MCLC: Social Lives of Dead Bodies symposia

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Rebecca Nedostup <nedostup at brown.edu>
Subject: Social Lives of Dead Bodies symposia
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Two Mini-Symposia: The Social Lives of Dead Bodies
November 14-15, 2013
Brown University
 
Contact: Rebecca Nedostup, Associate Professor of History, Brown
University rebecca_nedostup at brown.edu

Part 1: How to Be a Corpse in a Chinese World
A Mini-Symposium Supported by the Framework in Global Health Program and
by the Program in Science and Technology Studies
 
November 14, 2013, 4-6:30 PM
Wilson 102

 
“Breaking Dead: Corpse Donation for Education Purposes at a Buddhist
Medical School in Taiwan”
C. Julia Huang, Professor, Department of Anthropology, National Tsing Hua
University, Taiwan; Visiting Scholar, Center for Chinese Studies,
University of California, Berkeley

 
“Crafting Corpses: Between the Dead Body and the Body Politic”
Ruth E. Toulson, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology,
University of Wyoming
 

Moderator: Sherine Hamdy, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Kutayba
Alghanim Professor of Social Science, Brown University

 
The socio-cultural anthropologists C. Julia Huang and Ruth Toulson
chronicle how the boundaries between dead and living are being stretched
in unexpected ways in contemporary Taiwan and Singapore. Huang explains
how the successful efforts of the Buddhist Tzu Chi University to break
cultural taboos on corpse donation for medical education not only plays
with the supposed importance of somatic integrity, but also revises the
very ways a body undergoes the ritual stages of death. Toulson describes
how state-mandated cremation in Singapore has increased rather than
obviated corpse embalming. The visible, tactile physical body interacts
with global technologies, local practice, and emotional registers to
produce something “highly unnatural” yet also resistant to state power.
 

Part 2: Theory and Method of the Dead
A Mini-Symposium Supported by the Framework in Global Health Program and
by the Department of History Lecture Series
 
November 15, 2013, 3-5-2:0 PM
Wilson 101
 

“Dead bodies in personal and political histories”
Stephan Feuchtwang, Professor Emeritus, Department of Anthropology, London
School of Economics
 

“Why do we care about the dead body?”
Thomas W. Laqueur, Helen Fawcett Professor, Department of History,
University of California, Berkeley
 

Moderator: Harold Cook, Professor of History, Brown University
 

Thomas Laqueur is a historian of medicine and of early modern and modern
Britain. He has written the influential Making Sex: Body and Gender from
the Greeks to Freud (Harvard University Press, 1990) and Solitary Sex: A
Cultural History of Masturbation (ZONE BOOKS, 2003), among many other
publications. He is completing new book entitled The Work of the Dead, and
co-teaches a seminar on “Death, Dying and Modern Medicine”.

 
Stephan Feuchtwang is the author of numerous works on Chinese religion and
politics, and  on comparative civilizations. His After the Event: the
Transmission of Grievous Loss in Germany, China and Taiwan (Berghahn,
2011) brings together the histories of state violence in Europe between
1933 and 1945, in China between 1959 and 1961 (the Great Leap famine) and
the Taiwan during and after the civil and Cold wars.