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The Potter's Field

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

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Type

Article

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Authors

Denyer Willis, GAN 

Abstract

I unpack the ‘potter’s field’ as an everyday practice and a category, especially as it operates in the material treatment of bodies as a mirror of life. I examine this space of ‘worthlessness’ as it exists in liberal capitalism. From the potter’s fields of São Paulo, Brazil, I consider how these are, in fact, mundane mass graves, made politically useful as a means to obscure important bodies alongside those who are, today, the subjects of terror. I then ask how the rise of the uncertified potter’s field –a burial field for the disposable not made legal by the state- is inseparable from recent historical and contemporary conditions of political abandonment. The uncertified field is made easy by a politics of abandonment, becoming useful to the institutions of the state as a material invocation of responsibility, interred elsewhere, while nonetheless advancing a larger logic of governance and political will in our times.

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Keywords

mass graves, indigent cemetery, potter's field, Sao Paul, Brazil, violence, abandonment, liberalism

Journal Title

Comparative Studies in Society and History

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0010-4175
1475-2999

Volume Title

60

Publisher

Cambridge University Press