Lecture image placeholder

Premium content

Access to this content requires a subscription. You must be a premium user to view this content.

Monthly subscription - $9.99Pay per view - $4.99Access through your institutionLogin with Underline account
Need help?
Contact us
Lecture placeholder background
VIDEO DOI: https://doi.org/10.48448/me9j-2g12

technical paper

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

November 18, 2021

Baltimore, United States

Antigone's People: Interment as Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Slovenia

keywords:

transitional justice

bioarchaeology

nationalism

My anthropological research project explores how the Slovenian reconciliationist project of retrieving 100,000+ human remains from mass graves of the Second World War and properly interring them is a project that reconfigures nationhood. Led by the government Commission on Concealed Mass Graves, this is an incipient campaign for post-communist transitional justice which brings to light crimes committed before Slovenian independence from Yugoslavia in 1991 and pardoned for the sake of civil “peace” immediately after. In this project, I examine how the proper interment of Slovenia’s unknown war dead right now gives us new purchase to think about post-communist nationalism. The orienting device of my analysis is the Slovenian reconciliationists’ move to make proper interment of the war dead the central project of the transitional justice process. Interment first requires retrieval of victims: it requires hundreds of thousands of euros to be funneled into the project of digging bone fragments or “a blackish paste of human remains” from bombed-out mineshafts and staggeringly deep karst abysses. Retrieval is done at great personal risk. At some point in the interment process•“proper” interment being funerary rites, relocation, and ongoing care practices•the unidentifiable dead are absorbed into the Slovenian nation and accorded the care practices reserved for ancestors. This phenomenon defies historical scholarly portrayal of Eastern Europe, a region supposedly rife with immutable, long-standing ethnic divisions. My analysis of Slovenian reconciliationism thus opens a re-examination of the inter-relationships between justice, democracy, and collective memory.

Downloads

Transcript English (automatic)

Next from AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Unusual Suspects of a Contested Border: Uncertainty, Mobility, and Nonhuman Border Emergencies in the Margins of Georgia
technical paper

Unusual Suspects of a Contested Border: Uncertainty, Mobility, and Nonhuman Border Emergencies in the Margins of Georgia

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Gorkem Aydemir Kundakci

18 November 2021

Similar lecture

Obeying God for the Nation: Religion, Citizenship and Struggles for Belonging
panel

Obeying God for the Nation: Religion, Citizenship and Struggles for Belonging

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

18 November 2021