Politics of dead bodies. Rituals of exhumation in Poland

Exhuming the dead and exposing the dead body in the public sphere are by no means exceptional political situations. They have been practiced in many times and cultures. But during few recent years in Poland, the number and quality of exhumations becoming public spectacle exceeded the limit of a “normal” custom. Mikolaj Kopernik, Wladyslaw Sikorski, Stanislaw Pyjas, Ryszard Kaczorowski, to name just the most important figures, were exhumed, among others, in order to find the truth about the past and advocate historical justice. During the procedures, forensic, legal, and historical discourses met, with physicians, prosecutors and historians collaborating, all taking advantage of truth hidden in a grave to achieve the declared goal of justice. Yet, when seen in their totality, the practices of exhumations appear to serve a different, political function – concealed by the historical justice façade – of maintaining identity of the political body as a whole. Are exhumations in contemporary Poland a new secular ritual? Is the hysteria of exhumations after the Smolensk catastrophe in 2010 merely a continuation of a process that started well before?

Marcin Moskalewicz is a Polish intellectual historian and philosopher, currently assistant professor at the Chair of the History of Medical Sciences at Poznan University of Medical Sciences (previously Marie Curie Fellow at Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in the Netherlands). He also serves as an editor of Polish sociopolitical quarterly Res Publica Nowa. His recent book is Totalitarianism, Narrative, Identity. Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy of History (Torun 2013). His main areas of research and interest are hermeneutic phenomenology and its medical application in psychiatry, and contemporary public discourse in Poland.