ABSTRACT
The formation, warping, fracturing, knitting and dispersal of human bones has remained a largely unremarked upon, ‘background’ element of geopolitics. They are readily denoted as collateral damage; one of the many the end-products of violent conflict. Yet, as with flesh, bones have a considerable cross-border movement shaped once again by a fluid distribution of capital, and animate a series of therapeutic and cosmetic becomings. Cadaveric bones and splinters are used to repair damage to the living body, to ameliorate ‘deformity,’ and to replace bone destroyed or removed because of cancer. Human bone is also ground for cement in orthopaedic operations and as a dental filler. On occasion, we gain glimpses of the extended geography of this market, as when bones stripped from the corpse of journalist Alistair Cooke in a New Jersey funeral home, for example, were discovered to have been shipped to a series of medical tissue companies before being implanted in orthopaedic patients throughout the US, Canada and Europe (Kittredge 2006). In this chapter, though, I want to take a different route in regard to bones, and that is to focus not so much upon their geopolitical ‘life’ as corporeally disassociated parts – a life underwritten by their diverse physio-chemical and biological capacities – but rather the manner in which these obdurate yet breakable fragments are afforded an ‘afterlife.’ That is, how they come to be understood, valorised, ignored, and recovered as tangible expressions of a lived experience of suffering and trauma – understandings that play upon the bleeding of time as well as space – but also as touchstones for the creation of gendered knowledges concerning what is appropriate (and not) to the world of war, conflict and international relations.
