Missing bodies and mortuary ritual in the Netherlands and Rwanda

Abstract

In this paper we consider the ritualisation of death in cases of alternative ways of disposal of dead bodies, including donating one's body to science. The donation of the whole body after death for medical research and education is increasingly popular in the Netherlands. The popularity of anatomical donation, to the extent that medical institutions declare they cannot take new corpses anymore, raises the question how the survivors perform mortuary rites, while the bodies of the deceased are missing. Whereas body donation mostly is a voluntary act, the disappearance of bodies at times of genocide is not. Drawing on ethnographic research in Rwanda and in the Netherlands, we will make a comparison of the survivors' ritualisation of death in the respective cases of the missing bodies of their loved ones.