The political lives of dead bodies : reburial and postsocialist change
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The political lives of dead bodies : reburial and postsocialist change
（The Harriman lectures）
Columbia University Press, c1999
- : pbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [167]-175) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
As socialist regimes crumbled across Eastern Europe and statues of their leaders were dismantled, another pattern arose in the former Iron Curtain nations: the bodies of political leaders, revolutionary heroes, artists, and other luminaries were taken from their graves to be reinterred - and in many cases, repatriated - in new, symbolically charged locations. What forces inspired these exhumations of long-dead spirits of Eastern Europe's past, from composer Bela Bartok's New York-Budapest journey to evictions of a group of Romanian communist leaders from their exalted mausoleums to a scattering of humble graveyards? What are the effects for the living of removing the bones of the dead from their resting places for ceremonial - or unceremonious - reburial? In this book, anthrolopogist Katherine Verdery explores Eastern Europe's political transformation from the perspective of sacred, symbolic ways that nations and cultures redefine themselves when new political orders are installed.
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