sic :3

1700s =the enlightenment and modernity brought the birth of reason and scientific method. also liberal societies across europe, industrialisation and capitalism

this meant an ‘administration’ of death, meaning ppl documented the number and types of death

biopolitics = a term for the way that everyday life (and the ways we think about and understand stuff) is shaped by biological aspects (Foucault)

Foucault argues: the ‘ologies’ eg natural sciences, have power over the norms for how we should live and how things should be.

within death studies, the concept of ‘biopolitics’ means that there are dominant constructions/messages about how we should handle and think about death and the dead body.

within the enlightenment, there was a data-focused approach to death; it was measured and catalogued at scale. there were also spatial changes as, during urbanisation and industrialisation, ppl moved to cities more and lived in more concentrated groups.

this meant they could no longer bury ppl in shallow graves. doing so in cities meant that the smell reached a lot of ppl, which harmed morale and led to social unrest. so they formed the social convention that dead bodies should be buried at 6 feet.

urbanisation also led to modern problems of death, such as the pandemic. bc more ppl lived closer together, diseases spread more. cholera outbreaks produced the idea of the dead body as infectious. and so, part of the reason we bury bodies at 6 feet deep is because of the increased focus on public health in these times.

‘Corpse medicine’ = the use of parts of a dead body for medicinal purposes. eg. when beheading a person, you collect their blood to cure epilepsy. some Monks made jam from blood in order to heal skin disorders. and ppl also rubbed detached hands to cure some ailments.

still, there was a growing view that the dead body was unhygienic. Mary Douglas (Book: ‘Purity and danger’) argued that, within modernity, culture changed towards viewing certain things within or to do with the body as dirty and dangerous, eg. blood or the dead body.

Ideas of the dead body changed from wanting to consume it (as part of healing medicinal practice), towards wanting to control it (eg. separate it from the living, in order to prevent the spread of real or perceived infection)

there was a rise in practices of embalming. it used to be primarily employed through stuffing dead bodies with herbs to stop ppl smelling when they died on military duties. but it became more widely used for the everyday man.