ABSTRACT
Haunting is used by the state in an attempt to re-order society after the trauma of the genocide. But haunting also posits a resistance to these ordering attempts, and reminds us that memorialisation, even monumentalisation, is always an ongoing performance. This chapter explains the notion of shared human vulnerability offers an opening to think spectrally: to think beyond the ontological construction of life and death. It seeks to trace a social and political process that takes on particular manifestations, including the levels of visibility or elision of bodies, construction and conceptualisation of spaces, and construction and pervasiveness of particular types of discourses. Mass graves are themselves unique among graves. Graves traditionally serve as memorials, usually to individuals. Thomas Laqueur refers to the phenomenon of gravesites from wars, stating that bodies, of course, being in the ground, are hidden and cannot be their own memorials, but markers of their skeletal uniformity serve the purpose'.
