Lively Corpses.

The Political Lives
of Dead Bodies
Reburial and Postsocialist Change
Katherine Verdery
Columbia University Press, $21.50, 208 pp.

When I went to work in the Philippines in the summer of 1985, Ferdinand Marcos appeared to be firmly in control of the country. His opponents were numerous but divided among themselves. A few months later, the dead body of Benigno Aquino became a symbol of opposition that led the anti- Marcos forces to coalesce behind the leadership of Aquino's widow. Marcos himself subsequently died in exile and his own well-preserved body became a focal point of controversy and an object of pilgrimage for his former followers. When the earthly remains of Marcos were finally returned to his homeland, the debate over his legacy became a heated one over where and how he would be buried. Corpses have power.

Katherine Verdery's The Political Lives of Dead Bodies is an absorbing meditation on that power. Verdery, an eminent anthropologist and an authority on socialist Eastern Europe, considers the role of the dead in Eastern Europe's current and continuing political transformation. The movement toward a postsocialist Central and Eastern Europe became, in Verdery's phrase, "a parade of dead bodies." After the collapse of communism in 1989, the remains of political leaders, artists, and national heroes began returning from abroad or were relocated from ignominious domestic graves to honored places of burial. Even socialist- era statues, which Verdery sees as stone or bronze corpses, were marched away from their pedestals.

Bodies, Verdery argues, are potent vehicles for political meaning. As material objects with definite locations in space, bodies connect the past to the present. They are (or were) people, with claims on the emotions of others. Of course, unlike living people corpses do not speak for themselves. That silence gives bodily remains an ambiguity that enables groups and factions to claim them as emblems for competing causes. For example, in Hungary Prime Minister Imre Nagy was shot in 1958 and buried face-down in an unmarked grave for his attempts to reform communism. When he was reburied in a public ceremony attended by thousands in 1989, the anti-Communists, the Communists, the nationalists, and young reformers all claimed him as one of their own.

Communism was more than an economic system; it was a moral order. The artificial bodies of statues and real bodies, such as that of Lenin, literally embodied that order. With the passing of the Communist regimes, the populations of Europe sought new moral orders and new identities. Nationalism, ethnicity, and religion were among the prime props used in constructing new definitions of the self and the world. The formerly forgotten or despised dead were called upon to further the causes of these frequently competing allegiances.

Verdery looks in detail at two sets of competing postsocialist claims of dead bodies. In Romania, she considers the case of Bishop Inochentie Micu-Klein, a Transylvanian who died in Rome in 1756. Inochentie was a clergyman of the Greek Catholic church, which followed the Eastern Orthodox ritual and liturgy but had united with Rome. He also championed the political rights of all Romanians against their Hungarian and German rulers, and he became a national hero to both Greek Catholic and Orthodox Christians. In 1989 Romanians seeking to re-interpret their history brought Inochentie's remains home. However, Eastern Orthodoxy had been greatly strengthened by its official religious monopoly during the Communist period and there was a bitter debate over the return of Greek Catholic churches and properties that had been converted to Orthodox use. Inochentie was claimed as a hero specifically of the Greek Catholic cause and as an Orthodox Christian who had turned to Rome only for the sake of his nationalist goals.

Yugoslavia provides Verdery's second example of how dead bodies can be focal points of competing moral orders. This nation was, in Verdery's telling phrase, "a land of graves." World War II saw massacres of Serbs and Communist partisans by Croatian Fascists; of Fascists and others by Communists; and of Muslims, Croats, and Communists by Serbian royalists. During the Tito regime the dead were collectivized as "victims of fascism" or "traitors," and there was no mention of slaughter by Communist partisans. With the end of communism and movement toward the break-up of Yugoslavia, exhumations and reburials became part of the historical claims of the competing factions. Different groups claimed the dead as victims of the Fascists, the Communists, or the Serbs. By selectively recognizing victims, the factions could make statements about responsibility and accountability. Burials and reburials served to make territorial as well as historical claims. Burial unites the community of the living and the dead with the land.

The Political Lives of Dead Bodies is a timely book. The affairs of Eastern Europe, and especially those of the lands that were once Yugoslavia, now hold the attention of the entire world. Verdery gives readers a new angle of vision on this troubled region. However, I think the value of the book goes beyond current events, important as those events may be. It should be regarded as a classic work on the meaning of death and the dead for human views of time and space. This is one of the first books on the dead as sacred objects in modern times, to be read along with Patrick Geary's Furta Sacra (Princeton University Press, 1990), which deals with the theft of holy relics in the Middle Ages, and Peter Brown's books on the body and the cult of saints in late antiquity. Verdery's work reminds us that history is largely concerned with the dead and with negotiating the relationship between the living and the dead. In modern times, as in ancient times, struggles over the meaning of history often become rivalries for the possession and patronage of the dead.

The examples Verdery chooses illustrate two of the primary symbolic functions of the dead. They are heroes and victims. Heroes like Bishop Inochentie serve as emblems of social groups. Victims like the unnumbered dead of former Yugoslavia create claims of collective responsibility and collective righteousness. Katherine Verdery makes a convincing and intriguing case for seeing the corpses of heroes and victims as vehicles of political meaning for post-Communist Europe and for the rest of the living world.

Carl L. Bankston III teaches in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Southwestern Louisiana.