THANATOPOLITICS IN THE SERVICE OF CULTURE OF REMEMBRANCE – CASE FROM FORMER YUGOSLAV COUNTRIES
Keywords:
thanatopolitics, death, culture, memory, post-conflict societies, YugoslaviaAbstract
Falkner, one of the most renowned poets in Western Europe literary circles, has observed that although the living ones are the ones who close eyes on the dead, it is precisely the dead that can open the eyes of the living ones. Dead bodies, or to be more specific, human corpses can be instrumentalised as a kind of ideological or religious resource. According to the observations of Todor Kuljić, author of the only study of the political instrumentalization of death in the former Yugoslavia, death is the bearer of a potentially huge symbolic capital. It is therefore quite understandable that through the political instrumentalization of death, the whole cultures based on the memory and remembrance can be built. Accordingly, the aim of this paper is to analytically dissect the mechanism of constructing post-Yugoslavian cultures of memory with the use of tanatopolitical instrumentation.
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