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Mortality
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The rights of the corpse

John Sutton Baglow a a Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada Online Publication Date: 01 August 2007

To cite this Article Baglow, John Sutton(2007)'The rights of the corpse',Mortality,12:3,223 239 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13576270701430692 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13576270701430692

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Mortality, Vol. 12, No. 3, August 2007

The Rights of the Corpse

JOHN SUTTON BAGLOW
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

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ABSTRACT The notion of the rights of the corpse can provoke incredulous reaction, seeming as it does to denigrate the concept of rights and to assign an ontological status to the corpse that dees reason. On the contrary, however, it can be demonstrated that the social corpse is constructed as a repository of meaning and value: that it remains human and, in a social sense, animate. Rights, deriving from obligations, are shown to inhere in the corpse as a result of the duties that we continue to acknowledge to it. KEYWORDS: death; corpse; society; rights; obligations

Interfering with a persons body, even after death, is a serious violation of his rights (No to presumed consent, 2005).

Introduction Does a corpse have rights? In this era of endlessly proliferating rights talk, have we nally discovered a limit, or alternatively a reductio, in the phrasing of a newspaper editorialist, an apparently self-satirizing comment that sends up the entire notion of human rights, whether through clumsy writing or sloppy thinking or both? The writer was here arguing against a proposal for presumed consent with respect to organ donations, under which doctrine the absence of expressed opposition to the use of a persons organs in case of death would be taken as a tacit agreement by that person to such use (No to presumed consent, 2005). And he or she is far from alone, even in a scientic and secularized age in which most major religions have no moral objection in principle to organ transplants, one where medical technology is increasingly rened to prolong lives through organ replacement, and where a shortage of such organs is endemic. After all, is this not a time when the corpse is no longer sacralized but is merely a thing where life once resided? Or is this indeed the case? Had the editorialist insisted on the rights of the survivors, an odd term used guratively to denote the next-of-kin (and unproblematized even in the
Correspondence: Dr. John Sutton Baglow, 53 Simcoe Street, Ottawa, ON K1S 1A3, Canada. Tel: 613 235 5688. Fax: 613 230 7871. E-mail: baglow@rstwrite.ca ISSN 1357-6275 (print) ISSN 1469-9885 (online) 2007 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13576270701430692

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literature: see D. Davies, 1996, p. 24; Shibles, 1974, p. 460; Stephenson, 1985, p. 169), this would not have been remarkable. Survival, normally used to refer to living through adversity or danger, here acquires a special meaning: it applies to those immediate family members who live on and who appear to acquire, by reason of that, both ownership and rights with respect to the departed. While our families claim no ownership of our bodies while we are alive, it appears entirely natural that they, at least within limits, come to own us when we die. Moreover, that they have rights over the corpse seems unquestionable, although the nature of those rights is, upon examination, somewhat difcult to grasp. Even more problematic is the notion that a dead body can have rights. Certainly we can attempt to substitute the more usual talk of wills for talk of rights (what the person in life would or would not have wanted), but even there the matter is far from clear. Wills provide for the orderly transfer of property from one generation to the succeeding one. While invested with the presence of the absent person, a will serves a relatively mundane function. But is the body itself merely property, to be willed like a house or a bank account? Must we accept the dualism inherent in the notion of living persons owning their bodies? In this paper, I will explore these and other questions in order to make a specic argument: that the corpse indeed can be said to have limited human rights, passive rights, to be sure, but rights nonetheless. The social corpse is imbued with presence and personhood. And this is perhaps reinforced by the lack of universal agreement on when death actually occurs. The unanswerable anti-abortion question, When does life begin? has its complement in When does life end? Death, says the historian of death Phillippe Aries, referring to the present day, is a technical phenomenon obtained ` by a cessation of care, a cessation determined in a more or less avowed way by a decision of the doctor and the hospital team. It has been dissected, he goes on, cut to bits by a series of little steps, which nally makes it impossible to know which one was the real death. . . (Aries, 1974, p. 88). Hence, until its journey to ` the next world is done, until it is conveyed by ritual of one kind or another to the realm of the dead, the corpse remains to some degree a member of the living human community. The notion of universal human rights, with its own pedigree and by no means uncontested, will be examined in order to demonstrate its applicability in this circumstance. The lively corpse
For all its grave stillness, there is nothing more dynamic than a corpse (Harrison, 1994, p. 93).

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Analyses of the body have for the most part been taken up with the living body: what is done to it, as in regimes of regulation and discipline (Foucault, 1973, 1977), what it does, for example its practices and its techniques (Mauss, 1972 [1934]), its discursive construction (see Shilling, 1993, pp. 79 80, on Foucaults vanishing body), or, alternatively, its corporeal, experienced presence as the

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body-subject (Howson & Inglis, 2001, p. 304). While some, insisting that the body is irreducible to discourse (Mellor & Shilling, 1997, pp. 4 5) demand the grounding assurance of a pre-discursive biological body (as does Shilling, 1993, pp. 10 11, 99; and Turner, 1992, p. 20), this is in effect a Kantian ding an sich: the body, as opposed to the body, cannot be known. It is the body, therefore, that is the subject of discussion here, although, in this case, it is the dead body. Between life and death there lies not a boundary but a space, differing, certainly, from culture to culture and from historical period to historical period, populated by ghosts (Searle, 1998, p. 52) and near-ghosts (Tuan, 1979, p. 115), the prematurely buried with no discernible pulse or breath (Aries, 1981, pp. 396 399; ` Lock, 2002, p. 69; Quigley, 1996, pp. 183 188), neo-morts, that is, breathing corpses with beating hearts (Lock, 2002, p. 108), cryonic corpsicles awaiting revivication (Quigley, 1996, pp. 20, 233 236), restless, unusually spirited corpses who do not go gentle into the good night (Verdery, 1999, p. 16), and others who do so relatively tamely (Aries, 1981, p. 28). (While it may be objected ` that brain-dead neo-morts and even corpsicles are not corpses, they occupy the self-same liminal space, not quite dead, but no longer inhabiting the world of the living either.) And across this bleak and contested space the corpses stream, on their way to becoming dead, for the most part, but sometimes taking up residence in it, or heading back to make new contact with the living. On their passage from this world to the next, they are newly vulnerable: to having portions of them snatched away (although some have no objection), to being put on display here indenitely as plastinated exhibits (Moore, 2005, p. A10; Quigley, 1996, p. 60), or to being kept breathing in hospitals, their hearts pumping, held back from the grave by fundamentalists and conservative politicians (Terri Schiavo Dies at age 41, 2005). Corpses are a lively bunch, and hence require a degree of engagement. The social construction that is a corpse is difcult to kill. The corpse has a certain sensibility, and retains a remnant of life (Aries, 1981, p. 355). It possesses a ` kind of charisma (Harrison, 2003, p. 147). Even when reduced as nearly as possible to a thingto a cadaver, subject to student dissection or embalmingthe corpse is still granted respect that a mere thing would not command. Students at one embalming school in New York were asked to visit the sources of their cadavers (institutions for the indigent). Memorial services for medical cadavers are conducted; remains are buried or returned to the families of the donors for proper disposal (Quigley, 1996, pp. 199 200). Nevertheless, the indigent have historically been effectively dened as socially dead, with their corpses at the disposal of the institutions that housed them (Lock, 2002, p. 152). Corpses in some cultures may be married before burial or in the grave, although it is illegal to arrest one in Maine, and in Oregon corpses are explicitly not permitted to serve on juries (Quigley, 1996, pp. 181 182). In Haiti, corpses are kissed to ensure that the spirit does not return (Quigley, 1996, p. 17), while deceased virgin women may have ritual intercourse before burial (Shibles, 1974, p. 400). In historical Europe, they have been tried, punished, and deliberately mutilated (Quigley, 1996, pp. 281 283). Superstitions in many cultures and times,

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indeed, prescribe various precautions in treating the corpse to ensure in effect that eventual separation from the living world takes place (Quigley, 1996, pp. 16 19). In some parts of Europe, if a corpse is denied proper burial, it will return to make life unpleasant for relatives and neighbors (Verdery, 1999, pp. 40, 109). Corpses, named or unnamed, can play an active role in politics, moving from grave to grave to return home or to colonize the soil (Verdery, 1999, p. 106). Their bodies make the past present (Verdery, 1999, p. 27) and they dene territory: Serbia is wherever there are Serbian graves, says one nationalist (quoted in Verdery, 1999, p. 95). Bags of bones are unearthed, claimed by ethnic groups in Eastern Europe and reburied (Verdery, 1999, pp. 99 100). Former leaders, and cultural and religious gures, are movedand others are removed (Verdery, 1999, p. 13ff, 19). Corpses can also take on the guise of the living. Three days after the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp, Elie Wiesel recalls, I wanted to see myself in the mirror . . . From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as he stared into mine, has never left me. Corpses, he continues, call us to life, faith, and salvation in the face of the Holocaust (Elie Wiesel, quoted in Moller, 1996, p. 235). Sequestered death? Western society, many claim, avoids or denies or sequesters death (C. Davies, 1996, p. 60; Littlewood, 1993, p. 69ff; Lock, 2002, p. 200; McIlwain, 2005, p. 11; Mellor, 1993, p. 26; Mellor & Shilling, 1997, p. 121; Moller, 1996, p. 15; Shibles, 1974, p. 442; Shilling, 1993, p. 190; Stephenson, 1985, p. 31). In the USA, death is positively un-American (Stephenson, 1985, p. 32). The fact that death has been medicalized and taken over by experts (Aries, 1974, p. 80; Moller, 1996, p. 25ff; ` Seale, 1998, p. 75; Shilling, 1993, p. 185 re Giddens), that natural death by old age takes place in remote rooms of institutions so that the young need not confront it (Shilling, 1993, p. 195), that death is rarer than it once was (Walter, 1996, p. 286), allegedly renders death savage rather than tame, isolates and denies it (Aries, 1981, pp. 612 613), makes of it an individualized, lonely agony that dare ` not speak its name (Aries, 1981, p. 613; Mellor, 1996, p. 22; Walter, 1996, ` p. 286). Protestantism individualized the experience of death and effected a rupture between the dead and the living (Mellor & Shilling, 1997, p. 121; Shilling, 1993, p. 188). A heavy silence has fallen over the subject of death, says Phillippe Aries (Aries, 1981, p. 614). Today death no longer makes any sign (Aries, ` ` ` 1985, p. 266). This is not a consensus view, however. Talcott Parsons maintained that the scientic paradigm had taken root in modern society, offering a natural death (Seale, 1998, p. 54; Stephenson, 1985, p. 41); only premature death causes anxiety, in his view. But what would Parsons, writing in the 1960s and early 1970s on the subject, have thought about the naturalness of the technological prolongation of life (and unlife) that conjures up for Aries the popular image of a ` person on a hospital deathbed covered with tubes (Aries, 1981, p. 614)? McIlwain, ` who notes the tendency in modern life to avoid mention of death in educational

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institutions (McIlwain, 2005, p. 42ff), points out that, as immediate contact with death is diminished, mediated representations of death proliferate (McIlwain, 2005, p. 49). Stephenson notes that life insurance plans and pre-need funeral plans are growing as existential death is avoided (rather than denied) (Stephenson, 1985, p. 44). Walter argues that there is a countervailing current to medicalized death, at least in America; the humanizing of death (Walter, 1993, p. 286). Seale writes of revivalist cultural scripts in which individuals see dying as yet another experience for personal growth (Seale, 1998, pp. 7 8), perhaps the nal technology of the self in Foucauldian terms. Walter points out, additionally, the proliferation of articles about dying, how to die and so onthe ultimate self-help books (Walter, 1993, p. 199). McIlwain, who claims that fear and denial characterize our relationship to death (McIlwain, 2005, p. 11), goes on to expound at length about the plethora of representations of death in popular culture. Indeed, such representations are all around us: popular television shows, namely, Dead Like Me and Six Feet Under, and also Crow and The Collector, for example. Death has been a recurrent theme in fantasy and science ction for decades, for example, Robert Silverbergs Born with the dead (1974) in which the dead and the living coexist on earth, although their interests are different and they live in separate towns. I would maintain that the medicalization of death, the medical gaze, the repression of death (its sequestration, its denial) has done for death what it did for sex (Foucault, 1990, p. 72), namely generate a proliferation of death discourses, create and re-create death as discourse, and energize it. Death imbues our culture. Far from denying it, we imbibe it, talk about it, and (thanks to a plentiful supply of foreign wars and sensational homicides at home) experience it, if in mediated form. Organ transplants and the boundaries of death Denial, no: but a continuing anxious uncertainty about death is revealed in current debates over organ transplants. Medical technology has made such transplants almost routine, but there is a problem; specically, an acute shortage of organs for transplant purposes. This has, like the fear of execution, concentrated the mind wonderfully, demanding exactitude in the determination of the moment of death, and hence a scientic determination, one that is not congruent with the social one. Brain death is that scientic boundary: a political act, one commentator suggests, permitting organ procurement (Lock, 2002, pp. 374 375; see Seale, 1998, p. 87). But social death, as noted earlier, is not a boundary but a space. Locks comparative study of the West and of Japan is illustrative in this respect (the majority of Japanese reject the notion of organ transplants, while the West has naturalized brain death; Lock, 2002, p. 45). Here in the West, vivisection has replaced premature burial as a fear (Lock, 2002, pp. 76 77); as a possibility (Quigley 1996, p. 201), organs having nearly been harvested from people not dead (Quigley, 1996, p. 185); and as a reality. In China, where executions feed the

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demand for organs, the latter at least on occasion have been removed prior (Scheper-Hughes, 2005, p. 3). It has been seen as exploitation of the newly dead, and has conjured up new creatures (neo-morts), neither dead nor alive, who are essentially incubators of their own organs (Quigley, 1996, p. 201). While a number of discourses describe transplantation in terms of solidarity (Gold, 1996, p. 131) and even as a species of immortality (Freidin, 2003, p. 69; Healy, 2004, p. 312; Lock, 2002, p. 207; Quigley, 1996, p. 197), and see it, in any case, as a better fate than worms (Freidin, 2003, p. 66), other accounts compare it to cannibalism (Lock, 2002, p. 254; Scheper-Hughes, 2005), and the uncomfortable idea surfaces of the body as a resource (Lock, 2002, p. 97). Moreover, the person is not coincident with the biological presence, which in any case is socially constructed as well (Seale, 1998, p. 34; Turner, 1996, p. 215). What they are is neither immediately obvious nor susceptible to clear denition. The notion of brain death does not create certainty in the midst of doubt, but can breed nightmares. There is anxiety and conict about organ transplants (Lock, 2002, p. 247), arising as images of the corpse being violated (Robbins, 1996, p. 181), disgured, of being warm and breathing (Freidin, 2003, p. 65; Robbins, 1996, p. 187), of the organs themselves being lively, animate, spiritualized part[s] of the self (Scheper-Hughes, 2005, p. 5; see Friedan, 2003, p. 60). Family members effectively have a veto over organ transplants even in jurisdictions with presumed consent (Healy, 2005, pp. 4, 24), and some will exercise it when called upon to make the decision (Lock, 2002, p. 368). In previous eras, death, whenever it occurred, was certied, as it were, by the onset of evident putrefaction of the corpse, or in the early 1900s by the cessation of the heartbeat. And the soul was felt to adhere to the body for some time after apparent clinical death (Lock, 2002, p. 40, 198; Quigley, 1996, p. 51). Brain death is trickier, seemingly more arbitrary, and established as noted earlier with an ulterior motive. The lack of congruence between this kind of death and the notion of personhood is especially acutely felt in Japan (Lock, 2002) where the person is not considered to be dead until the family accepts the death as nal. People anywhere, Lock says, might consider the person as extended throughout or even beyond the body (Lock, 2002, p. 8), and the Japanese do not, in any case, accept that it is simply resident in a brain (Lock, 2002, p. 231). In Europe, the end of life does not coincide with physical death either: what follows is an extension, or a sleep (Aries, 1981, p. 604). Death is dened by the social ` milieu, not by some scientically determined moment (Stephenson, 1985, p. 21). Hence, while the doctrines of most major religions do not oppose organ transplants, accepting and even encouraging voluntary donation (Healy, 2004, p. 317; Quigley, 1996, p. 202), individuals do not nd it easy to detach themselves from the notion that the corpse is not dead (D. Davies, 1996, p. 24). Identity is attached to the body: the corpse is the bearer of positive meaning (Freidin, 2003, pp. 68 69). I do not agree, therefore, that organ transplants threaten sacred beliefs about death and the body, as Healy maintains (Healy, 2004, p. 326). What they threaten is at once closer to home and further away: the integrity of the person, whose traces inhere in the corpse as the latter sets out on its journey to the realm of the

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dead, to a new and altered condition . . . (as souls, images, voices, masks, heroes, ancestors, founders, and the like) (Harrison, 2003, p. 154). The journey from life to death If every journey begins with a single step, it is impossible to determine in this case when that step has been taken. But take it we must: Dasein [Heideggers term for a consciousness in-the-world, literally being-there] does not die until its remains are disposed of (Harrison, 2003, p. 143). Indeed, the corpse undergoes a transition from this world of the living to the realm of the dead. As a neighbor commiserating with my mother on the event of my fathers death said, Im sorry your husband has gone out of sight. The corpse mediates between the living and the dead (McIlwain, 2005, p. 16), occupying a liminal space that can coincide with that of the living mourners (van Gennep, 1965, p. 147). In this connection, Stephenson is surely wrong (Stephenson, 1985, p. 200) to view the funeral as the reintegration phase of a rite of passage: that is a classical communitas event. Mourning and burial constitute (re)integration, one with the living and the other with the dead. The recently dead are most like us, and may even be frozen that way for a time by being embalmed, having cosmetics applied, and so on, but this should not necessarily be seen as an attempt to deny death, a basically dishonest practice (Quigley, 1996, p. 54). Rather, it seems to me to demarcate a starting-point for the corpse, resembling the living but already on the journey to the unknown world of the dead,1 a place of representations, memories, and a repository of wisdom and history. As Harrison says, Ritual disposal serves to detach the image from the corpse and thereby free the image for its repersonications and reverbalizations in various culturally determined guises (Harrison, 2003, p. 154). And that image will of necessity bear a resemblance to the person who has died. Quite literally, if the repository of the dead is the social memory, then one would want to start the corpse off looking as much as possible as it did in life. (Alternatively, we can shorten its progress considerably through cremation, reducing the corpse almost immediately to ashes and dust.) During the journey, as already noted, the corpse can be waylaid in a number of respects. Gold and Shilling note the discord between the ways we value the human body and property discourse (ownership) (Gold, 1996, p. 22; Shilling, 1993, p. 4). Harrison asks (2003, p. 142), to whom does the dead body belong? Domanska puts it more forcefully: It is worth asking . . . whether the dead really are our property. Does the relation between the living and the dead have to be governed by the economics of exchange and the rhetoric of debt? (Domanska, 2005, p. 121). Corpses are an integral part of the social body, slow to be sloughed off. Getting them to die in us is, as Harrison puts it, an arduous task (Harrison, 2003, p. 147). However, on arrival, [v]oid of personality, the corpse joins the masses (Quigley, 1996, p. 9). They become in some cultures, such as China or Japan, ancestors (Tuan, 1979, pp. 118 119; Lock, 2002, p. 216). The corpse is the frail bearer of news to the realm of the dead: its location is out of sight, marked in this culture by the hic jacet (Harrison, 2003), invested in the earth but not out of mind until,

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through the natural process of damnatio memoriae, it dies a second time through erasure from memory. Joining the dead [Death] does not exist apart from its signicance, suggests Richard Fardon in an interview with Bryan Turner (1992, p. 255). The dead must not be mistaken for the sum total of corpses. The dead, as we construct them, live among us in a far different fashion. I cannot agree that the dead have dominion over us, as Harrison asserts; rather, they live with us in interdependence, in a kind of symbiosis (Domanska, 2005, p. 119), possessed of what Harrison, in a felicitous phrase, calls nocturnal vision (Harrison, 2003, p. 158). We engage with the dead in Heideggers reciprocative rejoinder (Harrison, 2003, p. 102), appropriating aspects of their tradition, transforming and giving them new life (Thomson, 2004, p. 456). The dead live with us, sometimes in our own homes. Harrison claims that a house is really a porch of the underworld; this is taken literally in Serbia, where houses have been built over the graves of relatives (Verdery, 1999, pp. 46 47, 107), and has been a feature of more ancient cultures (Tuan, 1979, pp. 115 116). The dead are in contact with the living across many cultures; indeed, the two realms are imbricated in a wide variety of superstitious practices (Quigley, 1996, p. 16ff). Pieces of the dead circulate as relics and trophies (Quigley, 1996, p. 247). While attention must be paid to cultural differences, no culture fails to engage its dead in one way or another. Put graphically, in reference specically to the practice of beheading, severed heads always speak, [but] they say different things in different cultures (Janes, 1993, p. 245). The dead communicate to us from monuments and graves, demanding remembrance. Although Michel Serres (Harrison, 2003, p. 21) claims that the rst statue was a mummied corpse, I would maintain that, through mummication the corpse becomes something else: a citizen of the dead realm. It signies a living absence, an emptiness that its mere preservation cannot ll. It connects us to another world through this very absence. It is not in transition from the land of the living; it has arrived in the Underworld,2 and testies to us about it. Conversely, the rigid cryonic corpsicle (Quigley, 1996, p. 233ff), mimicking a statue, is a project not a representation, directionless as well as motionless, whose ontological status constitutes a rupture in the very notion of progression from here to there. The corpsicle remains unproblematized in the literature, but deserves further examination. Why, for example, may a live individual not be frozen in this fashion, but only a newly-dead body, or its head? Indeed, statues are the dead among us (Verdery, 1999, p. 5), partaking of timelessness, and speaking soundlessly with that authority. Nor must a monument be representational. The Vietnam War memorial in Washington DC is inscribed only with the names of the Americans who died, connecting us through the medium of language, a series of introductions without comment, highlighting the ambiguities surrounding the war in which they fell. In a real sense, the dead are

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the authors of this inscribed memorial. The dead are invested in the earth, and are the paradoxically living context in which we awake to nd ourselves. Nor are the nameless dead rendered mute and hence incapable of communication: [t]hrough them, not individual/national biographies but entire social categories (fascists, a specic generation, Serbs, etc.) are repositioned or associated with different sets of values (Verdery, 1999, pp. 20 21). The unknown soldier speaks for the collective dead, slain on the eld of battle, not as a symbol (Quigley, 1996, p. 288) but as the representative of a collective. Assisting corpses to reach the social space of the dead, therefore, is a duty that one must handle with tremendous care and precision. Hence the solemnity and complexity of funeral rites; hence the concern about the obstacles and dangers that corpses (bodies) might encounter on their way. But there is something unsatisfying and reductive about the notion of a corpse simply as a former live body leaking life as it progresses to the realm of the dead. This leaves unexplained and unproblematized the sheer intensity and anxiety that characterize the struggles on this site, the instantaneous conversion of the corpse to property (but an odd kind of property that cannot be bought or sold), the complicated gift of organs (Healy, 2006, p. 1039) that causes particular anxiety in Japan with its strong tradition of reciprocal obligations (Lock, 2002, p. 329), and the immediate kinship attachments that appear to nullify the wider social interest in the dead body, particularly in the case of organ transplants. We now need to look past the notion of the individual body, alive or dead, in order to grasp its full social signicance; in effect, what constitutes it as social in the rst place. The indeterminate body: Blurred ontologies Socially-constructed boundaries tend to be leaky affairs (see Haraway on the leaky distinction between nature, society, and culture quoted in Turner, 1992, p. 46; Lock, 2002, p. 39, on blurred boundaries; and Seremetakis, quoted in Lock, 2002, p. 195 on leaky boundaries). When it comes to life and death, we are not really dealing with boundaries at all, but with a shifting liminal space whose outlines depend upon culture, time, and circumstance. This holds true of the body as well: its extensions beyond the integument persist in Western culture despite the Protestant move that may be said to have created the individual body by dismantling the social body of earlier times, privatizing both the body and death (Lock, 2002, p. 119). Relations between the dead and the living were more intimate in mediaeval times, as indicated in the practice of communal burial (Turner, referenced in Mellor & Shilling, 1997, p. 82) and the recurrent image of the danse macabre in which the living and the dead joined hands (Mellor & Shilling, 1997, p. 82). [W]hat constitutes a persons own body? asks Fernando Vidal. The own body, belongs to one person alone; as opposed to the visible body, which ages and nally dies (Vidal, 2002, pp. 958 959). In the modern age objectied and distanced from our selves, our bodies are for us things that we own, not entities we are (Vidal, 2002, p. 936). But between individual bodies, between

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live bodies and dead bodies, between the realm of the living and the dead, there is what Erin Hefferon, in another connection, refers to as ontological seepage (Hefferon, 2005). Any precise division between the material body and its cultural representations, according to Hallam, Hockey, and Howarth (Turner, 2000, pp. 220 221), reproduces the body self dichotomy that the embodiment theorists have been at pains to resolve. But divisions between bodies are also problematic and blurred. Pregnant women report, for example, that their bodies are invaded by the baby from the inside and total strangers from the outside: the edges of the self become blurred as the body no longer seems to operate as a marker of individuality (Bailey, 1999, p. 340). This is an instance of the Deleuzian body without organs (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 8, 10), a body that is constructed to permit free ows and intensities and whose enemy is the organism, or pre-set assemblages of organs (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 8). The BwO is . . . necessarily a Place, necessarily a Plane, necessarily a Collectivity (assembling elements, things, plants, animals, tools, people, powers, and fragments of all of these; for it is not my body without organs, instead the me (moi) is on it, or what remains of me, unalterable and changing in form, crossing thresholds) (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 10). In their colorful and almost hermetic language, Deleuze and Guattari are arguing that we create a number of possibilities for ow in which bodies that extend far beyond the integument come into being. The relationship between the next-of-kin and the corpse constitutes such a body; the ows between the realms of the living and the dead are another. The advent of Protestantism marked, in the Western world, a shifting of the symbolic boundaries from the social body to the individual body (Shilling, 1993, pp. 188 189). The body, as now constituted, became a barrier, separating individuals from one another (Shilling, 1993, p. 187). According to Shilling, death came to represent the ultimate end of the self; once the body is buried or cremated, it placed severe limits on [it] as a bearer of value (Shilling, 1993, p. 186). I would suggest, however, that this is more apparent than real; that there remains an active and lively social body that comprises the dead as well as the living, and that, despite the anxieties brought about by the advent of individualism, we can see practices and strategies that reinforce the social body and protect it from atomization. This comprises a plethora of shared discourses, funerals that involve the next of kin and friends in a highly ritualized context, social practices of mourning (see Seale, 1998, pp. 198 199; Harrison, 2003, p. 58), memorials, and commercial sympathy cards. If we are constituted, dead or alive, as free, the social dimension of personhood neglected (Glendon, 1991, p. 109), it is equally the case that we are social (Sweet, 1997, pp. 207 208); indeed, as Shilling reports, new technologies (transplants and virtual reality) are threatening to collapse the boundaries which have traditionally existed between bodies, and between technology and the body (Shilling, 1993, p. 4). As Gold remarks, [T]he boundary between what is us and what is not is far from clear and does not necessarily depend on the contours of our material body (Gold, 1996, p. 129). Indeed, the boundary between the body and the world may be

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dissolving: the body is coming to be viewed as a self-regulatory system whose functioning is dependent on, and inseparable from, the larger world, and which consequently can exist only in continuous, psychologically mediated interaction with a complex eld of social, cultural, historical, and environmental conditions (Levin & Solomon, quoted in Gold, 1996, p. 128). The dissolution of the boundary between bodies is not a function of high modernity. Many other cultures manifest no such rigid boundaries. In Fiji, for example, the body is not a function of an individualized self: a pregnant woman feels obliged to make her pregnancy known publicly, to create, as it were, a social pregnancy. The phenomenon of the couvade, in which the male partner of a woman in labor shares the pain of labor, is another example of what Czordas calls a phenomenon of embodied intersubjectivity (Czordas, 1993, p. 146). This contrasts vividly with the solitude of isolated brains in our society (Vidal, 2002, p. 974), against which the social body may be seen as re-forming, strategizing, and struggling against the dissolution that radical individualism threatens. The joining of the corpse to the living, however, can produce a pathological body. Referring to a cadaver in a dissection room, Kristeva writes: The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulng us (Julia Kristeva, quoted in Ratzan, 2004, p. 298). This dreadthat, in effect, the corpse is taking us with it can only be overcome by the animation of the social corpse. If we endow a lifeless corpse with the capacity for feeling hurt and the expectation of respect (Robert Wilkins, quoted in Quigley, 1996, p. 277) then we are part of the journey; we are in transition with the corpse, but as part of a live, renewing process, not heading for extinction or oblivion. The uncertain body (Shilling, 1993, p. 3) is, in the nal analysis, a cultural product (Seale, 1998, p. 14) or, more poetically perhaps, the site of tragedy, the very source of life and death (Tierney, in Lock, 2002, p. 203). The boundaries of the embodied self are indistinct, social death can take place on either side of the grave (Mulkay, 1993, p. 33), and death itself is only its interpretation (Shibles, 1974, p. 139). Within and throughout this vast and amorphous consociality, a skein of obligation and reciprocity is woven. It is at this point, in considering the integrity of the journeying corpse, that the notion of rights can nally be introduced. The matter of rights Rights had their pre-Enlightenment genesis in the Christian notion of duty to others; where there are obligations on the part of some, there are expectations of fulllment on the part of others. If giving to the poor is an obligation, then the poor may, reciprocally, be said to have the passive right to charity (Langlois, 2004, p. 250). Deriving from Christian natural law, duties created rights (Langlois, 2004, p. 251).

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With the Enlightenment, however, came another conception of rights: the rights of the citizen (Wallerstein, 2002, p. 15). While pretending to be universal, these rights were a method of systematic exclusion: universal rights became an oxymoron (Wallerstein, 2002, p. 3). Abbe Sieyes, just after the fall of the Bastille, ` proposed that rights be divided into passive and active rights, the former (including liberty, protection of the person and of property, etc.) to apply to all inhabitants of a country, while the latter (authorizing active involvement in public life) would apply only to active citizens. These were white, male, and propertied (Wallerstein, 2002, pp. 2 3). How could the rights of the poor, of mulattos, blacks, or women be gured as the rights of Man? The general answer is: with difculty (Joan Scott, quoted in Wallerstein, 2002, p. 5). Inclusion became dened by exclusion; who was in, in other words, was determined by the formation of categories of the excluded, which by the nineteenth century came to include race, nationality, and ethnicity (Wallerstein, 2002, p. 10). What were these rights, precisely, bracketing for the moment the question of who had them? As Langlois observes, the ontology of human rights is a slippery one (Langlois, 2004). Even the notion of duties and obligations had no clear point of demarcation: how far does duty extend, and how far, therefore, does the right so created extend? And by the Enlightenment, persons were constituted as having rights; or, perhaps a better way to phrase it would be that rights were held to inhere in the human person, a view espoused by Grotius and Hobbes (Langlois, 2004, p. 253). Rights, then, became part of being human, an integral aspect of the new liberalism. But how are they enforced in a period where the Church has lost sway? The answer is, by sovereign states. Rights became a matter of law, subject to state enforcement, in effect against itself. Hence the entry of rights into law meant, effectively, depriving people of rights (Langlois, 2004, p. 260). Legal structures, rather than inherent rights, determined the question, a position endorsed by Jeremy Bentham (Langlois, 2004, p. 253). But, when rights are reduced to law, humans in turn are reduced to subjects upon which state power acts. Instruments meant to uphold human rights can be abused to the point that they become an ornament adorning tyrannical regimes (Langlois, 2004, p. 247). One merely has to remind oneself of the former USSR constitution to see how law and its practice can deform the notion of human rights. After the defeat of fascism in 1945, however, with its wholesale murder and genocide, the concept of rights became genuinely universalized in 1948 by the United Nations in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The person became a rights-bearing subject (Langlois, 2004, p. 246); the bearer of obligations was the state, rights were constructed as a limit upon sovereignty, a stand against the arbitrary use of power (Glendon, 1991, p. 11), freedom against the state, as it were (Mamdani, 2000, p. 4; Donnelly, 1999, pp. 83, 85). Rights were universal because states were universal (Englehart, 2003, p. 34). Leaving matters thus is, of course, problematic in this era of globalization: hence it has been suggested that corporations might now be designated duty-bearers (Donnelly, 1999, p. 95). It is also problematic because such basic human rights as

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the security of the person, freedom from discrimination, etc., are not always or even usually violated by the state: rather, this can take place in the home, at ones place of work, and so on. Hence the state, under the new regime, becomes charged with regulating its internal affairs in a manner consistent with upholding human rights. What are they, as reconstituted? [T]hose conditions of life which allow us fully to develop and use our human qualities of intelligence and conscience and to satisfy our human needs (Canadian Human Rights Foundation, 1989, pp. I-21). No longer a few declarative statements, a rights regime is now equated with a utopian world; it has become an objective, not solely a guarantee. Langlois claims that metaphysics cannot be sidestepped if human rights are to be grounded, as he insists that they be. Jack Donnelly, conversely, supports the idea of consensus, seeing rights as a set of social practices in which there is a shared assumption that one has rights by virtue of being human (Donnelly, 1999, p. 79). Human rights are a social relation (Langlois, 2004, p. 254), a type of social contract, their re-statement a description of an ideal form of social relations. These are contingent relations, however, and thus the search for grounding is futile. Their strength relies upon the successful strategic deployment of rights talk in the context of power relations within nations (Mamdani, 2000, p. 3). Needless to say, rights talk can also be deployed to negative effect: to impose Western values (Nhlapo, 2000, p. 148), for example, or to defend such faux-rights positions as civil rights for whites (Menon, 2000, p. 65). While an ontology of rights may always elude our grasp, rights talk, as noted, consists of accounts of social relations, and rights, as a series of social practices (Donnelly, 1999, p. 79), are a reinscription of obligations and expectations that constitute social life. While the notion of duty may have been elided, as in the USA, in narrow discourses of individual entitlement (Glendon, 1991, p. 76ff) and legalism rather than a more overtly social, balancing approach as in Europe (Glendon, 1991, p. 65), the balancing and reciprocity of social relations imply a notion of rights that includes duties, known as the correlative theory (Gallatin, 1976, p. 304). As we have seen, social relations of necessity include the corpse and the dead. We invest corpses with life, value, and meaning; we acknowledge our obligation to the dead in, for example, Remembrance Day ceremonies. Our obligation to the corpse is to see it safely on its way, while, as is the case with other considerations of rights, weighing its rights to bodily integrity, dignity, and respect against the conicting rights of society, and effecting the best possible balance. As Harrison puts it:
[T]he obligation consists in an imperative to dispose of the corpse so as to liberate the person from its tenacious embrace . . . rst and foremost (funeral rites) serve to separate the image of the deceased from the corpse to which it remains bound up at the moment of demise. Before the living can detach themselves from them the dead must be detached from their remains so that their images may nd their place in the afterlife of the imagination (Harrison, 2003, pp. 147 148; emphases in original).

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Conclusion The reciprocity of obligations and rights that serves to dene the human rights matrix cannot apply only to the individual living embodied self. As has been demonstrated, the boundaries between individuals, between the living and the dead, and between the living embodied person and the corpse, are loose and owing, porous, and are comprised in fact of leaky spaces, not clear lines of demarcation. These, then, are the bodies that we perform, that we do, and that we are. If rights consist of the obverse of obligations, it is clear that corpses have their rights, because the living, across cultures, observe the obligations of their culture and society to the corpse. Because this is often a family obligation, occurring within a web of interdependencies and reciprocal duties, it follows that the family, in claiming the corpse of a family member, is actually carrying out an obligation to that corpse, rather than asserting rights or ownership over it. As the defense of rights remains an obligation of the state, the rights of the corpse fall into its purview. While the corpse is not included in rights talk, at least at the moment, other older discourses and cultural scripts are called upon to invest the corpse legally with what to all intents and purposes are rights: to proper disposal, to dignity, to bodily integrity. What at rst blush appears incongruous the notion of the rights of the corpse can be seen to ow logically from both the construction of rights and from the voiceless demands of the social corpse for recognition and respect, demands that we continue to honor. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of signicance he himself has spun, says Clifford Geertz, I take culture to be those webs (1973, p. 5). Within such webs of signicance, we discover, are entangled live bodies, corpses, and the dead. Even in a post-modern, post-industrial society, where observer after observer complains that we have lost our authentic connection to the earth and to each other (Heidegger, Levi-Strauss, and Baudrillard come immediately to mind, and in this study such historians of the dead as Aries and Harrison), we can see, upon examination, that the old ` connections and obligations remain: re-dened certainly, perhaps in disguise, but having lost none of their vibrancy. Acknowledgements Upon reading the Globe and Mail editorial referenced at the beginning of this article, I was amused enough to write an unreective rejoinder, published by that newspaper, mocking the notion of the rights of the corpse. I here acknowledge my late partner, Marianne MacKinnon, whose sharp response made me consider and reect, and ultimately dig a little deeper. I also acknowledge Professor Bruce Curtis, Department of Sociology, Carleton University, for his helpful comments, and Professor Kieran Healy, Department of Sociology, University of Arizona, for graciously sharing unpublished material with me and giving permission to cite it.

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[1] In ancient Egyptian custom, a lengthy embalming process was intended at once to preserve the features of the deceased so that his or her personality would not disintegrate (Hamlyn, 1965, p. 140) and to make the body new, or radiant, in anticipation of the afterlife (Quirke, 1992, p. 144). [2] Not that the travails of the deceased end there. In ancient Egyptian belief, the dead continue on a journey through the Underworld (Hamlyn, 1965, p. 137) after being conveyed, though an extensive, 70-day ritual embalming process, to the Hall of Judgment (Hamlyn, 1965, p. 140, 143). Once again, there is no clear boundary demarcating life and death, but a space; in Paul Hamlyns words, the terrifying stretch of country between the land of the living and the kingdom of the dead (Hamlyn, 1965, p. 145).

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Biographical Note John Sutton Baglow obtained his PhD in modern literature at the University of Glasgow in 1973. His dissertation was published in 1987 by McGill-Queens University Press: Hugh MacDiarmid: The poetry of self. He is currently pursuing an MA in Anthropology at Carleton University.