Abstract
Morgue in its contemporary institutional form, for all its silent presence, combines at least two sets of organisational practices that operate characteristically amidst the heat and din distinctive of social tenacity of the still-living. One set of practices aggregate around the pre-designated architectural spaces affiliated to hospitals, crematoria, funeral parlours, stand alone municipal mortuaries and the like. The second set of practices are centred around the potentiality of a would-be morgue, wherein, pre-existing spaces like that of school, university, gymnasium, stadium, office, mosque, restaurant or virtually any place can be turned into a morgue, when disaster strikes, accidents occur, mishaps take place, catastrophes happen or when a temporally condensed fatal health epidemic spreads rapidly. This contemporary institutional form of the morgue offers an occasion to witness the extent to which the modern state may invest itself formally in the work of sorting, sifting, keeping and storing the dead. In one reading it may appear that the state creates a debt, through its peculiar formal care for the dead, on the living who may come to reclaim their own personal deceased. Alternatively, it is my case that this investment of the modern state should be seen and heard on two registers that help us depart from the preceding reading. First, Julia Kristeva’s formulation that “the corpse seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection” has to be refuted as the modern state does not formally allow an ‘outside' or ‘without’ for the corpse. Thus the corpse in the instance of morgue is fundamentally refracted into a frame which opens it to a whole range of enactments including the almost mandatory processes of science and piety but also that of modalities of sexuality and treatment of the dead body as a repository of truths that can be used jurally.It seems to be the case that the anthropology of death which has relied heavily on the life cycle trope to explain death as an event in the community appears insufficient to explain the range and variety of these enactments. A way out, I suggest, is to not assume the dead as ‘abject' as Kristeva does, but to treat them as subjects-objects. To further specify how this can be achieved, in my view, the abstract category of dead could be limited for this study to what one may call as the ‘newly dead’. The 'newly dead’ can be proposed as an epistrophic entity. As subjects-objects they repetitively come to stand in the same line with the living, in the inexhaustible multiplicities of life and death. Second, the assiduous work of the modern state with the dead should be seen as an acknowledgment of its work toward normalisation of disaster and bad death. In this reading then the contract is that the state owes the living claimants an ‘authentic’ part or body of the dead, granted that disasters and accidents are continually absorbed by the society.
Bio
Dr. Ravi Nandan Singh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Hindu College, University of Delhi. His research interest is largely focussed on making a shift from an anthropology of death to an anthropology of the dead.