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Isurprise my students sometimes with the idea that a cultural historian looking back on the United States during the first years of the twenty-first century will find a people troubled by unburied bodies—dead bodies and parts of bodies in all the wrong places. For many months, pieces of bodies turned up around the site of the World Trade Center. Construction on the memorial and on new buildings stopped. Just across lower Manhattan, at the South Street Seaport, crowds lined up to see an exhibit featuring the German anatomist Gunther von Hagens’s plasticized human bodies. But some visitors wondered about the ethics behind Body Worlds. Did each donor sign a consent form? And in Noble, Georgia, the owner of the Tri-State Crematory stopped burning bodies when his furnace broke. In February 2002, Georgia authorities discovered 334 bodies rotting in stacks in outbuildings and moldering in the woods. They charged the owner with three hundred counts of theft by deception. Did the charge of commercial fraud capture what the man had done wrong? During these same years, Native Americans reclaimed and reburied remains of the dead from nineteenth-century museum collections; activists asked for the Vietnamese skulls taken for trophies by U.S. soldiers. Why have these skulls and bones long forgotten become suddenly so visible?1 It is clear from these stories that there is something particularly powerful about these misplaced dead. Encounters with dead bodies cut through the surfaces of modern life, exposing something basic and visceral. Anthropologist James Frazier might have included these recent encounters on his long list of meetings between “undutiful relatives” and disagreeable ghosts. But there is 59 5 VVVVVVVVVVV Seeing Katrina’s Dead ANN FABIAN For, as every one knows, ghosts of the unburied dead haunt the earth and make themselves exceedingly disagreeable, especially to their undutiful relatives. —Sir James G. Frazier, “On Certain Burial Customs as Illustrative of the Primitive Theory of the Soul,” 1885 ANN FABIAN 60 also something historically specific about the recent meetings between the living and the unburied and misburied dead. These are the dead bodies of particular times and particular places. In September 2005, Katrina’s dead bodies joined the contemporary parade of ghosts of the unburied. In those first flooded days, we saw bodies on the streets of New Orleans, bodies floating in the receding floodwaters, bodies in Convention Center refrigerators. Rescue workers found bodies in attics, in nursing homes, in piles of rubble, squeezed under moldy couches. Discoveries pushed the coroner’s office beyond the breaking point and challenged the death-dealing skills of the people of New Orleans. Over two and a half centuries, residents of that city had grown particularly adept at dealing with the dead. New Orleans boasted architectural wonders to keep the dead above floodwaters, jazz musicians ushering out dead friends, voodoo priestesses who mediated relations between the living and the dead, and vampires who never managed to die. The city’s cultural mix had invited a kind of artistry around death; strains of African, African American, Catholic, and Creole ways of doing things were woven together in this city’s fragile natural setting.2 In those first days after the storm, Katrina’s dead were too much even for the artistry of the people of New Orleans. Katrina’s bodies stood out as stark reminders of the great vulnerability of these people and this place. The dead were too visible, slipped free from all the cultural nets that help the living deal with the dead. These bodies, it seemed, expressed a failure of the “cultural infrastructure ” every bit as glaring as the failures in the city’s physical infrastructure. Katrina showed us many things we prefer to keep hidden: our inability to stop hurricanes, of course, but also our neglect of the poverty and racism that made many particularly easy targets of the storm. This failure was obvious to the locals. Patrick McCarthy, a retired electrician, described it this way to a reporter from London, “If you need a metaphor for failure, this is as good as it gets. Everybody should be buried. [This is] an insult to our humanity.”3 Remembering the exposed bodies, now mostly hidden again, offers a way for us to remember those other hidden wrongs and perhaps to become more dutiful relatives to the people scattered out of New Orleans. Remembering, in other words, can be a forensic exercise, not to learn the identity of the dead or why they died...

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