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163 Chapter 6 Postmortem Economies ONE DAY I WAS SITTING WITH LT. SOMSY and our interpreter in a small, spare room at a community center. A tape recorder sat on the beige formica-topped tablebetween us. Our conversationhad eventually gravitated, like many otherswith emigrants,to a conjunctionbetweenviolence and material relations with the dead. The lieutenant was describing how he and his unit in the Royal Lao Army handled the bodies of those killed in combat during the wars of the 1960s and 1970s. As quick as possible try to get rid of the body. Try to hide the body from the enemy. We dig a hole and take necklace, identification of the person, out. We would use the ID to report. If we had enough time, we would bury that person . If we didn’t have enough time, we put gasoline on the dead person and then burn it. If we didn’t have enough gasoline, or didn’t have any gasoline, then we would put dynamite on the body of the person, and then blow it up. . . . The thing that we should not do is steal anything from the dead person . If you do that then you’ll be in danger. Let’s say you want to get something from the dead person. I would tell this person that it is not for me. . . . I have to tell the dead person that this is to give to your wife or to your family member. So they can do the ceremony for you. But if I just take these things away from the dead person for myself maybe the spirit of the dead person may haunt me or do some harm to me. . . . There are many people who got things from the dead person. They got shot. They got killed. Some people didn’t get shot in the battlefield, but once they got into a safe place, the village or the city, they would fall ill or something would happen to them, and they die. I’ve seen many people who have had this experience. The lieutenant’s memory of the injunction not to steal from those who died in battle assumesthatthe dead are enfolded into a material exchangewiththeliving , characterized by an expectation of gifts, a presumption of debt, a possibility of theft, and an acknowledgement (or,thethreat of a nonacknowledgment) of sacrifice. Deprived of the ceremonies that would inform him that he was dead, ask him not to trouble the living, and supply him with money and provisions for his journey, a dead soldier was already disoriented and apt to harass theliving. If, in addition,hewere robbed,he might extract theverylives of the thieves. The demands of the dead continue to weigh on emigrants from Laos and Cambodia living in the United States, particularly as these demands come to be mediatedby thanatopolitical institutions. As physical connectionswith the dead have become entangled in welfare rules, medical procedure, and mortuary protocol, survivors sometimes fail to fulfill their material responsibilities to the dead, not because of war, but because of lowered economic means and extreme minority status in relation to the dominant ethos underlying management of death in the United States.1 While it is difficult anyway for emigrants to settle their debts with those who died violent deaths, it is harder for thosewho owe their survival, as they say, to thebenevolence of their ancestors or to bargains struck with spirits. The difficulty is recast in political exile, when emigrants who have been socially marginalized as immigrants and charity recipients are less able to define the terms through which they relate to the dead. Thanatopolitics and Reciprocity The frequent connection, in emigrant stories,betweenviolence and a material responsibility to the dead offers an opportunity to rethink biopolitical theory from the perspective of reciprocity. From thevantage point of many emigrants, the postmortem protocols of hospitals and funeral homes threaten to disturb relations with the dead in subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) ways. These protocols are informed not simply by sciences of sanitation and death causation , but also, as suggested earlier, by latent theological presumptions about matter and spirit that are largely Christian in genealogy. As Cannell (2006a) and others have shown, the commitment to a matter–spirit opposition can vary widely in Christianities around the globe. Certain Christian Hmong and Kmhmu practices discussed later in this chapter are exemplary of that variation . Moreover, as Webb Keane (2007, 2006) perceptively notes, the matter– spirit opposition may be more...

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