ABSTRACT
The obsession with retrieving the remains of U.S. soldiers from Vietnam points to a resurgence of a pattern of reifying the body politic during a crisis of political legitimation. The genuine and cross-cultural (one is tempted to use the term ubiquitous) concern with proper disposal of the dead can be observed in as diverse phenomena as Antigone on the one hand, and, on the other, recent Native-American victories in their protest against researchers' disrespectful appropriation of their ancestral remains. However, far from being a “universal” feature that operates similarly across the cultural board and around the world, care of the dead, in this case the war dead, consistently reflects and constitutes an instance of the dynamics of each culture.
