ABSTRACT
This study locates the body as a central and defining agent in its exploration to understand both the effects of the war and how resilience is expressed through rituals. Resurfacing after centuries of marginalisation following the segregation of mind from matter and materialist science from metaphysics, the body has now been decisively recognised as possessing both authority and agency. This reassertion of the body began at the start of the twentieth century within sociological, political and philosophical traditions: from descriptions of the learned behavioural aspects of the body in the social world, to more overtly political connections of the body in relation to hegemonic state regularisation. Marx, Durkheim, Mauss and, later, Foucault have all been credited with critical analyses that situate the body as a focus of restraint and control and have particular relevance in studies of state violence.
