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Summary
This article examines the practice of autopsies in French-ruled West Africa in the interwar era. It contributes to the discussion of medical knowledge and its employment in the colonies and raises a set of questions regarding the administration's motives for performing autopsies and the African responses to this practice. In order to answer these questions, I briefly examine the practice of autopsies in France and move to the colonies to look at the problematic ways in which they were performed under colonial conditions. I then delve into local practices of ritual autopsies that also aim to explain death, but in different ways. Finally, I demonstrate what the differences and similarities between practices of colonial and ritual autopsies can teach us about the idea of the Civilising Mission and its perception by African colonial subjects.

Aged bodies and kinship matters: the ethical field of kidney transplant / Sharon R. Kaufman, Ann J. Russ and Janet K. Shim -- Anatomizing conflict: accommodating human remains / Maja Petrović-Šteger -- On the treatment of dead enemies: indigenous human remains in Britain in the early twentieth-first century / Laura Peers -- Towards a critical Otziography: inventing prehistoric bodies / John Robb -- Bodies in perspective: a critique of the embodiment paradigm from the point of view of Amazonian ethnography / Aparecida Vilaça -- Using bodies to communicate / Marilyn Strathern

This essay speaks to the criminalization of Black bodies via the purported "confession" of wrongdoing that Blackness makes through the interpretive White gaze. Blackness operates as a site of always imminently actualized criminality or pathology that must be quelled or eradicated. Using James Baldwin's meditation on the function of Wayne Williams's body as a historical anchor, this essay seks to articulate the contemporary ways in which Black bodies are positioned via the White gaze, as well as demonstrate the continuity of anti-Black violence, itself predicated on what Charles Mills calls an "epistemology of ignorance."

The interface between an institution concerned with the administration of justice (the London Police Dept) & the body is examined, using as points of departure a London map used to investigate sex-related offenses (homosexuality & prostitution) & a London police report on plainclothes officers' surveillance of public lavatories. These documents present law as a cartographic technology that produces a spatial order for law & a set of practices of the body as legal technique. The map portrays the landscape of bodily perversion in London. Policing is accomplished with the visible body as agent, or the invisible body in the case of surveillance. When policing a public urinal, the public/private nature of this space & the corporeal practices generating the space are ambivalent. 23 References. M. Pflum

Cover -- Endorsements -- Half Title -- Series -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Part 1 The Dead Among Us -- 1 Introduction -- 2 An Encounter With the Corpse -- 3 Promises and Respecting the Ends of the Dead: An Arm-Twisting Argument and a Kantian Framework for Respect -- 4 Disturbing Bodies: Art, Science, and Exhumation -- 5 Human Resources: The Cases of Cannibalism and Organ Harvesting -- 6 Memento Mortuis: The Obligation to Remember the Dead -- 7 Dialogues With the Dead: Memorials, Monuments, and the Duties of History -- Part 2 The Immortal Dead -- 8 The Argument for Modest Immortality -- 9 Is the Immortal Life Worth Living? -- 10 Ars Moriendi: Learning to Live With Death and the Dead -- Bibliography -- Index.

We all know that we have and are our bodies. But might it be possible to leave this common place? In the present article we try to do this by attending to the way we do our bodies. The site where we look for such action is that of handling the hypoglycaemias that sometimes happen to people with diabetes. In this site it appears that the body, active in measuring, feeling and countering hypoglycaemias is not a bounded whole: its boundaries leak. Bits and pieces of the outside get incorporated within the active body; while the centre of some bodily activities is beyond the skin. The body thus enacted is not self-evidently coherent either. There are tensions between the body's organs; between the control under which we put our bodies and the erratic character of their behaviour; and between the various needs and desires single bodies somehow try to combine. Thus to say that a body is a whole, or so we conclude, skips over a lot of work. One does not hang together as a matter of course: keeping oneself together is something the embodied person needs to do. The person who fails to do so dies.