Book Review
The Political Lives of Dead Bodies:
Reburial and Postsocialist Change
The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. By Katherine Verdery (New York, Columbia University Press, 1999) 185 pp. $22.50
The demise of the socialist party-states of eastern Europe and the frantic pace of national redefinition that has ensued have afforded fertile ground for the small band of anglophone anthropologists who specialize in this part of the world. American anthropologists, influenced by Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Clifford Geertz to view humans as seekers of meaning, here confront societies where meanings are in rapid flux, and culture--in its anthropological sense--is unusually fluid.
Verdery, one of the most prominent of the American anthropologists in this field, has been a student of Romanian society and politics for three decades. In this slender volume, she asks why the postsocialist period in eastern Europe has witnessed so much activity involving dead bodies. The book provides an overview of the uses made of dead bodies in these societies and an analytical framework for making sense of them.
Some of the examples of this frenetic activity are well known, such as the widespread demolition of statues of Vladimir Lenin, following by a few decades the removal of Joseph Stalin's body from its place alongside Lenin in the Red Square mausoleum in Moscow. Other examples are less familiar. Verdery's main interest is in actual dead bodies rather than statues, in the concern for their whereabouts and welfare, and in the often strikingly passionate interest in reburying them. The bodies range from the famous to the unknown, but the widespread concern for them reflects the expression of new social values and plays a key role in the reevaluation of the national past.
The interest in dead bodies--an exotic one for most political analysts--reflects Verdery's view of what anthropology can contribute to an understanding of the political and social transformation of postsocialist societies: "They help us to see political transformation as something more than a technical process--of introducing democratic procedures and methods of electioneering, of forming political parties and nongovernmental organizations, and so on" (25). That "something more" is the cultural dimension; Verdery's focus is on the pursuit of [End Page 119] meaning. She thus joins many other anthropologists in rejecting rational-choice approaches to political change.
The introductory chapter sets out these views, characterizes nationalism as a kind of ancestor worship, and calls for viewing national identity as a sub-species of kinship. Verdery devotes the remaining two chapters to particular illustrations of this approach. Chapter 2 examines the case of Bishop Inochentie Micu, the eighteenth-century Transylvanian priest, long buried in Rome, who was returned to Romania for reburial in 1997. Verdery views this case in terms of the recently rekindled conflict between the dominant Orthodox church in Romania and the marginalized and much smaller Greek Catholic Church, which Micu championed. The Greek Catholic Church attempted to use the reburial as a means of bringing attention to its key role in the historical formation of Romanian national identity, and hence to improve its position in the conflict with the Orthodox church. Oddly, given the focus of the book, only two paragraphs of the chapter are devoted to the actual reburial of Micu, and they are based not on direct observation, offering only a second-hand account.
The book's final chapter treats a case with which Verdery is less familiar, that of postsocialist Yugoslavia. In this setting, she moves away from the famous dead to concentrate on the political uses of the nameless dead for nationalist purposes, examining the necessity of controlling burial land in terms of the construction of meaning, and kinship ideology.
The Political Lives of Dead Bodies offers a pithy, and highly readable, example of current anthropological approaches to national-level politics. The emergence of such a focus on national-level processes is one of the most important developments in the anthropological study of politics today. This book's value lies in the questions that it raises and the theoretical perspective to which it contributes.
David I. Kertzer
Brown University
