta Lenina v Sovetskom Soiuze, 191.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., 200.
Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (New Haven Alexei Yurchak, ''Esli by Lenin byl zhiv, on by znal chto delat': Golaia zhizn' vozhdia
- See Richard Pipes
- David Brandenberger
See Richard Pipes with David Brandenberger, Unknown Lenin: From the Secret
Archive (New Haven, 1996). Alexei Yurchak, ''Esli by Lenin byl zhiv, on by znal
chto delat': Golaia zhizn' vozhdia,'' Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 83 (2007);
If Lenin Were Alive Today, He Would Know What to Do
- Alexei Yurchak
Alexei
Yurchak, ''If Lenin Were Alive Today, He Would Know What to Do,'' in Irina
Prokhorova, ed., 1990: Russians Remember a Turning Point (London, 2013).
Vera, nadezhda, Lenin'' [Belief, hope, Lenin], Rabochaia tribuna
- V Melnichenko
V. Melnichenko, ''Vera, nadezhda, Lenin'' [Belief, hope, Lenin], Rabochaia
tribuna, December 4, 1990.
Ostorozhno martyshizm
- R Kosolapov
R. Kosolapov, ''Ostorozhno martyshizm'' [Beware of monkey business], Leningradskaia Pravda, December 22, 1990.
Vozhdi i sovetniki [Leaders and advisors]
- F Burlatski
F. Burlatski, Vozhdi i sovetniki [Leaders and advisors] (Moscow, 1990).
Zasedanie tsentral'noi Komissii Prezidiuma Tsentral'nogo Ispolnitel'nogo'' [Meeting of the Central Commission of the Presidium of CEC (Central Exectutive Committee) of the USSR for the organization of Lenin's funeral]
- Formirovanie Ennker
- Kul 'ta Lenina V Sovetskom
- Soiuze
Ennker, Formirovanie kul'ta Lenina v Sovetskom Soiuze, 191.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., 200.
50. ''Zasedanie tsentral'noi Komissii Prezidiuma Tsentral'nogo Ispolnitel'nogo''
[Meeting of the Central Commission of the Presidium of CEC (Central Exectutive Committee) of the USSR for the organization of Lenin's funeral]. March
5, 2014; RGASPI, f. 16, op. 2c, ed. khr. 52.
Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty
- Ibid
Ibid.
Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty
Protokol zasedaniia Meditsinskoi Komissii po sokhraneniiu tela V. I. Lenina ot 12-go marta 1924 g.'' [Protocol of the meeting of the medical commission for the Preservation of V. I. Lenin's Body
- E Ibid
Ibid. E.g., ''Protokol zasedaniia Meditsinskoi Komissii po sokhraneniiu tela V. I.
Lenina ot 12-go marta 1924 g.'' [Protocol of the meeting of the medical commission for the Preservation of V. I. Lenin's Body. March 12, 1924];
Commission for the Organization of Lenin's Funeral
Statement of the ''Commission for the Organization of Lenin's Funeral,''
March 25, 1924 (quoted in Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!, 185).
Mavzolei Lenina snova otkroetsia dlia poseshcheniia 9 ianvaria 2007 goda'' [Lenin's Mausoleum will open again to the visiting public on
''Mavzolei Lenina snova otkroetsia dlia poseshcheniia 9 ianvaria 2007 goda''
[Lenin's Mausoleum will open again to the visiting public on January 9,
2007], Newsru.com, December 25, 2006, www.newsru.com/russia/25dec2006/
lenin.html.
The King's Two Bodies
- Ernst Kantorowicz
Ernst Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies (1957; reprint, Princeton, 1996).
The King's Two Bodies, 330. 64. Ibid
- Kantorowicz
Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies, 330.
64. Ibid., 331.
The King's Two Bodies, 426; Giesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France, 144; Ralph Giesey
- Kantorowicz
Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies, 426; Giesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony in
Renaissance France, 144; Ralph Giesey, ''Funeral Effigies as Emblems of Sovereignty: Europe, 14th to 18th Centuries,'' lecture delivered to the Collège de
France, June 10, 1987, 9, 17, www.regiesey.com/Lectures/Funeral_Effigies_as_
Emblems_of_Sovereignty_Lecture_[English]_College_de_France.pdf.
The History of the Collection
- Richard Mortimer
Richard Mortimer, ''The History of the Collection,'' in Harvey and Mortimer,
The Funeral Effigies of Westminster Abbey, 21-28.
Frazer's book still remains influential to a large degree due to important critical engagements with it over the years, among them those by Wittgenstein and Evans-Pritchard: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer's Golden BoughThe Intellectualist (English) Interpretation of Magic
Frazer's book still remains influential to a large degree due to important critical
engagements with it over the years, among them those by Wittgenstein and
Evans-Pritchard: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough (1931;
reprint, Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1979); Edward Evans-Pritchard, ''The Intellectualist (English) Interpretation of Magic,'' Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts, King Fuad
1st University 1, pt. 2 (1933): 1-21.
The Demise of Kings and the Meaning of Kingship: Royal Funerary Ceremony in the Contemporary Southern Sudan and Renaissance France
- W Arens
W. Arens, ''The Demise of Kings and the Meaning of Kingship: Royal Funerary
Ceremony in the Contemporary Southern Sudan and Renaissance France,''
Anthropos 79 (1984): 355-67;
Nations, Papal Sovereignty: The Government Within Our Government
- O Gilbert
Gilbert O. Nations,
Papal Sovereignty: The Government Within Our Government (Cincinnati, 1917).
The Question of Democracy
- Claude Lefort
Claude Lefort, ''The Question of Democracy,'' in Democracy and Political Theory,
9-20;
The Royal Remains: The People's Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty
- Eric Santner
Eric Santner, The Royal Remains: The People's Two Bodies and the Endgames of
Sovereignty (Chicago, 2011), 33-34.
If Lenin Were Alive,'' and Yurchak, ''Esli by Lenin byl zhiv
- Yurchak
Yurchak, ''If Lenin Were Alive,'' and Yurchak, ''Esli by Lenin byl zhiv.''
Factionalism in the National Socialist German Workers' Party, 1925-1926: The Myth and Reality of the 'Northern Faction): 45; see also note 82 and Jowitt, New World Disorder, 7-8, and SlavojŽižekSlavojˇSlavojŽižekThe Two Totalitarianisms
- Joseph Nyomarkey
Joseph Nyomarkey, ''Factionalism in the National Socialist German Workers'
Party, 1925-1926: The Myth and Reality of the 'Northern Faction,''' Political Science
Quarterly 80, no. 1 (March 1965): 45; see also note 82 and Jowitt, New World
Disorder, 7-8, and SlavojŽižekSlavojˇSlavojŽižek, ''The Two Totalitarianisms,'' London Review of Books
27, no. 6 (March 17, 2005).
at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 Khrushchev saidWe sharply criticize today the cult of the individual which was so widespread during Stalin's life and. .. which is so alien to the spirit of Marxism-LeninismThe Secret Speech-On the Cult of Personality
- Nikita S Khrushchev
In his ''Secret Speech'' at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 Khrushchev
said, ''We sharply criticize today the cult of the individual which was so
widespread during Stalin's life and... which is so alien to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism''; Nikita S. Khrushchev, ''The Secret Speech-On the Cult of
Personality, 1956,'' in Internet Modern History Sourcebook, Fordham University,
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1956khrushchev-secret1.html, italics
added.
Esli by Lenin byl zhiv.'' 94. Not surprisingly, in popular slang Lenin's body is called a ''mummy
- See Yurchak
See Yurchak,''If Lenin Were Alive,'' and Yurchack, ''Esli by Lenin byl zhiv.''
94. Not surprisingly, in popular slang Lenin's body is called a ''mummy,'' which
connotes a stiff, dried-up corpse. But the Lenin Lab scientists frequently point
out that this is a gross misrepresentation.
N 12115/s, 29.06.42, po osmotru tela V. I. Lenina, sostoiavshemusia 13 i 14 iiulia 1942 g. v gorode Tiumeni'' [Protocol of the meeting of the commission formed in accordance with the directive of Soviet of People's Commisars of the USSR, N 12115/s
- Protokol Zasedaniia Komissii
- Snk Sssr
Comment by Burdenko, ''Protokol zasedaniia Komissii, obrazovannoi
soglasno rasporiazheniiu SNK SSSR, N 12115/s, 29.06.42, po osmotru tela
V. I. Lenina, sostoiavshemusia 13 i 14 iiulia 1942 g. v gorode Tiumeni'' [Protocol of the meeting of the commission formed in accordance with the directive of Soviet of People's Commisars of the USSR, N 12115/s, of June 29, 1942,
on the examination of V. I. Lenin's body that took place on July 13 and 14,
1942 in the town of Tiumen];
Protokol zasedaniia Komissii 109Doklad zasluzhennogo deiatelia nauki professora B. I. Zbarskogo 29 noiabria 1943 goda
- Comment
- Burdenko
Comment by Burdenko, ''Protokol zasedaniia Komissii.''
109. ''Doklad zasluzhennogo deiatelia nauki professora B. I. Zbarskogo 29 noiabria
1943 goda'' [Report of the honored scientist Professor B. I. Zbarsky on November 29, 1943]; RGASPI, f. 16, op. 2s, papka 5, ed. khr. 54.
110. Ibid.
111. Ibid.
112. Ibid.
Bolezn', smert' i bal'zamirovanie V. I. Lenina. Pravda i mify [Illness, Death, and Embalming of V
- Yu M Lopukhin
Yu. M. Lopukhin, Bolezn', smert' i bal'zamirovanie V. I. Lenina. Pravda i mify
[Illness, Death, and Embalming of V. I. Lenin] (Moscow, 1997), 126.
See also interview with a photo technician in Pavel Lobkov's film Mavzolei, shown on NTV television
- Ibid
Ibid. See also interview with a photo technician in Pavel Lobkov's film Mavzolei, shown on NTV television, Moscow, 1999.
who in late 1939 was promoted to the rank of Academician, partly in recognition of his work in the Mausoleum), ''Protokol zasedaniia komissii
- Comments
- Burdenko
Comments by Burdenko (who in late 1939 was promoted to the rank of Academician, partly in recognition of his work in the Mausoleum), ''Protokol
zasedaniia komissii.''