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Record W4413301978 · doi:10.25071/2292-6739.252

The Body Political: Political Symbolism of Human Remains

2025· article· en· W4413301978 on OpenAlexaffvenue
Jamie Headrick

Bibliographic record

VenueContingent Horizons The York University Student Journal of Anthropology · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicFrench Historical and Cultural Studies
Canadian institutionsCarleton University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPoliticsHuman bodyPolitical scienceAestheticsArtMedicineAnatomyLaw

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The ways in which different cultures treat human remains are a potential goldmine for information concerning the structures of power that influence people in life and death. Cultural anthropology is often considered a social science wholly concerned with the living, often in opposition to the work with human remains that physical anthropology undertakes. However, human remains also have a place in sociocultural anthropology and are particularly pertinent to political anthropology. This paper explores the political structures of the Western world, particularly those within Europe and post-settler colonial contact with North America, as they affect and are reflected in the post-mortem treatment of the human body. The main focus of this paper is the cultural meaning attributed to putrefaction and decay, the historical origins of the moralization of post-mortem preservation, and the role of human remains in maintaining political power. As such, the tradition of the incorrupt saint is traced from its origins in miraculous preservation to examples in recent history wherein politicians are deliberately preserved and displayed to allow them to maintain a degree of the power in death as they had in life.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesScience and technology studies
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.964
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0020.004
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.021
GPT teacher head0.269
Teacher spread0.247 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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