5th Global Conference

Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers

Session 6b: Historical Chapters
Chair: Stafford Betty

Alternative Perceptions of Death and Mourning in Understanding Past Societies
Karina Croucher
School of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, University of Liverpool, United Kingdom

Whilst death is universal, reactions to death are diverse, varying widely from culture to culture. Through death, identities are transformed – both the identities of the deceased, as well of the living necessarily negotiate relationships and re-establish their position in society after a liminal period.  In this paper I explore how understandings of alternative perceptions of death and mourning can aid our understanding of past societies. Through examining archaeological evidence from case studies from the prehistoric Near East I discuss how concepts and perceptions of the body and identity are evidenced through treatment of the dead, discussing themes of fragmentation, circulation, and discard, and how the integral, individual body, and identity, may have been negated, contested, or debated, through mortuary practice.

Mr. Moss's Skull: Changing Attitudes toward Accidental Exhumation in Annapolis, Maryland, 1855-2006
Michael P. Parker
United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, MD, USA

This paper examines the changing attitude towards accidental exhumation in Annapolis, Maryland, from 1855 until the present. In the nineteenth century the discovery of human remains outside an established cemetery was considered worthy of notice in the local newspapers, but the remains themselves merited no special treatment: after being examined and stripped of items of antiquarian interest, they were disposed of casually.  This attitude changed dramatically in the early twentieth century: human remains were increasingly sacralized, i.e., treated as sacred relics holding some innate power.  The emergence of this new attitude in Annapolis may be traced to the translation of the body of John Paul Jones from Paris and its elaborate reinterment in the Naval Academy Chapel in 1906. By the close of the twentieth century sacralization had led to politicization: local interest groups had learned to capitalize on the discovery of human remains to prosecute partisan agendas and renegotiate the boundaries between sacred and secular space. Civil authorities have, in turn, asserted their jurisdiction over remains, roping off discovery sites and taking the finds into custody. If place of burial rendered human remains sacred in the nineteenth century, today human remains sacralize the place: the signifier has become the signified.

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Abuse of a Corpse: A Brief History of Necrophilia Laws in America
John E. Troyer
Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature Program in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN USA

In September 2006, police in the American state of Wisconsin discovered twenty-year old twin brothers Nicholas and Alexander Grunke and their friend Dustin Radtke, also 20, digging into the grave of a recently deceased woman. Upon questioning by police, Alexander Grunke explained that the three men wanted to exhume the body to have sex with it.
In the Wisconsin state court system, the three men were charged with attempted third-degree sexual assault and attempted theft (of a human corpse). What none of the men could be charged with was attempted necrophilia. Furthermore, had the trio succeeded in taking the corpse from the cemetery and had they had sex with the body, none of them could have been charged with committing an illegal necrophilic act. Why is this the case?
The state of Wisconsin has no law making necrophilia illegal.
What the Wisconsin case helps to illustrate is a surprising gap in American jurisprudence, namely, that most American states have no laws regarding necrophilia. The states that do have necrophilia laws vary widely in their penalties. In the state of Minnesota, “Whoever carnally knows a dead body or an animal or a bird…” faces one-year of imprisonment. In the state of Nevada, “A person who commits a sexual penetration on the dead body of human being…” can face life imprisonment in the state prison. The legal fine in Minnesota is $3,000 and the Nevada fine is $20,000.
In my paper on American necrophilia laws, I argue that human corpses and the laws that govern the use of dead bodies are uniquely positioned to cause precisely these legal discrepancies since the dead body is a quasi-subject before the law. The technologies of law and science which living humans use to define and produce the dead body then contribute to another legal dilemma: how should sovereign state authorities create laws to govern necrophilic behavior? To legislate against abject behavior means acknowledging its existence but to do nothing within the law suggests legislative negligence. Or, as Wisconsin Sheriff Keith Grovier explained, “…necrophilia is one of those things that you hear about, but you never think you’ll have to deal with.”

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