Mass violence and burial practices: comparative aproach to collective reburial in Europe and Latin America XXe XXI c. – TRANSFUNERAIRE

Our project focuses on a comparative analysis of collective burial and funerary practices currently occuring in Europe and Latin America, in post-mass death and mass violence contexts. It aims at enleightening their transformations, but also the ritual, religious and political arrangements that lie beneath and enable societies to deal with the difficult issues of fragmented or absent bodies. Beside an interrogation upon funeral grammar and glossaries' adaptability as well as upon forensics expertise's impact, our main goal is to grasp what is at stake in the ritual transformations, and how relationships to the dead may be reshaped. In these unprecedented mortuary situations, an empirical and acute understanding of material and symbolic funerary procedures implemented to deal with human remains en masse or missing corpses, will indeed lead to at a better understanding of sociocultural resilience mechanisms in time of crisis.