The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (The Harriman lectures)

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.