Since 1989, scores of bodies across Eastern Europe have been exhumed and brought to rest in new gravesites. Katherine Verdery investigates why certain corpses—the bodies of revolutionary leaders, heroes, artists, and other luminaries, as well as more humble folk—have taken on a political life in the turbulent times following the end of Communist Party rule, and what roles they play in revising the past and reorienting the present. Enlivening and invigorating the dialogue on postsocialist politics, this imaginative study helps us understand the dynamic and deeply symbolic nature of politics—and how it can breathe new life into old bones.

'Political Bodies/Body Politic' draws on feminism, gender studies, and queer theory to examine how myth, symbol and ritual express belief systems. The book explores the operation of gender in a variety of social and historical contexts, ranging from feminist speculative fiction and systems of belief to popular culture and ancient historical texts. 'Political Bodies/Body Politic' makes an original contribution to religious and feminist studies in its examination of gender in human communication and belief systems.

An investigation into what makes the consistency of political groupings What should we do with the ideals of internationalism, the withering away of state and horizontality? Probably start by thinking seriously about them. That is to say, about their conditions of possibility (or impossibility), rather than sticking to the wishful thinking which believes that for them to happen it is enough to want them. Humanity exists neither as a dust cloud of separate individuals nor as a unified world political community. It exists fragmented into distinct finite wholes, the forms of which have varied considerably throughout history - the nation-state being only one among many, and certainly not the last. What are the forces that produce this fragmentation, engender such groupings and prevent them from being perfectly horizontal, but also lead them to disappear, merge, or change form? It is questions such as these that this book explores, drawing on Spinoza's political philosophy and especially his two central concepts of multitudo and imperium.

This subtle and powerful ethnography examines African healing and its relationship to medical science. Stacey A. Langwick investigates the practices of healers in Tanzania who confront the most intractable illnesses in the region, including AIDS and malaria. She reveals how healers generate new therapies and shape the bodies of their patients as they address devils and parasites, anti-witchcraft medicine, and child immunization. Transcending the dualisms between tradition and science, culture and nature, belief and knowledge, Langwick tells a new story about the materiality of healing and postcolonial politics. This important work bridges postcolonial theory, science, public health, and anthropology.

Amanda Machin considers six embodied modes of democratic politics: identification, deliberation, disagreement, protest, occupation and counsel. Drawing on diverse thinkers, she offers an absorbing illustration of the ways that human bodies are not only the disciplined objects of politics but also the generative subjects of democracy.

Religious Bodies Politic examines the complex relationship between transnational religion and politics through the lens of one cosmopolitan community in Siberia: Buryats, who live in a semiautonomous republic within Russia with a large Buddhist population. Looking at religious transformation among Buryats across changing political economies, Anya Bernstein argues that under conditions of rapid social change—such as those that accompanied the Russian Revolution, the Cold War, and the fall of the Soviet Union—Buryats have used Buddhist “body politics” to articulate their relationship not only with the Russian state, but also with the larger Buddhist world. During these periods, Bernstein shows, certain people and their bodies became key sites through which Buryats conformed to and challenged Russian political rule. She presents particular cases of these emblematic bodies—dead bodies of famous monks, temporary bodies of reincarnated lamas, ascetic and celibate bodies of Buddhist monastics, and dismembered bodies of lay disciples given as imaginary gifts to spirits—to investigate the specific ways in which religion and politics have intersected. Contributing to the growing literature on postsocialism and studies of sovereignty that focus on the body, Religious Bodies Politic is a fascinating illustration of how this community employed Buddhism to adapt to key moments of political change.

From the start of the French Revolution, contemporary observers were struck by the overwhelming theatricality of political events. Examples of convergence between theater and politics included the election of dramatic actors to powerful political and military positions and reports that deputies to the National Assembly were taking acting lessons and planting paid "claqueurs" in the audience to applaud their employers on demand. Meanwhile, in a mock national assembly that gathered in an enormous circus pavilion in the center of Paris, spectators paid for the privilege of acting the role of political representatives for a day.Paul Friedland argues that politics and theater became virtually indistinguishable during the Revolutionary period because of a parallel evolution in the theories of theatrical and political representation. Prior to the mid-eighteenth century, actors on political and theatrical stages saw their task as embodying a fictional entity—in one case a character in a play, in the other, the corpus mysticum of the French nation. Friedland details the significant ways in which after 1750 the work of both was redefined. Dramatic actors were coached to portray their parts abstractly, in a manner that seemed realistic to the audience. With the creation of the National Assembly, abstract representation also triumphed in the political arena. In a break from the past, this legislature did not claim to be the nation, but rather to speak on its behalf. According to Friedland, this new form of representation brought about a sharp demarcation between actors—on both stages—and their audience, one that relegated spectators to the role of passive observers of a performance that was given for their benefit but without their direct participation. Political Actors, a landmark contribution to eighteenth-century studies, furthers understanding not only of the French Revolution but also of the very nature of modern representative democracy.