Sobibor Archaeology, Memorialisation and the Politics of Dead Bodies

Résumé 0

Responding to a recent upsurge in research on the material, cultural and political trajectories of dead bodies in the aftermaths of political violence, this chapter focuses on the complex and charged politics relating to human remains of Holocaust victims at the former extermination camp at Sobibór. The chapter challenges the long-standing perception of Holocaust dead as ‘invisible’, and instead addresses the dynamics behind the epistemic blindness to dead bodies resulting from the Holocaust, and the myriad practices that have evolved and revolved around them since the end of the Second World War. These practices are considered through the conceptual frame of the politics of dead bodies, understood as a multifaceted set of political, cultural, religious and material processes through which the dead are managed, governed, inscribed with meaning, represented, mobilised symbolically and politically, and subjected to social, cultural and political inclusion/exclusion. While it is exigently informed by archaeological reframings of Sobibór and of the dead present in its landscape, the engagements and encounters with human remains thematised in the chapter expand beyond those facilitated by archaeological practice.