This seminar will be a hybrid event where the speaker will be presenting in-person and the talk will be streamed via zoom. Those who want to attend physically are more than welcome to join us in meeting room 929 at Eilert Sundts hus.
Abstract
Excess deaths are synonymous with armed conflict, and dealing with messy, emotive dead bodies is an unavoidable reality for combatants around the world. Combatants must respond to their own fallen colleagues. They also end up supporting burial efforts after civilians are killed by direct violence, disease or famine. Wartime bodies become political spaces that shape the meaning of war, and the value of the dead and living. This article focuses on periods during armed conflict when combatants themselves must make decisions about how to deal with bodies and respond to death. Combatants who must deal with the dead are faced with decisions about the risks and efforts they will take. In such dilemmas, the dead can themselves become both a political actor through the remembered voices, through the continued ghostly interventions and through evocative histories. The paper is based on participant observation and qualitative interviews in 2022 and 2023 in South Sudan and especially among the Nuer in Unity State and Dinka in Warrap State. It also builds on long-term ethnographic work in these sites from 2009 – 2013. The paper will look at burial during war and famine in the 1990s, the 2010s and the 2020s. The paper discusses both how combatants were dealing with the bodies of those who died, or choosing not to, as well as the popularity of a fifty-year-old curse song which evoked an alternative material legacy for the dead.