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Dead Bodies (dead + body)
Selected AbstractsFront and Back Covers, Volume 21, Number 5.ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Issue 5 2005October 200 Front and back cover caption, volume 21 issue 5 Front cover Children in the favela (squatter community) of 'Caxambu', in the northern zone of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Although favelas are often depicted as dangerous and as the housing option of last resort, they are also characterized by dense and multi-stranded social ties between residents, long histories of occupation and settlement, and multi-generational families. Caxambu (a pseudonym) was originally settled at the beginning of the 20th century, and residents often describe the neighbourhood as a 'big family'. As the photo makes clear, the alleys, street corners and other public spaces in the favela often serve as giant playgrounds for local children. Back cover THE HUMAN BODY The photo on the back cover shows one of the exhibits from Gunther von Hagens' anatomical exhibition Body Worlds, discussed by Uli Linke in this issue. The exhibits in this show are fashioned from human corpses. The male figure shown here, the body of a man holding and gazing at his own skin, attempts to convey something about the human skin. The anatomical museum markets corpses, artfully transformed to appeal to the viewer. Body Worlds has toured internationally, and attracted millions of visitors. Dead bodies are transformed into sensually appealing 'works of art', playing to fantasies of the alluring body common to the dream worlds promoted by multinational media and entertainment industries. In the exhibition anatomy and pedagogy, economy and medical science, pathology and human rights are closely intertwined. But where do the bodies come from? The corpses, contrary to the exhibitor's claims, are not supplied by German donors - they are procured from Eastern Europe, Russia, Kyrgyzstan and China, from places where human rights and bioethical standards are not enforced. Von Hagens insists that bodies displayed are from donors, and his exhibition website (www.bodyworlds.com) welcomes donations to its body donation programme. In his body factory in Dalian, China, thousands of corpses, including the remains of executed prisoners, are flayed and prepared for later use. This trade in bodies, a multi-million-dollar enterprise, is highly problematic. For the trumpeted 'art of anatomy', with its beautified corpses and eroticized installations, also has a violent dimension, with human victims whose bodies are bought and sold for profit. In November 2002, Gunther von Hagens risked prosecution by holding the first public dissection of a (donated) body in the UK since the 1830s, in London's Atlantis Gallery. The issues surrounding procurement, preparation, dissection and display of human remains are central to anthropology, and in this article Uli Linke discusses in particular the various ways in which this exhbition was interpreted in Germany. [source] Phenomenological diversity of spinal reflexes in brain deathEUROPEAN JOURNAL OF NEUROLOGY, Issue 3 2000J. F. Spittler In brain death, spinal reflexes and automatisms are observed which may cause irritation and even doubt in the diagnosis. In the literature there are no dedicated descriptions of the diversity and of neuroanatomical considerations. In 278 examinations of 235 patients for the determination of brain death, on 42 occasions obvious spinal reflexes and/or spinal automatisms were observed in 27 brain dead bodies. Because they were not systematically searched for, minute forms have probably been missed. The reflexes (R) and automatisms (A) are described according to the time of observation in relation to the development of brain death, the presumable spinal localization and the possible phylogenetical interpretation. Especially disquieting examples are discussed in more detail, e.g. monophasic EndotrachealSuction,ThoracicContraction-R supposedly switched in segments C2,6 or TrapeziusPinch,ShoulderProtrusion-R conveyed by the accessory nerve (terminology according to the scheme: for the reflexes, Trigger-Response-R: for the automatisms, Movement-A). After these experiences a more thorough examination showed frequent observations of rather minute forms of spinal reflexes, as well as automatisms and even the Lazarus sign (in possibly more than two thirds of the examinations). An estimation of the factual frequency would necessitate special attention to those much more frequent but less obvious minute spinal reflexes and automatisms. [source] Fear of the Dead as a Factor in Social Self-OrganizationJOURNAL FOR THE THEORY OF SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR, Issue 2 2005AKOP P. NAZARETYAN The image of dead person returning to life was the most ancient source of irrational fear (i.e. fear not caused by objective menace) appeared in culture. This conclusion is argued with empirical data from archeology and ethnography. Fear has been expressed in funeral rites, the tying of extremities, burning and dismemberment of dead bodies, and ritual cannibalism (compensatory necrophilia) etc. At the same time, it was attended by effective care for helpless cripples, which seems to descend to the Lower Paleolithic as well. Dread of posthumous revenge played a decisive regulative role at the earliest stage of anthropogenesis, as the disparity between artificial weapons (the tools) and natural aggression-retention mechanisms (the instincts) became self-destructive. In the new conditions, individuals with normal animal mind were doomed to catastrophe. Those hominid groups proved viable, in which mystical fear, a product of unnaturally developed imagination, bounded lethal conflicts among kinsmen. The phobias corresponded to the psycho-nervous system's "strategic pathology"; that was a condition for early hominids' self-preservation. As a result, a causal connection between instrumental potential, cultural regulation quality and social sustainability (the techno-humanitarian balance law) was formed, which has been a mechanism of social selection for all of human history and prehistory. [source] Nursing care of dead bodies: a discursive analysis of last officesJOURNAL OF ADVANCED NURSING, Issue 6 2003Beverleigh Quested BN MN RN DipAppSc Background.,Nurses care for patients before they are born, after they have died and during the lifetime in between. This paper explores nursing care of the patient after they have died including the actions by nurses in preparation of the body, the covering with a shroud, and the transfer to the mortuary. Aims.,The analysis of a procedure manual excerpt Last Offices, which directs care of the dead patient aims to explore nursing care practices in regard to dead patients, as well as the impact of the health care institution and society at large on these care practices. Method.,An acute care teaching hospital located in a major Australian city was approached and permission was granted to access their procedure and policy manuals. The Last Offices excerpt of the procedure manual was discursively analysed. Findings.,It is the contention of this paper that, through their care, nurses enact the transition between life and death, and from person to corpse. Furthermore, nurses mediate the move from embodied person to becoming dead, and in so doing traverse the cultural, ontological and epistemological breaks that death entails. [source] BODYWORLDS AND THE ETHICS OF USING HUMAN REMAINS: A PRELIMINARY DISCUSSIONBIOETHICS, Issue 5 2006Y. MICHAEL BARILAN ABSTRACT Accepting the claim that the living have some moral duties with regard to dead bodies, this paper explores those duties and how they bear on the popular travelling exhibition Bodyworlds. I argue that the concept of informed consent presupposes substantial duties to the dead, namely duties that reckon with the meaning of the act in question. An attitude of respect and not regarding human remains as mere raw material are non-alienable substantial duties. I found the ethos of Bodyworlds premature but full of promises such as public attitudes to organ donations. At the practical level I conclude that Bodyworlds should use only willed donations or unclaimed bodies for which dignified funerals are not available. In the case of live donations, Bodyworlds has a duty to participate in the medical care of needy donors. However, secrecy with regard to the sources of cadavers seems to be the most troublesome aspect of Bodyworlds. [source] D(en)ying narratives: death, identity and the body politicLEGAL STUDIES, Issue 3 2000Patrick Hanafin One of the enduring features in Irish legal discourse in the postcolonial period is the manner in which the individual body has become a receptacle of contested meaning. In Ireland, with its birth out of a violent trauma based on a philosophy of blood sacrifice, the heroic patriot who dies in the service of his imagined nation is invested with particular symbolic capital and casts a traumatic shadow over discourses on death in Irish society. The nation is always already in the shadow of death, of the deathly apparition of the new nation, made hauntingly manifest in the photos of the dead body of the nationalist hunger striker Terence MacSwiney, as his corpse lay in state in 1920. This body being dead also signals the hope that, in the sacrifice of the individual for the national cause, liberation will one day come. This theme of the primacy of community over individual prefigured the manner in which in postcolonial Irish society the individual body of the citizen was relegated to a secondary position. The attempt to deny or repress death may be analogised with the similar attempt on the part of political elites to create a notion of political identity which is rigid and attempts to keep all those others associated with death and degeneration outside the body politic. [source] | |||||||||||||